Free Republic

Press conference to start shortly; podium is set up waiting for Gonzales.

Illinois Senator Barack Obama warns citizens at his 50th Town Hall meeting about gas guzzling. It was among many points made to the standing room only audience at the Metropolis Community Center. Obama spoke on everything from DC politics to global warming. He says part of the blame for the world's higher temperatures rests on gas guzzling vehicles. Obama says consumers can make the difference by switching to higher mileage hybrids. Today the Senator said, "It would save more energy, do more for the environment and create better world security than all the drilling we could do in Alaska." After...

British cops investigating the airline bomb plot have reportedly found scores of bottles that had been filled with the components for liquid chemical bombs in outdoor garbage bins. The bottles contained liquids including peroxide, which can trigger an explosion when mixed with other chemicals and ignited with a small spark, Britain's News of the World reported today. The newspaper also reported authorities had uncovered 30 other radical Islamist murder plots - and that among the airline bomb-plot suspects were a mom-and-dad suicide couple who planned to take their baby with them on the mission. Eight of the suspects are believed...

"If other people in al Qaeda are really as sadistic as this guy seems to be, then we're really in for a long and awful war." National Public Radio's Daniel Schorr made this comment about the anti-American courtroom tirade of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker. Yes, Mr. Schorr, the Islamofascists — the ones who want us dead — are, indeed, that "sadistic." http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/elder080306.php3

The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchman. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese-and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than...

WASHINGTON -- First came the Al Gore movie, and then there was the Tom Brokaw television documentary. Now, a heat wave with triple-digit temperatures is gripping much of the nation. Is U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, who believes that manmade global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," losing the public relations battle on that issue? The Oklahoma Republican and chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee concedes that those on the other side of the global warming debate have dominated the air waves lately, but he remains confident that his side will be proved...

Iraq Prime Minister Maliki to Address US Congress any moment. Post your comments here.

Joe Wilson to be interviewed on Keith Olberman's show on MSNBC in a few minutes. This despite saying the other day during his press conference he wouldn't be giving interviews.

When you watch the violence unfolding in the Middle East today, it is easy to feel that you've been to this movie before and that you know how it ends — badly. But we actually have not seen this movie before. Something new is unfolding, and we'd better understand it. What we are seeing in Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon is an effort by Islamist parties to use elections to pursue their long-term aim of Islamizing the Arab-Muslim world. This is not a conflict about Palestinian or Lebanese prisoners in Israel. This is a power struggle within Lebanon, Palestine...

Robert Novak sits down with Brit Hume to discuss the Varlie Plame case; tonight during the 6:00 EST hour.

An Arab regime, possibly Iraq, supplied how-to manuals for Arab operatives working throughout Afghanistan before 9/11, and provided military assistance to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. That's the most likely conclusion drawn from an apparent training manual unearthed in captured Iraqi government computer files translated and analyzed exclusively for Fox News, and made public for the first time. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,202277,00.html

The Daily Kos lot received such a Niagara of ridicule for their meeting in Las Vegas (Alexander Cockburn's column in The Nation, available in a slightly different form on the Counterpunch site, making me almost feel sorry for them) that I now feel guilty for piling on. In particular, I feel that I ought to retract what I said on Hugh Hewitt's radio show last week, where I mentioned the self-important bloggers and Joseph Wilson-cultists in the same breath as those who are gathering—in quite another city—to indict the Bush administration for secretly sponsoring the assault of Sept. 11, 2001....

Because he was the first Democrat to step up and say publicly last year that he’s exploring running for president, we can assume that Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) is plenty interested in the office. But like most other men, apparently there are things that interest him more. Speaking to a group of 130 twenty- and thirty-something supporters of his leadership PAC last Thursday, Biden indicated that while he thinks he could be an effective chief executive, as far as the job itself goes, he could take it or leave it. “I’d rather be at home making love to my wife...

Yesterday, Rick Santorum and Pete Hoekstra announced they had successfully pressed the Department of Defense to de-classify a report concerning the 500 WMD that our military has found in Iraq since 2003. Santorum said that the report warns about the hazards that the chemical weapons could still pose to coalition troops in Iraq. "The purity of the agents inside the munitions depends on many factors, including the manufacturing process, potential additives and environmental storage conditions. While agents degrade over time, chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal," Santorum read from the document. Democrats are trying to portray this as...

Saddam - al Qaeda connection. al Baghdadi is a man leading the insurgency in Iraq currently. He was a Republican Guard officer for Saddam, companion of Zarqawi since the start of the war AND HAS BEEN FRIENDS WITH BIN LADEN SINCE MEETING HIM IN AFGHANISTAN http://markeichenlaub.blogspot.com/2006/06/abu-abdullah-rashid-al-baghdadi-former.html

Reporter Paul Wallsten, a leftist reporter, asked the president a question today during the press conference while keeping his sunglasses on. The president commented on the sunglasses in this exchange: Bush: You gonna ask your question with shades on? Wallsten: Yes... Bush: But there's no sun out here. Wallsten: It depends on your perspective. Bush: Touché. Daily Kos nutjobs are claiming that Wallsten is blind. Unless it happened recently, I think the nutjobs are just making stuff up (again). Wallsten is featured on the left of this picture:

Two major issues were used by the President in the run up to war with Iraq. One was the WMD issue and the other was Iraq's support for Al Qaeda. Since the war began in March 2003, the Democrats and media have repeatedly lied to the American public that Saddam didn't have a relationship with Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden. They have been permitted to lie without challenge by Congressional Republicans or the President or his administration. It is well past time that we educate Republican Congressmen and the conservative media, and try to encourage Tony Snow and Karl...

AS INFORMATION CONCERNING HIS DEMISE continues to surface, the death of Abu Musab Zarqawi marks the end of one of the most accomplished mass murderers in the modern history of terrorism. According to the claims of responsibility released by his own group in Iraq, Zarqawi and his followers have conservatively murdered thousands of Iraq civilians and hundreds of coalition soldiers--in addition to perpetrating the February 2006 bombing of the al-Askariyyah Mosque in Samarra that instigated a wave of sectarian violence across the country. Born Ahmed Fadel Nazal al-Khalayleh, Zarqawi was first identified as a major threat during a meeting of...

Jerry Buck Inman, 35, was arrested without incident late Tuesday after sheriff's deputies spotted his car driving past his parents' home in Dandridge, about 30 miles east of Knoxville, Jefferson County Sheriff David Davenport said. "He showed back up, and by God we got him and we're going to send him back to South Carolina," Davenport told The Associated Press. Inman was arrested on warrants for murder, rape and kidnapping, and was being held in the county jail pending a preliminary hearing Wednesday. Tiffany Marie Souers, a 20-year-old civil engineering junior from Ladue, Mo., was wearing only a bra when...

"If I cared what commenters said, I'd kill myself." In the high-octane non-stop flame war that is the political blogosphere, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga knows how to get attention. He's kidding, of course. We're talking about the rhetorical excesses that can spill out of the impassioned debate that takes place on his creation, DailyKos.com, the world's most popular political blog. Compact and wiry, Moulitsas, 34, exudes quivering intensity. He speaks in staccato paragraphs, punctuated by intense stares and a raised eyebrow. His eyes bulge slightly outward, as if reacting to the pressure of all the ideas inside his head. Many of...