Free Republic

NEW YORK (AP)—NBA referees, influenced by cozy relationships with league officials, rigged a 2002 playoff series to force it to a revenue-boosting seven games, a former referee at the center of a gambling scandal alleged Tuesday. Without identifying anyone or naming teams, Tim Donaghy also claimed the NBA routinely encouraged refs to ring up bogus fouls to manipulate results but discouraged them from calling technical fouls on star players to keep them in games and protect ticket sales and television ratings. Speaking before the start of the NBA finals Game 3 featuring the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics, NBA...

(CNN) – Former Rep. Bob Barr, the newly-selected Libertarian presidential nominee, rejected suggestions Monday that he could spoil his former party's chances of holding onto the White House. "There are two folks that are out to spoil the race here — it's Senator Obama and Senator McCain. They're setting out, I think, to spoil our chances," he told CNN's "American Morning." He added, "There are millions of voters out there that are not going to vote for Senator McCain, and we aim to reach those voters with the message of smaller government and more individual liberty." For years, Barr was...

Republicans are and should be panicked over the fact that conservative Democrat Travis Childers just defeated Republican Greg Davis by a margin of 54%-46% in the race for a vacant Mississippi congressional seat. That seat is in a conservative district that had given President Bush a 25-point margin of victory over John Kerry in 2004 - it never should have flipped Democrat. This is the third double-digit loss in a row for Republican candidates in conservative districts across the United States. Childers' victory came one week after Rep. Don Cazayoux won a House seat in the Baton Rouge, La., area...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Close-in supporters of Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign are convinced he never will offer the vice presidential nomination to Sen. Hillary Clinton for one overriding reason: Michelle Obama. The Democratic front-runner's wife did not comment on other rival candidates for the party's nomination, but she has been sniping at Clinton since last summer. According to Obama sources, those public utterances do not reveal the extent of her hostility. A footnote: Support is growing in Democratic ranks for Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland as vice president. He would bring to the ticket maturity (66 years old), experience (six terms...

I picked up a copy of Time magazine yesterday, in which a columnist declared that issues of "character" were a "distraction" in the Presidential race. Obama actually said the same thing in his North Carolina press conference, that the Reverend Wright affair has been a "distraction." Isn't this what liberals usually say when their own characters come under public scrutiny? What a heap of pure poppycock! Character is the primary issue in every Presidential election. Period. And we, the voters, have an inalienable right to know the specifics, as much as can be discerned, of a candidate's character. But don't...

I just saw a TV ad starring Newt Gingrich and his pal Nancy Pelosi pitching their bipartisan solution to the nonexistent "climate crisis". You can join Newt and Nancy at http://wecansolveit.org/, if you wish to join their delusional bipartisan crusade. "The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance." Michael Crichton

DES MOINES, Iowa -- A pizza delivery driver, who police said defended himself by shooting a robber who attacked him, was fired from his job on Friday. James Spiers, 38, confirmed to KCCI that he is no longer employed by Pizza Hut. Spiers said he was given two months severance pay and was offered help finding a new job by the company. Spiers told KCCI in an interview two weeks ago that he was not angry with his employer about the possibility of being let go and said he hadn't decided whether to return to the job even if he...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush plans to announce on Wednesday an intermediate goal to limit greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, but will not make specific proposals, the White House said on Tuesday. Bush will "articulate a realistic intermediate goal for reducing greenhouse gasses" and press for incentives for technology aimed at cutting emissions, said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. "This speech is not going to lay out a specific proposal," she told reporters. "It is a speech that will talk about a strategy for a way forward and principles for dealing with the problems." The United...

Charlton Heston, 84, an Academy Award-winning actor who starred in epics such as "Ben-Hur" and "The Ten Commandments" and then became a conservative political activist and influential president of the National Rifle Association, died last night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. A family spokesman did not release the cause of death, but Heston said in 2002 that he had symptoms consistent with Alzheimer's disease. In a message at the time, he told fans, "I've lived my whole life on the stage and screen before you. I've found purpose and meaning in your response. For an actor there's no...

Futurist and trends forecaster Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, NY, predicted the 1987 stock market crash, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the Asian economic implosion of ‘97, the decline of the dollar beginning in 2005, the meteoric rise in gold prices in an age of currency volatility, and the turn of events that may be the blessing of our era, the subprime mortgage crisis. Because of this habit of prescience, Celente has appeared regularly on CNN and Fox and MSNBC, his “Trends Reports” widely quoted in newsprint, on Oprah Winfrey, on Good...

