Free Republic

Northwestern students and administrators are defending an explicit after-class demonstration involving a woman being publicly penetrated by a sex toy on stage in the popular Human Sexuality course last week. The optional presentation last Monday, attended by about 120 students, featured a naked non-student woman being repeatedly sexually stimulated to the point of orgasm by the sex toy, referred to as a "f**ksaw." The device is essentially a motorized phallus. The 600-person course, taught by psychology Prof. John Michael Bailey, is one of the largest at NU. The after-class events, which range from a question-and-answer session with swingers to a...

*All Applicants Listed have had 1 or more plans/policies approved Approved State applicants are listed separately [below] Applications for waivers from annual limit requirements are reviewed on a case by case basis by Department officials who look at a series of factors including whether or not a premium increase is large or if a significant number of enrollees would lose access to their current plan because the coverage would not be offered in the absence of a waiver. More detailed information on specific criteria can be found at: http://www.hhs.gov/ociio/regulations/11-05-2010annual_limits_waiver_bulletin.pdf. Approved applicants are granted an annual limit waiver for one year....

When workers came to repair his flood-damaged house, Mike Elliott put his things in storage and moved out temporarily. Three months later, the workers are gone, the job unfinished, and Elliott is still renting a room from his next-door neighbor, wondering when he can move back home. His two-story frame house in Des Plaines needs new floors, a bathroom, a kitchen and plumbing. The half-fixed home is the result of a bureaucratic breakdown in the Cook County program meant to fix the damage.

<p>December 13, 2010 8:49 AM | No Comments SPRINGFIELD -- The state of Illinois wants residents to pay sales taxes on all of the gifts they buy.</p>

Chicago's public pension funds are teetering on the brink of insolvency in large part because city officials and union leaders repeatedly exploited the system, draining away billions of dollars in the last decade to serve short-term political needs, a Tribune investigation has found. Time and again, the funds have been used as a bargaining chip or a piggy bank. Politicians trimmed budgets by offering early retirement incentives and greased union contract deals with increases in benefits. "Pension holidays" allowed the city to avoid paying into workers' retirement funds. As a result, the funds soon may not be able to keep...

I confess, I find it dispiriting to read the polls and see candidates, mostly Republicans, leading in various midterm races while promoting many of the very same ideas that got us into this mess. Am I hearing right? Let’s have more tax cuts, unlinked to any specific spending cuts and while we’re still fighting two wars — because that worked so well during the Bush years to make our economy strong and our deficit small. Let’s immediately cut government spending, instead of phasing cuts in gradually, while we’re still mired in a recession — because that worked so well in...

In the United States, several regulations are being proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that directly affects the electric industry. Depending on the outcome of any or all of these regulations, the results could accelerate the retirement of a significant number of fossil fuel-fired power plants. EPA is currently developing rules that would mandate existing power suppliers to invest in retrofitted environmental controls at existing generating plants or retire them. The most significant proposed EPA rules have been in development for over ten years and are currently undergoing court-ordered revisions that must be implemented within mandatory timeframes. The...

Learning a new language doesn't have to be hard, especially when "Tea Bag" is so minimalistic! Mark Fiore offers his personal take in this animation. The Wall Street Journal dubbed Fiore "the undisputed guru of the form." He creates political animation from an undisclosed location somewhere in San Francisco. Interested in learning more about the origins of the 'tea bag' movement? Jay Nordlinger of The National Review breaks down where the term came from, what it means, and why it's been embraced — and rejected — by conservatives and liberals alike. You can read NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard's thoughts on...

Time magazine called Toni L. Griffin a “star urban planner,” which doesn’t have quite the same ring as “starchitect,” but properly describes the 46-year-old. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where she still teaches, Griffin began her career in the private sector, working first for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in her native Chicago. While at SOM, she helped turn the Renaissance Center, John Portman’s office and hotel complex in downtown Detroit, into General Motors Co.’s world headquarters.This spring, Griffin signed on for what may be America’s...

Valerie Jarrett has stayed as others in the Obama administration have planned their departures to places such as Chicago or Harvard. None of the others have Jarrett's job history with Barack Obama. Now, with a tough mid-term election closing in, what advice does this senior White House adviser and assistant to the president have for the person she has been a friend to for 19 years, since before he was elected state senator in Illinois? "To stay the course and to know that it will get better," she said in an interview Friday. "He's a student of history, so he...

