Free Republic

“For 20 years, I thought about it,” he said in an interview on Wednesday morning. That is how long he’s been in the industry. “But you never think you’re going to do it.” On Monday, on a full flight that had just landed from Pittsburgh, he did. ... Following his arraignment on Tuesday, his court-appointed lawyer said that Mr. Slater had intervened in an altercation involving a female passenger before the flight left Pittsburgh for Kennedy International Airport. The woman had been squabbling with another passenger over access to the overhead luggage bins. Her identity remains unknown. A document submitted...

SNIP...I’ll reserve final judgment until I read the entire piece. But based on these excerpts — which presumably reflect the thrust of the 10,000-word article — what is striking is the degree of self-pity we find in Obama’s advisers, which is reflected in the president’s words and attitude as well. Team Obama sounds nothing so much as overmatched and overwhelmed, unable to understand what has gone wrong, and increasingly bitter toward the nation’s capital and the pace and nature of politics.

Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began the college selection process with a grim determination. They would do whatever they could to get Cortney into the best possible college, and they maintained a blind faith that the investment would be worth it. Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she's been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan...

A Teleflubbie from the Obama speech on Afghanistan. Watch Obama stumble as he says that the US will "bring the Iraq War to an irresponsible end." (22 seconds in)

As (John noted) last night, Barack Obama's formulaic denunciation of the Iranian crackdown, stopped short of giving up on his hot dog diplomacy with Iran. (Fox News reports) Iranians will have to decide whether they want to attend Fourth of July celebrations at U.S. embassies, President Obama said Tuesday, linking their attendance to the potential for warming between the two nations. The United States and Iran don't have formal diplomatic relations but Obama said that it's up to the Iranian diplomats to decide whether to use an invitation to attend embassy festivities as an opening. "I think that we have...

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the national media made a headline out of every niggling trip a corporate CEO took in the company jet. The flames of public outrage were stoked as one editorial after another demanded to know how they could be so audacious, so wasteful, so negligent of shareholders' interests, when the companies they were supposed to be running were bleeding red ink, reaching out to the government for bailouts, etc. etc. ad infinitum. Remember the outcry to "throw the bums out?" But when the entity is the United States government, and the...

Detractors of my columns continuously chide me a free-market zealot lunatic inebriated by capitalist ideology, unable to recognize criminals subjugating poor suckers, even when we catch them red handed. Some of my Democrat friends (I actually have a couple) admonish my laissez-faire ideals and ask, “Jim, don’t you root for the underdog?” I thought I was the underdog. No college degree, no rich parents, no “connections” to wealthy influential businessmen or politicians who might aid my rise. Only if I was a black woman lesbian, then I would have the whole package! All this talk about the failure of the...

WASHINGTON – Republican leaders are calling President Barack Obama's handling of the economy irresponsible and wrongheaded, saying it will increase taxes and government debt. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who may challenge Obama in 2012, said Tuesday that the Obama-backed stimulus package will "grow the government, increase our taxes down the line, and saddle future generations with debt." Although he said Republicans are willing to work with Obama and congressional Democrats, his remarks continued the generally harsh GOP reactions to Obama's bid to boost the economy with billions of dollars in spending. ... In excerpts released early, Jindal suggested that Obama...

Eat, drink, and be merry -- someone will bail you out. After the humiliation of haggling over bailouts, there comes the post-bailout party. Staff of supposedly ailing companies are living it up on more than a prayer. See where and how they celebrated government money and keeping their jobs.

A school board in Arizona has decided that condoms are among the items that should be given to students attending this year's prom. The school board in the Bisbee District voted 4-1 at a recent meeting to include the condoms in a "prom bag" that will be given to prom-goers this year. A spokeswoman in the office of Supt. Paul McDonald confirmed the condoms would be handed out to the event celebrants, along with other items such as picture frames, balloons and candy. "The governing board approved [this]," she told WND. "They are to have what they call prom bags,...

VALENCIA, Spain - The U.N.'s top climate official warned policymakers and scientists trying to hammer out a landmark report on climate change that ignoring the urgency of global warming would be "criminally irresponsible." Yvo de Boer's comments came at the opening of a weeklong conference that will complete a concise guide on the state of global warming and what can be done to stop the Earth from overheating. It is the fourth and last report issued this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, co-winner of this year's Nobel Peace prize. Environmentalists and authors of the report expected tense...

