Free Republic

The rebellious former allies – Deborah Courtney, Barbara Coe and Marvin Stewart – improperly ousted Gilchrist as president of the organization he founded, Judge Randell Wilkinson said. The issue now is whether Gilchrist can prove damages. In the past, Gilchrist has claimed $3 million in damages on behalf of the MMP. Presumably he'll try to show the drop off in fundraising since the dissidents started agitating. Trial resumes today. Coe has settled, so she's not on the hook. Courtney has told me she's already lost everything – including her house and car – fighting Gilchrist in court. She and Stewart...

Dollar-denominated risk assets, including asset-backed securities and corporates, are no longer wanted at the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), nor at China’s large commercial banks. The Chinese government has ordered its reserve managers to divest itself of riskier securities and hold only Treasuries and US agency debt with an implicit or explicit government guarantee. This already has been communicated to American securities dealers, according to market participants with direct knowledge of the events. It is not clear whether China’s motive is simple risk aversion in the wake of a sharp widening of corporate and mortgage spreads during the past...

An internet protest group has launched an attack on Government websites in a protest against the proposed internet filter and censorship of some pornography. The attack, dubbed Operation Titstorm by the group known as Anonymous, brought down a number of Government websites this morning, with the Parliament House site remaining offline well into the afternoon. Anonymous claimed the attack was to highlight moves by the Government to ban the import of films featuring female ejaculation (which was classified as urination) as well as films featuring small-breasted women, over fears such films were simulating child pornography. "More importantly, Anonymous does not...

President Obama has so lowered expectations for the Republican Party that if they come to the health care summit he has called at the White House with concrete and well articulated proposals, it will blow the country away. Repeatedly, the president has fashioned the GOP as the party of "no," goading them by saying, "If you have any ideas, bring them on." Well, let them do it. Republicans need to be on their toes and aggressive in the meeting, and not let it devolve into a question and answer session with the president hogging the mike. He asked for a...

In warfare and in political warfare, underestimating your opponent amounts to a terrible, often fatal mistake. That's why conservatives who deny or ignore the president's obvious intelligence imperil their own cause and prevent the emergence of an effective anti-Obama strategy. For Barack Obama, his brain power makes him dangerous but also creates a special vulnerability that his critics should exploit. On the most obvious level, it makes no sense to insist (as many of my radio callers and internet correspondents do) that a guy with degrees from Columbia and Harvard Law (magna cum laude), and with a successful twelve-year stint...

Most governors facing unsubstantiated rumors and unspoken innuendo would either say nothing or issue a forceful denial and move on. Not in Albany. Not our accidental governor, David Paterson, bless his heart. If Paterson wanted to tamp down the buzz surrounding him, his truly astounding press conference on Tuesday only added to the din. Obviously upset with unsubstantiated rumors - some in print and others in the blogosphere - that he'd had extramarital affairs since taking office, Paterson went into high-drama mode. There he was, on live television, ostensibly to talk about the looming snowstorm, going on and on about...

EXCERPT VAN SUSTEREN: All right. All right, now, back to the health care bill. February 25th -- do you intend to go to this bipartisan meeting that the president is calling and is going to have televised at the White House? BOEHNER: Well, listen, I want to have a bipartisan conversation with the president about how to fix our health care system. But Eric Cantor and I sent a letter to Rahm Emanuel posing a series of questions about, really, what is this? You know, the White House let us know about an hour before the American people saw this...

"Do you mean he is taller than me am?" sarcastically barked Dr. Martin Rosenberg, my high school English teacher, to one of the students in our class. The student actually said, "He is taller than me," but Rosenberg was ridiculing the student's grammar. The subject of the elliptical (or understood) verb "am" must be in the subjective case. Thus, the correct form of the sentence is: He is taller than I. This correction/dressing down of a student, that occasionally included me, occurred during my attendance at North Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin High School in the early '50s. Franklin was predominantly black;...

Government is taking us a long way down the Road to Serfdom. That doesn't just mean that more of us must work for the government. It means that we are changing from independent, self-responsible people into a submissive flock. The welfare state kills the creative spirit. F.A. Hayek, an Austrian economist living in Britain, wrote "The Road to Serfdom" in 1944 as a warning that central economic planning would extinguish freedom. The book was a hit. Reader's Digest produced a condensed version that sold 5 million copies. Hayek meant that governments can't plan economies without planning people's lives. After all,...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Phil Harris, the fishing boat captain whose adventures off the Alaska coast were captured on the television show "Deadliest Catch", has died, the Discovery Channel said Tuesday night. He was 53. Harris suffered what his family described as a massive stroke on Jan. 29 while the fishing vessel he captained, Cornelia Marie, was in port at St. Paul Island, Alaska. The fisherman was flown to Anchorage for surgery. The reality show, which has filmed five seasons, has been one of the Discovery Channel's most popular and depicts the crab fishing industry in the dangerous waters off Alaska....

