Free Republic

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama sought on Thursday to tamp down public anger over the AIG bonus scandal and refocus Americans' attention on the bigger picture -- his administration's efforts to fix the economy. "We can be as mad as we want, but ... we gotta work through this huge mess that was made in the financial system," Obama told a town hall-style meeting in Los Angeles attended by 1,100 people who had stood in line for hours to hear him speak. "I understand how mad everybody is about this AIG bonuses business. I'm mad. But fixing...

BATON ROUGE, La. - Even before Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana Democratic Party was struggling in a conservative state skewing more Republican in its voting tendencies. Voters overwhelmingly backed President Bush for re-election in 2004 and selected their first Republican U.S. senator since Reconstruction. Katrina dwarfed those concerns with even bigger problems: nonstop criticism of Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco and the scattering of thousands of residents from New Orleans, normally a Democratic stronghold, amid questions about how many will return. As the Democratic State Central Committee on Saturday chose attorney Chris Whittington as its third state party chairman in less than...

BLURRY snaps could be a thing of the past with the development of a digital camera that refocuses photos after they have been taken. The camera could be useful for action shots taken by sports photographers or for CCTV surveillance cameras, which often produce fuzzy shots due to poor lighting. In an ordinary digital camera, a sensor behind the lens records the light level that hits each pixel on its surface. If the light rays reaching the sensor are not in focus, the image will appear blurry. Now, Pat Hanrahan and his team at Stanford University have figured out how...

<p>NASHUA -- Even his advisers called the performance "sluggish" and "unpresidential": Senator John F. Kerry, at a house party here on Nov. 7, left some Democrats in the room bewildered by referring to President Bush's "job-creating tax cut," calling an abortion procedure "grisly or whatever," and offering such anti-sound bites as "the road traveled is the prologue to the road to be traveled."</p>