Free Republic

Former Vice-President Al Gore sold his Current TV network to Al Jazeera for a reported $100 million after rebuffing a bid from Glen Beck. Money, as it turns out, was not the deciding factor. “We chose to go with Al Jazeera because of a compatibility of values and objectives,” Gore said. “We feared that Beck, as a purveyor of extremism, would have taken things in the wrong direction. It was clear to us that Al Jazeera was founded with the same goals we had for Current TV. Our decision was basically a ‘no brainer.’” That Al Jazeera has been a...

Most of them were holding machetes, knives, and long swords; they kept on dividing some of them [the villagers], cutting their heads into two, even a little child, no matter how small. And some little children who could run, they would follow them as far as almost half a kilometer to kill them; there was no mercy for anyone trying to escape. The above was a testimonial of a Nigerian man, speaking of an attack on one of his nation's villages. The attackers - the unidentified "them" and "they" in the above passage - were Muslims. And the victims were...

It's official. President Obama has chosen former Republican senator from Nebraska Chuck Hagel as his nominee for Secretary of Defense and plans to make the announcement Monday, POLITICO's Mike Allen and Darren Samuelsohn report over on the home page: A Democratic aide described the White House’s logic for choosing Hagel, age 66: “Chuck Hagel is a decorated war hero who would be the first enlisted soldier and Vietnam veteran to go on to serve as Secretary of Defense. He had the courage to break with his party during the Iraq War, and would help bring the war in Afghanistan to...

Monday's meeting of the Capistrano Unified School District A school board should offer more fireworks than usual. At the meeting, Stan Wasbin, a father of four, plans to voice his complaint that local schools are becoming "re-education camps" because of an excessive focus on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues, reports the San Juan Capistrano Patch. Wasbin, a resident of the seaside suburb of San Clemente, asked in a three-page letter that his concerns about the supposedly agenda-driven politicization of the school curriculum be placed on the official board agenda. Both the curriculum and Wasbin's missive come in response to...

"...Al Gore, anti-carbon fuel drum major, made a cool $100 million selling his 20% share in the failing, unwatched Current TV to Arab Al-Jazeera, owned by major carbon fuel producers. (His partner, Joel Hyatt, son-in-law of former Ohio Democratic senator Howard Metzenbaum, also benefited mightily.)...It's hard to conclude that this $500 million Al-Jazeera purchase is anything other than a payoff...in recent weeks, Mr. Gore personally lobbied the distributors that carry Current on the importance of Al Jazeera, according to people briefed on the talks who were not authorized to speak publicly. So... Al Jazeera was buying the former Vice President's...

On Thursday evening I received a Facebook message from my friend, Henry Louis Gomez, who writes at the BABALU BLOG. He sent me a link to this DUmmie THREAD about a DUmmie whining over the fact that the new 2013 taxes took an intolerable chunk out of his paycheck after the beginning of the year. I thought it was quite ironic what with the DUmmies calling for higher taxes yet now whining about it so I told Henry I would probably DUFU it after I got done DUFUing the DUmmies supporting Al Gorezeera's HYPOCRISY. Well, the next day (Friday)...

2013: List of Pro-Liberty Bills in Congress Updated: Jan 5, 2013 H.R. 23: To provide that human life shall be deemed to begin with fertilization. H.R. 24: To require a full audit of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal reserve banks by the Comptroller General of the United States, and for other purposes. H.R. 25: To promote freedom, fairness, and economic opportunity by repealing the income tax and other taxes, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, and enacting a national sales tax to be administered primarily by the States. H.R. 33: To amend title 31,...

The executive branch isn’t the only arena in which the Obama affirmative action crusade will be felt over the next four years. The legislative branch, too, offers manifold opportunities for mischief. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-148), or “Obamacare,” for example, offers a generous supply of tripwire. Section 5301, which defines criteria for federal aid to medical schools, contains a subsection, “Priorities in Making Awards.” It states: “The Secretary [of Health and Human Services] shall give priority to qualified applicants that…have a record of training individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups.” Section 5303,...

From Godlike Productions Forum: Another pair of actors in Sandy hoax exposed. 100% BUSTED! Two parents “Nick” and “Laura Phelps” [link to edition.cnn.com] “Nick and Laura Phelps also are struggling with what to tell their two children, a first-grader and a third-grader.”“When I saw those teachers, I locked eyes with them separately. If I could go back, I would embrace them,” Nick Phelps said, “because I had no idea what they had gone through.” [not the guys in the video in that article]

They’re on the dole — and watching the pole. Welfare recipients took out cash at bars, liquor stores, X-rated video shops, hookah parlors and even strip clubs — where they presumably spent their taxpayer money on lap dances rather than diapers, a Post investigation found.

