Free Republic

Bill Clinton sought to persuade Rep. Kendrick Meek to drop out of the race for Senate during a trip to Florida last week — and nearly succeeded. Meek agreed — twice — to drop out and endorse Gov. Charlie Crist’s independent bid in a last-ditch effort to stop Marco Rubio, the Republican nominee who stands on the cusp of national stardom. Meek, a staunch Clinton ally from Miami, has failed to broaden his appeal around the state and is mired in third place in most public polls, with a survey today showing him with just 15 percent of the vote....

Madoff's Slippers, Piano Can Be Yours at AuctionFeds to Sell Disgraced Financier's Personal Items in NYC; All Proceeds Will Benefit His Wronged Investors NEW YORK, Oct. 20, 2010 (AP) More than 400 of Bernard Madoff's possessions are heading for the auction block in New York City. The items include Madoff's black velveteen slippers, embroidered in gold with "BLM," a Steinway piano and his wife Ruth's 10.5-carat diamond ring. The U.S. Marshals Service will be selling the disgraced financier's personal items on Nov. 13 at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers. They are the last items taken from Madoff's Manhattan...

Internet domain name registry GoDaddy.com has put itself up for sale, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

If you hoped to get your hands on some of the garden gnomes at the City of Gillette auction on Thursday, you’re out of luck. The little guys will be hanging around the Gillette Police Department a while longer. More than 100 garden gnomes that were supposed to be sold at the city auction were pulled from the auction block after Gillette police got reports that the gnome nabbing may have been more expansive than just northeastern Wyoming. Three teenage girls confessed to stealing 143 gnomes from lawns in Gillette and Campbell County in May after Sundance police caught them...

Philadelphia Newspapers Up For Auction Theresa McCabe 09/15/10 - 10:06 AM EDT NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The auction for The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News is set for Sept. 23 after creditors missed Tuesday's deadline to complete their planned $139 million buyout. The two newspapers, run by private company Philadelphia Media, have been operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection since February 2009. In April, a combination of hedge funds including Angelo Gordon and Alden Global Capital agreed to purchase the newspapers out of bankruptcy protection. The sale was not finalized due to unresolved labor contracts with the papers' truck...

NEW YORK,- A New York auction house said the "Ten Commandments" tablets from the film of the same name and a piece of the Lady Liberty's nose are headed for the block. Guernsey's Auction House said its Sept. 24 Iconic Objects Auction will include the tablets from the Charlton Heston film, a piece of the Statue of Liberty's nose made but not used during a 1980s restoration and other items, including a falcon statuette made for the Humphrey Bogart film "The Maltese Falcon" and sunglasses once worn by James Dean, the New York Daily News reported Friday. "Any of these...

The house of the former Beatle Ringo Starr has been under threat for a number of years. Beatles lovers in Liverpool have united in a bid to save Ringo Starr's home which is under threat of demolition. The Save Madryn Street (SMS) campaign will be launched at the city's Hard Day's Night Hotel. It will be headed by local Ringo lookalike Max Frudd. Born Richard Starkey on 7 July 1940, the drummer lived at the house for the early years of his life. The Victorian terrace in Madryn Street, Toxteth, is one of hundreds in the "Welsh Streets" area to...

...A mono-sound copy Two Virgins, which he recorded with Yoko Ono, is expected to fetch at least £2,500. When the avant-garde LP was released in November 1968 it was notable for being sold in brown paper bags because the sleeve controversially featured a naked picture of the famous couple on the cover. Although a limited release of 5,000 stereo versions of the album were available in shops, fans had to write to the record label to purchase a mono copy of the record. The exact number of mono copies sold is not known, but auction organisers say it is likely...

Good news for Elvis Presley's creepiest fans, as a set of tools from the singer's autopsy are to be auctioned next month... are among the items that will come under the hammer at what is perhaps the grisliest sale in rock'n'roll history. According to a spokeswoman for Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, a senior embalmer at the Memphis Funeral Home set the tools aside after Presley's 1977 funeral, waiting decades before deciding to sell to the highest bidder. "The mortician, who prepared the body, retained this tag and the instruments, along with the preparation room case report, the case sheet, dry cleaning...

CHEYENNE, Wyo. – An unprecedented special state oil and gas lease auction to handle a rush to drill for oil in eastern Wyoming has grossed a near-record $42 million. The Office of State Lands and Investments held Friday's auction in response to demand from oil companies to snap up leasing rights. Figures released Monday showed bids for the right to drill on state land ranged as high as $3,200 an acre. That's comparable to the high prices paid in May at a regular state lease auction that grossed a record $45.6 million for Wyoming. Friday's special sale was Wyoming's second...

