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If Barack Hussein Obama II is Malcolm X's biological son, it would explain the mystery of why he was so generously helped by so many Arab and communist "friends in high places" long before he was a "somebody." ..."There are said to be photos of Ann Dunham on Waikiki Beach taken in or about July 1961, when she is supposed to have been in her third trimester, in a bikini, taken by a fellow female student. AD is clearly not pregnant...[The] CIA did a DNA test on the grandparents, using saliva from glasses, which conclusively rules out any relationship between...

Eating less meat is one of the most effective steps any of us can take to fight climate change, as Nicholas Read points out in his insightful article in The Vancouver Sun last week. However, as he demonstrates, despite evidence that intensive meat production contributes significantly to global warming, and to further threats to public health and environment such as water pollution, most citizen and environmental groups play down the issue. They ask people to walk more and turn off lights, but usually steer clear of the meat question. As an educator working on this issue, I can concur that...

Now are rough times. For all of us. This is where we stand: Liechtenstein/Saudi Arabia: Business as usual, minor sources of irritation Venuzuela: INRI - IN a moRon CommunIst we trust, that'll do the trick! Germany/Switzerland/Austria: High tax, some captial, medium sized car, can't afford fuel, decent house, nothing left of our former empires. USA: Moderate tax, nice eating out, nice car, heavy debt, some capital, some fuel, no home. Japan: Small tax, microscopic car, no future Italy, Spain: Heavy tax, small car + vespas, Fascist tradition, government debt, Catholicism, nice food Norway: Heavy tax, small car, dried cod (lutefisk),...

Is Halloween Harmless? Every year at Halloween, well-meaning parents dress their children in grotesque and ghoulish costumes. Is Halloween really harmless? Who and what's behind this bizarre holiday? by Jerold Aust It all looks like so much fun and seems so harmless: jack-o'-lanterns, grotesque grinning masks, long black witch attire with pointed black hats, costumes painted like skeletons, outfits that represent demons and goblins, and children going door to door, soliciting treats from compliant neighbors. But when Halloween comes around, do you find yourself yearning for the hours to pass until the whole trick-or-treat farce is over? If you don't,...

For more than a half a century, those few humans who knew about the time Milton Torres battled a giant UFO had only his word as proof. Yesterday, after British officials released previously classified Ministry of Defense 'X-files', the world found out the secret that Milton — now a retired civil engineering professor living in Miami — was ordered never to reveal. According to the documents, on the night of May 20, 1957, the former U.S. F-86D Sabre pilot was told by his U.K. commanders to unload all 24 of his rockets on a mysterious object moving over the sleepy...

It saddens me when I see a member of my profession go over to "the dark side," that is, to politics. Politics replaces voluntary action with compulsion, private contract with coercion. Government intervention imposes distortions, inefficiencies, and extra costs on society. In essence, politics is "anti-economics," a nullification of economics, so for an economist to argue for more government control over private economic decisions and transactions, is anomalous, pathetic, and an abandonment of economic truth. We see frequent examples of economists mutilating economic principles during an election year. The latest example is an article, "The Great Debate," by Alan Blinder,...

Let's fill some trucks with books, drive them downtown and burn them in front of the Chicago Public Library. Let's drive other trucks to the regional libraries and burn them, too . . . I mean the books, not the libraries, though libraries are the source of the problem. If it weren't for the libraries, it would be hard for innocent young people to be corrupted by the filth pouring out of the country's printers. Instead of burning books or libraries, perhaps we ought to start smashing printing presses. They have served as tools of sin and the devil since...

For those who are or claim to be unfamiliar with the Larry Sinclair story, let me summarize it as briefly as possible. Larry Sinclair, who now lives in Duluth, Minnesota, claims to have spent parts of the evenings of Nov. 6 and Nov. 7, 1999 with Senator Obama in Chicago. At least as far back as 1986 Sinclair has been in trouble with the law, arrested for a variety of things (fraud seemingly at the top of the list), and had been up to that time in and out of prison. He is an openly gay man, and he seems...

The Annenberg Political Factcheck website has published photographs and an analysis of what it says is the "original birth certificate" of Barack Hussein Obama II. While the physical document depicted in the photos resemble the document image previously scanned and published by the Daily Kos website and Obama's own "Fight the Smears" site in June, FactCheck's case for authenticity and its claims to objectivity are undermined by a litany of process flaws, conflicts of interest and factual inconsistencies that raise doubts about its motives and methods of those of the Obama campaign. The Factcheck.org report, titled "Born in the USA,"...

