Free Republic

The well-shined boots, the perfect marches, the fittest figure. Staff Sgt. Michael F. Johnston is the U.S. Army’s new standard bearer. The Lincoln Pius X High School graduate was recently named 2009 Drill Sergeant of the Year after a week of exhausting competition against six other drill sergeants. “And, of course, I was just ecstatic,” said his mother, Joan Johnston, of Lincoln. Her son has been to Afghanistan twice, but he spent the last year and a half teaching recruits the ups and downs of combat. Sometimes he has to yell, he said in a phone interview from Fort Benning,...

ERIN McAULIFFE had a vision for this summer. A 20-year-old junior at Bowdoin College, she had lined up an internship at a New York publishing house and imagined stimulating days leafing through manuscripts, and evenings of sparkling conversation with friends at downtown cafes. She ended up starring in a real-life version of the movie “Adventureland� instead. In that recent comedy, a recent college graduate is forced by economic hardship to work at a suburban amusement park. Life is imitating art for Ms. McAuliffe. With her parents unable to help bankroll three months of unpaid work in Manhattan, she gave up...

Despite almost 50 years of large and accelerating efforts to improve the school achievement of African-American students, the gap between their achievement and that of whites and Asians remains about as large as ever. Yet proposals for what to do about it seem basically unchanged: Spend more money and divert existing money to reduce class size and train teachers better, have more students take a rigorous college prep curriculum, work on improving self-esteem, eliminate ability-grouped classes, use cooperative-learning techniques, and reassign top teachers to schools with a high percentage of African-American students. I have become especially doubtful about whether those...

A nephew of mine is doing some project/study work on the Great Depression. I have tons of history books, but very little on economical history and the Great Depression. I'd like him to avoid Roosevelt adulating propaganda. What do you consider the authorative and most relevant books on the Great Depression and the (etatist) measures certain States (particularily US and Europeans) have taken against it? Thanks for your help.

ELK GROVE, Calif. – A Northern California elementary school teacher sent her students home for the summer with a video of class memories, only the DVD included six seconds of her having sex on a couch. Officials at the Elk Grove Unified School District asked families of the teacher's 24 students to get rid of the DVD after the unintended clip was found spliced in a scene where children were sharing stories in class.

With a fattened GI Bill covering full tuition and more, the number of veterans attending college this fall is expected to jump 30 percent from last year to nearly half a million. That's left many universities looking for ways to ease the transition from combat to the classroom.

This was sent by a Deputy Sheriff. The New Fashion Rage In Mug Shots These are actual Police Photos...too funny. Just think about this for a second: Did you ever see anyone arrested wearing a Bush T-shirt, or for you older guys, an Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, or even Nixon, or Bob Dole shirt. Obama must be proud of his supporters!

"Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." --Leviticus 25:10 Inscription on the Liberty Bell

YAKIMA, Wash. -- A teacher who sent a 5-year-old student home with a bag of feces in his backpack was issued a formal reprimand, according to a document released Thursday. The student at Apple Valley Elementary arrived home April 17 with a bagged up piece of human feces in his backpack and a note that read, "This little turd was on the floor in my room."

"The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth." --Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

One of the most significant transformations in U.S. graduate education and the international market for highly-trained workers in science and engineering during the last quarter century is the representation of students from outside of the United States among the ranks of doctorate recipients from U.S. universities. In all but the life sciences, the foreign share of Ph.D. recipients now equals or exceeds the share from the United States. Students from outside the United States accounted for 51 percent of Ph.D. recipients in science and engineering in 2003, up from 27 percent in 1973. In 2003, doctorate recipients from outside the...

Out with Treos, in with iPhones Monday, June 29th, 2009 by Scott Lowe Over the weekend, my family and I visited Louisville, Kentucky for TechRepublic’s tenth birthday and had a blast! The TechRepublic crew, as always, was a fun and friendly bunch.  While I was there, I mentioned to Jason Hiner that Westminster College was moving away from Windows Mobile-based Treos in favor of iPhones for mobile devices.  He tweeted this to the world (the guy has like 8 billion followers), so I thought I’d follow up on that conversation with a little bit of the background information. ———————————————————————————————– Obviously,...

The Supreme Court's decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, the case of the New Haven, Conn., firefighters, was a ringing endorsement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964's ban on racial discrimination and a repudiation of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's decision in the Second Circuit Appeals Court. While five justices flatly rejected Sotomayor's ruling, even the four dissenters wouldn't have let stand her ruling allowing the results of a promotion exam to be set aside because no black firefighter had a top score. Ricci is also something else: a riveting lesson in political sociology, thanks to the concurring opinion by...

