Free Republic

America is beginning to take the next election cycle a bit more seriously these days, as the Republican field begins to see its first competitors step up.President Trump was the first candidate to officially throw his hat in the ring way back in November 2022. Nikki Haley has begun her bid for the White House, and investment firm manager Vivek Ramaswamy has also recently jumped in the race.Republican voter enthusiasm at the moment seems to be pointing to a match-up that isn’t even a sure thing at this point – Donald Trump vs. Rick DeSantis. Even the left wing media...

Censorship is the first step toward liberal tyranny. First, liberals came for the Confederate Flag. Then the statues of our Confederate leaders. Classic literature is being censored (10 Literary Classics That Have Been Banned). Now, like-minded liberal groups who defend Robert Mapplethorpe or Andres Serrano’s artistic images of the Christian Crucifix submerged in urine, want to destroy the Americana art of the 1940’s. Victor Arnautoff is one of the foremost muralists in the San Francisco area during the Depression. His work of art The Life of George Washington is from the “New Deal” era. Its erasure is just the next...

A Depression-era mural depicting white children playing outside in the winter was removed from Percy Julian Middle School in Oak Park because school officials said it failed to represent the school’s diversity. While some said the mural was upsetting to students of color who felt it excluded them from the school, a local historian likened the removal to a “modern-day book burning.” Cynthia Brito Millan, a coordinator for the middle school’s Social Justice Club, said the push to remove the mural began in February at a district school board meeting. Students expressed frustration about an atmosphere of exclusion for students...

I think this is actually worse than when they looked the other way at him waging war unilaterally in Libya. That was lazy and cowardly too, but you could understand where the cowardice was coming from, at least. Libya was politically risky. There were good arguments that we had no vital interests there and that knocking out Qaddafi would lead to something even worse, up to and including a civil war between jihadis and other Libyans (which turned out to be true); there were also good arguments that a slaughter was in the offing if the west didn’t intervene to...

I was viewing some of my neighbors' wi-fi connections on my tablet computer and noticed that most are using the outdated WEP network security standard. This was deemed to be insecure a decade ago and was replaced by the WPA and, later, the WPA2 security standard. Someone in "listening range" of a wi-fi hotspot using the WEP encryption standard could, potentially, break into the network relatively easily and disrupt it. Many internet service providers (ISP) still provide WEP as the default, but they are now required to also provide WPA. So it is a good idea to insure that your...

Regulators: The EPA has commemorated the start of Hispanic Heritage Month with an emailed picture of Marxist thug Che Guevara. Considering the agency's totalitarian energy policies, it's somehow appropriate. The internal email sent by EPA management analyst Susie Goldring was said to have been issued without clearance from higher-ups. EPA said it was "drafted and sent by an individual employee, and without official clearance." But sent it was, a document with a photo of a mural with a visage of the murderous revolutionary that was lifted without attribution from the website, www.buzzle.com. Guevara, of course, was an enemy of the...

Is your network safe? Almost all of us prefer the convenience of Wi-Fi over the hassle of a wired connection. But what does that mean for security? Our tests tell the whole story. We go from password cracking on the desktop to hacking in the cloud.We hear about security breaches with such increasing frequency that it's easy to assume the security world is losing its battle to protect our privacy. The idea that our information is safe is what enables so many online products and services; without it, life online would be so very different than it is today. And...

It seems as if that is the case, given that John McCain has chastised those GOP presidential candidates who wonder how Libya posed a threat to the U.S., how Obama has grounds for claiming that the U.S. isn't even at war with Libya or how he can claim - through Harold Koh and Jay Carney - that "the limited nature of this particular mission is not the kind of hostilities envisioned by the War Powers Resolution." Obama is claiming that since U.S. troops are supposedly at little risk in this particular mission and that we have no boots on the...

...With Harold Koh (legal advisor for the Department of State) and Jay Carney in tow - engaged in a game of semantics. Harold Koh recently said: "We are not saying the president can take the country into war on his own. We are not saying the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional or should be scrapped or that we can refuse to consult Congress. We are saying the limited nature of this particular mission is not the kind of hostilities envisioned by the War Powers Resolution." Problem is, is that the WPA does not make any distinction between one kind of...

On March 21, 2011, Obama cited the WPR which requires him to notify Congresa 48 hours before beginning military operations. That same day Obama said that the military strikes against Libya would be "limited in their nature, duration and scope." During the past almost 90 days, Obama has given updates on these "limited" strikes. Now that 90 days draws near, Carney says that since the strikes have been "limited" that basically the 90 day rule doesn't apply. He apparently wants to use a WPA provision which allows for the president to deploy U.S. forces and engage in military strikes for...

