Free Republic

First, if you follow the link, you'll find that this does not appear to be an April Fools prank. Nuance on Monday launched Voice Ads, a voice enabled ad platform that allows a consumer to talk to brands. Companies get a new monetization vehicle and consumers presumably will get a say in brand advertising delivery. snip"Nuance, which is using its voice technology in mobile, health and auto applications, is obviously hoping to get on the ad gravy train. Voice Ads promise to give marketers an avenue "to deepen the relationship with their consumers." The theory is that you'll chat with...

See the video HERE. FEINSTEIN FINALLY DEBATES EMKEN! Emken Uses Hollywood Technology To 'Create' Debate (ORANGE COUNTY, CA) After weeks of watching Dianne Feinstein refuse to give California voters an opportunity to compare their U.S. Senate candidates in public debate, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Emken has turned to Hollywood for a solution. Using the same technology that made Forrest Gump a household name, the Emken campaign is releasing a YouTube video that puts Emken in a “debate” with Feinstein – a debate that the 79-year old three term Senator had sought to deny the public as well as her...

Colorado artist Dave Merrick, DaveMerrick.US, provides the Defining Moment in the State of America 2012, proving with his talented artwork the truth in the old adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” More at the source... The poster is HERE.

Johnny Carson as a truthful politician.

My newest book is now on Amazon; it's a paperback. I need to convert it to ebook format but have been frustrated with the results produced by the automatic conversion systems. The book has several graphics; they are causing the epub to separate the background from the text overlay. Arrgh! I produced the manuscript on InDesign CS4 and exported it to PDF and the Kindle export. I am dissatisfied with both. Can anybody point me in the right direction. the book's website is here. Thanks for any help!

View the Video With the grace of an accented vacuum cleaner salesman, Apple's promotional video star delivered a point by point sales pitch on the new IPhone 5. But why did they use a person whose appearance contrasted so heavily with a new product? Isn't he paid well enough to dress well enough? The video is of high professional quality. Beautiful, rotating video images of the new product were interspaced with cuts of a human who hadn't shaved in four days, but sported a newly buffed cranium. His dress was a simple, gray t-shirt. It appeared to have been recently...

Just a shift of a couple letters and here's what you have.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Apple Inc.'s sweeping court victory over Samsung Electronics Co. cements its dominance of the wireless industry and could force carriers, and even Google Inc., to re-evaluate their product plans and strategies. Interviews with jurors and legal experts reveal that Friday's verdict in the patent dispute did much more than order the South Korean company to pay $1.05 billion to its Silicon Valley rival. The nine jurors here also sent a signal that companies need to be much more careful in incorporating basic design elements in their electronic devices, particularly those affecting the way gadgets look and feel. -----------...

Of all the developments in The Voting Wars since 2000, the lead story has to be the successful Republican effort to create an illusion of a voter fraud epidemic used to justify a host of laws, especially tough new state voter identification requirements, with the aim to suppress Democratic turnout and to excite the Republican base about “stolen” elections. Democrats sometimes have exaggerated the likely effects of such laws on turnout—we won’t see millions of voters disenfranchised by state voter id laws, for example. But in a very close presidential election, as we are likely to see in November, new...

Let’s take John Lennon up on his offer. Let’s imagine what the world would be like with no countries, religions or a heaven or hell. Let’s imagine a world with no possessions and nothing important enough to be willing to kill to protect it or die to ensure its continuing. Let’s imagine Lennon’s world where all the people are living for nothing other than today. In this world, people will have saved no money for their retirement. After all, retirement is somewhere down the line. All the people would have massive debts – borrowed every penny from everywhere they could,...

Photographer Joe Klamar has become the target of much scrutiny—and in some cases, ire—ever since the series of portraits he shot of U.S. Olympic team athletes was published by CBS News. The criticism is that the photographs fall short: they’re underwhelming both visually and from a technical point of view, especially when you consider that the occasion they represent (the Olympic Games!) has likely been a lifelong dream for these athletes. Not that you can tell from these awkwardly lit and posed shots. Also, note the torn seamless paper.

