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<p>The portrait gives the impression of a movie poster associated with the 1972 mobster classic, “The Godfather,” directed by Francis Ford Coppola.</p> <p>A video uploaded by the Chicago Tribune on Sunday shows Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass entering Emanuel’s Chicago office to give the mayor his gift.</p>

Let me know if I’m being a right-wing paranoid. I saw a headline last week: “US military deaths in Afghanistan at 1,968.” (Article here.) If a conservative Republican, rather than a liberal Democrat, were in the White House, would the media be doing a big countdown to 2,000? Based on recent experience, am I being paranoid — or more like realistic? (It will shock you to know that I vote “realistic.”) Think way back to the Florida recount in 2000. The Democrats worked pretty hard to block military ballots — to have them invalidated. This did not play very well,...

*snip* FBI agents arrested Russell Wasendorf, Sr., 64, of Cedar Falls on Friday. Federal prosecutors unsealed a criminal complaint charging the CEO of Peregrine Financial Group, Inc., with making false statements to regulators and released documents detailing a wide-ranging fraud scheme that apparently fooled colleagues, customers and regulators for years *snip* Peregrine Financial Group, which marketed itself as PFGBest with offices in Chicago, filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday, the same day federal regulators filed civil fraud charges alleging the firm falsely claimed a bank account contained more than $220 million when it actually had about $6 million. The money in...

These WikiLeaks are about the same numbers the Iraq Body Count have? Are people in the media idiots? I have been referencing these in debates with libs for years...

BIDEN: "I think Americans will recognize that there aren’t body counts . . .that they got 95,000 people home." Vice President Joe, Joey Buttafuoco, "Bite-me", Biden says there are no body counts from the Iraq war! We all know he's an idiot, but this one perhaps takes the cake. WTH is he talking about? Remember all the Bush Death Counts the left kept when it was Bush's war?... Hey Joey, there are indeed body counts. There are thousands of lives that have been lost, and many more that have been changed forever due to the sacrifices those in our military...

US Citizens Killed In Afghanistan Eight Americans have been killed in a suicide bomb attack in south-eastern Afghanistan, US officials say. The suicide bomber was wearing an explosive vest as he carried out the attack at a forward operating base in Khost province, CNN reported. Details about the attack are still emerging and it was not clear how many people had been injured. One unnamed US official was quoted by Reuters news agency as saying that all of those killed were civilians.

Sadly we have lost more US Troops, but I have to wonder how an attack like this could even happen. Did this Muslim pose as a friend in the past, or did this maybe have something to do with Obama’s and our General’s new Rules of Engagement (ROE)? May they RIP.

Iraq's government said at least 85,000 people were killed from 2004 to 2008, officially answering one of the biggest questions of the conflict - how many perished in the sectarian violence that nearly led to a civil war. What remains unanswered is how many died in the 2003 U.S. invasion and in the months of chaos that followed it. A report by the Human Rights Ministry said 85,694 people were killed from the beginning of 2004 to Oct. 31, 2008 and 147,195 were wounded. The figures included Iraqi civilians, military and police but did not cover U.S. military deaths, insurgents,...

Hi everyone I’m new here at FreeRepublic, but I need help from people I trust. I trust the people here, who understand that no government bureaucrat should decide who gets health care… my father has a serious health condition and as hes getting older I worry… and I don’t want to worry that OBOMBO’s death panel will decide whther he should live or die. ONLY GOD MAKES THAT CHOICE, but I understand that you all know this. America is the greatest country in the world because we are a free democracy where we choose and we have the life we...

Vice-president Biden reveals US forces will step up operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Obama administration warned the US public yesterday to brace itself for an increase in American casualties as it prepares to step up the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan. Against a background of widespread protests in Pakistan and Afghanistan over US operations since Obama became president, the vice-president, Joe Biden, said yesterday that US forces would be engaged in many more operations as it takes the fight to its enemies in the region. The Obama administration is to...

