Free Republic

CNN’s Jake Tapper would have done well to read “Lone Survivor,” rather than just seeing the new movie, before interviewing former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell last week. If he had, Tapper might have been more careful than to describe the deaths of Luttrell’s SEAL comrades in Afghanistan as “senseless.” And he would have been wary of Luttrell’s contempt for the liberal media. The film “Lone Survivor, which ” took in $38.5 million at the box office its opening weekend is based on a 2010 book by Luttrell that tells the tragic story of a 2005 operation in which the three...

LONDON -- St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, may well have been a tax collector for the Romans who fled to Ireland where he could have traded slaves to pay his way, according to new research by a University of Cambridge academic published on Saturday. The generally accepted account of the saint's life, albeit based on scant evidence, says Patrick was abducted from western Britain as a teenager and forced into slavery in Ireland for six years during which time he developed a strong Christian faith. Afterwards, the account continues, he escaped his captors and went back to Britain before...

As many states move forward with pro-growth spending and tax reforms, a couple of state legislatures are taking steps in the opposite direction. Legislators in Virginia and Kansas are advancing bills that seek to dissolve the physical nexus standard in their respective states and implement an Internet sales tax on out-of-state companies. This type of tax will not only kill jobs and close down businesses, as it has done in other states, but it is also entirely unconstitutional. In Kansas, SB 371 moves to push the long arm of the tax collector past its appropriate state boundary and count third-party...

.......... the private equity giant once run by the GOP presidential frontrunner carved his church a slice of several of its most lucrative business deals, securities records show..-SNIP-As part of just one Bain transaction in 2008, involving its investment in Burger King Holdings, filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission reveal that an unnamed Bain partner donated 65,326 shares of Burger King stock to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, holdings then worth nearly $1.9 million. And there were numerous others, giving the church a stake in other Bain properties, such as Domino's Pizza, the electronics manufacturer DDi,...

At his public school, Little Village Academy on Chicago's West Side, students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria. Principal Elsa Carmona said her intention is to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.

Eighty-eight-year-old retired metallurgist Bob Wallace is a self-described tinkerer, but he hardly thinks of himself as the Thomas Edison of the illegal drug world. He has nothing to hide. His product is packaged by hand in a cluttered Saratoga garage. It's stored in a garden shed in the backyard. The whole operation is guarded by an aged, congenial dog named Buddy. But federal and state drug enforcement agents are coming down hard on Wallace's humble homemade solution he concocted to help backpackers purify water. Wallace says federal and state agents have effectively put him out of business, because authorities won't...

MAPLE VALLEY, Wash. -- A local school district has removed chocolate milk from its menus, but students aren't giving up their sugary drink without a fight. The Tahoma School District has spent the past three years reworking its lunch menu to offer students healthier foods. It already did away with canned fruit, and now officials are taking chocolate milk off the menu.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will run the first-ever Emergency Alert System (EAS) test for 30 seconds Wednesday at 2 p.m. EST, which will be used to inform Americans in the case of a national emergency. *snip* The alert, administered in conjunction with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), will be used to inform Americans in the event of a national emergency, should other modes of communication be unavailable.

Michele Bachmann's New Hampshire campaign staff is definitely gone, even though Bachmann said she didn't know about it. The news that all five of Bachmann's paid staffers in New Hampshire had quit broke on Friday, but when Radio Iowa approached Bachmann for comment, she said all was well. "That is a shocking story to me," she said. "I don't know where that came from. We have called staff in New Hampshire to find out where that came from and the staff have said that isn't true, so I don't know if this is just a bad story that's being fed...

Last week, the Obama administration dropped one of the signature provisions of its healthcare plan. The CLASS Act (Community Living Assistance Services) was intended to provide affordable insurance for long-term care to individuals who, because of infirmity or age, could no longer care for themselves. But the reality that not enough healthy Americans would sign up to make it self-supporting finally doomed the program. Many opponents of Obamacare will no doubt cheer this turn of events because it confirms the view that we cannot afford to, in essence, nationalize health care. I agree --but I also recognize that the problem...

