Free Republic

In spite of the increasing dangers that we face as a society from communism, international socialism, fascism, Islamic extremeism, loss of cultural identity, outsourcing of blue collar jobs, a failing public school system, and moral degeneration and emasculation, many if not most people rather than face these problems head on choose to hide from these ugly realities by engaging in the mindless diversions of professional sports, fantasy based television and movie programming, conspicuous consumption, an over reliance on both legal and illegal drugs, and video games. In the 2000 presidential election, only 51% of eligible voters exercised this precious francise...

Democratic Sen. Charles E. Schumer said Friday that the Senate should not confirm another U.S. Supreme Court nominee under President Bush "except in extraordinary circumstances.” "We should reverse the presumption of confirmation,” Schumer told the American Constitution Society convention in Washington, reported The Politico. "The Supreme Court is dangerously out of balance. We cannot afford to see Justice Stevens replaced by another Roberts, or Justice Ginsburg by another Alito.”...........................

Memorial Day Parade '07 - Albany, NY

Sandy Bungler's Burglary Exposed or...Why Character Matters “My staff’s investigation reveals that President Clinton’s former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger compromised national security much more than originally disclosed,” Davis said. “It is now also clear that Mr. Berger was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to compromise national security, apparently for his own convenience. “The 9/11 Commission relied on incomplete and misleading information regarding its access to documents Mr. Berger reviewed. No one ever told the Commission that Mr. Berger had access to original documents that he could have taken without detection. “We now know that Mr. Berger left stolen...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 — The Bush administration is expected to announce next week a major step forward in the building of the country’s first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades. It will propose combining elements of competing designs from two weapons laboratories in an approach that some experts argue is untested and risky. Skip to next paragraph The new weapon would not add to but replace the nation’s existing arsenal of aging warheads, with a new generation meant to be sturdier, more reliable, safer from accidental detonation and more secure from theft by terrorists. The announcement, to be made...

CHICAGO, Jan. 5 — The annual meeting of the American Economic Association, which opened here on Friday, is usually a pretty esoteric affair. But this year it could resonate much more broadly as the departing president of the organization, which represents most of the nation’s academic economists, tries to push prevailing economic theory further away from the free market approach that has generally held sway for the last four decades. The protagonist in this drama is George A. Akerlof, a Nobel laureate, who is using the same platform that the late Milton Friedman adopted in 1968. As president of the...

JERUSALEM, Jan. 27 — Hamas leaders, savoring their landslide victory in Palestinian elections, faced an array of threats on Friday: a huge government deficit, a likely cutoff of most aid, international ostracism and the rage of defeated and armed Fatah militants. Of the many questions that the Hamas victory presents, the need to pay basic bills and salaries to Palestinians is perhaps the most pressing. The Palestinian Authority is functionally bankrupt, with a deficit of $69 million for January alone. That will be an urgent question when the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations, known as...

The group allegedly sent e-mails with spoofed MSN customer support addresses to dupe recipients into divulging credit card information Bulgarian authorities arrested eight people last week on charges that they were part of an international phishing ring that operated dozens of bogus Web sites mimicking official Microsoft MSN pages. Dubbed the "MBAM Gang" by Microsoft -- for Microsoft Billing Account Management, the purported source of the phishing messages -- the group allegedly sent e-mails with spoofed MSN customer support addresses to dupe recipients into divulging credit card information. According to Bulgaria's National Services to Combat Organized Crime (NSCOC) agency, the...

Americans overwhelmingly support President Bush's authorization to the National Security Agency to tap the private conversations of U.S. citizens to search for evidence of terrorist activity, an exclusive NewsMax.com poll reveals. In one of the largest responses to a NewsMax poll ever, more than 150,000 people across the Internet have made their opinions known about this controversy. And they resoundingly say that the President was justified in taking this action to protect America. Here is a breakdown of the poll results for several key questions: 1) Has President Bush been justified in tapping the conversation of U.S. citizens? Justified -...

Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, or so goes the old saw. For decades, the famous and the infamous alike largely followed this advice. Even when subjects of news stories felt they had been misunderstood or badly treated, they were unlikely to take on reporters or publishers, believing that the power of the press gave the press the final word. The Internet, and especially the amplifying power of blogs, is changing that. Unhappy subjects discovered a decade ago that they could use their Web sites to correct the record or deconstruct articles to expose...