Two days before Notre Dame will face off against Alabama in college football’s national championship game, the Washington Post has published a piece—Should American Catholics cheer for old Notre Dame?—in which author Michael Leahy discusses his understanding of how Catholics might view the game and expresses his belief that the Catholic Church is “dogmatic, frustrating change and stifling dissent.” … Leahy explains why he and some other Catholics, who were friends of his when he grew up in Southern California in the 1960s, rooted against Notre Dame. Their attitude toward Notre Dame’s football team, he said, was influenced by their...

They coulda' been contenders — and now they have a second chance. Nearly 300 black and Latino firefighter candidates who didn’t score high enough to join the FDNY in 1999 and 2002 are getting a rare opportunity take their entrance exams again. They’ll sit for the FDNY written exam Friday, and an intense physical fitness test will follow later. If they can rack up passing grades on both, the job with generous pension, sick pay and other benefits could be within their grasp. The break is part of a controversial ruling from Brooklyn Judge Nicholas Garaufis, who in July found...

Dash cam video taken by an SPD squad car shows Issac Ocak taking sharp blows to the face while other officers held back his arms. (Warning: full video contains graphic language.) Ocak says he was brutally beaten by officers in December 2010 while shopping at Seattle's Westwood Village. Once the police dash cam video surfaced, he enlisted the help of attorney James Egan. "This officer is a bully with a badge," Egan said.

Index Universe reports US ETF Inflows Hit A Record $188B In 2012 Investors poured a record $188 billion into U.S.-listed ETFs in 2012, eclipsing a previous record of more than $175 billion in 2008, as a variety of asset classes shined—including domestic as well as international equities, and particularly fixed income. Overall, total ETF assets ended the year at almost $1.349 trillion, 27 percent higher than the $1.062 trillion a year earlier and 2 1/2 times as much as the $537 billion total at the end of 2008, according to data compiled by IndexUniverse. The 2012 year-end asset total, just...

Government spending is the No. 1 problem in America, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he won’t rule out a government shutdown if President Barack Obama refuses to address the country’s growing fiscal woes. “We now have a debt the size of our economy, which makes us look a lot like Greece,” McConnell said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “It’s a shame that the president doesn’t embrace the effort to reduce spending.” When host David Gregory asked McConnell about the debt ceiling, and whether Republicans would consider a government shutdown to force the issue of spending cuts, the...

It doesn't matter; people will forget them again because we have become inured. I don't think we've completely lost our ability to be shocked. People will always remember that 20 children died at Sandy Hook. But the murderers are running together, fusing themselves into the obscurity they so badly wanted to escape. Maybe there are just too many of them. Maybe it is a collective self-defense mechanism on our part, our way of making them less real. Or maybe it is our little protest, our refusal to give anything of value -- even the effort to recall a name --...

Some in the media have popularized the term “culture war,” giving the impression that the war being waged against Christianity is the same thing as a war against everything that is traditional. But in 2013, let’s change the term. Let’s call it what it is: “A war against Christ.” Certainly there are many American traditions rooted in Christian teaching and history. But mixing some traditions with what is purely Christ-honoring—although it may recruit support from non-Christian traditionalists or conservatives—dilutes the Christian dye. Take for example the ACLU’s war against Christians praying in public schools while obliging Muslims the ability...

But there is plenty of Gold ::Here are my recently edited Google+ comments on, “Hey, let’s avoid the debt-ceiling standoff by minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin instead.”Yeah, let's borrow another trillion dollars, and then use it to buy a trillion dollars worth of platinum. Then we can mint it into a gigantic non-marketable, non-negotiable coin, deposit it into the Treasury, and use it as collateral for the cost of buying the Platinum and minting it into a gigantic coin. That sounds like a real winner, eh? Yeah, it’s a dumb idea, and not even possible since there isn’t a trillion...

I see that Joey “spread-your-legs-you’re-gonna-get-frisked” Biden has been busy again. He’s the hardest working man in government business. Last week he all butt single handedly built the diving platform for us to jump off the fiscal cliff:     And now I see that he’s close to developing awesome legislation that will apparently prevent all future mass murders – something nobody’s been able to accomplish yet! He did cheat a little on this one though. He’s taken the Affordable Care Act template and plans to use it as a road map for how to ram it down our throats get...

North Korea: A day after leader Kim Jong-un delivered his New Year's address urging reunification and conciliation, the National Defense Commission (NDC) published a very different message. On 2 January a spokesman for the most powerful organ of state in North Korea said, "We should raise our awareness of the confrontation commotions against fellow countrymen happening at the beginning the new year. Nothing but war will be incurred by confrontation against fellow countrymen. This is an historical lesson that the past North-South relations clearly show us." The statement contained three resolutions by the commission which reprise long standing warnings. Comment:...