Lately, Barack Obama has been quoting John F. Kennedy: "The world is changing. The old ways will not do." For a few hours the other day, I was starting to think he really meant it. On Thursday, The Washington Times reported that in 2004, as a candidate for the U.S. Senate, Obama came out for decriminalizing marijuana use. That usually means eliminating jail sentences and arrest records for anyone caught with a small amount for personal use, treating it more like a traffic offense than a violent crime. But in a show of hands at a debate last fall, he...

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, the latest big name to endorse Sen. Barack Obama, could give the Illinois Democrat a boost by lending his gravitas in the financial world to a presidential candidate whose biggest hurdle is to convince voters he is experienced enough. “After 30 years in government, serving under five Presidents of both parties and chairing two non-partisan commissions on the Public Service, I have been reluctant to engage in political campaigns. The time has come to overcome that reluctance,” Volcker, a Democrat, said in a statement today. “However, it is not the current turmoil in markets...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- While President George W. Bush has maintained neutrality among contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, he privately expresses to friends his exasperation with Mitt Romney's hard-line stance on immigration. Bush is upset that Romney changed his position on the issue, compared to what it had been when he was governor of Massachusetts, at the expense of the president's immigration reform. Bush and Sen. John McCain are not close, but the president is grateful for McCain's support on Iraq and immigration. A footnote: The president's younger brother, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, has not endorsed any presidential candidate....

KISUMU, Kenya - The young man hefting a machete at the burning roadblock was frustrated. He'd been looking for five days, but could not find a member of the Kikuyu tribe to kill. Members of Kenya's biggest tribe have disappeared in their thousands from Kisumu, making it the first — but perhaps not the last — city to be ethnically cleansed. "If we find any Kikuyus, we're going to slaughter them or burn them alive," 19-year-old Daniel Odongo said Wednesday, who wielded the machete as a mob of hundreds of young men with rusty axes and other weapons roared their...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In a major boost for John McCain, Republican presidential rival Mitt Romney signaled Wednesday he's not ready to commit to a costly campaign in the states holding primaries and caucuses next week. Several officials said that on the heels of a defeat in Tuesday's Florida primary, Romney's campaign was not attempting to purchase television advertising time in any of the states on the Super Tuesday calendar. Instead, the former Massachusetts governor's current plans call for campaigning in California and other primary states, said the officials, who had knowledge of the internal discussions. There would be organizational efforts...

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- When is a win in the South Carolina Democratic primary really a win? For Sen. Barack Obama, anything less than a decisive victory Saturday might lead some political operatives and observers to shrug off a first-place finish as a given. Mr. Obama has been leading rival Sen. Hillary Clinton in polls by as much as 16 percentage points over the past week. He fares particularly well among African-American voters, who make up half of all registered Democrats in the state. By a 5 to 1 margin, they said they would vote for Mr. Obama over Mrs. Clinton....

Discussion on CNN news now

Shelby Steele, an African-American research fellow at Stanford University Hoover Institute and author of White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era pointed out that, “By the mid-sixties White Guilt was eliciting an entirely new kind of Black leadership, not selfless men like Martin Luther King who appealed to the nation’s moral character but smaller men, bargainers, bluffers, and haranguers - not moralists but specialists in moral indignation - who would set up a trade with White Guilt.” Barack Hussein Obama is different from previous African-American presidential contenders - he understands that the...

... Which Obama is real? Or is that a naïve question to ask of such a formidable identity artist? ... Like Madonna or David Bowie, he has spent his life trying on different personalities, but while theirs are ... sexual personae, his specialty is racial personae. ... his is “a story of race and inheritance,” two closely linked topics upon which American elites have intellectually disarmed themselves. In an era when fashionable thinkers claim that race is just a social construct, Obama’s subtitle is subversive. Although his expensive education—prep school, an Ivy League bachelor’s degree, and then a Harvard professional...

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan, Dec. 31 -- Pakistani authorities have pressured the medical personnel who tried to save Benazir Bhutto's life to remain silent about what happened in her final hour and have removed records of her treatment from the facility, according to doctors. In interviews, doctors who were at Bhutto's side at Rawalpindi General Hospital said they were under extreme pressure not to share details about the nature of the injuries that the opposition leader suffered in an attack here Dec. 27. "The government took all the medical records right after Ms. Bhutto's time of death was read out," said a...