Free Republic

Democrat Terry McAuliffe leads Republican Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II by 4 points in the Virginia governor’s race, according to a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday — a considerably narrower margin than other recent public polling has shown. The businessman and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee leads Mr. Cuccinelli, the state’s attorney general, 45 percent to 41 percent, the poll showed, with 9 percent of likely voters opting for Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis. That lead is down from a 46 percent to 39 percent advantage for Mr. McAuliffe in a Quinnipiac poll last week, when Mr. Sarvis was at 10...

Drudge has a poll up. Do you support giving Obama authority to conduct military operations in Syria.

Reform advocates and Democrats on the Hill are not ready to give up just yet, and they are quietly circulating a new memo that details a list of House Republicans they believe may — may — be gettable in support of reform. The list and memo, which you can check out right here, is meant as a very broad, and admittedly optimistic, look at the full range of House Republicans whose support should not be completely ruled out just yet. The idea here is that if Speaker John Boehner does, in the end, allow a vote on the Senate bill,...

The Northwest Territories has switched its engine for economic independence to oil from natural gas as majors start exploring a promising shale play in the central Mackenzie region. The Canol shale formation could be as big as the prolific Bakken light oil play which stretches across Montana, North Dakota, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, said David Ramsey, minister of industry and of transportation for the NWT, Wednesday. Major oil and gas producers have invested $628 million in working commitments on 15 parcels in the central Mackenzie region since 2011, establishing a foothold in the promising region, Ramsey said. “It goes to show...

The U.S. Army announced it will no longer sponsor Ryan Newman's Sprint Cup entry at Stewart-Haas Racing or continue a presence in NASCAR after this season. The team released a statement Tuesday announcing the U.S. Army made the decision as part of a reallocation of its marketing budget. “The U.S. Army has been a great partner of Stewart-Haas Racing since the team's inception. It has been a mutually beneficial relationship, with the U.S. Army introducing training regimens that improved our pit crews while instilling the mental, physical and emotional strength of the U.S. Army Soldier in all of us. We...

It seems an inglorious beginning, but some scientists are now convinced humanity's origins can be traced to an ancient, flat, fishlike worm. A team of researchers subjected the 505-million-year-old Burgess shale fossils of Pikaia gracilens to the latest technology and found evidence that could settle a decades-long debate about the primitive species. Notably, that they had the seeds of a spine. "We can see and discern the positive location of the notochord and the nerve chord. This was not obvious at all, you needed these techniques to see it," said Jean-Bernard Caron, the curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Royal...

Nature Journal of Science, ranked as the world’s most cited scientific periodical, has just published the definitive study on Global Warming that proves the dominant controller of temperatures in the Earth’s atmosphere is due to galactic cosmic rays and the sun, rather than by man. One of the report’s authors, Professor Jyrki Kauppinen, summed up his conclusions regarding the potential for man-made Global Warming: “I think it is such a blatant falsification.” The research was conducted by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which invented the World Wide Web, built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and now has...

The crew of the plane carrying Poland's president that crashed in Russia last year killing all 96 on board were poorly trained and ignored crucial safety regulations, a long-awaited Polish government report into the disaster said on Friday. The 328-page report, which may complicate Prime Minister Donald Tusk's bid for re-election in October, chronicles a long litany of errors and neglect by both the crew and Russian ground staff leading to the crash, which shook Poland to the core. "There were serious shortcomings in the organization of the unit (of the air force responsible for handling VIP flights)," a member...

A federal appeals court in Cincinnati on Wednesday upheld the health-care law passed by Congress last year, saying the law's requirement for most Americans to carry insurance or pay a penalty is constitutional. The vote was 2-1 on the three-judge panel on the key question of whether the insurance requirement exceeded Congress's powers under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The majority concluded that it did not. "Congress had a rational basis for concluding that the minimum coverage provision is essential to the Affordable Care Act's larger reforms to the national markets in health care delivery and health insurance,"...

The massive earthquake that forced the closure of four nuclear power plants in Japan has highlighted the grave risk of inadequate back-up generators at U.S. facilities, a leading U.S. scientist group said on Friday. While the U.S. regulator made clear that the national nuclear fleet is built to withstand the biggest earthquakes in history, scientists said they needed to do more to ensure that future quakes don't risk the kind of reactor impact that Japan is now grappling with. "We do not believe the safety standards for U.S. nuclear reactors are enough to protect the public today," Edwin Lyman, senior...

