Free Republic

Priorities: While our consulate in Benghazi was guarded by unarmed Libyan contractors making $4 an hour, our embassy in Vienna received an expensive charging station for its new electric cars to help fight climate change. Even MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell says Vice President Joe Biden lied during Thursday's debate when he said twice that no one in the Obama administration knew that requests for extra security had been made by our Libyan ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and other members of our consulate in Benghazi. The State Department knew "in real time," as Mitchell put it in her post-debate analysis, that requests had...

Priorities: While our consulate in Benghazi was guarded by unarmed Libyan contractors making $4 an hour, our embassy in Vienna received an expensive charging station for its new electric cars to help fight climate change. Even MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell says Vice President Joe Biden lied during Thursday's debate when he said twice that no one in the Obama administration knew that requests for extra security had been made by our Libyan ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and other members of our consulate in Benghazi. The State Department knew "in real time," as Mitchell put it in her post-debate analysis, that requests had...

(AP) - General Motors will buy Chevrolet Volts back from any owner who is afraid the electric cars will catch fire, the company's CEO said Thursday. In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, CEO Dan Akerson insisted that the cars are safe, but said the company will purchase the Volts because it wants to keep customers happy. Three fires have broken out in Volts after side-impact crash tests done by the federal government. Akerson said that if necessary, GM will recall the more than 6,000 Volts now on the road in the U.S. and repair them once the company...

40 Thousand volts, four thousand amperes, and over one hundred million watts squeezed into a cubic centimeter. YouÂ’d think that would be enough to vaporize just about anything, and it certainly doesnÂ’t seem like the kind of electricity youÂ’d want to apply to your body. But if our research continues to succeed as it has, years from now weÂ’ll be asking some cancer patients to do just that. And it might just save their lives. The trick is to apply that gargantuan jolt for only a few billionths of a second. ThatÂ’s so brief a time that the energy delivered...

While I was waiting in line to be processed after my arrest at the Republican National Convention, a NYPD officer walking alongside sneered at an obnoxious, verbally abusive protester, "Remember, we're the heroes." It does nothing to denigrate the very real risks these officers take to say there was nothing heroic about arresting hundreds of people for standing more than four abreast on the sidewalk. In other words, heroism one day does nothing to dismiss a misdeed the next. There are no little yellow "get out of jail free" cards outside of Monopoly. The power that comes with a badge...

<p>We have the War Against Poverty, the War Against Drugs and the War Against Terrorism. Needless to say, we're losing all of them. I say let's make a war that we can win. My proposal? The War Against Stupidity.</p> <p>Now you might think this would be the most difficult of all wars to win, but as a schoolteacher, I have hope. I'm fortunate to work in a school where the teachers think—they read books, they write poems, essays, songs and stories, they discuss current affairs and even timeless questions. They think about how they think and they think about how to help children to think. And the results are impressive. The children do think and they show promise of growing into adults who will continue to think.</p>