1. What is the supreme law of the land? 2. What do we call the first 10 amendments to the Constitution? 3. What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress? 4. How many justices are on the Supreme Court? 5. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? 6. What ocean is on the East Coast of the United States? 7. What are the two major political parties in the United States? 8. We elect a U.S. senator for how many years? 9. Who was the first president? 10. Who is in charge of the executive branch?

Excuse the vanity post but I just picked up a new Ruger P95 9mm. I figured it was the right time. I'm not a stranger to handguns, carrying the .45 back in the Corps and then transitioning from a wheel gun to the Sig 9 (226 I think...or 228 - one was bigger) when I was a cop...but I left that over a decade ago and I haven't had a handgun since. I am almost ashamed to say, I didn't leave with much memory either...they gave me rounds - I shot rounds - qualified well 4 times a year and...

"Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!" --George Washington, letter to James Warren, March 31, 1779

I've got two kids (12 and 10) and we are moving about 800 miles away from their friends. They want to be able to stay in touch so I am thinking about letting them have email addresses BUT with conditions. Is there a safe way to allow kids this age to surf the web and email? I just looked at my gmail spam box and I'm having second thoughts. What are your suggestions? Spam filters? Web filters? Is there a way to only allow access to specified incoming email and specified web sites? I'll take all the help I can...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Dmitry Medvedev has told Russians they must kick the alcohol habit. "We drink more now than in the 1990s, although those were difficult times," the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Medvedev as saying on Tuesday. Health Minister Tatyana Golikova has been ordered to devise an anti-alcohol strategy. "We need to prepare a corresponding programme and take appropriate measures," Medvedev said. A report by The Lancet medical journal last week said alcohol-related diseases caused around half of all deaths of Russians between the ages of 15 and 54. Vodka is enshrined in Russian culture despite efforts by previous...

Rivals has an article about a thirteen year old accepting a scholarship from Tennessee. Lets reiterate that Tennessee just offered a college football scholarship to a kid who probably has not finished putting all of his eighth grade trip pictures on his face book account. A kid three years away from legally learning to drive, a kid who has probably not looked at any aspect of college other than the fact his big brother is a star with the Volunteers.. The NCAA has more rules, regulations, and bylaws than some nation have in their tax codes so how about one...

It's been a while since I've read our foundational documents, so my memory is a bit fuzzy, but isn't it specifically spelled out that the Govt is *forbidden* from competing with public and private businesses?

Thousands of Maine high school students will receive new laptops this fall through an expansion of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI). The Maine Department of Education announced it has placed an order for more than 64,000 MacBooks for students and faculty in grades 7 through 12, and will place an additional order for up to 7,000 more laptops in the coming weeks. MLTI has provided Apple notebook computers to all Maine middle school students since 2002 – making Maine the first and only state with a statewide implementation of laptops for every student. The high school expansion will mark...

If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved? If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved? If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky? If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have approved? If George W. Bush had visited Austria...

SAN JOSE, Calif. - A shambling sentence about sea fellows who bellow took top honors in an annual contest celebrating bad writing. David McKenzie, a 55-year-old Washington man, won grand prize in San Jose State University's 27th Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with this: "Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it...

A petition has been launched to force council chiefs to drop plans to brand a Prescot school with a bizarre 12-word name. More than 100 people have already signed up opposing the plan to re-name Prescot School as Knowsley Park Centre for Learning - serving Prescot, Whiston and the wider community. Organisers behind the Prescotian - a website for former Prescot School pupils - have branded the new name "politically correct madness". They plan to present their petition to education bosses before the start of the next school term in a bid to force a u-turn. The far from snappy...

Associate director of Duke University's Center for Health Policy, Frank Lombard, was recently arrested by the FBI and charged with offering up his adopted 5-year-old African American son for sex to an undercover cop. Lombard admitted to molesting his own adopted son to the undercover officer in an online chat room under the user name "Perv Dad for Fun". He invited the under cover officer to travel to North Carolina to rape his already-molested adopted son. Lombard faces 20 years in prison if convicted but is not eligible for the death penalty.Lombard bragged to the detective that “the abuse of...

Saddened by the wickedness of man, God directs the righteous Noah to build an ark for his family and two of each species of animal. Together, they ride the ark through 40 days and 40 nights of torrential rains that God unleashes upon the Earth. And when the waters subside, Noah and the animals return to land. "That seems almost like a fairy story," said archaeologist Randall Price, who is director of Liberty University's new Center for Judaic Studies. "But we believe it was an actual event." This summer Price, 57, plans to continue on a journey to prove just...