Good news! Gun owners are welcome at the Casper Starbucks. A Starbucks Representative contacted me and said "there has not been any policy change and Starbucks follows the laws of the state and municipalities they are located in" They also said "this has been a misunderstanding and apologies go out to any customers this may have inconvenienced". It is encouraging that Starbucks has taken this stand in light of the pressures being put on them to do otherwise. Say thanks, by patronizing Starbucks today!

It was only a year ago that liberal elites in Washington were shoveling dirt on conservatism. James Carville was writing boastful books about 40 years of Democrat dominance, boasting in his typical way that he could call "time of death" on the Republican Party. Liberals believed their hype that Barack Obama would be that black FDR they pictured on the cover of Time magazine. Now newspaper headlines read otherwise: "Where did the hope for Obama go?" The hot-air balloon has crashed to Earth, and you can tell conservatism is back with a swagger. You can tell because the media's daily...

Immutable law of Beltway political physics: The only real jobs that a government stimulus stimulates are government jobs. A year after President Obama signed his first almost trillion-dollar economic stimulus package into law, the federal workforce is at an all-time high. The nation's unemployment rate has swelled to 9.7 percent, but Washington's economy is thriving. More than 2.1 million government workers will be on the federal payroll by the end of 2010. The lobbying industry is booming. USA Today reports that 14 federal agencies have hired 3,000 workers to oversee stimulus spending and have spent nearly $190 million so far...

Man fatally shot by resident in 600 block of Independence Street Police say a suspected burglar was shot to death around 12am Saturday in the garage of a residence in the 600 block of Independence Street in New Orleans. The shots were fired by a resident of the home. Investigators say a burglar alarm was trigged and the alarm company notified those in the house that a motion sensor indicated activity in the garage located in the rear of the home. One of the residents went to investigate and fired multiple shots after encountering the suspect. No charges have been...

A Modesto, California woman reportedly used her gun to fend off a burglar. Police say the woman walked into her home, and found a burglar. She reportedly feared for her safety, grabbed her gun, and fired a shot at the burglar, causing him to flee. The burglar, who was apparently not hit, fled the scene, leaving the woman unharmed, police say. Those opposed to gun ownership would call this a self defense failure, because the victim didn’t manage to hit the burglar. However, shooting the burglar was not really the goal. Instead, when using a gun for self defense, the...

They are called the PIGS -- Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain. What they have in common is that all are facing deficits and debts that could bring on national defaults and break up the European Union. What brought the PIGS to the edge of the abyss? All are neo-socialist states that provide welfare for poor people, generous unemployment, universal health care, early retirement and comfortable pensions. Most consume 40 percent to 50 percent of their gross domestic product annually, a crushing burden on the private sector. Dying populations is a second cause. -------------------------------------------- In Western Europe, the passing of the native-born...

State-linked Dubai entities have started talks to divest Asian assets as the emirate steps up the pace of its overseas asset sales to help ease its debt ­burden. Dubai-based Emaar Properties is talking to potential buyers of its majority stake in Singapore-based distributor and retailer RSH, according to people familiar with the matter. RSH, which works with brands including Zara and Mango, operates across Asia and the Middle East. A unit of Dubai Holding, which is looking to sell its 40 per cent stake in Malaysia’s Bank Islam, has appointed Rothschild to seek potential buyers. Dubai Holding is owned by...

SEATTLE - The KING 5 Investigators have uncovered a disturbing video-tape captured on five different security cameras underneath downtown Seattle.  It shows the graphic beating of a teenage girl in Seattle's Metro bus tunnel, while uniformed security guards simply look on. (edit) The video shows the two girls hitting each other for a few seconds. Then, the scene gets vicious. The young attacker punches the victim in the head and face 10 times. "It looks like a very egregious assault, which in fact it was," said Sgt. John Urquhart of the King County Sheriff’s Office, which is investigating the...

