Free Republic

Florida Republicans extended a wary hand Wednesday to their new gubernatorial nominee, Rick Scott, who spent millions of dollars attacking them during the campaign, as Democrats reckoned with their own divisions in the race to lead the most populous battleground state. National and state GOP leaders began reaching out to Mr. Scott, a former health care executive who defeated the candidate backed by the party establishment, Attorney General Bill McCollum. Mr. Scott and his aides, meanwhile, worked the phones to arrange meetings with party leaders, some of whom had assailed his business record. "I'm the candidate for the Republican Party...

Believe it or not, Rick Scott is your Republican nominee for Florida governor. Here are some highlights from his victory speech tonight in Ft. Lauderdale: “Remember me, the handsome bald guy? With a deep sense of humility, I’m here tonight to accept the Republican nomination for the office of governor of our great state of Florida.” “The Republican party will come together, and the reason we will come together is our shared devotion to values that make America great.” “Voters took a chance on me today. They know I’m not a politician. I didn’t come up through the political ranks....

A group of supporters rally in front of the Cuban cafe where Rick Scott will make a campaign stop in Miami, Friday, Aug. 20, 2010. Florida governor hopefuls Bill McCollum and Rick Scott entered the final frenzied days of the their tight Republican primary race Friday hoping to sway the sizable chunk of voters that polls suggest are still teetering on the fence.

The emergence of former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio as a candidate for the U.S. Senate has energized conservatives not only across Florida but across the country, as well. Mr. Rubio, 39, is the hands-down choice in this race against two little-known candidates: William Escoffery III is a Jamaican-born physician based in Shalimar who moved to Florida in 1977. William Billy Kogut is an Ormond Beach real-estate salesman who moved to Florida in 1995. In a sense, Mr. Rubio, running as a conservative's conservative, can already claim a big victory. What once seemed a long-shot challenge against Gov. Charlie Crist...

This is one of the most touching things I've seen lately. I know that people like Richard Feynman are the exception, but I wish there were more like him. Imagine life if the world of stones and forests and stars mattered more to all of us than the world where we battle for status and respect. Feynman later proposed that the recipients of Nobel Prizes be allowed to privately decline them before their names were announced. Explaining his own decision not to decline the prize, he pointed out that such a gesture would have represented an even more ostentatious claim...

Would you be happier if you spent more time discussing the state of the world and the meaning of life — and less time talking about the weather? It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject. “We found this so interesting, because it could have gone the other way — it could have been, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ — as long as you surf on...

AGING is an indiscriminate leveler. You might have been a shapely bombshell who made heads turn. You might have honed your intellect and résumé and let looks take a backseat. Still, most of us will pass a mirror one day and wonder who is that stranger with the droopy eyelids. It would be easy to dismiss worries about such an aesthetic concern as weak. But two models-turned-psychotherapists argue in “Face It,” their new guide for women, that struggling with changing looks can be no less daunting than dealing with a financial loss, a demotion at work or a divorce. The...

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the father of a fallen Marine can collect damages from a religious sect that picketed his son's funeral with vulgar placards celebrating the death of American soldiers. The court also accepted two other cases on Monday, one testing whether vaccine makers are immune from lawsuits under state law and another that challenges government background checks on federal contractors as an invasion of privacy. The cases are likely to be heard in the fall.

In the McCarthy era, demagogues on the right smeared loyal Americans as disloyal and charged that the government was being undermined from within. In this era, demagogues on the right are smearing loyal Americans as disloyal and charging that the government is being undermined from within. These voices — often heard on Fox News — are going after Justice Department lawyers who represented Guantánamo detainees when they were in private practice. It is not nearly enough to say that these lawyers did nothing wrong. In fact, they upheld the highest standards of their profession and advanced the cause of democratic...

Her summer wedding to Simon Cowell will be far more than just a lavish affair. This time it will actually be a joyous occasion - unlike the first time Mezhgan Hussainy said her marriage vows. For when she was just 19, Miss Hussainy found herself trapped in a loveless arranged marriage to a carpet-seller 13 years her senior who 'disgusted' her. Both her ex sister-in-law Erlene Garcia and friend Eva Hayes say young Miss Hussainy was left so depressed that she would often cry for hours on end. Miss Garcia, 44, who was married to Miss Hussainy's older brother Wahid,...