For many residents of this northeast Ohio hamlet, the oil bonanza began with a knock at the door. City Hall received a fax. Spit from that machine last summer was a mineral rights lease offer -- just like those being hand-delivered to homeowners -- from oil and gas explorer Chesapeake Energy Corp. (CHK). In the subsequent months Chesapeake's oil-field leasing agents swarmed the region, laying claim to what the company and others say may be one of the last big unconventional oil discoveries in the U.S. "It was a mad rush," said Mayor Rob Donham. Windham eventually sold Chesapeake the...

Ford is working with the Center for Compact and Efficient Fluid Power and Folsom Technologies to develop a prototype F-150 light-duty pickup truck propelled by a hydraulic hybrid powertrain. Hydraulic hybrids differ considerably from gas-electric hybrids, like the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 Hybrid, but the goal is the same: to improve fuel efficiency. “We have the potential to reach 40 miles per gallon or higher with hydraulic power,” said Perry Li, co-deputy director of CCEFP and a mechanical engineering professor. “But we feel like we don’t give up anything versus an electric hybrid, and there are no batteries and nothing to...

The U.S. military should not be spending money on sponsoring NASCAR teams, Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., said in a budget bill she sponsored. McCollum's chief of staff, Bill Harper, told The Virginia-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk his boss sponsored the budgetary amendment to address the plight of a growing number of veterans and their families. "There's an amendment on the floor to eliminate all funding for homeless veterans," he said. "On one hand, we're eliminating assistance to men and women who served our country ... and on the other hand, we're paying for race cars."

On Friday February 11, the day Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down, CBS correspondent Lara Logan was covering the jubilation in Tahrir Square for a "60 Minutes" story when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into frenzy. In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers. She reconnected with the...

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I wonder if I'm the first to call it, the reported unexplained missile launch off the coast of California, was US Airways 808. I did a lot of extrapolation of what flights could be at the right position (off the coast) at the right altitude (for contrail formation) and came down to two possibilities: UPS flight 902 (UPS902) or US Airways flight 808 (AWE808). As I was researching tonight (24 hours later), I realized that today's AWE808 current position (at around 4:50pm) was almost the same as it was the day of the incident. I quickly pulled up a Newport...

Sarah Palin and a group backed by Republican strategist Karl Rove moved Tuesday to influence North Carolina's congressional races with a late endorsement and blitz of advertising. snip The heaviest voting has been in the 11th District, covering the western part of the state. In that area, Democratic Rep. Heath Shuler has been facing a tough and increasingly costly challenge from Republican businessman Jeff Miller. snip Another area with heavy balloting is in the 7th District in southeastern North Carolina. In that district, Demoratic Rep. Mike McIntyre has faced a tough challenge from military veteran Ilario Pantano, who received an...

Meg Whitman's campaign for governor was thrown into turmoil Thursday as the Republican sought to fend off new evidence that she knowingly had an illegal immigrant housekeeper on her payroll for nearly a decade. Whitman denounced the allegations as a "baseless smear attack" by Democratic challenger Jerry Brown in what has become a dead-heat race five weeks before the election. The central issue is whether Whitman knew about a letter that the Social Security Administration sent her in 2003 that raised discrepancies about the housekeeper's documents — a possible tip-off that she could be illegal. The letter is the foundation...

Jessica Olmstead is a 17-year-old senior at Harper Creek (Mich.) High School. In many ways she's like most teens; she worries about classes, gets excited about the next weekend and likes to hang out with friends. But Olmstead has a hobby that isn't shared by many of her peers: She's a big-game bowhunter, a pursuit which recently helped her land big headlines when she bagged a 448-pound black bear on a summer hunt in Canada. According to Aaron Harris of the Battle Creek Enquirer, Olmstead considers herself a hunting natural. She relishes the adrenaline and excitement of a hunt. Despite...

A Senate bill to repeal the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy appeared headed for defeat Tuesday, a major setback for gay groups that saw the vote as their last chance this year to overturn the 17-year-old ban. Advocates had been optimistic that the Democratic-controlled White House and Congress could overcome objections to repeal of the law barring gays from serving openly in the military. The move is unpopular among Republicans, military officers and social conservatives.