Free Republic

The major Demo tactical effort against Mitt Romney is based on portraying him as a robotic, out-of-touch figure not much like other Americans -- at least not Americans of the 21st century. Romney is a creature of the 1950s, raised and indoctrinated within a Mormon cocoon, a man effectively living in a time warp. He uses words like "zany." His hair looks funny. He's been married to the same woman for nearly half a century. What kind of post-'60s American is this? The key element here, repeated in piece after piece, is that Romney was "untouched by the '60s." Liberals...

STEUBENVILLE, Ohio — This is the land of die-hard Democrats — mill workers, coal miners and union members. They have voted party line for generations, forming a reliable constituency for just about any Democrat who decides to run for office. But when it comes to President Obama, a small part of this constituency balks. “Certain precincts in this county are not going to vote for Obama,” said John Corrigan, clerk of courts for Jefferson County, who was drinking coffee in a furniture shop downtown one morning last week with a small group of friends, retired judges and civil servants. “I...

"We don't intend to turn the Republican Party over to the traitors in the battle just ended. We will have no more of those candidates who are pledged to the same goals as our opposition and who seek our support. Turning the Party over to the so-called moderates wouldnÂ’t make any sense at all." -- President Ronald ReaganThere has been a lot of discussion on this forum on whether or not a "conservative" can or should support Mitt Romney in the general election. I am 60 years old, and for all of my adult life, since I joined the U.S....

How can someone who writes compelling nonfiction be so terrible at fiction? I’ve just read the first few chapters of David Frum’s new novel, “Patriots.” It is bloody awful. It also defeats the purpose that Frum claims he intended for it, which was to write a novel that tells deeper truths than journalism. In fact it retreads ground Frum the journalist has gone over many times before, most notably his increasingly shrill belief that conservatives are nuts. Frum is a former conservative who is now trending liberal and may in fact be headed for the netherworld of Andrew Sullivanville; he...

New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) is one of the world's premier destinations for artistic and historical exhibitions. But this epicenter of worldly culture is not above admitting the occasional mistake. Even when the correction comes from one curious 13-year-old boy. The Hartford Courant reports that 13-year-old Benjamin Lerman Coady found an error in the Met's Byzantine Gallery during a recent visit. The seventh-grader is a fledgling history buff who recently studied the Byzantine Empire in school. While checking some of the dates on the map, Coady noticed that sections featuring Spain and Africa were missing.

This an inspiring video of young children stopping play and standing at attention when they hear the Marine Corp Colors. Kudos to their parents! Marine Corps kids respect on the playground. COLORS!!

When Jonathan Frederick Will was born 40 years ago — on May 4, 1972, his father’s 31st birthday — the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome was about 20 years. That is understandable. The day after Jon was born, a doctor told Jon’s parents the first question for them was whether they intended to take Jon home from the hospital. Nonplussed, they said they thought that is what parents do with newborns. Not doing so was, however, still considered an acceptable choice for parents who might prefer to institutionalize or put up for adoption children thought to have bleak...

Poor Solicitor General Donald Verrilli. Once again he's been pilloried for fumbling a historic Supreme Court case. First shredded for his "train wreck" defense of ObamaCare's individual mandate, he is now blamed for the defenestration in oral argument of Obama's challenge to the Arizona immigration law. The law allows police to check the immigration status of someone stopped for other reasons. Verrilli claimed that constitutes an intrusion on the federal monopoly on immigration enforcement. He was pummeled. Why shouldn't a state help the federal government enforce the law? "You can see it's not selling very well," said Justice Sonia Sotomayor....

Public Trust: Our president, it seems, is quite the fabulist. A new book reveals he fabricated yet another story in his 1995 memoir, this one about a white girlfriend complaining about black anger. In his supposedly nonfiction memoir, "Dreams From My Father," Obama claims he and the girlfriend got into a "big fight" after seeing a New York play by a black writer. He became annoyed when she allegedly asked "why black people were so angry all the time." Obama biographer David Maraniss contacted the former girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, who insists the scene never took place. She says they never...

Enlarge Image Slaughtered star. A black hole (upper left) tears a helium-rich star to shreds. Credit: S. Gezari/Johns Hopkins University and J. Guillochon, UC Santa Cruz/NASA Some people seem born under an unlucky star. But some stars are equally unlucky themselves. Astronomers have spotted a star in another galaxy plunging toward a giant black hole and being ripped to shreds, sparking a flare so brilliant that observers detected it from a distance of 2.1 billion light-years. By watching the flare brighten and fade, scientists have achieved the unprecedented feat of reconstructing the life story of the doomed sun. Giant...

~Favorite Song's with Number's in it~ Arlo Guthrie - City of New Orleans The City of New Orleans by Steve Goodman Riding on the City of New Orleans, Illinois Central Monday morning rail Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders, Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail. All along the southbound odyssey The train pulls out at Kankakee Rolls along past houses, farms and fields. Passin' trains that have no names, Freight yards full of old black men And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles. CHORUS: Good morning America how are you? Don't you know me I'm your native son,...

