Free Republic

Joe Paterno sat in a wheelchair at the family kitchen table where he has eaten, prayed and argued for more than a half-century. All around him family members were shouting at each other, yet he was whispering. His voice sounded like wind blowing across a field of winter stalks, rattling the husks. Lung cancer has robbed him of the breath to say all that he wants to about the scandal he still struggles to comprehend, and which ended his career as head football coach at Penn State University. The words come like gusts. "I wanted to build up, not break...

Former Penn State football defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky sexually abused eight young men, state prosecutors said.

It has been 47 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and 46 years since the passage of the Voting Rights Act. And yet the political leaders of this nation of liberty cannot seem to muster the courage and principle to sweep away one remaining example of institutionalized, government-sanctioned discrimination: The 1996 law that denies the right of marriage to same-sex couples. The law, the Defense of Marriage Act, was passed in the heat of election-year fear and bigotry against men who want to marry other men, and women who want to marry other women. It was a...

School creep's detention haul By SUSAN EDELMAN and CYNTHIA R. FAGEN Last Updated: 8:41 AM, February 1, 2010 Posted: 4:08 AM, January 31, 2010 A Queens teacher who collects a $100,000 salary for doing nothing spends time in a Department of Education "rubber room" working on his law practice and managing 12 real-estate properties worth an estimated $7.8 million, The Post found. Alan Rosenfeld hasn't set foot in a classroom for nearly a decade since he was accused in 2001 of making lewd comments to junior-high girls and "staring at their butts," yet the department still pays him handsomely for...

Letterman has jumped the shark. The recent bad jokes about Palin and her daughter shows that Letterman has jumped the shark. A term used to describe a TV shows beginning of the end. This usually corresponds to the point where a show with falling ratings apparently becomes more desperate to draw in viewers. In the process of undergoing these changes, the TV or movie series loses its original appeal. Shows that have "jumped the shark" are typically deemed to have passed their peak. Face it if Letterman cannot or will not attack Obama or the Clintons so his show has...

Hoping to follow former Bond girls such as Halle Berry, Jane Seymour and Ursula Andress, Britney Spears met in London recently with the producers of the James Bond movies, reportedly at her request. Spears' Web site says she has signed on to produce and star in an adaptation of author Tobi Tobin's Door to Door, in which she will play a teenager trying to catch her big break in Hollywood.