The verdict is in: Team Boehner has taken Round One of the great journalistic reconstruction of last year’s failed debt talks. Eight months after deficit talks between the nation’s top two elected officials collapsed, a 4,600-word inside-the-room narrative by The Washington Post on Sunday — the first of several sweeping accounts in the works — paints the Obama administration as walking away from a nearly done agreement with Boehner. And when the president eventually came around and wanted to cut a deal, Boehner said it was too late. Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/74163.html#ixzz1pZjgTCKe

Every year, coal-fired power plants produce more than 386,000 tons of hazardous air pollutants -- including mercury, arsenic, lead and acid gases. Mercury, a potent neurotoxin, is a particular threat to pregnant women and young children. The Environmental Protection Agency has announced plans to issue strong, sensible protections from power plant pollution on December 16th of this year. Unfortunately, industry special interests are trying to block this critical safeguard. Tell President Obama to strongly support the EPA's efforts to clean up mercury pollution and protect the health of mothers, children and families. This is an email that I received from...

Now, Apple has always gone to considerable lengths to make the iPhone usable for people with vision and hearing impairments. If you’re deaf, you can have the LED flash to get your attention when the phone rings. You can create custom vibration patterns for each person who might call you. You can convert stereo music to mono (handy if you’re deaf in one ear). If you’re blind, you can literally turn the screen off and operate everything — do your e-mail, surf the Web, adjust settings, run apps — by tapping and letting the phone speak what you’re touching. You...

Workers at General Motors’ Fairfax plant in Kansas City, Kansas, have won the right to call themselves prisoners. GM suspended around eight workers this week and last for wearing T-shirts that read “Fairfax Penitentiary Inmate.” The shirts protest increasingly strict conditions in the factory. Yesterday, after the controversy aired on the evening news as far away as St. Louis, the company backed down and asked suspended workers to return to work at full pay.

Were Penn State coaches worried about outing a homosexual on their staff? One coach was not and is no longer at the University. Rene Portland, the Women's Basketball Coach for over twenty years, did not tolerate homosexuals on her team. The next two excerpts and links will give you enough information to decide for yourself. As anybody who follows Penn State knows, Portland doesn't tolerate lesbians in her program. It's a selling point in her recruiting. But last year, Portland was sued by a former player, Jennifer Harris, who alleged that Portland harassed her and eventually told her to find...

NEWPORT BEACH – A life-size statue of Ronald Reagan was damaged during an attempted theft from a memorial at Bonita Canyon Sports Park early Sunday, police said. The bronze statue was found by authorities at about 5:30 a.m., broken off its foundation and tilted forward with other damage, after thieves apparently tied a chain around it and tried to pull it away using a pickup truck or other vehicle, police said.

The Pan American Games men’s basketball competition gets underway Wednesday, exactly 13 days after the USA Basketball men’s group assembled in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The U.S. squad is comprised for the first time in Pan American Games history by professional players who are under contract to play in the NBA Development League in 2011-12. Serving as the USA Pan American Games head coach is Tulsa 66ers mentor Nate Tibbetts. The 2011 USA Pan American Games Team consists of Blake Ahearn (Erie BayHawks/Missouri State ‘07); Brian Butch (Injured for 2010-11 season/Wisconsin ‘08); Justin Dentmon (Texas Legends/Washington ‘09); Jerome Dyson (Tulsa 66ers/Connecticut ‘10);...

No, this is not being held in Poland. The photo file of the contestants is here. Miss Albania is certainly a cutie...

Requesting information for my new book: What are the HS children being taught about our government and our Constitution? What are they not being taught? What grades offer classes on civics and government? So far, what I have learned is that our founders owned slaves, so they were horrible people and the Constitution should be questioned. I need input. Please let me know what's going on; my kids are in their mid thirties.