Gregory B. Jaczko is the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Prior to his tenure at NRC, Jaczko served as appropriations director as well as the science policy adviser for Sen. Harry Reid. For the third consecutive time, the NRC ranked first in the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings, released this month.How do you continue to keep your employees engaged in NRC's mission and work? We listen to our employees. I think what is really incumbent upon me and the other senior managers is to make sure we listen to figure out, "What do...

Four senior Khmer Rouge leaders have been indicted for their pivotal role in deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians in the "killing fields" during the Maoist regime's four-year reign of terror three decades ago.The UN-backed genocide tribunal said the aging quartet would face charges including war crimes and crimes against humanity in a trial likely to open by the middle of next year. The long-awaited trial will put in the dock the regime's chief ideologue known as "brother number two", Nuon Chea, 84, nominal head of state, Khieu Samphan, 79, the foreign minister, Ieng Sary, 84, and his wife, Ieng Thirith,...

The outlook for Republicans in November is very good—at least as favorable as in 1994, and possibly more so than at any point since 1928. Several factors account for the positive environment. First and most obviously, the economy helps the Republicans. American voters have been booting incumbent parties that cannot produce economic growth since Martin Van Buren’s Democrats lost to the Whig party in 1840. Not only has the unemployment rate remained unacceptably high this year, the slowing of GDP growth has robbed the Democrats of the argument that the country is at least moving in the right direction. Adding...

Yesterday, President Obama spoke with Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta to inform him that he will be awarded the Medal of Honor for acts of gallantry at the risk of his life that went above and beyond the call of duty. Sergeant Giunta will be the first living service member to be awarded the Medal of Honor for service in Iraq or Afghanistan. The President thanked Sergeant Giunta for his service and extraordinary bravery in battle. Further information about the date and time of the ceremony will be released at a later date. ACTION FROM WHICH THE MEDAL OF HONOR WAS...

In this debate over whether a Muslim community center should be built two blocks from where the World Trade Center was destroyed on 9/11, both sides have sought to capture the high ground. President Obama and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg have defended the building of the community center by invoking the First Amendment. “The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are,” the president declared. Republican conservatives, like former House speaker Newt Gingrich and current House minority leader John A....

A few months ago, I sat with some friends in a pizza place in Chapel Hill, N.C., engaged in my own version of a “beer summit.” A successful Connecticut entrepreneur, a Wall Street executive, and a retired senior bank officer pummeled me with questions about my support of President Obama. Politically outnumbered, I ended up playing defense most of the night. I get myself into these situations because my conversion from moderate, middle-aged, Southern conservative to Obama campaign foot soldier got splashed all over the Web after an opinion piece I wrote for the Monitor went viral and briefly turned...

The White House has announced that Dr. Christina Romer, Chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, will soon resign and return to California. This comes on the heels of Budget Director Peter Orszag’s resignation. Dr. Romer is generally considered to have the inside track to replace Janet Yellen as President of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank when Dr. Yellen moves to become Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. There is a lot of press speculation about why Dr. Romer is leaving and about why Budget Director Peter Orszag left. This speculation centers on the personalities...

Project: Computational Creativity: Building Model of Machine—Generated Humor • Start Date: June 1, 2009 • Total Award Amount: $712,883 NSF Award in Computer & Information Science & Engineering How the results of this project will benefit society: Computational creativity has been a goal of artificial intelligence since nearly its inception. But while many interesting models have been developed, and some of these have produced interesting creative works, most have been built on foundations that either don’t scale, or don’t easily scope across different domains, or both. This project will create intelligent comedic performance agents and deploy them both on- and...

I've been away this week and only have a passing knowledge of the mosque issue. I do wonder if Obama is fasting during Ramadan. Has he been observed eating before sundown this weekend?

Robert Reich had a thought-provoking piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Unfortunately, his argument begins to fall apart two thirds of the way through. Reich argues: A stimulus too small to significantly reduce unemployment, a TARP that didn't trickle down to Main Street, financial reform that doesn't fundamentally restructure Wall Street, and health-care reforms that don't promise to bring down health-care costs have all created an enthusiasm gap. They've fired up the right, demoralized the left, and generated unease among the general population... The administration deserves enormous credit. It accomplished as much as it possibly could with a fragile...