Almost daily, we learn about new problems with the formerly respected UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):  In their 2001 report, they claimed that the 20th century was "unusual" and blamed it on human-released greenhouse gases.  Their infamous temperature graph shown there, shaped like a hockey stick, did away with the well-established Medieval Warm Period (around 1000AD, when Vikings were able to settle in Southern Greenland and grow crops there) and the following Little Ice Age (around 1400 to 1800AD).  Two Canadians exposed the bad data used by the IPCC and the statistical errors in their analysis. The most...

How should we characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned to its previous peak before this downturn began, and incomes were stagnant throughout the decade. Still, the weakness that lingered through much of the 2000s...

Smug sages of mainstream politics shouldn't underestimate her ### "No new ideas." That was the most prominent of the criticisms of Sarah Palin's speech at MSNBC's too-cool-for-school "Morning Joe" on Monday. The more general critique of former Gov. Palin's future was that while she certainly had star power, she could never speak to more than a fraction of even Republicans. The proof of the latter point was made with the evidence that many important Washington Republicans could never support her for more than cheerleader to her marginal people. They also pointed out that she had kept out of races in...

It's the Seven Nation Army against the U.S. Air Force Reserve: the White Stripes have taken "strong insult and objection" to a recruitment ad that aired during the Super Bowl. Jack and Meg White's issue with the TV spot? They claim the music used in the commercial is a rip-off of their 2002 breakout single, "Fell in Love with a Girl." "We believe our song was re-recorded and used without permission of the White Stripes, our publishers, label or management," the band wrote in a statement posted on their official website. "We have not licensed this song to the Air...

A MAN has been airlifted to hospital with 60 per cent burns to his body following a gas explosion at an Islamic school in Sydney's southwest. The explosion occurred shortly before 9am (AEDT) in a room next to the canteen of Unity Grammar College, Austral, a police spokesman said. A man in his 50s was injured. He was conscious and breathing, and has been airlifted to Royal North Shore Hospital with third degree burns to 60 per cent of his body. An ambulance spokesman said the burns were on the man's face, back and neck. Police are not yet sure...

Audi car commercial "hits home" for Gavin Newsom and other city dwellersAudi's "Green Police" Super Bowl ad was clearly out to mock environmentalist fervor -- and it hit close to home in greener-than-thou San Francisco. Perhaps that's because it was the brainchild of Audi's advertising agency, San Francisco independent Venables Bell & Partners. Sitting squarely in the "I am white, middle-class man, hear me roar" school of ads, the Cheap Trick-scored commercial suggested a world in which the type of individual decisions that seem meaningless but in the aggregate make a difference are enforced by enthusiastic law enforcement professionals in...

The Rothschild banking dynasty is to appoint a non-family member as chief executive for the first time in its 212-year history, as the group seeks to adapt its management structure to the post-crisis climate. Nigel Higgins, a 27-year veteran of the company who has co-headed the investment banking business for the past decade, will become chief executive of the family holding company in March, taking over from David de Rothschild. Mr Rothschild – he and his son are the only two Rothschild family members involved in the business – will remain as executive chairman. “We all know that organisations that...

"The Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show is a sportsman's paradise, but one where trouble is brewing. There were lots of kids here with their families, walking the nearly 300,000 square feet of the State Farm Show Complex. They were checking out the newest fishing lures, gun blinds and camouflage clothing. But many of the outfitters who set up booths at the show and sell mountain-lion stalks in New Mexico, bear hunts in Maine and African safaris are worried that they're in a dying business. Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show State Farm Show Complex Through Feb. 14 "Most kids wouldn't know...

Terrified passengers were left stranded between floors in the world’s tallest building after a lift broke as they were descending in the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai. Visitors queueing to descend from the observation deck on the 124th floor of the recently opened 828-metre (2,717ft) tower heard a crash and the sound of breaking glass from the lift shaft. Dust then billowed back into the room through the small gaps in the lift shaft doors. The 15 passengers inside the lift were left stranded for 45 minutes before they were rescued by staff who dropped a ladder into the shaft...

This kind of panic is only a small glimpse at what will happen when some real national emergency hits.

After 28 years in congress, Duncan Hunter is honored. I know first hand how much he did for our men and women in uniform!

The Red Bull Stratos team has kept itself under wraps until today’s press conference at the New York Academy of Sciences in NYC. The ambitious project marks the first major attempt at breaking an old but daunting skydiving record, one that starts at the edge of space. In 1960, U.S. Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger stepped out of a capsule at 102,800 feet above the Earth’s surface and, in just minutes returned to the surface by simply falling. The falling part was easy. The surviving part was not—his first jump, from the Excelsior I module nearly ended in disaster when...