Ok folks here's the new thread for the new season. .................................................................................Set in Washington, DC, "Day 7" opens four years after Season Six with CTU dismantled and JACK BAUER on trial. Bauer's day takes an unexpected turn when former colleague TONY ALMEIDA returns. Meanwhile, newly elected President ALLISON TAYLOR leads the country alongside White House Chief of Staff ETHAN KANIN and First Gentleman HENRY TAYLOR. A national security crisis prompts an investigation by a team of FBI agents including JANIS GOLD, RENEE WALKER, LARRY MOSS and SEAN HILLINGER. Although CTU is no longer, CHLOE O'BRIAN and BILL BUCHANAN are back for...

Air Force bombs more than 25 targets in Gaza Strip on Friday night. Palestinians say Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades commander Abu Zakaria al-Jamal died from wounds sustained in strike. Rocket lands in southern kibbutz on Saturday morning; no injuries reported, but building sustains damage. Another rocket hit open area near Sderot An Israeli air strike in the Gaza Strip killed a senior commander of Hamas' armed wing, the Islamist group said Saturday. Hamas said Abu Zakaria al-Jamal died early on Saturday from wounds sustained in an Israel Air Force strike overnight. Two rockets were fired into Israel on Saturday morning....

Russia's assertions that it was provoked into war by "genocide" in South Ossetia and that it is observing a cease-fire in Georgia came under new challenge Thursday, as the U.S. stepped up diplomatic pressure on Moscow. Washington agreed to base missile interceptors on Polish soil, in a new sign of how Russia's invasion of Georgia is redrawing the geopolitical map. On the ground in South Ossetia -- the contested region where fighting broke out last week between Georgia and Russia -- there was little evidence that Georgian attacks killed thousands of civilians, as Russia has said. Doctors said they had...

Most people don't care about the gay aspect of the Larry Sinclair story. If however, it is proven that Obama was doing hard drugs as recently as 1999 that is a major issue. What most American people care about is the truth. I have news for all the Obama supporters out there. This is not going away until it is addressed by the media or the Obama campaign. This video asks many important questions. Perhaps the most important: Why isn't Larry Sinclair mentioned on the "fight the smears" website?

While most Americans joined the billions of Christians worldwide in celebrating Easter this weekend, liberals closely watched the body count in Iraq, praying for a magic number.

I am trying to explain to my 18 year-old daughter the baggage that HRC would bring to the White House, if elected (God forbid!). Unfortunately my memory is not what it used to be, and some details are kind of foggy. Does any freeper have a list (or a link to it)of Bill's Body Count? Thanks

Just a quick refresher course lest we forget what has happened to many "friends" of the Clinton's. 1-James McDougal - Clinton's convicted Whitewater partner died of an apparent heart attack, while in solitary confinement. He was a key witness in Ken Starr's investigation. 2 -Mary Mahoney - A former White House intern was murdered July 1997 at a Starbucks Coffee Shop in Georgetown. The murder happened just after she was to go public with her story of sexual harassment in the White House. 3- Vince Foster - Former White House counselor and colleague of Hillary Clinton at Little Rock's Rose...

Food for Thought Just a quick refresher course lest we forget what has happened to many "friends"of the Clintons .

As a result of Hugh Hewitt's conversation with General Petraeus a few days ago, the question has been brought up of how many terrorist combatants have been killed due to the United States' fighting the War Against Islamic Terror in Iraq. This has been a complaint of mine for a couple of years now. Why do we never hear how many bad guys are killed from day to day from the television news journalists? All we ever hear is how many American Soldiers are killed each day, nothing else. The reason is because the TV news channels are antiwar pacifists...

One of the most useful roles of the blogosphere is its service as an open-source intelligence-gathering medium. You can draw on the expertise of people around the world at the touch of a button. We saw this with typography experts during the Rathergate scandal; Photoshop experts during the Reutersgate debacle; and military experts during the Jesse Macbeth unmasking. Now, it’s the statisticians and math geeks’ turn. Remember that massively-publicized 2004 Lancet Iraq death toll study? It was cited in nearly 100 scholarly journals and reported by news outlets around the world. “100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq” blared the Washington...

