Free Republic

Mitt Romney had a horrible, horrible night. Early yesterday, Mitt Romney’s campaign called Missouri a “beauty contest” and said to focus on Colorado. We did. Wow. I’ve said since Sunday that yesterday would be the first day of voting that Mitt Romney’s “poor” comment to Soledad O’Brien would have an impact. It typically takes a week for comments like that to be digested by voters. Six days after Romney opened his mouth, Rick Santorum swept the night. From Missouri to Minnesota to Colorado the Republican electorate sent a very clear signal — they want conviction over electability. They do not...

A powerful solar eruption is expected to blast a stream of charged particles toward Earth tomorrow (Jan. 24), as the strongest radiation storm since 2005 rages on the sun. Early this morning (0359 GMT Jan. 23, which corresponds to late Sunday, Jan. 22 at 10:59 p.m. EST), NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught an extreme ultraviolet flash from a huge eruption on the sun , according to the skywatching website Spaceweather.com. The solar flare spewed from sunspot 1402, a region of the sun that has become increasingly active lately. Several NASA satellites, including the Solar Dynamics Observatory, the Solar Heliospheric Observatory...

Mitt Romney: 36 Newt Gingrich: 25 Rick Santorum: 17 Ron Paul: 7 Other: 5 Undecided 10 Other: 5

Something major is occuring in the markets today. The US economy peaked in 2007. However, throughout much of 2008, the stock market continued to rally despite the economic collapse as well as the financial system imploding. Throughout this period the credit markets jammed up and implied something VERY BAD was in the system. However, stock investors continued to pile into stocks because, well, frankly stocks always are the last to "get it." And when stocks finally did get it... it was quite a thing. This same environment is occurring today. Only this time the collapse is sovereign in nature: entire...

In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following up to five million tweets a day. At the agency's Open Source Center in McLean, a team known affectionately as the 'vengeful librarians' also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms – anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly. From Arabic to Mandarin Chinese, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in native tongue. Keeping track: The CIA team follow up to five million tweets a day around...

Two small earthquakes that shook the Lancashire coast of northeast England and the nearby city of Blackpool earlier this year were probably caused by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—a shale gas extraction technique that was being used nearby to explore its shale gas wells—according to a report(PDF) released today. The energy company Cuadrilla Resources had begun an experimental drilling operation half a kilometer from the quakes' epicenter in March. Fracking has caused concerns in some countries over its potential health and environmental impact—critics accuse it of contaminating drinking water with gas and the chemicals used for extraction—and it is banned in...

Alabama Immigration Threat: Prove Your Legal Status Or Lose Water Supply Poster put up in town hall illustrates potential impact of new laws which are now subject of appeal by federal government Ed Pilkington 7 October 2011 The warning notice in Allgood, Alabama. Click the magnify icon to see the full poster The poster is mildly worded, but carries a very big punch. "Attention to all water customers," it begins. "To be compliant with new laws concerning immigration you must have an Alabama driver's licence …" And then comes the hit: "… or you may lose water service." The warning,...

Big Media Lauds Imaginary Opening of Ground Zero Mosque Pamela Geller, Big Government One year ago, Ground Zero Mosque leader Daisy Khan, the wife of stealth Islamic supremacist Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, said that they would be breaking ground on September 11, 2011 for the 15-story monster mosque going up in a building that was destroyed in the Islamic attack on America on 9/11. It was redundant. They had broken ground on September 11, 2001. Well, nonetheless, the jihadist radical Rauf and his third wife (one more, papa, and you are maxed out) have been kicked off the Ground Zero...

Obama advisers, Democrat senators, and terminally stupid ideologues that for days have blamed Standard and Poor's downgrade of America's debt on the Tea Party are sadly mistaken. Next to the President of the United States and his Party, those really responsible are members of the media. Since the junior senator from Illinois first threw his hat into the presidential ring in February 2007, America's press have refused to hold his feet to the fire concerning any important issue facing the nation. This debt ceiling debate and resulting downgrade were just the most recent examples. When Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) offered...