In just about every speech at their 2008 convention, Democrats promised voters that a change in the White House would, in Barack Obama’s formulation, restore “our moral standing” in the world. Replace the unilateralist cowboy at the top with a humbler multilateralist, and the path would finally be cleared to fix vexing international issues such as curbing carbon emissions and dealing with the mullahs in Iran. Like many of the party faithful’s long-nurtured beliefs, this hope has disintegrated on contact with reality. “America is losing the free world,” said a January headline in the Financial Times. While that statement is...

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Severely obese teens who had surgery to limit what they could eat lost more weight and enjoyed more health benefits than those who did an intensive lifestyle program, researchers said on Tuesday. They said 21 of 25 severely obese teens aged 14 to 18 who underwent a form of gastric banding lost more than half of their excess weight compared with just 3 out of 25 who did a diet, exercise and behavior modification program. "In this study, gastric banding proved to be an effective intervention leading to a substantial and durable reduction in obesity and to...

Sarah Palin and The Tea Party movement are making many headlines these days as they fortify their position as the key opposition against President Barack Obama. Make no mistake about it. Sarah Palin is going to run for president in 2012. And, the millions of morons who follow her with every beck and call will vote for her. She'll get a lot of votes. And, she very well could unseat President Obama in 2012. Sarah Palin has now captivated the hearts and minds of conservatives across the country by being the face of the divisive Tea Party movement. She spoke...

No matter what former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin does, she's not going to win any friends in the mainstream modern feminism activist movement in the United States. But that might not be a bad thing. On HLN's Feb. 8 "The Joy Behar Show," Eve Ensler, the writer of the infamous "The Vagina Monologues" appeared on the broadcast to promote her new book "I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World." During the interview, she was asked by the show's host Joy Behar what she thought about Sarah Palin, her political prospects and her belief system....

For my tens of thousands of non-Jewish readers, a shul is the word for synagogue in Yiddish. It is the common term used by Orthodox Jews. I only want to make one point which is relevant to Jews and non-Jews: nearly everywhere I look I see non-orthodox synagogues failing, for sale or barely hanging on. I see exceptions too. The one significant phenomenon I want to point out that I see around me, in urban areas, is the development of the new informal shul. In San Francisco the biggest gathering of Jews I know of is call the Mission Minyan....

WASHINGTON – Crediting civil rights-era protest songs and their spiritual predecessors for his election, President Barack Obama on Tuesday sat in the East Room of his White House and listened to an all-star lineup of performers pay tribute to the music that he said fueled freedom marches and civil disobedience. The nation's first black president transformed the grand ballroom into a concert hall packed with members of his Cabinet, Congress, civil rights leaders and students for a program that will air on public television later this week for Black History Month... "The civil rights movement was a movement sustained by...

Software-designed cars don't always behave as expected in the real world. As Toyota dealers begin to repair sticky gas pedals on 2.3 million recalled vehicles, one question lingers: How did engineers miss the potential for friction in the pedal assembly--identified as the root cause of the problem--during the design process? One possible answer is that the simulation software widely used by automakers, aerospace companies and others to design and test products is only as smart as the humans who program it. To save money and speed development time, carmakers today design their vehicles virtually, using computer-aided design software, rather than...

SACRAMENTO (CBS 5) ― A state program that provides health, education and childcare services for preschool children could be the latest victim of California's budget crisis. ... The First 5 program is perhaps best known for preschool classes, but there are also parenting programs and other resources for new parents. Times are tough in Sacramento, and now the governor and some legislators have their eye on the $500 million-a-year the tobacco tax generates. Voters have opted twice to keep the tax in place. But on Wednesday, an Assembly Committee will look at taking half of First 5's money for the...

~ Freeper Canteen ~ Today We Want To Know... What’s Your Power Bird? Click here and take the quiz! To share your results, click "Get HTML", then copy and paste the code into a "Reply" box. Have fun! Please remember that The Canteen is here to support and entertain our troops and veterans and their families, and is family friendly.

Maricopa Co. Sheriff Joe Arpaio is urging GOPers to shelve Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in favor of ex-Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R), a challenger attacking from the right, in a new letter sent to primary voters. "Senator McCain has served this country admirably but it's time to replace his moderate or even liberal positions on taxes, the border, social causes and big bank bailouts with a consistent conservative like J.D.," Arpaio writes in the letter. ""I just wish Senator McCain had run as hard against Barack Obama as he is against a conservative like J.D. That could have prevented the harmful,...