(CBS 3) PHILADELPHIA -- A violent night left two people dead, several injured and the city marked a grim murder milestone. The city’s 100th homicide this year occurred on the 4900 block of Aspen street around 5:45 a.m. Saturday morning. 36-year-old, Dwayne Green was shot in the torso and taken to HUP where he was later pronounced dead. Three males were shot, one fatal, on the 2800 block of North Ringold Street in North Philadelphia around 10:00 p.m. Friday night. The fatally injured male was 14-year-old Taron George of North Philadelphia. One of the injured males is in critical condition,...

A study by a group led by Dr. Gilbert Burnham of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, to be published Thursday on the Web site of the Lancet, a British medical journal, will claim that about 600,000 Iraqis have died from violence in Iraq since Operation Iraqi Freedom began. ... They used a methodology known as "cluster sampling," which can be valid if using real data and not anecdotal reporting. Most of the original Lancet clusters reported no deaths at all, with the journal admitting, "two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city...

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's brother Anthony D. Rodham has been barred from accessing his bank account while a bankruptcy trustee demands that he repay more than $100,000 in loans from a carnival company whose founder was pardoned by President Clinton, filings in federal bankruptcy court in Alexandria show. Mr. Rodham, one of Mrs. Clinton's two brothers, received $107,000 in loans from United Shows of America Inc. after its owners obtained the presidential pardon over the objections of the Justice Department. United Shows went bankrupt in 2002, and control of its finances was placed in the hands of court-appointed trustee Michael...

LOS ANGELES - Former President Bill Clinton praised President Bush on Saturday for supporting reforms that would allow millions of illegal immigrants to seek citizenship but said the debate in Congress is being fomented by Republicans who want to divide America. "I'm proud of him for doing it and I thanked him for doing it," he said of Bush during a "Cafe con Clinton" breakfast speech to the annual conference of the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Hispanic civil rights advocacy group. Clinton said Bush's roots in Texas — which has one of the nation's largest Hispanic...

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton charged Wednesday that a House GOP immigration bill would make her and her Senate aides criminals, and warned of a "ticking time bomb" lurking in the U.S. economy..

Does anyone have any links to the count of dead in Iraq? Such as number of Iraqi's? Number of insurgents? Etc.? Of course trying to find anything accurate on the web is real hard since there is so much left wing noise out there. Thanks.

Postscript on Iraqi War Dead Another figure in the news recently has been the number of Iraqis killed in the war. President Bush mentioned last month that in addition to the more than 2,100 American soldiers killed so far in Iraq, that there were approximately 30,000 Iraqis killed. He was likely referring to the approximate figure put out by Iraq Body Count, a group of primarily British researchers who use online Western media reports to compile an extensive list of Iraqi civilians killed. The organization checks the names and associated details of those killed. It necessarily misses all those whose...

PHILADELPHIA - President Bush offered encouragement to war-weary Iraqis on Monday but acknowledged they have paid a heavy price — 30,000 dead — as a result of the U.S.-led invasion and its bloody aftermath.

YEAR-MURDERS in the United States2002-16,204 Murders2003-16,528 Murders2004-16,137 MurdersTotal-48,802 MurdersLink: 2002 Statistics Link: 2003 Statistics Link: 2004 Statistics

BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. and Iraqi troops launched a dawn assault Monday on another town near the Syrian border and killed 50 insurgents, a U.S. statement said, while the interior ministry reported that a car bomb detonated outside a gate leading into the fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad, killing two South Africans.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- The number of deaths in Louisiana blamed on Hurricane Katrina has risen to 799, the state's Department of Health and Hospitals said Wednesday, bringing the overall death toll to 1,033. Mississippi reports 219 people killed in the storm, Florida's toll is 11 dead and Alabama and Georgia each report 2 killed. The death toll in New Orleans is expected to increase sharply, as crews are just now getting to some of the areas that were hardest-hit by flooding. Searchers from Florida break down a door Wednesday as they search for flood victims in New Orleans.

