Free Republic

DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) – Shots ring out as someone opens fire on a Dallas office building, and a window belonging to NewsRadio 1080 KRLD is hit. The bullets went through the outside panes of glass on two floors of the 12-story CBS Radio building off Central Expressway at Fitzhugh Avenue. One of the windows hit belongs to KRLD promotions director Matt Stacks, who was startled by the sound about 3:15 Friday afternoon. Stacks initially thought a bird hit the 5th floor window. “I just heard a loud boom. I turned around and looked at my window and noticed it started splintering...

Apple's (AAPL) iPhone gets more media attention, but smartphones running Google's (GOOG) Android operating system are beating it in the marketplace. Android was the top U.S. smartphone platform in the third quarter, with a three-month average market share of 53.6%, up 1.4 percentage points from Q2, research firm ComScore reported Friday. Apple's iPhone platform added 0.9 percentage point to 34.3% smartphone market share in Q3. Research In Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry, Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows and Symbian all lost share...

The number of FBI investigations into threats against members of Congress spiked in the wake of former Rep. Gabby Giffords’ shooting, according to documents obtained by The Daily. In the nine months following Jared Lee Loughner’s murderous rampage, the FBI opened up at least 38 cases based on threats against specific members of Congress, as well as a handful of generic threats against unnamed members. This was a notable increase from the previous year, when the bureau opened 26 cases over a 12-month span, according to FBI documents. A 2010 analysis by Politico found that investigations into threats against members...

Congressional Republicans seem to be tying themselves up in knots in their negotiations with Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats regarding ways to avoid the so-called ‘fiscal cliff.’ The fiscal cliff is of course the dramatic drop in economic and job growth that is supposedly going to occur if the country faces a combination of tax rate increases and government spending cuts. Whether anyone believes the fiscal cliff will actually occur is a moot point. What the Republicans should do at this point is give Obama and the Democrats everything they want in any fiscal cliff deal. That is right...

The Tenth Amendment Center has a great article which highlights the necessary road back to Liberty. Many Americans are understandably frustrated with Obama's re-election, but dissolving the union in order to defy Obama is not only a bad choice, it's an unnecessary one. We haven't exhausted all of our options yet. The sad thing is, that due to the state of progressive education in our country, Americans aren't taught about their constitutional powers. This is actually by design, considering that progressives view the government school system as a vehicle for change. In 1833, Judge Abel P. Upshur wrote a series...

Liberal Washington Post editorial page commentator Ruth Marcus sees sexism in the Republican opposition to naming the current U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, as Hillary Clinton’s replacement as Secretary of State. Marcus trots out a well-worn story from the 1970s. She relates the formidable Alice Rivlin’s recollections as first Director of the Congressional Budget Office. “Over my dead body will we have a woman in that job” was the reaction of the House Budget Committee Chairman. (Chairman, Ooh! Bad!) That was Dr. Rivlin’s testimony. Dr. Rivlin sailed through confirmation to chair the CBO and is widely respected on...

Why Asian Americans Voted So Overwhelmingly For Obama Menzie Chinn, EconbrowserDec. 1, 2012, 7:18 AMMenzie Chinn is a professor at Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs Noahpinion asks: “[W]hy did Asian-Americans break so strongly for Obama? I provide my (slightly different) answer. As Noahpinion observes, given Asian American’s higher than average income, the Romney-esque argument that the group is one of “takers” not “makers” cannot be correct (of course, there is little empirical content to this particular thesis, anyway). 2012 was not an isolated event, by the way. I am not a political scientist, and so am not...

The final draft of a constitution approved on November 29 by Egypt's 100-member constituent assembly protects some rights but undermines others, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). The constitution, approved in the midst of a political standoff between the president and the judiciary, provides for basic protections against arbitrary detention and torture and for some economic rights but fails to end military trials of civilians or to protect freedom of expression and religion, the New York-based human rights watchdog said in a new release on Friday. The constitution drafting process has been extremely contentious, and a number of assembly members...

Gov. Mark Dayton's own transportation advisory panel called Friday for a higher state gas tax and other fees and taxes to raise at least $50 billion more for roads and transit over the coming two decades. The Transportation Finance Advisory Committee's recommendations aim to improve the state's roads and expand transit, including new light rail lines, as a boost to the state's economy. Dayton created the group in January, saying a deteriorating transportation system was hurting economic growth. Dayton spokesman Katharine Tinucci said the governor has yet to review the recommendations. The report comes as the Democratic governor is preparing...

