Free Republic

Ironically, a major focus of the speeches at the "One Nation" hate rally was the need for "Green Jobs" along with plenty of rhetoric accusing conservatives of not caring about our environment.

I am looking for recipes for a good cookout meat this Saturday. Anyone?

A patient, believed to be having a stroke, says an officer with the Chattanooga Police Department blocked her husband from taking her to the emergency room at Erlanger Wednesday night. Aline Wright is a cancer survivor, amputee and a newlywed. Wednesday night she began to show signs she was having a stroke. "I started feeling some left arm numbness and a facial droop," said Aline. "It appeared to me that I was probably having a stroke." That's when her husband of four days, Jesse Wright, put her in the car and rushed her to the Erlanger Medical Center. Wright knows...

Currently, Muslims are attempting to build “a Mega-Mosque” near the site of the World Trade Center — to celebrate the murder of 3,000 Americans by Muslims on 9/11/01 by installing a mosque near Ground Zero as Islam’s way of claiming victory over America. Having a mosque so near the site of Islam’s worst attack on America, where their call to prayer will echo out into the streets where thousands of people ran for their lives on the day “The Religion of Peace” decided to prove, yet again, how peaceful it really is would be beyond shameful. It’s an absolute disgrace....

Leadership: This week Spain decided it wasn't going to be the next Greece. It launched tough fiscal measures, and pitched "green" programs and public union raises over the side. Seems there are some lessons here. Spain, a latecomer to democracy and the welfare state, has agonized for years about its place on the Continent. Wanting to be a European welfare state, it imitated its neighbors. It spent like they did, but it couldn't match their productive capacity. Instead, it found itself looking like Greece, a country with a stunted private sector and a bloated public sector. Any effort to balance...

Italy Tanks 5%, As PIGS Turn In Another Huge Down Day Gregory White May. 6, 2010, 11:54 AM Greek debt contagion continues to wreak havoc on European markets today, with several PIIGS indices getting whacked today. Italy's FTSE MIB, down over 5%: Spain's IBEX, down over 3%:[snip]

Roubini: 3 Out Of The 4 PIGS Will Get Creamed Vincent Fernando, CFA May. 6, 2010, 5:58 AM Nouriel Roubini, speaking to la Repubblica, explained that Portugal and Spain are most at risk of Greek crisis contagion. Italy is actually 'at a reasonable distance' from the problem. Still, “You have to be careful to not stop here [for Italy]... There are still serious problems like public debt and lack of competitiveness. Perhaps there's at least one contrarian play in the PIGS.[snip]

A powder nick-named "Pixie Dust" is being used to save the limbs of war heroes who have been wounded in Afghanistan. Surgeons have already used the dust to save several soldiers so badly mutilated that they were at risk of amputation. Made from pig bladders it has the ability to help the human body grow new tissue to replace large areas of a leg or arm destroyed by blast damage.

FAIRMONT, Minn. (AP) — Authorities say a southern Minnesota man was drunk when he allegedly went into a barn and stabbed 29 pigs. Twenty-three-year-old Curtis Lee Adams of Winnegago faces burglary, cruelty to animals and other charges in last week's incident at the Wiechman Pigs hog barn. All 29 pigs had to be euthanized. Authorities say he had blood on his knuckles and smelled of pigs and pig manure when he was found in the barn early April 27. According to authorities, he told a deputy he could remember drinking at a bar and falling asleep in his truck, then...

Reeling from a criminal probe into the Florida GOP's finances, Republican leaders finally got a peek Wednesday at the spending habits of the man at the center of the long-running scandal: Jim Greer. The ousted party chairman charged nearly $500,000 to his American Express card to eat well and live well: spa treatments, flowers, flights, fine hotels and pricey restaurants. In a month ending in March 2008, he spent $41,421.31 in Las Vegas, Washington and Beverly Hills, according to billing statements obtained Wednesday by The Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times. Greer's spending is just a sliver of the $7...

KIRKUK, Iraq — Of all the calamities war has loosed upon Iraq, pigs are not among the most obvious. Yet, there they are, across a growing swath of northern farmland, a scourge of feral swine risen from the reeds to root among the furrows and wreak havoc on the fields. “We farmers don’t even want to plant anymore because the pigs just eat it all,” said Abdullah Abdullah, a farmer southwest of Kirkuk whose fields have been trampled by swine. “And this animal, he is not just eating like other animals. He also destroys.” In better times their numbers were...