Yesterday morning a classmate and friend of my 17 year old son--a high school senior, was found hanging in his bedroom, having committed a gruesome suicide. In commiting this senseless, unimaginable act, this handsome, intelligent and witty young man has effectively destroyed not just his own life, but his family's--his mother and father, his younger sister, his older brother's. I've not been able to stop asking "WHY"? I cannot shake the memory of his humor and boyishness when he would stay overnight with my sons--travel with us to the lakehouse--his obvious intellect, his considerate manners and his easy willingness to...

I've been trying, because I'd truly like to see health reform pass, to find something nice to say about President Obama's plans for a summit. Another summit, that is, nearly a year after the first one. Here's best I could come up with: It can't hurt. Consider it Chicken Soup for the Legislative Soul. When the president used his Super Bowl Sunday interview with CBS News' Katie Couric to launch this Hail Mary summit pass, he explained that "what I want to do is to look at the Republican ideas that are out there. ... "'How do you guys want...

February 10, 2010 Church May Split Over Women Bishops and Gay Priests, Warns Rowan Williams Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent Members of the General Synod listen to Dr Williams?s address yesterday The Archbishop of Canterbury warned yesterday that damaging infighting over women bishops and gay priests could result in a permanent split in the Anglican Communion. Dr Rowan Williams stressed that he did not “want or relish” the prospect of division. He called on the Church of England and Anglicans worldwide to step back from a “betrayal” of God’s mission and to put the work of Christ before schism. But he...

Soldiers from AustraliaÂ’s Special Operations Task Group (SOTG) conduct a medical clinic (MEDCAP) for the Chenartu villagers while more than 150 people gather for a shura.(Photo courtesy Australian Government Department of Defence) Courtesy Australian Government Department of DefenceThe Australian Special Operations Task Group (SOTG) with their Afghan partner force have facilitated a major gathering (shura) of village elders and religious leaders in Chenartu, north-east of Tarin Kowt, as part of their current focus on reaching out to Afghan communities across Uruzgan Province. During the meeting, village leaders and representatives were consulted to gain an understanding from the community of their...

SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) -- Knowing where sex offenders are in your community is ultimately up to you. One resource available to West Virginians is the State Police Web site at www.wvstatepolice.com. Officers recommend checking it regularly and often, especially if you feel a registered sex offender could be out of compliance with the law. Troopers say the key to all of this when it comes to protecting minors is parental involvement. You can access the sex offender registry Web sites for all three states. Ohio, for example, has 19,019 convicts on its registry list. In Kentucky, meanwhile, you will...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Workers with depression stay home sick more often than healthy colleagues, even when their disease is treated, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Tuesday. The report, commissioned by drug maker Sanofi Aventis, suggests that employers would benefit from better treatments of their workers for depression. Depression is the leading cause of disability among Americans aged 15 to 44, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. "Even when depressed patients are treated with antidepressants, there are substantial productivity losses. Therapies that can better manage depression may provide opportunities for savings to employers," the Thomson Reuters...

Hoaxes: Despite failures at Copenhagen, the fraud of the IPCC and the farce of Climate-gate, the administration wants an agency to monitor climate change. Why must we fund one-stop shopping for climate charlatans? As the climate freezes, there's no freeze on federal employment that will grow even more with the establishment of a new agency, the Climate Service office. The new agency was announced Monday by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This ministry of climate change propaganda will operate in tandem with NOAA's National Weather Service and National Ocean...

For much of the past decade, "declinism"--the notion that America is heading toward a deadly denouement--has largely been a philosophy of the left. But more recently, particularly in the wake of Barack Obama's election, conservatives have begun joining the chorus, albeit singing a somewhat different variation on the same tune. In a recent column in TheWashington Post George Will illustrates this conservative change of heart. Looking over the next few decades Will sees an aging, obsolescent America in retreat to a young and aggressive China. "America's destiny is demographic, and therefore is inexorable and predictable," he suggests, pointing to predictions...

The calls for broad retaliation over the planned U.S. weapons sales to the disputed island came from officers at China's National Defence University and Academy of Military Sciences, interviewed by Outlook Weekly, a Chinese-language magazine published by the official Xinhua news agency. The interviews with Major Generals Zhu Chenghu and Luo Yuan and Senior Colonel Ke Chunqiao appeared in the issue published on Monday. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) plays no role in setting policy for China's foreign exchange holdings. Officials in charge of that area have given no sign of any moves to sell U.S. Treasury bonds over the...

Rick Synder: Is He MI's Revenge Of The Nerds?