Free Republic

Check out this Presidential Elections Atlas that will let you check final results state by state as far back as George Washington's presidency. This is a great resource. This lets you quickly compare the actual results with the pollsters results going into the election, including RCP going back to the 2004 election. Mouse hover over states to get a quick look at the percentage difference results, or drill down to the state and year and see county by county results. Enjoy! http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/

Jon Stewart confuses the National Debt and the Deficit in O'Reilly vs. Stewart Rumble 2012. Stewart thought Bush ran up a 10 trillion dollar national debt during his 8 year Presidency. He thought we had a 100 billion dollar surplus on the national debt from the Clinton Administration, when in fact it was on the deficit, not the debt. In Stewart's mind, Obama's 6 trillion dollar growth to the debt isn't as bad as Bush's. It's Bush's fault. O'Reilly tried to correct him, but I am not sure he or his followers understood the obvious mistake.

<p>Jesus Christ chose to inject Himself from His place inhabiting eternity, into created our reality. The Holy Spirit overshadowed a virgin Jewish girl named Mary who lived in Nazareth over 2000 years ago, to become God in the flesh, in the person of the Son. He lowered Himself in unfathomable ways, by laying aside His eternal attributes in order to demonstrate, by example to all mankind, how to perfectly relate to the Father. Emmanuel, God with us.</p>

More Hints at Early Origin of Stars, Galaxies   03/31/2006     Several articles this month showed further evidence for a growing realization in astronomy: stars and galaxies were already mature at the beginning of the universe (see, for instance, 09/21/2005 entry).  Some recent examples: Spitzer Clusters:  JPL issued a press release stating that the Spitzer Space Telescope, on a “cosmic safari,” found evidence for clusters of galaxies 9 billion years old.  In the standard dating scheme, this was when the universe was a “mere” 4.5 billion years old. Swift GRBs:  Astronomers reported in Nature1 the discovery, by the Swift satellite,...

Keeping Saturn’s Moons Old   02/06/2006     The Saturn system has a problem: young moons.  The current consensus on the age of the solar system (4.5 billion years) cannot handle such young objects.  Richard A. Kerr in Science last month described the vexing problem:1 Why is there geology on Saturn’s icy satellites?  Where did these smallish moons get the energy to refresh their impact-battered surfaces with smoothed plains, ridges, and fissures?  These questions have nagged at scientists since the Voyager flybys in the early 1980s, and the Cassini spacecraft’s recent discovery that Saturn’s Enceladus is spouting like an icy geyser...

Evolutionary Theory: Verified or Vilified?   01/26/2006     Jeffrey Schwartz has reason to be happy that his particular theory of evolution received some support recently, according to a press release from University of Pittsburgh.  But look at the pedestal he is standing on: the ruins of classical Darwinism and neo-Darwinism.  In supporting his own theory, he kicked out the props from under standard evolutionary theory (emphasis added in all quotes): Fossils:  The missing links Darwin expected to find “have not been found because they don’t exist,” he claims.  The gradualistic theory “glosses over gaps in the fossil record,” he accuses....

Fish Gill Evolves toward Tetrapod Ear?    01/20/2006   “This is another nail in the coffin of the creationist view, in my opinion,” said the curator of Chicago’s Field Museum about a paper published in Nature,1 reported the Washington Post yesterday (see MSNBC News).  Brazeau and Ahlberg of Uppsala University in Sweden examined the skull of Panderichthys, a Devonian lobe-finned fish, and found what they are calling a transitional form between gills and ears.  They found a spiracle (respiratory channel) they are claiming is intermediate between the gills of the Devonian fish Eusthenopteron and the middle ear bones of the...

Why Your Brain Has Gray Matter, and Why You Should Use It   01/13/2006     Vertebrate brains have an outer layer of “gray matter” over the inner “white matter.”  Why is this?  “By borrowing mathematical tools from theoretical physics,” a press release from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory announced, two researchers found out. Based on no fewer than 62 mathematical equations and expressions, the theory provides a possible explanation for the structure of various regions including the cerebral cortex and spinal cord.  The theory is based on the idea that maximum brain function requires a high level of interconnectivity among brain...

Grown Man in the Stellar Crib: Now What?    10/14/2005   The cover of Science News has a strange cartoon explained on the inside in an article by Ron Cowen: Imagine peering into a nursery and seeing, among the cooing babies, a few that look like grown men.  That’s the startling situation that astronomers have stumbled upon as they’ve looked deep into space and thus back to a time when newborn galaxies filled the cosmos.  Some of these babies have turned out to be nearly as massive as the Milky Way and other galactic geezers that have taken billions of...

Paleoanthropology: Start Over?   08/22/2005     The September issue of National Geographic, featuring the African continent, has arrived in homes.  On page 1, Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post wrote about the quest for early man, asking, “Are we looking for bones in all the right places?”  The bulk of the article describes the “messy” story of human origins.  It used to be clean-cut, he said, but no longer: Scientists are good at finding logical patterns and turning data into a coherent narrative.  But the study of human origins is tricky: The bones tell a complicated story.  The cast of...