Ethnic and racial minorities will account for a majority of the U.S. population in a little more than a generation, according to new projections from the Census Bureau. The Bureau calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander will outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would not occur until 2050. The main reason for the accelerating change is significantly higher birthrates among immigrants, The New York Times reports.

Ethnic and racial minorities will comprise a majority of the nation’s population in a little more than a generation, according to new Census Bureau projections, a transformation that is occurring faster than anticipated just a few years ago. The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050. The main reason for the accelerating change is significantly higher birthrates among immigrants. Another factor is the influx of foreigners, rising from about 1.3...

ON the afternoon of Nov. 7, 2006, pilots and airport employees at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago saw a disc-like object hovering over the tarmac for several minutes. Because nothing was tracked on radar, the Federal Aviation Administration did not investigate. Yet radar is not a reliable detector of all aircraft. Stealth planes are designed to be invisible to radar, and many radar systems filter out signals not matching the normal characteristics of aircraft. Did it really make sense to entirely ignore the observations of several witnesses? < > On Dec. 26, 1980, for instance, several witnesses at two American...

Barack Obama has never been shy about comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln. He did so when he announced his candidacy at the Illinois state capitol, where both he and Lincoln served in the legislature. "The life of a tall, gangly, self-made Springfield lawyer tells us that a different future is possible," Obama said. "He tells us that there is power in words ... He tells us that there is power in hope." That was, well, audacious, to say the least — and the comparisons have continued, on issues large and small. But the most important similarity, in Obama's mind, is...

For insights into healthy marriages, social scientists are looking in an unexpected place. A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships. Most studies show surprisingly few differences between committed gay couples and committed straight couples, but the differences that do emerge have shed light on the kinds of conflicts that can endanger heterosexual relationships. The findings offer hope that some of the most vexing problems are not necessarily entrenched in deep-rooted biological differences between men and women. And that, in turn, offers hope that the problems can...

ON RIGHT NOW! "Including references to "Whitey". There has been a race for Clinton operatives to aquire this tape, but I believe this tape is already in the hands of a major network." This JUST aired minutes ago on "Geraldo"... Geraldo prefaced by saying that Roger Stone was the same person who first exposed Spitzer's relationship with hookers.

The Texas megachurch pastor whose past comments about the Catholic Church have caused headaches for John McCain for over two months will issue an apology to Catholics later today, according a top Christian conservative. John Hagee, pastor of San Antonio's Cornerstone Church, will send a letter to Catholic League President William Donahue expressing "deep regret for any comments that Catholics have found hurtful." "After engaging in constructive dialouge with Catholic friends and leaders, I now have an improved understanding of the Catholic Church, its relation to the Jewish faith, and the history of anti-Catholicism," Hagee wrote in a letter running...

Like a marriage that has gone bad, I believe there are enough irreconcilable differences between those who want to control and those want to be left alone that divorce is the only peaceable alternative. Just as in a marriage, where vows are broken, our human rights protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution have been grossly violated by a government instituted to protect them. Americans who are responsible for and support constitutional abrogation have no intention of mending their ways.

Tiny plastic bags used to sell small quantities of heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs would be banned in Chicago, under a crackdown advanced Tuesday by a City Council committee. Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd) persuaded the Health Committee to ban possession of "self-sealing plastic bags under two inches in either height or width," after picking up 15 of the bags on a recent Sunday afternoon stroll through a West Side park.

Climate Skeptics Seize on Cold Spell By ANDREW C. REVKIN,The New York Times March 1, 2008 March 1) - The world has seen some extraordinary winter conditions in both hemispheres over the past year: snow in Johannesburg last June and in Baghdad in January, Arctic sea ice returning with a vengeance after a record retreat last summer, paralyzing blizzards in China, and a sharp drop in the globe’s average temperature. It is no wonder that some scientists, opinion writers, political operatives and other people who challenge warnings about dangerous human-caused global warming have jumped on this as a teachable moment....

