Free Republic

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday sought to distance himself and other senior Justice Department officials from a botched operation to track guns smuggled to Mexican drug cartels, saying they were not involved. The Obama administration has been under scrutiny after revelations that as many as 2,000 guns were sold to suspected gun traffickers, not properly tracked and ended up at crime scenes in the United States and Mexico. The operation, dubbed "Fast and Furious", was run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Attorney's office in Arizona. Congressional Republicans have questioned...

Wracked by debt but blessed with abundant sunshine, Greece plans to develop some 20,000 hectares of solar power parks in a bid to export renewable energy to Germany, a report said on Saturday. Top-selling Ta Nea daily said the project, which has a tentative budget of 20 billion euros ($29 billion), could create 60,000 jobs at a time when Greece is battling a deep recession and record unemployment figures. Germany is looking for alternative energy sources after chancellor Angela Merkel's government decided to shut down all 17 of the country's nuclear reactors over 11 years, following the disaster at the...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - President Barack Obama and Republican Sarah Palin sparred from a distance over nuclear policy with each questioning the other's experience on the issue in a potential preview of the 2012 White House race. "Unbelievable," Palin said earlier this week after Obama rewrote the U.S. nuclear strategy, and she suggested the president was weak on nuclear defense. Obama, in Prague to sign a nuclear reduction treaty with Russia, countered by deriding the former Alaska governor who resigned midway through her first term as "not much of an expert" on nuclear issues.

Here’s an interesting conundrum involving nuclear decay rates. We think that the decay rates of elements are constant regardless of the ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields). So that makes it hard to explain the curious periodic variations in the decay rates of silicon-32 and radium-226 observed by groups at the Brookhaven National Labs in the US and at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesandstalt in Germany in the 1980s. Today, the story gets even more puzzling. Jere Jenkins and pals at Purdue University in Indiana have re-analysed the raw data...

From an April 2007 New York Times article: “If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me,” Mr. Wright said with a shrug. “I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen.” Somehow that quote seems relevant today, with the news that Barack Obama has distanced himself from Jeremiah Wright.Obama’s untimely distancing was made in a qualified, lawyerly fashion. He repudiated “the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue,” and dismissed him from the African American Religious Leadership Committee. One wonders about the timing, since it wasn’t...

The First Boston Marathon After experiencing the spirit and majesty of the Olympic Marathon, B.A.A. member and inaugural US Olympic Team Manager John Graham was inspired to organize and conduct a marathon in the Boston area. With the assistance of Boston businessman Herbert H. Holton, various routes were considered, before a measured distance of 24.5 miles from the Irvington Oval in Boston to Metcalf's Mill in Ashland was eventually selected. On April 19, 1897, John J. McDermott of New York, emerged from a 15-member starting field and captured the first B.A.A. Marathon in 2:55:10, and, in the process, forever secured...

WASHINGTON - Republicans who were once cozy with President Bush are distancing themselves from both the president and their party in campaign ads. Consider Rep. Deborah Pryce (news, bio, voting record), the fourth-ranking House Republican struggling to hold onto her seat in an evenly split district in central Ohio, near Columbus. In 2004, her campaign Web site featured a banner of her and Bush sitting together, smiling. But in her latest television ad, Pryce is described as "independent." The spot also highlights how she "stood up to her own party" and the president to support increased federal funds for embryonic...

I'm a graduate of one of the top private schools in the country, and although I was conservative throughout, I have started to become very eager for a real conservative education... Obviously I can't go back to undergrad... I would love to hear some suggested remedies to my problem... If there were a comprehensive set of taped courses from a conservative perspective would be ideal, but I doubt such a thing exists... Perhaps a recommended set of books? I would like to cover intro to various disciplines from an academic perspective.

House Dems stoke the fire By Josephine Hearn House Democratic leaders yesterday distanced themselves from Howard Dean’s fiery rhetoric, saying that the outspoken Democratic Party chairman’s recent controversial statements do not speak for them. Their comments echoed Sen. Joseph Biden (Del.) and former senator and vice presidential candidate John Edwards (N.C.), who took issue over the weekend with Dean’s recent statement that “a lot of [Republicans] have never made an honest living in their lives.” Dean’s penchant for harsh rhetoric has drawn criticism several times already since he took the helm of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in February. Last...

Ok. I do feel very silly posting this, but I know Freepers will have some GREAT information sources and advice. I know a military family that has a marine coming back from Iraq. The base is holding a big party for them all. Like most military families, their financial situation isn't very good. In fact, as of late it has gone from not very good to worse than worse. There is just a short window of time to get things pulled together to send Mom & Dad to meet their son. We're working on the financials to pull this off,...

Hello, I am looking for aradio that can recieve programs from out of the area. I want to recieve a station taht is about 70 miles away and I cannot get it with the radios I have in my house. However, I can get the station in the car. Does anyone have any suggestions? Is this teh radio taht would work? http://www.kaitousa.com/WRX911.htm I want to get Phil Hendrie and Glen Beck. I woudl listen to them anyday that watch the tube.

  MEDIA CONTACT: Jonathan Sherwood (585) 273-4726   June 9, 2004 Top Quark Measurements Give ?God Particle? New Lease on Life Researchers from the University of Rochester have helped measure the elusive top quark with unparalleled precision, and the surprising results affect everything from the Higgs boson, nicknamed the ?God particle,? to the makeup of the dark matter that comprises 90 percent of the universe. The scientists developed a new method to analyze data from particle accelerator collisions at Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory, which is far more accurate than previous methods and has the potential to change the dynamics...

Rover sets Mars distance record Spirit can navigate over yellow and green colored terrain, but not red. The US space agency's robotic Mars explorer Spirit has broken a record for the distance travelled by a robot rover in one day on the Martian surface. Spirit travelled nearly 21 metres (70 feet) across the rock-strewn surface of Gusev Crater, where it is looking for past or present signs of liquid water. Scientists said Spirit's twin rover Opportunity had experienced slips during 50% of its drive on Tuesday. This is thought to be due to loose soil at its Meridiani Planum landing...

"This is just like being back in lab!" said one recent student tester of the LAAPhysics online virtual laboratory. "If I had to choose between this and a lecture course? No contest—LAAPhysics!" said another, echoing the sentiments of the testing group. "The graphics are terrific!" was another common response. Perhaps the most important reaction—from the developers' point of view—was from a student who said, "I really appreciated not being told I was wrong but rather being led to another [laboratory] investigation that let me see things correctly." And finally, "I finished the whole module in two hours and I had...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 October 7 The Galaxy and the Quasar Credit: R. Knacke (Penn State Erie) et al., Hubble Heritage Team, NASA Explanation: Is the galaxy in the center connected to the quasar on the upper right? Disagreements about systems like this have raged for decades and have been used to challenge the foundations of modern cosmology. Some believe that the quasar Markarian 205 was recently ejected from galaxy NGC...

Project Orion: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth Michael Flora The race to the moon, in the forms of Project Apollo and the still-shadowy Soviet lunarprogram, dominated manned space flight during the decade of the 1960's. In the United States, the project sequence Mercury-Gemini-Apollo succeeded in putting roughly sixty people into space, twelve of them on the moon. Yet, during the late 1950's and early 1960's, the U.S. government sponsored a project that could possibly have placed 150 people, most of them professional scientists, on the moon, and could even have sent expeditions to Mars and Saturn. This feat...