Election 2012: The Obama campaign website has a feature that's supposed to show how his policies will help a fictional "Julia" during her life. What it really shows is Obama's vision of cradle-to-grave government dependency. The campaign's "Life of Julia" interactive feature tries to depict how Obama would help, and Romney would hurt, women in America. It's so ridiculously amateurish, you have to wonder who's in charge of the $170 million the campaign has spent. Still, it provides a window into Obama's warped worldview — one in which everything good that happens in America is due to some federal program...

By Abby Ellin May 3, 2012 Million Moms Rips JCPenney on Gay ‘Culture War’ When JCPenney last heard from One Million Moms, the “pro family advocacy” organization was threatening to boycott the national retail chain for refusing to fire openly gay spokeswoman Ellen DeGeneres. “By jumping on the pro-gay bandwagon, JC Penney is attempting to gain a new target market and in the process will lose customers with traditional values that have been faithful to them over all these years,” OMM, a division of the American Family Association wrote on its website. But JCP refused to budge, and the Moms,...

Media: NBC's presentation of "Rock Center with Brian Williams" last Wednesday night demonstrated that MSNBC's Chris Matthews isn't the only one who feels tingles up his leg when he talks with or about President Obama. President Obama's victory lap and shameless, media-assisted political exploitation of the Navy SEALs' triumph continued with the program opening with the photograph taken in the White House Situation Room, now apparently open to public tours. Administration bigwigs were shown watching the fruits of President George W. Bush's labors as Navy SEALs, acting on a trail of evidence gathered using enhanced interrogation techniques President Obama opposed,...

Leadership: The Obama administration's shoddy rebuff of a blind Chinese dissident seeking asylum underlines a sorry reality: The White House will sell out American interests for political advantage. Where is the courage? Chen Guangcheng, 40, a blind Chinese human rights advocate of extraordinary courage, made a daring escape from an illegal house arrest last week and made his way to Beijing to stagger into the U.S. Embassy to seek asylum. He was no ordinary applicant. The self-taught lawyer had been imprisoned for four years and continuously menaced by Chinese officials for the "crime" of standing up for the human dignity...

Enlarge Image Hot spots. Three mutations in or near hemagglutinin's binding site (yellow) and one on its stalk increased transmissibility. Credit: H.-L. Yen and J. S. M. Peiros, Nature, Adavanced Online Edition, (2012) One of two influenza papers at the center of an intense, 6-month international debate has finally seen the light of day. Today, Nature published a controversial study in ferrets that shows how scientists can engineer an avian influenza strain to transmit between mammals through respiratory droplets such as those created by coughing or sneezing. The 11-page study, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin,...

The last few years have revealed an ugly underbelly to the plaintiffs’ bar, and some of the biggest trial lawyers across the country have been brought down in criminal prosecutions for their sharp practices. Bill Lerach and Mel Weiss, two legal eagles who made a fortune in bringing security fraud class actions against publicly traded companies, pleaded guilty in October 2007 and April 2008, respectively, for their roles in an alleged decades-long conspiracy pursuant to which serial plaintiffs were paid kickbacks from their court-awarded attorneys’ fees in the cases. The Milberg Weiss firm at which both men once were partners...

Macrophages play a key role in the immune response, protecting organisms against infection and regulating the development of inflammation in tissue. Macrophages differ depending on where they are located and which tasks they perform. A scientist at TUM has been investigating whether these different types of cells have the same origin – and has come up with some surprising results. His findings reveal that there are two distinct macrophage cell lines that continue into adult life and that these two lineages have different origins. The research was recently published in Science magazine. The organs of vertebrates, including of course humans...

SANFORD -- The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a group closely associated with the birth of the civil rights movement, is bringing its annual convention to Sanford, in order to keep the spotlight on the Trayvon Martin case. SCLC Interim President C.T. Vivian says the group wants to speak to the overall issue of African-Americans "being seen as something they are not"' and "being killed for something they shouldn't be killed for." Vivian says the Martin shooting is an opportunity to engage young people and teach them about non-violent direct action, a cornerstone of the civil rights movement....

Mockery of religion in general and Catholicism in particular is commonplace in Hollywood– from Showtime’s “The Borgias” to the recent “Three Stooges” movie which features Kate Upton wearing a “nun-kini.” The latest installment of Catholic-bashing, “The Perfect Family,” is slated to come out May 4 – and predictably stereotypes Catholics who believe and practice what their Church teaches as unfeeling busybodies. The About section for the “The Perfect Family” declares: “Suburban supermom Eileen Cleary (Academy Award® nominee Kathleen Turner) is the ultimate Catholic.” And indeed, the trailer for the movie perfectly reflects Hollywood’s twisted conception of Catholicism. One quote from...