David Axlerod took a swing at Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain Monday, saying that he thought Cain’s 9-9-9 proposal would hurt the poor and the middle class. The senior Obama adviser called Cain an “intruiging personality” on “Morning Joe,” but took a shot at the Republican candidate’s tax proposal, saying, “I think his plan deserves scrunity … I don’t think it’s good for most Americans.” “I think you’ve got to add the 9-9-9 up, get to 27 percent, and that’s probably what poor and middle-class people will end up paying once the thing is implemented,” Axlerod said. Despite the attention...

Bleak Economy Prompts Men To Seek More Sex Partners? Written by: Eurasia Review October 13, 2011 Grim economic times could cause men to seek more sexual partners, giving them more chances to reproduce, according to research by Omri Gillath, a social psychology professor at the University of Kansas. Men are likely to pursue short-term mating strategies when faced with a threatening environment, according to sexual selection theory based on evolutionary psychology. When made to think about their own death, which mimics conditions of “low survivability,” Gillath and his colleagues found that men responded more vigorously to sexual pictures and had...

Herman Cain leaving the campaign trail: Why now? Herman Cain is surging in popularity in a number of polls. So why is Herman Cain putting his campaign on hold for the next month? The Hermantor Experience is, by almost any measure, the hottest thing going in the GOP presidential primary (not named Chris Christie). < snip> But Cain seems destined to squander it. And here’s why. As NBC’s thoughtful First Read points out this morning, Cain's promoting a book - and appears to be taking himself off the campaign trail for almost a month. Cain won’t be back in the...

by John HillStand With ArizonaSneaking it in late on a Friday afternoon on a very busy news day, the U.S. Department of Justice quietly told the Texas Secretary of State that the state's Voter ID law - passed this past Spring - "lacked enough information for the government to render a decision." More specifically, the DoJ wants more information about the "group of , 605,576 registered voters who do not possess a valid ID". What kind of information? Why ethnic information, of course. But they only seem interested in Hispanic would-be voters, not Black ones... The department specifically asks the...

The Social Security system in my opinion is definitely a ponzi scheme and what follows is a way to fix it. If you agree with this approach, please cut and paste and pass it on to other forums.

Is this something Tea Party should take as a cause? Usually Republican party is for Free Trade, but its time we keep our jobs right here in this great country of ours. Can Tea Party change the conversation on trade issues?

Unless they get so angry at us that they send terminators from the future to kill us.Wow, that whole debt-ceiling debate was scary. For a while there, it looked like a few radical extremists were going to keep the country from going further into debt. And then where would we be? Without all the free stuff we like, because some people are stuck on the primitive notion that a budget should balance? I think you can say without hyperbole that people who think like that are literally terrorists, except a million times worse. What makes people think the government should...

As far as summer fashion goes, clothes with built-in electric fans leave a little something to be desired. But Hiroshi Ichigaya has managed to turn his breezy invention into the must-have item of the summer, thanks to sweltering temperatures and a power shortage stemming from the triple disasters that hit Japan in March. The founder of Kuchofuku, or "air-conditioned clothing" in Japanese, says sales for his clothes have increased 10-fold. Phones at his office haven't stopped ringing. "People ask me, why would I want to wear a jacket when it's so hot," Ichigaya, a former Sony engineer, said. "I tell...

The ATF’s website has an FAQ section. First up: “I want information on relief of federal firearm disability? (I am a felon but want to own a firearm, how do I get my privilege restored?)” According to dictionary.com, a “privilege” is “a right, immunity or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most: the privileges of the very rich.” It behooves the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to remember that all Americans have the RIGHT to bear arms. And once again, I state my firmly held conviction that ANY American who has paid his or...

The Real Reason Hitting The Debt Limit May Mean Social Security Checks Stop July 14th, 2011By Aaron Krowne Founder, ML-Implode.com It’s crunch time, and now we’re hearing as part of the hyper-political debt ceiling debate that that Social Security checks may stop. But interestingly, we’re not just hearing that from Congressional Republicans: Obama has raised that spectre as well. Many left-leaning critics are shocked, believing Social Security to be… well… secure, and are incensed that Obama would be willing to slaughter this sacred cow. After all, if in the case of default, the government can prioritize payments to various areas,...