Free Republic

For this week’s NewsBusters Time Machine, we look back at one of the most over-the-top examples of journalistic fawning over Barack Obama. Remember when Terry Moran compared the Democrat to George Washington and said that the presidency is a “step down” for Obama? It happened ten years ago this week. Appearing on a Mediabistro podcast on February 20, 2009, the Nightline co-anchor rhapsodized, “I like to say that, in some ways, Barack Obama is the first President since George Washington to be taking a step down into the Oval Office.” (For those who have forgotten, George Washington, prior to becoming...

“Truly,” Beethoven remarked in 1827, “in Schubert there dwells a divine spark.” Franz Schubert himself worshiped the older composer and was a torchbearer at his funeral. In the following year, he asked for one of Beethoven’s string quartets to be played at his own sickbed, days, if not hours, before he died at the age of thirty-one. Many of Schubert’s works contain homages to Beethoven: the Fate theme of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the animating motif of Schubert’s terrifying song “Der Zwerg” (The Dwarf). His “Auf dem Strom” (On the River, for voice, piano, and horn) takes up the theme...

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the German baritone whose beautiful voice and mastery of technique made him the 20th century’s pre-eminent interpreter of art songs, died on Friday at his home in Bavaria. He was 86.

What is the effect on the Earth, currently swept into the arms of Planet X periodically by the Sweeping Arms of the Sun, when more planets crowd up to the stop sign, and halt, due to the massive Repulsion Force issues presented by Planet X standing before them. Planet X is 23 times as massive, this mass not reflected in the mere diameter of this interloper, which is only 4 times as broad as Venus or Earth or the Earth’s Dark Twin, all of which are approximately the same size. The Sweeping Arms normally just propel the planets in the...