Women should no longer assume they will give birth in hospital with a doctor on hand. In a watershed moment, leading medical experts declared that mothers should be given more opportunity to have babies at home because a maternity ward is not necessarily the 'safer option'. A report by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists suggests that as many as a third of all women should give birth 'without a doctor going anywhere near them'. It calls for a radical shake-up in the NHS which could lead to thousands more women having babies at home, as was the case

The latest from the Big Labor efforts to strip Republicans of control of the Wisconsin state senate. State labor unions have always been major players in elections here, however, this kind of outside influence on Wisconsin legislative elections is unprecedented. Six million dollars from one interest group for only nine legislative elections? Note thate most of the recalls are not for a month yet, so this totall is sure to increase, perhaps 2-3 times…. [Madison, Wisc…] MNS …In the first eight days of July nearly three million dollars has been sent to Wisconsin by national liberal organizations and individuals, with...

Bristol Palin: Michele Bachmann Stole My Mom's Look Wednesday, June 29, 2011 at 11:19AM | Dave Odegard Bristol Palin seems to have no problem speaking her mind while promoting her book. First, she took a shot at Meghan McCain, then she told the press that her mom has already decided on whether she'll run for President or not. Now, she's saying that she thinks Michele Bachmann copped her mom's style. Recently, Bristol told a reporter: "I think she dresses a lot like my mom. But a lot, a lot of women have done that the last few years. I do...

Minnesota soldiers got a chance to train with the latest and greatest in new weapons on Wednesday at Camp Ripley. It’s the M-777 canon designed to hit a target with near complete accuracy up to 15 miles away. The state of Minnesota now has 12 of the big guns and Minnesota National Guard troops had a chance to fire the weapons up. “Two million dollars for a Howitzer, you can’t put a price on a life. It’s a small price to pay, if we can keep our soldiers alive down range,” said Minnesota National Guard Capt. Steve Hall. The soldiers...

The U.S. Medicaid program is likely paying far more than necessary for medications and not offering patients the most effective ones available, by ignoring international evidence-based lists of safe and effective medications, according to a new study by researchers at University of California, San Francisco. The study, which compared the Medicaid program's Preferred Drug Lists in 40 states nationwide against the World Health Organization's 2009 Essential Medicines List, found that the medications that are automatically paid for by the state-run Medicaid programs vary widely from state to state, with few consistent protocols or rationales for their selection, including cost, safety...

Deflationary Depression In America: The Double Dip Economic Recession Economics / Deflation Jun 08, 2011 - 07:33 AM By: Bob Chapman Wall Street seems to believe the waning recovery in the economy is only temporary and that further recovery is on the way. Such thinking can get you in serious trouble, unless QE3, or its equivalent, is on the way. It is on the way, as we pointed out 13 months ago. The economy cannot live and survive without it otherwise we could be looking at a minus 5% GDP for openers. Incidentally, there are those that believe that unemployment...

Cap-and-trade legislation may have failed in Congress in 2010, but that doesn’t mean that this is the last we will hear from this economically-harmful policy. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) through the Clean Air Act has been busily proposing and finalizing nearly 200 major policy rules aimed at curbing carbon and other particulate emissions. This despite the fact that the Clean Air Act was never intended for this purpose and widespread opposition exists among the business community, citizens and states. One particular regulation that is generating deep concern among the business community is the Utility Maximum Achievable Control Technology rule...

I am happy that Smith-Corona went bankrupt and that Western Union was forced to abandon its old business practices. If the government had bailed out these companies, we’d still be banging out papers on manual typewriters and communicating by telegram. Instead, the typewriter has been relegated to museums (and perhaps a few Birkenstock-wearing, hipster screenwriters’ offices somewhere) and messaging is done over phones that are smarter than the people who keep bailing out failing companies. Actually, I’m indifferent to the success or failure of either of these particular companies, but I champion the free market- a meritocracy - Portugal Seeks...

