Free Republic

Commercials take up 27% of commercial television screen time and are the main source of income for TV and radio stations. In most cases, advertisements on all channels appear simultaneously, so don't try to change the channel, there will be commercials elsewhere, too. Nowadays they have also taken over the Internet. For a financial support, websites have to run ads on their pages, the largest share supplied and controlled by Google. Ads pry into your eyes, unceremoniously interfere with text, and on YouTube, in the most inappropriate places they cut into the action of films, lectures and concerts, tearing apart...

This moment of a nation, a people who lived free, lived in liberty so unique, so true, so brief. Praise be to God for all of it – even if fleeting, fading, and gone. It was, in our time, glorious.

CONCORD — Republicans are doing some serious soul searching in the wake of a disastrous midterm election last Tuesday in which first-term Gov. Chris Sununu was the lone prominent survivor. Sununu is New Hampshire’s first Republican governor since the Civil War to be reelected but have the Democrats holding all other levels of influence in state government. Every single Democratic governor over those 150 years has presided over a divided government at some point in their term. In the days following the election, the finger-pointing and blame game was already in overdrive. Former Senate Majority Leader and lobbyist Bob Clegg...

Russia will cover an entire city behind a smoke screen this week as part of a military exercise. The city of Severomorsk — home to about 50,000 people along Russia’s northern arctic coast — is the venue for the unprecedented experiment. The idea is to create a “blanket of smoke” that makes the city and the naval base disappear from radars.

Now that BP engineers have managed to place a cap on the company's bleeding well in the Gulf, the sprawling oil slicks seem to have retreated from the water's surface, claimed many media reports this week. "Where is all the oil?" an AFP headline asked. Time magazine ran a piece suggesting that the environmental impact of the spill has been "exaggerated." The New York Times ran a story that said the "Gulf oil spill is vanishing fast." And this very news organization ran a story suggesting that oil-gobbling microbes are eating up a lot the oil. These reports have angered...

Since the year 2000, the German middle class has slowly diminished, while the gap between rich and poor is wider than ever, a recent study by the German Institute of Economic Science shows. The middle class now represents 61.5% of the population, down from 64% ten years earlier. The number of people with lower income, on the other hand, has increased by four percentage points to 22%, and the richest now represent 19% of the population, or 3 percentage points more than in 2000. Some newspapers have gone so far as to talk about "Panic in the middle class", as...

Charcoal, sidewalks and newspapers are just three of the endangered icons on this list. Oh, the times, they are et cetera. As you Twitter an update to your Tumblr account before hopping the subway and watching The Dark Knight on your iPhone, spare a thought for the It Items of eras past, the ancestors to these must-haves, the consumer goods, cultural icons and traditions whose existence you may have taken for granted (we certainly did) but whose days, thanks to progress and just plain changing attitudes, are most certainly numbered. Butcher shops, stick shifts, and maple syrup are on Walletpop’s...

A check on Dr. Orly Taitz' website came up with NOTHING today-except commercials for lawyers, and asvice the site is up for grabs. I'm sure there was a steady flow of donations, but the website is gone ! What shall we ever do ??

SANTIAGO, Chile - Scientists on Tuesday blamed global warming for the disappearance of a glacial lake in remote southern Chile that faded away in just two months, leaving just a crater behind. The disappearance of the lake in Bernardo O'Higgins National Park was discovered in late May by park rangers, who were stunned to find a 130-foot deep crater where a large lake had been. After flying over the lake Monday scientists said they were able to draw preliminary conclusions that point to climate change as the leading culprit for the lake's disappearance. They suggested the melting of nearby glaciers...

OSLO (Reuters) - Exotic frogs and toads are dying out in the jungles of Latin America, apparent victims of global warming in what might be a harbinger of one of the worst waves of extinction since the dinosaurs. Accelerating extinctions would derail a United Nations goal of "a significant reduction in the current rate of biodiversity loss" by 2010. That target will be reviewed at a U.N. meeting of environment ministers in Curitiba, Brazil, on March 20-31. "We are facing an extinction crisis," said Anne Larigauderie, head of Paris-based Diversitas which promotes research into life on the planet. She estimated...

Terrorism fear over vanishing aircraft By Robin Gedye, Foreign Affairs Writer (Filed: 19/06/2003) A Boeing 727 jet which made an unauthorised take-off from Luanda airport three weeks ago may be in the hands of terrorists, said US officials yesterday. The CIA has alerted operatives across Africa and asked countries within flying range of Angola to help in the search for the 153ft, 90-ton former passenger aircraft. Satellite read-outs of airstrips with the length of runway necessary to land the plane have so far failed to show any signs of the aircraft, which took off without control tower permission on May...