My fellow Freepers, I may have hit upon a way to help educate those of our fellow citizens, who can, and do read. What I intend is a newspaper, a newspaper similar to the ones printed in the 1700s, which helped ignite the Revolution. It is all about the issues concerning the governance of we the people. It worked then, perhaps it could work now. The mind-numbing speed with which we are approaching total socialism, has left me somewhat stunned. Its coming in such large increments that one can hardly keep up with the changes. I had hoped to get...

In my experience, whenever the subject of the Confederate secession or of a modern attempt at the same thing occurs someone is bound to respond with a reference to the infamous case of Texas v. White (7 Wall. 700 ). This Reconstruction Era case was written essentially to put a headstone on the Confederacy's grave and to stifle any other State's interests in leaving the Union in the future. It was in all significant respects a politically motivated decision. It ignored certain specific constitutional provisions as well as prior decisions of the court. In short, the decision was just plain...

A twitterer named lettersoftheliv has published an exhaustive series of tweets as a how-to guide for non-violent demonstrations. Here's how to protect yourself from tear gas: Do not pick up/throw back tear gas canisters- will severely burn your hands. Vinegar soaked bandana helps you breath with tear gas. Contaminates fast, have extra. Most tear gas injuries come from PANIC/chaos,not the chemicals:Ppl lose heads.Effects intense but very short-term. Stay calm and yell “WALK, WALK” as you walk away from tear gas/pepper spray attack- spread calm. Do not wear contact lens- pepper spray can linger and damage your eyes.

ON TV Hitler's Stealth Fighter airs Sunday, June 28, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel. About the show >> Top stealth-plane experts have re-created a radical, nearly forgotten Nazi aircraft: the Horten 2-29, a retro-futuristic fighter that arrived too late in World War II to make it into mass production. (See Hitler's stealth fighter in pictures.) The engineers' goal was to determine whether the so-called stealth fighter was truly radar resistant. In the process, they've uncovered new clues to just how close Nazi engineers were to unleashing a jet that some say could have changed the course...

I'll be on hiatus into July after this. So I looked for some waterfall pictures as a send-off. Waterfall in the Caucasus Mountains (Chegem Gorge). Click for full-size. Katibawasan Falls, Phillipines (click for full size) El Chorro waterfalls, El Salvador

New data show that enrollment in U.S. science and engineering (S&E) graduate programs in 2007 grew 3.3 percent over comparable data for 2006--the highest year-over-year increase since 2002 and nearly double the 1.7 percent increase seen in 2006. Science programs added the most students in absolute numbers, but engineering's percentage growth over 2006, 5.9 percent, was substantially higher than that of science, which grew by 2.4 percent. Enrollment in computer sciences programs was up 2.7 percent, the first increase since 2002. The proportion of foreign students enrolled in S&E graduate programs in 2007 remained below its 2002 high, despite a...

Is it freedom of speech or lack of respect? That's the question after Thursday's graduation ceremony at John Liechty Middle School. Angry parents crowded the school's lobby demanding a meeting with Principal Jeanette Stevens to discuss the issue, but were turned away Monday morning. It comes after 15 students chose to protest their graduation speaker, LAUSD Board President Monica Garcia. The students and their parents said they chose to do so to protest teacher layoffs and increased class sizes. "We didn't stand up," said Ender Perez, who continues to refuse to apologize for Thursday's events, "we just sat in our...

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. - The College of William & Mary in Virginia is looking for a mascot and ideas have ranged from a feathered horse to an asparagus stalk. The school said Monday more than 400 nominations have been submitted. William & Mary for decades was known as the Indians, but the school changed its nickname to Tribe in the 1980s. The NCAA ruled in 2006 that the college could keep the Tribe nickname but its feathered logo was demeaning to Native Americans and had to go. The school's athletic teams will still be called the Tribe, but the college wants...

E-mails sent by a “conservative” student to a “liberal” professor, calling him a traitor and threatening to “puke” all over him are not protected political speech, the Nebraska Court of Appeals said in a decision last week. Darren J. Drahota was found guilty of disturbing the peace and fined $250 for e-mails he sent to Bill Avery, then a University of Nebraska-Lincoln political science professor and now a state senator from Lincoln . The Nebraska Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, saying libelous and insulting or “fighting words” are not protected by the Constitution. The court described the content of...

i'm not very political, and i need to write a paper on the topic "Did the war in Iraq reduce the threat of Terrorism?" My teacher has made it a yes or no paper. i have to write about how it did reduce the threat of terrorism, the yes part.... so can anyone give me some info, in put

The spelling mantra "i before e except after c" is no longer worth teaching, according to the government. Advice sent to teachers says there are too few words which follow the rule and recommends using more modern methods to teach spelling to schoolchildren. The document, entitled Support for Spelling, is being distributed to more than 13,000 primary schools. But some people believe the phrase should be retained because it is easy to remember and is broadly accurate. Bethan Marshall, a senior English lecturer at King's College London, said: "It's a very easy rule to remember and one of the very...