The half-dozen contestants, 20-something aspiring artists all, enter the famous Phillips de Pury art auction house. Mr. de Pury himself ushers them into the special room where they are presented with a collection of paintings by Andres Serrano, the man who came to fame in 1989 with the ghastly painting, sponsored by the National Endowment of the Arts, depicting a crucifix dunked in a jar of urine. They are hugely impressed. The final painting they are shown is just that -- the original "Piss Christ." They are in awe, quietly expressing their amazement at the talent. And then the door...

NEW YORK (AP) -- An upcoming New York City auction will feature the belongings of movie cowboy Roy Rogers - including the preserved remains of his famous horse, Trigger. Christie's in Manhattan held a preview Friday for next week's auction. The items are from the now-closed Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum in Branson, Mo.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The apparently endless market for images of Marilyn Monroe now extends to inside the bombshell's body. A set of three Monroe Chest X-rays from a 1954 hospital visit sold Sunday for $45,000 at the Hollywood Legends auction at Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.

An American flag found at Little Bighorn after Lt Col George Custer and nearly 270 men were wiped out by Indian warriors is expected to fetch as much as £3.3 million when it goes up for auction. The swallowtail battle guidon of the 7th Cavalry Regiment was the only military artefact left behind after Custer and his men were defeated by thousands of Lakota and Cheyenne Indians, led by Sitting Bull, in June, 1876.*** The victorious Plains Indians had stripped the corpses clean of trophies but evidently missed the flag, which was hidden under the body of a fallen soldier....

NEW YORK – A striking black-and-white photograph of the majestic Bridalveil waterfall is among numerous that landscape photographer Ansel Adams took with Polaroid film — a technology many celebrated artists embraced to produce innovative and surprising works. ... The image is among 1,000 Polaroid and gelatin silver prints by some of the biggest names in 20th-century photography being offered at Sotheby's on June 21-22 as part of a bankruptcy court-approved sale. The prints are being sold by PBE Corp., a previous owner of the Polaroid brand. The Polaroid camera was the invention of Edwin H. Land, whose revolutionary 1948 technology...

Frank Frazetta's original 1955 artwork for Weird Science-Fantasy #29, considered by many comic art fans to be the finest comic book cover of all time, has been sold in a private treaty sale for $380,000 – almost certainly the most ever paid for a single piece of original American comic book art – to Heritage Co-Chairman and Co-Founder Jim Halperin, a collector known to own one of the finest comic book and original comic art collections in the world. It was an outright purchase for immediate payment, with no trade-ins involved. "Knowing I'm a huge Frazetta fan, and a...

Above the Restoration Hardware in this Jersey Shore town, not far from the Navesink River, lurks a Wall Street giant. Here, inside the humdrum offices of a tiny trading firm called Tradeworx, workers in their 20s and 30s in jeans and T-shirts quietly tend high-speed computers that typically buy and sell 80 million shares a day. But on the afternoon of May 6, as the stock market began to plunge in the “flash crash,” someone here walked up to one of those computers and typed the command HF STOP: sell everything, and shutdown.Across the country, several of Tradeworx’s counterparts did...

It's back again, now at $3,250.00. It was way over 6000 bucks last time.The item description has been drastically edited, old Charlie the Quisling must be spending our money on lawyers now!

His 1932 portrait 'Nude, Green Leaves and Bust' fetches $106.5 million. Some mistresses are more valuable than others. On Tuesday night, Christie's New York sold Pablo Picasso's bold 1932 portrait of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust," for $106.5 million, making it the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. "I think the Picasso illustrates what has been true in good and bad economic times — the very best works of art continue to sell at a premium," said Marc Porter, chairman of Christie's Americas. He said the nine bidders active after the opening bid of $58...

Privately Commissioned, High Quality, One of a Kind, Genuine Oil Painting on Fine Linen Canvas ★Canvas is naturally sensitive to changes of temperature and humidity, just as the Charlie Crist’s political convictions are subject to fluctuations in poll numbers. ★Depending upon variety of conditions, the stretch canvas may periodically lose and regain tautness, much like Charlie Crist periodically loosens or regains positions on a variety of issues. ★Ornate gold frame made of manufactured wood, similar to the fabricated conservative values of the politician depicted within. Estimated Value – PRICELESS!