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – A California start-up launched a TigerText iPhone application that lets people kill embarrassing text messages after they have been sent out. X Sigma Partners founder Jeffrey Evans told AFP that the smartphone program was named before fallen golf god Tiger Woods' public drubbing for philandering, which saw his alleged lovers tout text messages as proof of his indiscretions. "I understand part of the reason people want to talk about it today is because of the name but this is not about people trying to cheat," Evans said of the TigerText launch. "If you send a private...

Dorothy Lee and her husband of 40 years were driving home from a Bible study group one wintry night when their car suddenly hit the curb. Mrs. Lee looked at her husband, who was driving, and saw his head bob a couple of times and fall on his chest. In the ensuing minutes, Mrs. Lee recalls, she managed to avoid a crash while stopping the car, called 911 on her cellphone and tried to revive her husband before an ambulance arrived. But at the hospital, soon after learning her husband had died of a heart attack, Mrs. Lee's heart appeared...

Once a long-shot for the Senate seat left vacant after Sen. Edward Kennedy died last August, state senator Scott Brown defeated state attorney general Martha Coakley on Tuesday, becoming the first Republican Senator-Elect from this traditionally blue state in 30 years. Here's what you might not know about the new guy to DC

On June 24, Iranian Superstar Andy Madadian went into an LA recording studio with Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora and American record producers Don Was and John Shanks to record a musical message of worldwide solidarity with the people of Iran. This version of the old Ben E. King classic is not for sale - it was not meant to be on the Billboard charts or even manufactured as a CD.....it's intended to be downloaded and shared by the Iranian people...to give voice to the sentiment that all people of the world stand together....the handwritten Farsi sign in the video...

Speaking of the situation in Iran, U.S. President Barack Obama said June 26, “We don’t yet know how any potential dialogue will have been affected until we see what has happened inside of Iran.” On the surface that is a strange statement, since we know that with minor exceptions, the demonstrations in Tehran lost steam after Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called for them to end and security forces asserted themselves. By the conventional wisdom, events in Iran represent an oppressive regime crushing a popular rising. If so, it is odd that the U.S. president would raise the question...

Iran's Interior Minister announced Saturday that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won 63.29% of the vote in the nation's closely watched presidential poll. The announcement, greeted with widespread skepticism by Iranian opposition supporters and by foreign analysts, has brought thousands of people onto the streets where they have encountered a strong police presence and the threat of violence. (See TIME's photos of election day in Iran) Rumors of vote rigging had been flying for hours before the official announcement. At about 11 p.m. Friday, less than an hour after polls closed, reformist challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi held a press conference and...

Regardless of whether their preferred candidate ends up winning Friday's enthusiastic presidential election in Iran, women have emerged as a force to be reckoned with in the country's politics. Women have long been a potent force in Iran, and have come out to vote for other candidates in the past – in 1997, for example, 40 per cent of the voters who supported another reform candidate, Mohammad Khatami, were women – but observers this year say that never before have women played such a major part in an election. The two pro-reform candidates – Mir-Hossein Mousavi and cleric Mehdi Karoubi...

There's no doubt that Iran's election will be a major test for incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But many Iranian women hope the results will also shake the current status of women in the Islamic republic. "Thirty-four million women demand to have female Cabinet ministers; 34 million women demand to be eligible to run for president," Zahra Rahnavard, wife of reformist candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi, told CNN's Christiane Amanpour. Whether her husband wins or loses Friday, Rahnavard has broken barriers for women just by appearing on the campaign trail with her husband, a rarity for political wives in Iran. "We look...

Rome – A joint Iranian-Italian archeological mission in Iran has made an exceptional discovery: the archeologists have found the first traces of the urban settlement in Persepolis, one of the five capitals of the Achaemenid Empire in ancient Persia, the construction of which began in 520 BC under the Emperor Darius the Great and lasted almost seventy years. In an interview with the “Tehran Times”, translated by the magazine “Archeologia Viva” (Giunti Editore), the Italian director of the mission, Pierfrancesco Callieri, professor of Archeology and Iranian Art History at the University of Bologna, affirmed that the new findings at the...

The growing dispute between conservatives and liberals over the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor obscures a more troubling point of agreement: The government should almost always win. Many conservatives who think of themselves as proponents of limited government would be surprised to discover that conservative judges begin their constitutional analyses in almost every context by placing a thumb firmly on the government side of the scale. It's called "judicial deference." Many liberals, who take pride in being "empathetic," would be surprised to learn that liberal judges also subscribe to judicial deference. The practical result is that judges of both...