“Just as a fish may be barely aware of the medium in which it lives and swims, so the microstructure of empty space could be far too complex for unaided human brains." -- Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, physicist, Cambridge University Our known Hubble length universe contains hundreds of millions of galaxies that have clumped together, forming super clusters and a series of massive walls of galaxies separated by vast voids of empty space. Great Wall: The most vast structure ever is a collection of superclusters a billion light years away extending for 5% the length of the entire observable...

Anti-war filmmaker Michael Moore tore into President Obama for taking military action in Libya on Saturday.

Filmmaker Michael Moore slammed President Obama in a string of tweets for taking military action in Libya. Moore, who frequently criticized President George Bush for launching the Iraq War, compared the U.S. military’s mission in Libya to Iraq and Afghanistan in several Twitter messages sent Saturday. Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2011/03/20/filmmaker-michael-moore-rips-president-obama-libya/#ixzz1H9NxSrUi

Deception 6) “We reported this to the FBI” Planned Parenthood wrote the FBI a letter a week after our investigation, only after they realized that Live Action had conducted the sting.They say this themselves. As much as they may pretend, Planned Parenthood was not attempting to help send human traffickers to jail; they were attempting to pre-empt the release of Live Action’s footage. If Planned Parenthood really cared about reporting potential sex traffickers to authorities, they would have called police while the pimp was in the clinic, or immediately after. Not wasting a minute. Planned Parenthood, where are the reports...

Chief financial officers from multinational companies meet with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Friday to air gripes about the tax code under which they pay the steepest rate in the industrialized world. Companies want the rate slashed, arguing that it handicaps them competitively against their foreign-based peers. "The current tax code with its punitive corporate rates and complex maze of deductions and credits highly distorts economic decision-making," said Dean Garfield, president of the Information Technology Industry Council, whose members Cisco Systems and Microsoft Corp will attend the meeting.

Never take investment advice from a union leader. As usual, organized labor emptied its pockets for Democrats in the recent midterm elections, spending at least $171.5 million in an attempt to keep the electoral map blue. Ninety-three percent of that astonishing figure went to elect Democratic politicians. Half of those union donations came from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which represents government workers. Unsurprisingly, 99.5 percent of their contributions went to Democratic candidates. That money didn't come from the wallets of union leaders. It came from their

Have we found the universe that existed before the Big Bang? The current cosmological consensus is that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang. But a legendary physicist says he's found the first evidence of an eternal, cyclic cosmos. The Big Bang model holds that everything that now comprises the universe was once concentrated in a single point of near-infinite density. Before this singularity exploded and the universe began, there was absolutely nothing - indeed, it's not clear whether one can even use the term "before" in reference to a pre-Big-Bang cosmos, as time itself may...

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama have a packed social schedule this week, with two major galas and a reception for college athletes. On Monday evening, the President will welcome collegiate star athletes to the White House for a reception at 5:45 p.m. The annual event, first held by former President George W. Bush, recognizes outstanding student athletes in more than a dozen sports, including field-hockey, lacrosse, and volleyball. Neither of Obama's alma maters, Columbia University and Harvard University, made the grade. On Wednesday the First Couple will don black tie for the annual Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute...

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama have a packed social schedule this week, with two major galas and a reception for college athletes. On Monday evening, the President will welcome collegiate star athletes to the White House for a reception at 5:45 p.m. The annual event, first held by former President George W. Bush, recognizes outstanding student athletes in more than a dozen sports, including field-hockey, lacrosse, and volleyball. Neither of Obama's alma maters, Columbia University and Harvard University, made the grade. On Wednesday the First Couple will don black tie for the annual Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute...

Skateboarding on streets or a marketplace may look an effortless and entertaining task, but when it comes to riding, rather controlling the world's largest skateboard, the fun factor just takes form of a thrilling experience, taking the breath out of the rider. This is exactly what happened when the California Skateparks brought the world's largest skateboard to the Camp Woodward in Pennsylvania, and took it out for a breathtaking ride with campers. Check out the video, to see the enormous skateboard on a suicidal ride, after the jump. Follow this link if you wish to see a short video...