Nothing makes Democrats more upset than the recess appointment of someone they spent five months trying to keep out of a job so the appointment of John Bolton to be the US Ambassador to the United Nations seemed to be a sting that would take Democrats some time to get over. All of that changed when Democrats got the kind of news they love – causality figures from Iraq went over 1,800. There is nothing like watching Democrats spar for airtime to become cautiously gleeful over casualties during a war against people who want to kill us.

LONDON - A British research group said Tuesday that about 25,000 civilians died in violence in Iraq in the two years after the start of the U.S.-led invasion. Iraq Body Count compiled its figures of killings that occurred between March 20, 2003 and March 19, 2005 from reports by the major news agencies, including The Associated Press and British and American newspapers. The results could not be independently confirmed. U.S. and coalition authorities say they have not kept a count of such deaths and Iraqi accounting has proven to be haphazard. "There are no wholly reliable figures for civilian deaths,"...

HILLARY'S SECRET WAR The real story behindthe Clinton body count Posted: July 13, 20051:00 a.m. Eastern Editor's note: The following is an eye-opening look into New York Times best-selling author Richard Poe's revealing book, "Hillary's Secret War." Whereas Edward Klein's book on the New York senator reveals previously unknown aspects of her personal life, Poe's expose focuses on how Hillary Clinton and the left's "shadow government" have labored to put her and her far-left agenda in the White House by controlling the still-uncensored flow of real news to Americans – via the Internet.If that sounds too fantastic to be...

10 November 2004 -- Bosnian Serb authorities today apologized for the first time to relatives of around 8,000 Muslims killed by Serbian forces in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst atrocity since World War II. A statement posted on the government's official web page said "the government of Republika Srpska sympathizes with the pain of relatives of the Srebrenica victims and expresses sincere regrets and apologies over the tragedy which has happened to them." The Bosnian Serb government accepted last month a local report by a special investigative commission acknowledging that almost 8,000 Muslims were killed in the massacre, in...

I just posted this question in another thread, and realized that I hadn't seen it discussed in the press or here on FR. Lately Teddy Kennedy and his cohorts have been ranting about the lack of Iraqi military casualties versus American military casualties.But last week Paul Wolfowitz claimed that 1,500 Iraqi policemen had died in the last three months of 2004 alone.Which raises the question: unlike the intense and accurate scrutiny paid to American casualties, and the intense and utterly specious speculative theories by The Lancet and Johns Hopkins about Iraqi "civilian" casualties, there is not a single accurate source...

Confessions of a Liberal Democrat Betsy Gibson October 15, 1998 Partisanship is blinding us to the deeper truths we need to understand about Bill Clinton, ourselves and our country. I know about partisanship. I’m a liberal Democrat from a family so committed to those ideas that in 1968 my single-parent mother quit her job to volunteer for Senator Eugene McCarthy. During that long, hot summer in Chicago our already cramped apartment housed other volunteers who come to the convention to fight the good fight for the soul of the Democratic party. Our enemy was Hubert Humphrey and the establishment wing...

Who knew?..The former president of the US has a new gig. He's a crossword puzzle tester for the New York Times. The Sunday puzzle of the NY Times has legions of fans, including myself. So, imagine my surprise, when I open the magazine this morning, to find the following....

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com The Clintons' win-loss recordPublished November 28, 2004 Two weeks after yet another Democratic debacle at the polls, a crowd estimated at 30,000 celebratory partisans joined Bill and Hillary Clinton in a literal and metaphorical rainstorm to commemorate his two-term presidency at a ceremony dedicating the William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock. With Bill reportedly still weak and tired from his recent heart-bypass surgery, Hillary handled many of the non-stop media interviews, including a lengthy prime-time appearance on the Fox News Channel the night before the dedication.     How appropriate. Having been clobbered in the Nov. 2...

Former President William Jefferson Clinton formerly opens his Presidential Center, which will hold the papers from his two term presidency.Attending the ceremony will be President George W. Bush, former Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, along with First Lady Laura Bush ,Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Rosalyn Carter and Barbara Bush.