June 11, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Kevin Jennings, who was appointed by Obama to be the assistant deputy secretary of the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools inside the Department of Education, has always been interested in promoting the homosexualist agenda to schoolchildren. Jennings, cofounder and executive director of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), told attendees at a GLSEN conference over a decade ago that he looked forward to the day when promoting homosexuality in schools will be seen in a positive light.

NASA's Earth Observatory inspires a couple of different views this week. First of all, there's this: Fogo, Cape Verde Islandswhich in part notes that there are villages inside the caldera which holds the volcanic peak of Fogo (actually Pico do Fogo, if you're wondering why it's labeled Pico in the picture). I wouldn't think that's exactly prime real estate! In the picture below you can see the villages as small white dots, and the road to them through the caldera. The other images are a few I found that the two villages from various perspectives. View from the 1995 eruption...

I have been working as an independent professional rewriter and editor for many years and have recently began upgrading my resources and skills to handle science and medical technical papers, etc. I have heard some good things about Stylewriter, but I have also heard it takes a long time to get used to and the settings are difficult to manage. I have also seen online advertisements for a product called White Smoke, that seems much easier to use, but I have no idea of how capable it actually is. I know Free Republic has a great number of writers and...

Video: http://www.fbi.gov/multimedia/bombs061509/bombs061509.htm "Post-Blast Training, FBI Training Academy, Quantico" SNIPPET: "FBI bomb technicians from the Washington Field Office conduct training to recognize attributes of specific bomb types and their aftermath. Transcript" # http://www.fbi.gov/multimedia/bombs061509/transcript.htm "Post-Blast Training, FBI Training Academy, Quantico" SNIPPET: "Our bomb techs are very, very experienced. They’ve deployed to Iraq. They go on 90-day tours. They deploy to Afghanistan--90-day tours. And there’s a reason for that. We want to see what they’re using our there. We want to see what sort of tradecraft, what sort of components. And we want to see if there’s any sort of migration into the...

Ok, I fixed the one spelling error, NOW she is ready to roll!! GO SARAH PALIN 2012

You probably missed this in the rush of news, but there was a story in the European and Australian newspapers about an add that was put in a Pakistani newspaper. The add stated that their was an offer of a reward to anyone who would kill an American, any American would do. As I said not one US newspaper ran the story, so how would we know right. Well an Australian dentist read the story in his local paper and got very angry. The next day he sent this letter to the editor, and it was published a few...

Justin Denney's family watched on as he ascended the Cumberland County Civic Center stage during graduation Friday night to accept his diploma, but the superintendent told him to return to his seat Mary Denney said she can't believe how her son's taking a bow and blowing a kiss on stage was grounds for the superintendent to withhold his diploma. "I'm like, 'Did she not hand him his diploma?' I'm like, 'What's going on?'" Mary Denney said. She said she and Justin both signed a code of conduct regarding the graduation when she picked up graduation tickets on Friday, she doesn't...

MeMe Roth, a publicist and an Upper West Side mother of two, is getting really, really mad — “and I do not mean angry,” she clarified. “I mean mad, like crazy.” Ms. Roth is being driven mad by Public School 9, where her children are in second and fourth grades, and it seems that P.S. 9, in turn, is being driven mad by Ms. Roth. Ms. Roth, who runs a group called National Action Against Obesity, has no problem with the school lunches provided at the highly regarded elementary school on Columbus Avenue and 84th Street. What sets her off...

This animated video footage is intended to inspire faith in God and His Church! Also is arranged with a piano instrumental, “In The Garden”. Thanks for viewing!

The hawk in this video footage is ferruginous and also called rough-leg and the sound of its call is actual. The location of its habitat is the North Western part of the United States. Thanks for viewing!

One of the hottest topics in Washington these days is the debate over where the next major terrorist strike will come from. One avenue of attack cited on several occasions by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has concerns regarding the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). For example, last February the Washington Post reported, "[a]t a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, Mueller said that the bureau is expanding its focus beyond al-Qaeda and into splinter groups, radicals who try to enter the country through the visa waiver program and 'home-grown terrorists.' The universe of crime and terrorism...

"Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit." --James Madison, Federalist No. 51, February 8, 1788

Just want your thoughts on my prolife video... Pleae pass it around! If it can save ONE baby's life then it is worth it. Judi