You may have heard the UPS is in quite the political fight with FEDEX. Though both are package-delivery companies, they're governed by totally different federal labor rules. As a result, UPS's workforce is much more heavily unionized than FEDEX's—and more than twice as expensive. So now UPS is trying to get FEDEX reclassified under federal law as a way of screwing a competitor. That's horrendous, but it also makes a sick kind of business sense. And it also reveals the real villain: A government that is big enough to absolutely, positively guarantee it can screw any business. Overnight. "UPS Vs....

The debate agitating many in New Jersey right is whether or not the state’s Governor, Chris Christie, is actually doing much to reform the state as it needs to be. I have to say that I wasn’t impressed with him during his campaign for the Republican nomination against Steve Lonagan. Having no interest in the politics of politic, he sounded like a big government Republican to me. With that in mind, I was nicely surprised by the turn that Christie’s campaign against Corzine took and by some of his policies. He talked about small government, the need for reforming New...

* No more new drugs today than 60 years ago * Diversification push as blockbusters stumble * 200,000 jobs could go across the industry * Can biotech and contract research pick up the pieces? LONDON, June 16 (Reuters) - At just 28, Duncan Casey has already been from the university science bench to the world of Big Pharma research and back again. Now working in an Imperial College lab tucked behind London's famous Science Museum, he has no illusions about the prospects for researchers in the pharmaceutical industry. "The unit I used to work in -- GlaxoSmithKline's place in Harlow...

Yesterday’s story on the “Cry Wolf” project has exposed a dangerous pretense that has been prevalent, yet well disguised, for some time in our institutions of higher learning. It’s an important post. A small committee of professors and academic professionals, normally held in high regard, have blatantly betrayed the trust of the public and quite possibly smeared the reputations of all colleges and universities nationwide. By soliciting “paid activists” to create research papers that are intentionally designed to silence opposing viewpoints, they have undermined the political system and manipulated the governmental policy making process. And in the meantime, they’ve also...

On a July afternoon in 2006, Patrick Hale microwaved a bag of popcorn for his two young children and sat down with them to watch television. When he got up to change the channel, he heard a strange noise behind him, and turned to see his 23-month-old daughter, Allison, turning purple and unable to breathe.

In response to the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., is asking the Interior Department's inspector general to review “the extent to which the oil and natural gas industry exercised influence” over the development of drilling safety regulations.

The media industry may be going through some rough times, with the landscape changing day to day, but at least one aspect is business as usual: big paydays for the people at the top. Top executives at the country’s largest media companies continued to reel in multimillion-dollar pay packages in 2009, a year of widespread cost-cutting throughout the industry. In several cases, the packages even increased from the year before.

We are at a remarkable moment. We have an open, 2,000-mile border to our south, and the entity with the power to enforce the law and impose safety and order will not do it. Wall Street collapsed, taking Main Street's money with it, and the government can't really figure out what to do about it because the government itself was deeply implicated in the crash, and both political parties are full of people whose political careers have been made possible by Wall Street contributions. Meanwhile we pass huge laws, bills so comprehensive, omnibus and transformative that no one knows what's...

Desperate to balance their budgets, school districts on the Peninsula and in the South Bay are increasingly turning to furloughs. But faced with no-school days at unconventional times, parents are scrambling for child care, worrying about how their children will remember square roots and feeling left out of the decision-making. While a handful of districts, including San Jose Unified, began furlough days last year, hundreds more statewide are proposing the unpaid leaves as they struggle with their worst budget crunch in decades. If labor unions agree, millions of schoolchildren will get from one to five fewer days of school in...

My party challenges the whole basis of the Progressivist vision of this country's future. We challenge their attack on American exceptionalism. We challenge their claim that bureaucratic centralization is the only way the US can meet the economic and social challenges of our time.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) intends to purchase sixty Remington Model 870 Police RAMAC #24587 12 gauge pump-action shotguns for the Criminal Investigation Division. The Remington parkerized shotguns, with fourteen inch barrel, modified choke, Wilson Combat Ghost Ring rear sight and XS4 Contour Bead front sight, Knoxx Reduced Recoil Adjustable Stock, and Speedfeed ribbed black forend, are designated as the only shotguns authorized for IRS duty based on compatibility with IRS existing shotgun inventory, certified armorer and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts.