A 13-year-old Yemeni girl who was forced into marriage died five days after her wedding when she suffered a rupture in her sex organs and hemorrhaging, a local rights organization said Thursday. Ilham Mahdi al Assi died last Friday in a hospital in Yemen's Hajja province, the Shaqaeq Arab Forum for Human Rights said in a statement quoting a medical report. She was wedded the previous Monday in a traditional arrangement known as a "swap marriage," in which the brother of the bride also married the sister of the groom, it said.

Is the United Kingdom in danger of being exiled to the island of misfit debtors? For most of the past year, anxiety about overextended governments has focused on the southern European countries derisively known as the PIGS -- for Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. But the PIGS may soon have company. U.K. officials this week released a budget that was short on cost-cutting details. Silence on that unpopular subject was hardly surprising, given the U.K. economy's slow recovery and the political jockeying ahead of a national election that is expected to take place in early May. The move wasn't the...

...while these top earners are a small percentage of the overall congressional work force, their numbers are growing at a rapid rate under the Democratic Congress. The number of staffers earning within the upper 3 percent of House salaries — currently $163,358 or more — has increased by nearly 39 percent in the past four years....

And surprise-surprise, it has nothing to do with the Euro - it is, once again, to bail out bad speculative bets made by banks: "If the country is not stabilised, the next problem will be the banks," Ackermann in a speech to an academic audience on Wednesday, adding that German banks had "billions in the fire." So once again we have banksters literally putting a gun to government heads and threatening them. When does this stop? It's not like Deutsche Bank (and the rest) didn't know Greece was cooking their books and holding debt off balance sheet! They sold them...

A man with learning difficulties was 'tormented to death' after being bullied by yobs for more than a decade, neighbours claimed today. David Askew, 64, dropped dead after he tackled thugs who broke down his gate and invaded his garden. Neighbours said Mr Askew had been targeted before he was found dead at his home in Hattersley, Greater Manchester, last night. One neighbour said he had been 'tormented to death - like bear baiting'. Residents criticised police and officials for not supporting Mr Askew and his brother Brian and mother Rose, who was wheelchair-bound. Officers were called to the address...

Greek consumer group has called for a boycott of German goods as a festering row between the two countries over the euro grows. Greece's Consumer Institute demanded Germany admit 'we are no crooks' after a German magazine blasted the country as 'cheats'. The new trade war came as Angela Merkel admitted the euro is in 'a difficult situation' for the first time. She spoke as German magazine Focus ran a cover image of the armless Venus de Milo somehow raising her middle finger under the headline 'Cheats in the euro family' to suggest that Greece deliberately misled EU peers to...

Simon Johnson: Goldman Is About To Be Blacklisted And Possibly Banned In Europe Joe Weisenthal Feb. 15, 2010, 6:45 AM MIT professor Simon Johnson raises some provocative scenarios in regards to Goldman's participation in Greece's scheme to obfuscate its debt levels. In particular, he expects a full audit of the company, and perhaps some kind of ban: If the Federal Reserve were an effective supervisor, it would have the political will sufficient to determine that Goldman Sachs has not been acting in accordance with its banking license. But any meaningful action from this direction seems unlikely. Instead, Goldman will probably...

Pigs are dispensable; or, at least, so says the Ministry of Defence, which yesterday owned up to detonating more than 100 of the poor sow-and-sows in its bid to improve the lot of soldiers blasted by roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is enlightened attitude that cannot be said to be shared by our European neighbours, who were last night on the brink of endorsing the biggest pig-rescue mission in history. Of course, in this case, the PIGS in question are not animals but countries – or, to be more precise, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. In crisis talks...

This looks pretty bad for both Goldman and Greece, as if things could look worse. According to a scathing piece in Der Spiegel, European statisticians in Luxembourg have had a very difficult time getting proper Greek economic and financial data for years. Worse yet, Goldman Sachs appears to have been helping Greece take advantage of a European regulatory loophole in order to understate its deficits: Der Spiegel: