Free Republic

Sovereignty: Even if he's not re-elected, the president hopes to leave behind a treaty giving a U.N. body veto power over the use of our territorial waters and to which we'd be required to give half of our offshore oil revenue. The Law Of The Sea Treaty (LOST) has been lurking in the shadows for decades. Like the Kyoto Protocol that pretended to be an effort to save the earth from the poisoned fruit of the Industrial Revolution, LOST pretends to be an effort to protect the world's oceans from environmental damage and remove it as a cause of potential...

The United Nations treaty called Law of the Sea was negotiated by the State Department, and then presented to Ronald Reagan for signing as soon as he became President in 1981. Reagan immediately recognized it as a bad treaty that would restrict U.S. sovereignty and require us to pay an international body half of all our royalties from offshore drilling. UN bureaucrats would then distribute the money as they wanted, because the U.S. would have only one vote out of 160. Reagan rejected the Law of the Sea Treaty, and we thought that took care of the problem. The American...

A former college student convicted for hacking into Sarah Palin's e-mail account during the 2008 presidential election lost a bid to overturn his felony conviction on Monday. The former University of Tennessee student, David Kernell, argued he was not aware of any pending investigation when he deleted information from his computer related to the hacking of Palin's account. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit found Kernell's awareness of a possible future FBI investigation was enough to uphold a conviction on obstruction of justice.

SEATTLE - A snowshoer who was lost in a blizzard for two days on Washington state's Mount Rainier said he burned his paper money for warmth. Yong Chun Kim, 66, of Tacoma, told KOMO-TV of Seattle that he had fire starters with him and first burned some leaves. Then he started burning personal items: his socks and then $1 and $5 bills from his wallet. Kim also said he kept moving to keep warm, took cover under a tree at night and dreamed of his wife and a nice hot sauna. He became separated from his snowshoe group Saturday and...

A poem I wrote to highlight the difference between Jesus and false religion. In the scriptures Jesus received the most opposition from the most religious people of his day. At it's core Jesus' gospel and the good news of the Cross is in pure opposition to self-righteousness/self-justification. Religion is man centered, Jesus is God-centered. This poem highlights my journey to discover this truth. Religion either ends in pride or despair. Pride because you make a list and can do it and act better than everyone, or despair because you can't do your own list of rules and feel "not good...

A poem I wrote to highlight the difference between Jesus and false religion. In the scriptures Jesus received the most opposition from the most religious people of his day. At it's core Jesus' gospel and the good news of the Cross is in pure opposition to self-righteousness/self-justification. Religion is man centered, Jesus is God-centered. This poem highlights my journey to discover this truth. Religion either ends in pride or despair. Pride because you make a list and can do it and act better than everyone, or despair because you can't do your own list of rules and feel "not good...

FORT LEWIS, Wash – More than 100 soldiers were on lockdown Sunday after "sensitive" military equipment was stolen from a base in Fort Lewis, Wash. The soldiers were put on lockdown Wednesday after items such as scopes, night vision goggles and range finders went missing from Joint Base Lewis-McChord over the holidays, myFOXSpokane.com reported. Lewis-McChord spokesman Matt Hinkle said Saturday that the army was carrying out a criminal investigation into the 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division after the "sensitive" items went missing, The News Tribune reported. "They'll be on base until the items are found," Hinkle, who estimated the company...

I read Ann’s latest column with a heavy heart. I came away with the unmistakable feeling that she has lost faith in the philosophy and movement she has been a firebrand for until now. And I think about how it happens that a person at the age of 50 becomes the very cheerleader for the status quo that she argued against these many years. I believe it is true that as we age we develop different thoughts about things, through experience, through people we meet, through having to be forced to take a position on something we cannot imagine when...

Welch was right! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZU0c8DAIU4&feature=related

Actually, they’re not lost geographically. We see them every day on the cable news channels and the evening news of the broadcast networks. This decade they call themselves the “Occupy Wall Street” Group. I believe they are lost, unrecoverable, as productive, patriotic, Americans. I’m no shrink, but I believe they will carry a degree of bitterness, for the reminder of their lives, as a result of America’s rejection of their attempt to force a socialist form of government on a nation of people who love freedom. The risk was theirs to take. History will record their failure — a failure...