IN the beginning, personal computers were for loners. You sat at the desk and stared at the screen. To involve anyone else in what you were doing, you had to pull up an extra chair at that same desk, or carry a printout or floppy disk containing your work to a friend's or a workmate's machine. Working with computers became interesting, as opposed to merely useful, when it became a social activity. E-mail was the first big step, and the Internet the second. Now, with the BlackBerry and Skype and municipal WiFi and the omnipresent cellphone, it is tempting to...

XIAOSHABA, China - Far from the pulsing cities that symbolize modern China, this tiny hillside village of crude peasant houses seems disconnected from this century and the last. But follow a dirt path past a snarling watchdog, sidestep the chickens and ducks, and a small clearing on the banks of the Nu River reveals a dusty slab of concrete lying in a rotting pumpkin patch. The innocuous concrete block is also a symbol, of a struggle over law that touches every corner of the country. The block marks the spot on the Nu River where officials here in Yunnan Province...

SEOUL — Watching foreign movies clouds the mental and ideological health of the people. Foreign hairstyles and clothing are signs of the "utterly rotten bourgeois lifestyle." Shaking hands should be avoided in favor of bowing, as it is more hygienic and a part of the national culture. It might sound like a cross between Miss Manners and a political screed, but this is the advice recently crafted by North Korea's ruling Workers' Party for indoctrination lectures at factories, collective farms and other workplaces. For decades, North Koreans have been forced to attend such sessions to reinforce the national illusion that...

AMSTERDAM - Samir Azzouz is only 19, but for almost three years Dutch authorities have struggled without success to punish him for what they see as plotting terrorism. Police records show that he was first placed under surveillance in early 2003, when he was in high school, after he was stopped at the Ukrainian border while trying to join Islamic militants in Chechnya. He was arrested months later in Amsterdam but released in days for lack of evidence. Arrested again in June 2004 on terrorist-related charges, he was convicted only of weapons possession. The police had found an array of...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 - Urgently trying to improve relations with the United States, the Saudi Arabian government is promoting a scholarship program that has already more than doubled the number of new Saudi enrollments at American colleges and universities since last year. The program, aimed in part at reducing widespread hostility in the Saudi public toward the United States, has reversed a steady plunge in Saudi students here that started immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The Saudi government offered 5,000 students full four-year scholarships, complete with living allowances. About two-thirds of the 5,000 students enrolled in American...

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Congressman Curt Weldon has said that Able Danger will not go away. The congressman has reason to believe this, after securing support from over one half of congress in the form of a letter sent to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, asking that participants in Able Danger be allowed to testify in an open hearing before the United States Congress. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh, writing in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, was critical of the 9/11 Commission’s inquiry and subsequent report. Freeh said that if the Able Danger intelligence is confirmed, it is “undoubtedly the most relevant fact...

Hundreds of battered immigrant women and children are being illegally denied food stamps and other aid because of programming errors in New York welfare computers and faulty staff training, according to legal papers that poverty lawyers plan to file in federal court today. The lawsuit is a last resort, the lawyers said, because city and state officials have failed to fix systemic problems that force many women to choose between staying safe and feeding their families, despite government policies aimed at supporting them until they can get on their feet. At its most basic level, the problem lies in the...

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 7 - In the effort to slow earth's rising temperatures, even a well-intentioned proposal could backfire, scientists said Wednesday. One suggestion has been to grow more trees, which absorb carbon dioxide, the gas blamed for trapping heat. More trees mean more carbon dioxide removed from the air. New computer simulations, however, indicate that establishing new forests across North America could provide a cooling effect for a few decades to a century, but that after that, they would lead to more warming. "There's really no simple answer," said Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution Department of...

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 3 - The number of American children without health care coverage has been slowly but steadily declining over the past several years even as health care costs continue to rise and fewer employers provide insurance, creating a breach that states have stepped in to fill with new programs and fresh money. The overall ranks of the uninsured continue to swell, to nearly 46 million Americans at the beginning of this year. But a landmark federal program begun in 1997 to provide health coverage to poor and working-class children and additional measures taken by states have provided health...