  The Progressive Review's Arkansas Sudden Death Syndrome  A number of persons associated with WJ Clinton or Arkansas politics have died of unnatural causes or suddenly under circumstances that have raised questions. While lists compiled by some run as high as 61 deaths, the following is limited to those deaths with clear anomalies that, based on the information available to TPR, require further investigation.A few important points: (1) The fact that anomalies need to be investigated carries no presumption of how a death occurred, only that there remain serious questions that require answers. (2) The possibility of foul play...

We have now lost 700 soldiers. I was thinking how many of the enemy have we taken out? We don't usually fight wars with bad kill ratios, so I'm wondering what is a good estimate of how many Iraqi bad guys have been taken out?

SAMARRA, Iraq, Dec. 1 — American commanders vowed Monday that the killing of as many as 54 insurgents in this central Iraqi town would serve as a lesson to those fighting the United States, but Iraqis disputed the death toll and said anger against America would only rise. Accounts of a three-hour battle fought in the alleys and streets of Samarra on Sunday diverged radically, with Iraqis saying only eight people had been killed, several of them civilians. At the morgue, Adnan Sahib Dafar, 52, an ambulance driver, pointed to a dead woman on a steel tray. The woman, Mr....

The Washington press corps has begun its daily drumbeat over U.S. casualties in Iraq, with reporters citing "body count" statistics as evidence that the Bush administration is "losing the peace." And while even a single U.S. soldier's combat death is one too many, the truth is, more Americans are being killed daily in Washington, D.C. than in Baghdad. Since President Bush told the nation on May 1 that major combat operations in Iraq had ended, 52 U.S. soldiers have been killed in hostilities, according to statistics complied by Reuters on Thursday. In the same period of time, however, 66 Americans...

The death of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster – one of the most bizarre events of the Clinton years – was ruled a suicide by two independent counsels and considered a closed case by the mainstream media. Any suggestion that officials covered up the "murder" of Bill and Hillary Clinton's loyal aide and close friend has invited only scorn from lawmakers. Just a handful of media outlets have ever followed up on evidence and testimony from witnesses that contradict the conclusions of government investigators Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr. But as the 10th anniversary of the July 20, 1993,...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, (Reuters) - U.S. troops killed 27 Iraqis who they said ambushed a tank patrol Friday, after killing at least 70 at a guerrilla camp the day before, in the bloodiest clashes since major combat was declared over. The U.S. military has launched two big operations west and north of Baghdad this week to try to root out what it says are diehard Saddam Hussein loyalists behind a recent spate of attacks on American troops in mainly Sunni Muslim areas. A U.S. statement said an organized group of fighters had fired rocket-propelled grenades at a 4th Infantry Division tank...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - At least 3,240 civilians died across Iraq (news - web sites) during a month of war, including 1,896 in Baghdad, according to a five-week Associated Press investigation. The count is still fragmentary, and the complete toll — if it is ever tallied — is sure to be significantly higher. Several surveys have looked at civilian casualties within Baghdad, but the AP tally is the first attempt to gauge the scale of such deaths from one end of the country to the other, from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south. The AP count was based...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - At least 3,240 civilians died across Iraq (news - web sites) during a month of war, including 1,896 in Baghdad, according to a five-week Associated Press investigation. The count is still fragmentary, and the complete toll — if it is ever tallied — is sure to be significantly higher. Several surveys have looked at civilian casualties within Baghdad, but the AP tally is the first attempt to gauge the scale of such deaths from one end of the country to the other, from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south. The AP count was based...

The effort to number the dead on the Iraqi side in the war begins with a conundrum: who is a civilian and who is a soldier? In Basra, for example, ambulance drivers and hospital workers estimate that they have handled between 1,000 and 2,000 corpses in three weeks of war. Some were clearly military: they wore uniforms and military boots. Others were obviously civilians: women, children and older people. Some were burned or blasted beyond recognition by bombs, artillery or grenades. But perhaps hundreds more were men and boys of fighting age who arrived at hospitals and morgues in civilian...