Michael Ruse Balances the Scales in Creation-Evolution Conflict    07/22/2005   Sahotra Sarkar seems in a bit of dilemma about how to treat Michael Ruse’s new book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle (Harvard, 2005).  In his review of the book in Science,1 Sarkar knew that Ruse is an important ally in the fight against intelligent design (see 02/18/2003 entry), but he seemed a little bit put off by Ruse’s distinction between evolution and evolutionism.  Ruse is brazen in his claim that most evolutionists have made a religion out of the theory.  Sarkar begins, In this timely book, Michael Ruse interprets the last...

Depressed Kerry Supporters Find New Cause: Fight Creationism    07/20/2005   A grass-roots group of Virginia liberal Democrats has found a new cause to lift them out of their depression after John Kerry’s defeat last fall, according to a Washington Post article reprinted by MSNBC News: “Keep Virginia evolving.”  Their chosen mission is to defend evolution from intrusions by the intelligent design movement and conservative Republicans and Christians.  Peter Slevin writes: Evolution’s newest defenders, who came together in frustration after the November elections, have little political experience, apart from hoisting Kerry-Edwards signs in morning traffic.  They mostly are middle-class people...

Rock Formation Built in Millions of Years, Lost in Seconds?    07/05/2005   To the surprise of tourists, one of Australia’s seacoast rock formations called the “Twelve Apostles” collapsed into a pile of rubble before their eyes, reported CNN, ABC and other news sources.  The fall of the 150-foot high sedimentary formation was caught in before-and-after snapshots by a teenager.  Even though standard geology claims the rocks began to form 20 million years ago (see the BBC News story), the remains will probably be washed away by the waves within weeks.  Answers in Genesis took this event, and others like...

Something from Nothing Dept.: Can a Divide-and-Conquer Strategy Climb Mt. Improbable?    06/20/2005 Darwinian evolution from the most primitive organisms to the most advanced must have produced huge increases in functional information (see 06/12/2003 entry).  Yet finding specific genetic mechanisms for just how DNA succeeded in “climbing Mt. Improbable,” as Richard Dawkins termed it in his book of the same name, has been daunting.  In a recent paper in PNAS,1 Austin L. Hughes meant to encourage his fellow Darwinists that explaining the origin of new function in proteins has been given a boost by recent findings.  In the body of...

Still, some critics claim that science by definition can't accept design, while others argue that science should keep looking for another explanation in case one is out there. But we can't settle questions about reality with definitions, nor does it seem useful to search relentlessly for a non-design explanation of Mount Rushmore. Besides, whatever special restrictions scientists adopt for themselves don't bind the public, which polls show, overwhelmingly, and sensibly, thinks that life was designed. And so do many scientists who see roles for both the messiness of evolution and the elegance of design.

Astrobiology: 0 Steps Forward, 3 Steps Back    01/28/2005 Astrobiology, the science in search of a subject, has major hurdles to overcome in its quest to explain everything from hydrogen to high technology.  Despite being one of the most active interdisciplinary research projects around the world (see 01/07/2005 entry), a leading researcher this week conceded that several promising leads of the past are now considered unlikely.  Because the biochemicals we know (proteins and nucleic acids) are so advanced and improbable under prebiotic conditions, attempts to generate them or build living systems based on them have proved fruitless.  Astrobiologists are having...

Relatives of Living Ducks and Chickens Existed Alongside Dinosaurs More Than 65 Million Years Ago Newly published North Carolina State University research into the evolution of birds shows the first definitive fossil proof linking close relatives of living birds to a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Research by paleontologist Dr. Julia A. Clarke, an assistant professor in the marine, earth and atmospheric sciences department at NC State, and colleagues provides unprecedented fossil proof that some close cousins to living bird species coexisted with dinosaurs more than 65 million years ago. Information from a new avian species called Vegavis iaai...

Robots Don’t See as Well as You Do   01/12/2005 Robot designers are still working on ways to emulate the human eye.  Just when you thought digital cameras were all the rage, we learn from EurekAlert they are miserable substitutes when put into the eye sockets of robots.  Robot-vision export Vladimir Brajovic explains: Often, when we take a picture with a digital or film camera, we are disappointed that many details we remember seeing appear in the image buried in deep shadows or washed out in overexposed regions.  This is because our eyes have a built-in mechanism to adapt to local...

Anthropologist Claims Humans, Neanderthals, Australopithecines All Variations on One Species   01/01/2005 According to a news story in the UK News Telegraph, all fossil hominims, including modern humans, Australopithecines, Neandertals and the recent Indonesian “hobbit man,” belong to the same species: Homo sapiens.  Reporter Robert Matthews wrote about Maciej Henneberg (U of Adelaide) and his argument, based on skull sizes and body weights for 200 fossil specimens, that all known hominim bones fit within the range of variation expected for a single species.  Henneberg made the startling claim in the Journal of Comparative Human Biology, where he said, “All hominims appear...

Christianity and the Birth of Science by Michael Bumbulis, Ph.D The author holds an M.S. degree in Zoology from Ohio State University and a Ph.D in Genetics from Case Western Reserve University. Summary: In an attempt to account for the origin of modern science, I will argue that the Judeo-Christian world view played a crucial role in this birth. I will cite four lines of evidence to support this hypothesis and respond to objections at the appropriate places. Acknowledgement: Several points in the following essays are indebted to Stanley Jaki's, "Science and Creation: From eternal cycles to an oscillating universe."...