WASHINGTON - First Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was attacked by political rivals at home. Now he is under fire from abroad. A senior Pakistani government official Friday criticized as "irresponsible" a threat Obama made this week to launch unilateral American military strikes against Al Qaeda havens in a remote border region of the Muslim nation. Obama's comments also stirred street protests in Pakistan and criticism from Pakistani-Americans living in the Chicago area. "It's a very irresponsible statement, that's all I can say," Pakistan's Foreign Minister Khusheed Kasuri told AP Television News. "As the election campaign in America is heating...

With the new majority raising the bar on ethics, new directions for America, and faith in Government, we should all be grateful for the lengths to which they will go to bastardize the Constitution and destroy the intended functions of the Executive branch. I happen to have come across (THIS) little beauty from the Tony Snow press briefing of 25 July. Consider what the Dims are doing with YOUR money over this non-scandal, solely for the purpose of keeping bad Bush press in the fore so you won't notice that they CONTINUE to accomplish a whole lotta NOTHING in their...

Billions of Home Ownership Wealth to be Lost by Minority Americans; Chart Contains Detailed MSA-Specific Projections of Home Foreclosure Impacts WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- A new Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) study reveals that 2.2 million American households will lose their homes and as much as $164 billion due to foreclosures in the subprime mortgage market. Titled, "Losing Ground: Foreclosures in the Subprime Market and Their Cost to Homeowners," the CRL study is the first comprehensive, nationwide review of millions of subprime mortgages originated from 1998 through the third quarter of 2006. CRL's research suggests that risky lending practices...

It’s no wonder that the American people are frustrated with the Republican Congress. Americans deserve progress, but instead are bombarded with politics driven by fear and division. They deserve action on the challenges we face as a nation - an endless and costly war in Iraq, skyrocketing gas prices and soaring health-care costs. Rather than dealing with real priorities, the Republican leadership is focused on writing discrimination into the Constitution. Just like the circus surrounding the Senate’s effort to intrude into the Terry Schiavo case, today the Senate will begin debate on the Federal Marriage Amendment - a wholly inappropriate...

Recently, Oprah Winfrey aired a special show featuring author and Holocaust survivor, Elie Weisel. Oprah and her guest toured Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp in Poland. Weisel was a survivor of Auschwitz. Winfrey...uttered a statement that was an insult to the millions of Americans and others who fought against Hitler's war machine. Speaking to Weisel, Winfrey said of the Holocaust, this all went on while the world did nothing. Winfrey made her comment based on Weisel's statement that the Allies knew of places like Auschwitz as early as 1942. The truth is, some historians do not agree with Weisel's take...

The best thing that can be said about the call by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) to censure President Bush is that practically none of his colleagues is backing him up. Democrats are not, as he charges, "cowering" in the face of possible Republican allegations that they are pro-terrorist. Rather, they don't want to distract attention from the main Democratic assaults on Bush and the GOP - that he's "incompetent" and that Republicans are in "disarray."Moreover, as The New York Times reported Thursday, Feingold's move is being used by Republicans, right-wing talk show hosts and conservatives in general to motivate the...

Let me guess. These words were taken out of context.

The DRUDGE REPORT has learned from a top GOP operative that the Republican National Committee will provide state parties with a web video prior to release tomorrow afternoon that shows a white flag waving over images of Democrat leaders making anti-war remarks. The ad is in response to the controversial comments Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean and 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry made earlier in the week. A Democratic strategist who had the web ad described to her said, “This is way over the top but we have no one to blame but Dean, Kerry and others who continue...

Couple poisoned children to escape debts BEAUVAIS, France, Oct 18 (AFP) - A French married couple poisoned their five children in a desperate bid to escape spiralling consumer debt but only their 11 year-old daughter succumbed to the injection of insulin, a court was told Tuesday. Emmanuel and Patricia Cartier, aged 37 and 44, accumulated EUR 230,000 euros of debt divided between more than 20 bank and loan accounts, and when they could no longer meet repayments resolved to take the family "to a better place", the court heard. However the murder-and-suicide pact went wrong on August 19, 2002, when...