There must be something in the water in Massachusetts this year. For the second time in a month, police have responded to a 911 call from a couple stranded — and lost — on a farm outing. This time, the rescue appeal came from an apple orchard. When Mark and Marcia Rosenthal of Boston went apple-picking on the afternoon of Oct. 22, they didn’t expect it to end with a rescue. According to the farm’s owner, the two wandered too from their parked car at Honey Pot Orchard in Stow, and as night began to fall, they became frightened that...

It's a rare day when positive news surfaces from the frontlines of Iraq's post-occupation government--or from its troubled economy. However, a U.S. Iraq inspector general report that concluded this week that $6.6 billion in shrink-wrapped cash the U.S. government previously feared had gone missing in the chaotic early days of the Iraq occupation has in fact been safely accounted for. "The mystery of $6 billion that seemed to go missing in the early days of the Iraq war has been resolved, according to a new report," CNN national security producer Charles Keyes reported Wednesday. "New evidence shows most of that...

For two days, there was one big thing missing from Justice Wadsworth’s bedroom: “Daddy Bear.” “It makes me feel like cotton candy and I’m cuddling with my dad,” the 6-year-old girl old KOMO-TV in Seattle. Justice was reunited with her best friend Thursday thanks to social media and two Washington state transportation workers. When Justice left her Sedro-Woolley, Wash., home last weekend for a trip to Idaho, she took the teddy bear. But when she got sick along Interstate 90 during the return ride, Daddy Bear apparently fell out and was accidentally left by the side of the road. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2011/10/daddy-bear-found-girl-reconnected-with-lost-friend/

LABOR may have finally bounced off rock bottom but Australia's oldest political party and its leader are still facing a historic loss of public confidence and electoral failure. A three-point rise in the Newspoll primary vote for the ALP has avoided the unthinkable for the Gillard government of going to 25 per cent or below to have less support than the combined vote for the Greens and various odds and sods, but the broader view of this survey of public opinion about Labor - as well as the personal standing of Julia Gillard - is devastating. The electorate has not...

NORFOLK, VA - A woman who lost her husband overseas says she's lost something else close to her heart and she's asking America for help finding it. "My jaw dropped, my heart just fell to the floor, I felt like someone was standing on my chest," said Kimberly Vaughn. She'd been wearing the ring on her right thumb since her husband, Aaron Vaughn was killed in what was the deadliest day for our troops in Afghanistan since 2005. "Since my husband was killed in action on August 6, I've been wearing his wedding band on my hand...just a nice reminder...

Here it comes, you can bet on it. As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, the GREAT BEAR TRAP will be primed and ready. Not only have I been writing and commenting on the financial markets for almost forty years, I’ve also been able to observe Wall Street up close in the trenches. Based upon all my past experience, what lies on the horizon is classic textbook. Historically, October has been the month we all love to hate. The most infamous date was October 29th 1929. My grandfather, a broker for 57 years, was there. As a youngster, I...

A long-lost, highly valuable Moon rock brought back from the Apollo 17 mission has turned up in the files of Bill Clinton. The rock was one of 50 presented to each state, and was given to Arkansas while the ex-president was governor. The rock, worth millions of dollars, had been missing since at least 1980 until an archivist found it in old gubernatorial papers. Bobby Roberts, director of the Central Arkansas Library System, told Reuters the archivist opened a box previously archived as "Arkansas flag plaque." The rock and a state flag were originally affixed to the plaque, but the...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Posters have gone up in the area of Spring Street and Lexington Road about Job, a 5-month-old kitten that has been reported missing. Job was taken from the animal shelter, to the Woodstock Animal Foundation, to a local couple for adoption. The kitten is also blind. Anyone with information is asked to call 502-553-5740 or 502-396-0974

It’s the year before a presidential election, so it must be time to debate the Law of the Sea Treaty (“LOST”) again. As recently as last Thursday the Chief of Naval Operations pleaded for the U.S. to join the treaty. The Obama Administration has supported Senate action on LOST since at least May 2009 when it released its Treaty Priority List. The last time LOST came up was in 2007 when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then chaired by Sen. Joe Biden, held hearings. But the treaty was never brought to the floor for a vote. 2011 is beginning to...

The man Congress put in charge of auditing the billions of dollars dumped on Iraq after Saddam Hussein was toppled has told the Los Angels Times he can't rule out the possibility that $6.6 billion in cash sent from the U.S. was stolen. Special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction Stuart Bowen told the Times the missing money may represent "the largest theft of funds in national history." It was not, it is crucial to note here, U.S. tax-payer dollars which have gone missing in Iraq. The money came from a special fund set up by the Federal Reserve Bank of...