Free Republic

With former President Donald Trump now facing four indictments, one recalls Lloyd Bentsen’s famous remark that Dan Quayle was no Jack Kennedy. The appropriate parallel today is to say that Donald Trump is no Richard Nixon. The Trump-Nixon comparisons are facile but superficial and in crucial respects wrong. They ignore fundamental differences between a serious and accomplished public servant whose overwrought ambition led him astray, and a self-centered dilettante whose main interest in government service is to feed his boundless ego. The contrasts between the two men are far more significant than the similarities. Confronted with clear indications that his...

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher argued that while the U.S. has “been quasi-socialist” for the last century-and-a-half, all advanced democracies are quasi-socialist, and the U.S. has been more socialist in the past than it is today, “we have too much socialism,” and he knows that we have too much socialism because he lives in California. During an interview with New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) where Sununu referenced the “socialist agenda” on the left, Maher said, “America has always been quasi-socialist — or at least for the last century-and-a-half. Social Security is socialism. The Marine...

Any interesting, or noninteresting, dinners?

Why Italians Can't be Paramedics ... Vinny and Sal are out in the woods hunting when suddenly Sal grabs his chest and falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing; his eyes are rolled back in his head. Vinny whips out his cell phone and calls 911. He tells the operator, "I think Sal is dead! What should I do? The operator, in a calm soothing voice says, "Just take it easy and follow my instructions. First, let's make sure he's dead.” There is a silence. And then a gun shot is heard. Vinny's voice comes back on...

e Rev. Al Sharpton thinks Donald Trump has run a “great” media campaign in his bid for the White House — and believes the Republican is like a white version of his pal Don King. Sharpton, in a wide-ranging interview with the Daily News editorial board Thursday, said he’d probably get in trouble for saying it, but admitted that the similarities between the boxing promoter and the real estate tycoon are striking. "My definition of Donald Trump is that if Don King had been born white, he'd be Donald Trump," Sharpton said.

While the use of ochre by early humans dates to at least 250,000 years ago in Europe and Africa, this is the first time a paint containing ochre and milk has ever been found in association with early humans in South Africa, said Paola Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and lead study author. The milk likely was obtained by killing lactating members of the bovid family such as buffalo, eland, kudu and impala, she said... The powdered paint mixture was found on the edge of a small stone flake in a layer of...

MSNBC host Al Sharpton’s apparent lack of preparation for his own show has become the stuff of legend, so much that now four volumes of his teleprompter flubs and incredible mispronunciations are now part of the Free Beacon annals. In this latest installment, Sharpton wrecks the names of such people as Ebola patient Nina Pham, quarterback Troy Aikman and actor Ray Romano, of animals like koalas (kola-cue?), and of general terms like waterboarding (waterboating), manhunts (manhoods), YouTube (UseTube) and asphyxia (asphema).

Seriously, the cans say chunk light but it's all mush.

Barack Obama is a nice guy who has degrees from prestigious institutions. He speaks well and writes well, but he is nonetheless an idiot because he sees things only through the lens of himself. Where others hold a window into the world, he holds a mirror. His supporters say he plays three-dimensional chess. He cannot even play checkers. Consider his apology to Afghanistan for the accidental burning of a few Korans. Instead of calming thing down, his apology was used by the enemy to rationalize a new wave of violence in Kabul. President Obama thinks that is all A-OK. From...

Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds How Much Would It Cost To Buy Congress Back From Special Interests? Here's a thought: let's buy our Congress back from the special interests who now own it. We all know special interests own the U.S. Congress and the Federal machinery of governance (i.e. regulatory capture). How much would it cost the American citizenry to buy back their Congress? The goal in buying our Congress back from the banking cartel et al. would not be to compete with the special interests for congressional favors--it would be to elect a Congress which...

As an addendum to Katie's earlier post with the unemployment numbers du jour, this visual from Zero Hedge (h/t to The Blaze) provides some perspective into the effects that such dismal unemployment rates have on our economic growth. Photobucket Following the most recent NFP disappointment, the simple math indicates that for the US to return to its December 2007 unemployment [4.8%], when factoring in the natural growth of the labor force of 90k people a month, the economy will need to add 250k jobs a month for the next 66 months or until the end of Obama's now very implausible...

How many times have you heard President Obama say, “Health insurers won’t be able to drop your coverage just because you get sick?” Or Kathleen Sebelius? Or the Democratic leadership in Congress? Or the mainstream news media? You would think that the private health insurance industry was being revolutionized. In fact, it has been illegal since 1997, under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, for insurers to drop coverage because someone gets sick. And even before then, the practice almost never happened.

4/12/2007 - RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany (AFNEWS) -- As wounded servicemembers were loaded onto stretchers in preparation for their medical evacuation mission to get underway, a special visitor provided pillows and blankets to make their journey a little more comfortable. One of the patients she attended to was a Soldier wearing a bulky metal halo protecting a severe leg injury. She made sure he received special footwear for the journey to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. After placing the specially made warm sock on the grateful Soldier, Ginger Dosedel gave him an affectionate pat on the...

Santorini eruption much larger than originally believed Media Contact: Todd McLeish, 401-874-7892 Santorini eruption much larger than originally believed; likely had significant impact on civilization KINGSTON, R.I. – August 23, 2006 – An international team of scientists has found that the second largest volcanic eruption in human history, the massive Bronze Age eruption of Thera in Greece, was much larger and more widespread than previously believed. During research expeditions in April and June, the scientists from the University of Rhode Island and the Hellenic Center for Marine Research found deposits of volcanic pumice and ash 10 to 80 meters thick...

White House political strategist Karl Rove said Tuesday that the highly charged immigration debate has "clouded" the views of some Americans, leading them to dismiss the importance of immigrants and their contributions to the nation. "Everything that this country is, everything that we have achieved, everything that we hold, everything that we promise, is because we are a nation of diversity, brought together by immigration, and sharing a common dream," Rove told members of the nation's largest Hispanic civil rights group, the National Council of La Raza, gathered in Los Angeles. Alluding to the deadlock over immigration reform on Capitol...

Post-war stress too much for Marlboro Man's marriage By Catherine Elsworth in Los Angeles (Filed: 28/06/2006) A US marine whose photograph touched the hearts of countless Americans has filed for divorce just weeks after his lavish wedding was funded by donations from the public. An iconic picture of James Blake Miller, 21, was taken in 2004 during a break from combat in Fallujah and was published in hundreds of newspapers. Showing him grubby-faced and exhausted with a cigarette dangling from his lips, it earned him the nickname Marlboro Man. After his return to the United States, the lance corporal revealed...

Contact: Robert Sanders rsanders@berkeley.edu 510-643-6998 University of California - Berkeley Alleged 40,000-year-old human footprints in Mexico much, much older than thought Berkeley -- Alleged footprints of early Americans found in volcanic rock in Mexico are either extremely old - more than 1 million years older than other evidence of human presence in the Western Hemisphere - or not footprints at all, according to a new analysis published this week in Nature. The study was conducted by geologists at the Berkeley Geochronology Center and the University of California, Berkeley, as part of an investigative team of geologists and anthropologists from the...

Recent Landslides In La Conchita, California Belong To Much Larger Prehistoric Slide The deadly landslide that killed 10 people and destroyed approximately 30 homes in La Conchita, California last January is but a tiny part of a much larger slide, called the Rincon Mountain slide, discovered by Larry D. Gurrola, geologist and graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The slide started many thousands of years ago and will continue generating slides in the future, reported Gurrola at the national meeting of the Geological Society of America today in Salt Lake City. Mudslides at La Conchita. (Image courtesy...