Washington (AP) - After a sleepless, overnight flight to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month, President Barack Obama made a not altogether surprising admission. He was tired. Who could blame him? The president was on his ninth foreign trip to his 21st country; he added a 10th trip the following week. The year had been bookended by the two most intense periods of his young presidency -- the early decisions to bail out the nation's banks and automobile industry, steps the president deemed unpopular but necessary, and his December orders to deploy 30,000 additional U.S. troops...

Something big just blew up in baytown texas

I hold an executive position at a private corporation located on Long Island, NY (250+ employees). On Thursday, November 19, 2009, two casually dressed gentlemen showed up at our facility (unannounced) and asked for the Human Resource Manager.They, unilaterally, determined that our company had a connection to the public safety and national security concerns of the United States. As such, they are requiring us to provide them with 100% of the Form I-9 - Employment Eligibility Verifications for all our current employees and employees who have been terminated within the past 12 months.The purpose of the form is for an...

The White House may want to diffuse its spat with the Chamber of Commerce, but Big Labor clearly has no such intentions. Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union and chairwoman of the five-union federation Change to Win, slammed the big business lobby and its president, Tom Donohue, in a letter delivered today to House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank and Rep. Spencer Bachus, the ranking Republican on the committee.

WASHINGTON — Democrats lost a big test vote on health care legislation on Wednesday as the Senate blocked action on a bill to increase Medicare payments to doctors at a cost of $247 billion over 10 years. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, needed 60 votes to proceed. He won only 47. And he could not blame Republicans. A dozen Democrats and one independent crossed party lines and voted with Republicans on the 53 to 47 roll call.

Federal, state, and local government spending will be 42 percent of U.S. gross domestic product in 2009, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s huge–more than 4 out of every 10 dollars of everything produced in America now gets channeled through governments. How does that compare to other advanced nations? Chart 1 shows that total government spending in the United States is somewhat less than the average of the 30 industrial nations in the OECD, but that the U.S. advantage is shrinking. During the 1990s, the U.S. government size was about 10 percentage points smaller...

Mathematicians have proposed an alternative explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe that does not rely on the mystifying idea of dark energy. According to the new proposition, the universe is not accelerating, as observations suggest. Instead, an expanding wave flowing through space-time has caused distant galaxies to appear to be accelerating away from us. This big wave, initiated after the Big Bang that is thought to have sparked the universe, could explain why objects today appear to be farther away from us than they should be according to the Standard Model of cosmology. "We're saying that maybe the...

President Barack Obama on Thursday selected for ambassadorships in Europe two of his presidential campaign's biggest fundraisers, extending a pattern of rewarding political supporters. Obama chose career foreign service officers to head U.S. embassies in Latvia, Benin and Zimbabwe. Obama said he will nominate William Eacho, chief executive officer of Carlton Capital Group, a private investment company, to be ambassador to Austria. Eacho raised more than $500,000 for Obama's presidential run; he and his immediate family also donated $226,000 to federal politics in 2007-08, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics.

It took Gregory Dunham 3 years to build, and it cost him 300.000$. But then he’s also got a 3.429 m (11 ft and 3 inch) tall behemoth of a contraption sporting 500hp and a whooping top speed of 65 mph. World's largest arcade machine. The machine is 13 feet tall, has about a 70-inch screen.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two troubled companies at the heart of the nation’s mortgage market, are set to pay their employees “retention bonuses” totaling $210 million, despite calls from lawmakers to cancel the payments.

As the Bush administration was drawing to a close, Robert M. Gates, whose two years as defense secretary had been devoted to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, felt compelled to warn his successor of a crisis closer to home.

Shedding Light on the Protein Big Bang Theory March 13, 2009 — The precise three-dimensional structure of a typical protein molecule is so complex, its origin would seem hopeless by chance. What if evolutionary biologists were to discover a whole host of proteins literally exploded into existence at the beginning of complex life? We can find out what they would think by looking at an article on the “protein big bang” found on Astrobiology Magazine...