Obama asks Congress for a resolution of support on LibyaBy Jamie Klatell - 05/20/11 08:15 PM ET Sixty days after launching military action against Libya, President Obama on Friday sent a letter to Congressional leaders asking them to pass a resolution supporting the U.S. mission. "I wish to express my support for the bipartisan resolution drafted by Senators Kerry, McCain, Levin, Feinstein, Graham, and Lieberman, which would confirm that the Congress supports the U.S. mission in Libya and that both branches are united in their commitment to supporting the aspirations of the Libyan people for political reform and self-government," Obama...

The social realist artist Jack Levine, who skewered the rich and powerful in paintings that echoed Old Masters like Goya and El Greco stylistically, has died. He was 95. Levine's son-in-law, Leonard Fisher, said the artist died Monday at his New York City home. Levine's works are in the collections of major museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, New York's Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Born in Boston in 1915, Levine found work as a young man with the federal Works Progress Administration. He achieved wide recognition...

There’s just one thing wrong with Barack Obama’s $8 billion economic stimulus plan to build high speed railroad lines he claims will create lots of jobs, move millions of people, curb traffic, clean the air and make intercity travel more cost-efficient and fast. It won’t. It will create relatively few high paying jobs because the companies who build high speed trains are mostly in Europe and Asia. It will not be truly high speed like Japan’s Bullet train, because U.S. roadbeds can’t handle such speeds safely. It will have little or no effect on traffic because most of it is...

Krugman: It's Time For The WPA Joe WeisenthalNov. 6, 2009, 12:08 PM We wondered if Paul Krugman would use this morning's 10.2% unemployment reading as an excuse to call for another stimulus. Indeed: You can make a pretty good case that just employing a lot of people directly would be a lot more cost-effective; the WPA and CCC cost surprisingly little given the number of people put to work. Think of it as the stimulus equivalent of getting the middlemen out of the student loan program. So why aren’t we doing this? Politics, of course: government is the problem, not...

Computer scientists in Japan say they've developed a way to break the WPA encryption system used in wireless routers in about one minute. The attack gives hackers a way to read encrypted traffic sent between computers and certain types of routers that use the WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) encryption system. The attack was developed by Toshihiro Ohigashi of Hiroshima University and Masakatu Morii of Kobe University, who plan to discuss further details at a technical conference set for Sept. 25 in Hiroshima. Last November, security researchers first showed how WPA could be broken, but the Japanese researchers have taken the...

With the debate over the "Porkulus" bill in Congress (or, as I like to call it, "Pork and Awe"), there has been a great deal of related discussion over why the bill will work, or won't work, to stimulate the economy and create much-needed jobs and economic growth. However, much of the debate has devolved into partisan bickering. It might help to take a step back, and consider the differences between government and private spending in a more general sense. To begin with, what does the stimulus package claim to do? Apparently, it authorizes the government to spend money, in...

WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama has increased his employment goal with the nation's economic outlook worsening, seeking to create or save 3 million jobs in the next two years instead of the 2.5 million he proposed last month. Obama set the more ambitious target earlier this week after meeting with top economic advisers who cautioned that the nation's unemployment rate could exceed 9 percent given the current pace of job losses, Obama transition officials said Saturday. During the presidential campaign, Obama pledged to create or save 1 million jobs. He increased that goal to 2.5 million over two years just...

Security researchers say they've developed a way to partially crack the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption standard used to protect data on many wireless networks. The attack, described as the first practical attack on WPA, will be discussed at the PacSec conference in Tokyo next week. There, researcher Erik Tews will show how he was able to crack WPA encryption, in order to read data being sent from a router to a laptop computer. The attack could also be used to send bogus information to a client connected to the router.To do this, Tews and his co-researcher Martin Beck found...

The Great Depression... hit in waves, making everyone feel helpless. First came the crash of the stock market, then the failure of the local banks, then the failure of larger ones, then joblessness, and more joblessness, and hunger. By the time the country elected Franklin Roosevelt on his New Deal platform in 1932, one in four was unemployed.... Overly efficient factories, [economists] said, were producing too many goods for a market that could not keep up. Factories therefore had to lay off workers. It all amounted to "vicious industrial Darwinism," as Nick Taylor terms it in "American-Made: The Enduring Legacy...

Tonight I upgraded my wireless router to be 802.11g compliant. At the same time, I switched wireless PCMIA cards on my laptop, from a Microsoft MN520 card (802.11b only) to a Belkin card (802.11g). The router (also from Belkin) gave me an option of WEP or WPA, so of course I chose the latter. Therefore, I believe anyone else who wants to connect via wireless must have WPA capability. If all they have is WEP, they will be unsuccessful. In fact, I tried it myself, but deliberately trying to connect with the old Microsoft MN520 card, and having nothing happen....