It may take election experts years to unravel the mystery of why Mitt Romney was convinced he had won the 2012 presidential election, as a new report shows some skewed internal poll numbers, and explains Romney’s two trips to Pennsylvania. But at the same time, the article from The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber shows inconsistencies with reports from November 5 and November 6 about the numbers that might have convinced Romney and his team that he had a good chance of beating President Obama in Ohio. Obama’s resounding win is starting to take on more of a resemblance to Harry...

The final flight of any manned space project is special, and on that score the Apollo 17 mission, which began 40 years ago this month, did not disappoint. The final lunar landing mission was a fitting capstone to what was arguably the greatest technological achievement of human history, a tour de force of scientific discovery and engineering virtuosity that has never been duplicated. In this sense, it could reasonably be concluded that NASA saved the best for last. The flight of Apollo 17 was not planned to be the final lunar landing mission. The original Apollo program schedule included missions...

My chihuahua Sloopy, after our thanksgiving meal started dancing for the plate of turkey on the counter! He kept dancing so I put on some Miami Sound Machine and let him get busy

'We have now an American political party and a European one. Not all Americans who vote for the European party want to become Europeans. But it doesn't matter because that's what they're voting for. They're voting for dependency, for lack of ambition, and for insolvency." Few have thought as hard, or as much, about how democracies can preserve individual liberty and national virtue as the eminent political scientist Harvey Mansfield. When it comes to assessing the state of the American experiment in self-government today, his diagnosis is grim, and he has never been one to mince words. Mr. Mansfield sat...

1) Working hard, being self-reliant and taking responsibility for your own life are good for you and will make you much happier than having too much leisure time, being overly dependent and giving others responsibility for your life. 2) The more a behavior is rewarded with attention, fame, sympathy or money, the more of it we'll see. We recognize this almost instinctively when it comes to good behaviors, but we also tend to almost habitually block it out when it comes to behaviors we don't want to encourage. 3) There's nothing shameful about being poor -- but, if you stay...

The Pentagon is in the process of eliminating two heavy armored brigades based in Germany. That will leave two U.S. Army combat brigades permanently stationed in Europe, one in Germany and one in Italy.

........Late Friday night, the EPA said in a news release that it had approved the state rules for part of the state's waterways, but would still impose the federal rules for the rest. According to David Guest of Earthjustice, that means the state rules cover only 15 percent while the new federal rules cover 85 percent — about 100,000 miles of waterways. State DEP officials said they were disappointed the EPA would impose federal rules on any part of the state and vowed to "work with them to craft solutions" to put the state in charge of all pollution rules....

Let’s cut right to the end of the story: Ordinary people have already tumbled off the precipice. There will be no dramatic rescue at the height of the tension, with crashing, ominous music turning to a sunshine ditty, a government handout straining to reach you, to save you from tumbling over the lip of the cliff. Instead the government is going to intentionally bump into you, making it look like an accident, head turned away, mumbling an apology, much like a pick-pocket does in a crowd, with the object to lift your wallet.      So, yes; however much they deny it,...

Even good actors sometimes get horribly miscast in the wrong roles. The case most often cited is this first one in which John Wayne played an odd role for him...a Mongol warrior. John Wayne: Miscast as Genghis Khan in "The Conqueror," the Duke had to utter lines like: "My blood says, take this Tartar woman." Susan Hayward: Co-starring as the tartar woman love interest in "The Conqueror." Yeah, an Irish chick from Brooklyn as a Tartar woman on the Asian steppes. The closest thing about Hayward to a tartar is that she had a tart tongue. Chuck Connors: Tall, blond,...

No matter what we do, no matter how often we do it, above trend GDP growth isn't happening. Over the past few days we got the latest gross domestic product figures for the third quarter and we saw that GDP grew at a 2.7% seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR). The first estimate came out in October and had growth pegged at 2% SAAR. This clip from the Bureau of Economic Analysis' press release tells us why: The "second" estimate of the third-quarter percent change in GDP is 0.7 percentage point, or $21.9 billion, more than the advance estimate issued last...

Placing toilet paper imprinted with President Barack Obama's face in a fire station has led to a firefighter's termination and he had until 5 p.m. Friday to turn in his badge. It was Clint Pierce's third instance of posting political paraphernalia on city property and a violation of a direct order to cease and desist from such behavior, according to city records. "It was clearly a case of insubordination," city spokeswoman Sandra King said Friday. "He had a similar situation of posting political messages on city property and he was given a free pass at that time and told to...