Free Republic

An Oklahoma senator has released a report outlining what he believes is some of the Pentagon’s most wasteful spending. Among a number of odd items includes a workshop on how Christianity would be affected if aliens were proven to exist. Senator Tom Coburn is known to be the “waste-watcher” on Capitol Hill, as he investigates unnecessary spending in various branches of the government. On Thursday, he issued what some consider to be a laughable list of Defense Department expenditures that have nothing to do with defense. In addition to $1.5 billion being spent on a plan to invent roll-up beef...

The Level 3 sex offender arrested yesterday in a horrifying Beacon Hill home invasion and rape was sprung from custody twice in the past year, prosecutors said. Anthony G. Williams, 45, made bail in July on a charge of failing to register as a sex offender — and then again in September in an assault and battery charge, Suffolk District Attorney spokesman Jake Wark said. Prosecutors at that hearing had asked Judge Mark Summerville to revoke his earlier bail and keep him in custody on an additional $200, Wark said. Summerville denied the request; Wark did not know why. Williams...

The prospect of higher investment tax rates (on capital gains and dividend income) is on every investors' mind lately. As it stands, Bush era tax cuts will expire by the end of the year sending the long-term capital gains tax to 25 percent from 15 percent and the dividend income tax to north of 39 percent. Conventional conservative wisdom suggests higher taxes would be bad for the economy. But the empirical evidence is less clear. Societe Generale writes about it in a note to clients today: In terms of the macro impact, the dollar amounts involved are small and will...

To Deirdre and Charles Wright, their 4-year-old Newfoundland named Rosie was a member of the family — a big, hairy, doe-eyed friend and companion who "aided in their enjoyment of life, well-being, personal development and daily activities." To the trio of Des Moines police officers who confronted the barking bear-of-a-dog in the driveway of the Wrights' home two years ago, she was something else entirely. "He doesn't want me to get very close," one of the officers is heard saying on an audio recording from a patrol cruiser's dashboard camera, the deep bark of the dog in the background. -snip-...

With all the efforts to understand the recent election defeat, a lot of the focus has been on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and his campaign. That is exactly the wrong way to begin analyzing the outcome of the 2012 campaign.The focus on Romney as a candidate is profoundly misleading for those who want to prepare for future Republican victories.Any analysis of recent Republican presidential results will reveal a systemic failure which can’t be ascribed to Romney.The last clear Republican presidential victory was in 1988 when Vice President George H W Bush won with 53.37 percent over Dukakis.Since then we...

Story by 89 WLS reporter Bill Cameron (CHICAGO) - Convicted ex-congressman Mel Reynolds has just announced for re-election with the slogan "Re-elect Reynolds so he can finish the work." Standing before a sign that said "redemption," convicted felon Mel Reynolds admitted he's made mistakes. But he would not specifically admit what he did time for – sexually abusing a 16 year old campaign worker. Some say Mel Reynolds has no shame. To those people Mel Reynold's says, "I say to those people that I'm not perfect, and if you're perfect, I'm not appealing to you." Reynolds conceded this is not...

In response to a question from reporter Major Garrett on whether the Obama administration's mishandling of Benghazi raises "core questions of basic competency," press secretary Jay Carney revealed that Barack Obama "is not particularly concerned" about whether Susan Rice misled the American people: "What the president is worried about, Major, is what happened and why in Benghazi. He is not particularly concerned about whether the ambassador or I went out and talked about the fact that we believed extremists might have been responsible.

Featured Term (selected at random):MORAL PERSON In ecclesiastical law, a group of at least three physical person united together by their free will to form a society recognized as such be competent Church authority. All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

The Bolsheviks, according to historians, robbed banks before they rose to power in Russia. That foreshadowed their economic policies. The Marxism they implemented once in power was just an extension of their armed robbery. Today's redistributionists in America don't have bank robbery in their pasts but they do accept organized theft as the norm of politics. They see all wealth belonging to the state automatically, which is why they count all tax cuts as "government spending" and why they feel entitled to hike up taxes whenever a self-inflicted "crisis" appears. Taxpayers didn't cause the "fiscal cliff" emergency; derelict pols did....

First the Associated Press announced that it would continue using “Illegal Alien” instead of “Undocumented American”, “Accidental Border Crosser” or “Beautiful Dreamer” on the grounds that it was well… technically accurate. Now the AP is throwing out Homophobia and Islamophobia on the grounds that they are inaccurate and conflate prejudice with mental illness. And that has led to outrage hysteria from the usual organs of the left who like sticking to their politicized words once they’ve made enough people aware of them. “Ethnic cleansing is a euphemism for pretty violent activities, a phobia is a psychiatric or medical term for...

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) -- An elder from Montana's Crow Indian Tribe who ceremoniously adopted then-Sen. Barack Obama into his family during the 2008 presidential race has died. Tribal officials say 78-year-old Hartford "Sonny" Black Eagle Jr. died Monday at his home in Lodge Grass on the tribe's reservation in the southeastern part of the state.

WASHINGTON (CBS DC) – Founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, dismissed discussion of GOP defections from his “no new taxes” pledge, and President Obama’s tax theories, as pure fantasy. In a Tuesday interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition,” the conservative activist reinforced that support for his “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” — which was signed by 95 percent of Republican congressmen earlier this month – is not waning. Norquist stated that Democrats’ openness to substantial spending cuts is like imagining a “pink unicorn.”

<p>Pete Peterson. Peterson founded, funded or supported most of the institutions in Washington devoted to publicizing the problem of the deficit, including ... documentary “I.O.U.S.A.”</p> <p>Bill Clinton. By the time Clinton left office, politicians were beginning to talk about perpetual surpluses, in exactly the same way that hucksters on Wall Street were talking about a perpetual bull market.</p>

Iran will step up its uranium enrichment program by sharply increasing the number of centrifuges used to make nuclear fuel, a senior official said Wednesday, in direct defiance of Western demands. The statement by Iran’s nuclear chief, Fereidoun Abbasi, is likely to escalate tensions. The West suspects Iran’s nuclear program could be headed toward weapons production and has imposed punishing sanctions to try to persuade Tehran to stop enrichment. Iran has denied the charges, saying its program is peaceful and geared toward generating electricity and producing radioisotopes to treat cancer patients. …

WASHINGTON (AP) — The first cracks are developing among Republicans over whether to accept a quick deal with President Barack Obama on allowing the top two income tax rates to expire. Conservative Oklahoma GOP Rep. Tom Cole told GOP colleagues in a private meeting on Tuesday that it's better to make sure that tax cuts for the 98 percent of taxpayers who make less than $200,000 or $250,000 a year are extended than to battle it out with Obama and risk increasing taxes on everyone. Cole's remarks are noteworthy because he's a longtime GOP loyalist and a confidant of House...

Winston Churchill has been quoted as saying, “Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.”And any man who writes on politics for New York Magazine has neither heart nor brains --- especially if his name is Jonathan Chait: How doomed are conservatives? Pretty doomed, if you look carefully at the Pew Research Survey’s close analysis of the youth vote in the 2012 elections. The Republicans’ long-term dilemma has generally been framed in racial terms, but it’s mainly a...

The South End will be buzzing Monday as Trojan — thwarted in its initial plans to give away vibrators at City Hall Plaza — has moved the sex-toy free-for-all to the Cyclorama at the Boston Center for the Arts on Tremont Street. The condom king will set up “Trojan Vibrations Pleasure Carts” from noon to 4 p.m. handing out 3,000 of the $30 to $40 vibrators, which the company calls “the perfect stocking stuffer.” The giveaway has drawn hundreds of people in other cities, including Chicago on Black Friday and New York in August, where it tied up traffic as...

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Big money managers are warning investors. They’re now citing the Bible: “Seven lean years.” No recovery till 2016. That was Jeremy Grantham back a few years ago. His GMO firm manages $104 billion. Now Bill Gross and Mohamed El-Erian, the co-CEOs at the $2 trillion Pimco money managers, are citing the same biblical warning to jar investors awake and prepare for the coming lean years of slow, low growth and austerity. Except in Pimco’s new warning, the future just got much, much darker for investors — no recovery until 2022. Earlier in the summer...

<p>The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was written in order to keep the government from invading the right to be left alone--today known as the right to privacy. The Framers who wrote the Constitution, and Jefferson and his colleagues who insisted on the Fourth amendment among others, had suffered grievously at the hands of the British king and his soldiers.</p>