One aspect of the current Presidential Campaign Season has continued to cause Figgins and I to regularly cock our heads and look at each other with facial expressions that obviously say, "What the heck does that mean?!" This aspect is the passion-evoking, yet vacant, rhetoric of Barack Obama. Actually, we touched on this subject in an earlier posting entitled The Better Angels of Our Nature?!?!?!?. Although that posting addressed Senator Ted Kennedy's old-style-politics approach to whip the crowd into a frenzy when he endorsed Obama (ironically, quoting the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln), the theme is the same ... words...

Mitt Romney suspended his presidential campaign yesterday, after his poor showing on Super Tuesday made a victory over John McCain all but mathematically impossible. As much as McCain and Mike Huckabee loathe Mitt, it's been easy to imagine them conspiring to deliver the killing stroke. Conventional wisdom says Huckabee won five southern states outright and helped turn others, such as Missouri, to McCain by taking conservative votes away from Romney. But Romney probably wasn't going to earn those ballots anyway. Southern states have GOP primary electorates dominated by evangelical Christians, specifically by Southern Baptists. And many of those Southern Baptists...

Convention Chaos Theory (Note: this is crossed-posted from TPMCafe.com). Now that an extended Democratic nomination contest appears almost certain, there's been an explosion of renewed interest in the "brokered convention" scenario, which really just means a nomination that's in doubt after the primaries and caucuses are over. The big topics (explored especially well at OpenLeft.com) have been the battle over the 796 superdelegates, who are not bound by election results, and the possibility of a pre-convention or convention credentials fight over the Michigan and Florida delegations, who currently have no seats (or even hotel rooms) in Denver. There's a more...

Tom Cruise thinks very highly of himself in this video that his church tried to hide: http://gawker.com/5002269/the-cruise...ed-to-suppress Reminds me of the David Bowie song, Major Tom: Ground Control to Major Tom Ground Control to Major Tom Take your protein pills and put your helmet on Ground Control to Major Tom Commencing countdown, engines on Check ignition and may God’s love be with you Spoken: Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Lift-off This is Ground Control to Major Tom You’ve really made the grade And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear Now it’s time...

No details as of yet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ7YedEopp4

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Just when it appeared Julie Myers had cleared every hurdle in her quest to officially become the nation's top immigration official, a dreadlocked wig and a prisoner's outfit could cost her the job. Myers, director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ran into trouble earlier this month after she and two other agency managers gave the "most original" costume award to a white employee who came to the agency's Halloween party dressed as an escaped prisoner with dreadlocks and darkened skin. The incident drew complaints of racial insensitivity and an apology from Myers. It also cast doubt on...

Americans are once again preparing for the heart-wrenching drama of a presidential election. By the middle of 2008, we expect the nation to be neatly divided between fear and loathing of the left and fear and loathing of the right. The first thing Europeans need to know is that for the price of a movie ticket you can get much more entertainment and an experience that has just about as much to do with democracy and real American politics. It doesn’t matter which movie you see.For the sake of American readers, I should point out that the left goes...

Well, you knew this just had to happen. Fires are devastating California from North of Los Angeles down to San Diego. Hundreds of thousands of people have had to flee their homes. Disaster is an understatement. So along comes MoveOn Moonbat Senator Barbara Boxer to announce who is to blame. And who would that be? Why none other than George Bush. It would seem that President Bush has taken the time off from killing children and becoming amused as our servicemen are killed in Iraq to plot these fire strategies for California. And just how is this all Bush's fault?...

Charleston Daily Mail Secessionists from South and New England to meet The Associated Press Wednesday October 03, 2007 CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. -- In an unlikely marriage of desire to secede from the United States, two advocacy groups from opposite political traditions -- New England and the South -- are sitting down to talk. Tired of foreign wars and what they consider right-wing courts, the Middlebury Institute wants liberal states like Vermont to be able to secede peacefully. That sounds just fine to the League of the South, a conservative group that refuses to give up on Southern independence. "We believe that...

Last month, UAF researcher Katey Walter brought a National Public Radio crew to Alaska’s North Slope, hoping to show them examples of what happens when methane is released when permafrost thaws beneath lakes. When they reached their destination, Walter and the crew found even more than they bargained for: a lake violently boiling with escaping methane. “It was cold, wet and windy. We were dropped off in the middle of nowhere by a helicopter and paddled out to a huge methane plume in the middle of the lake with no idea what to expect, how strong the bubbling plume would...

Tuesday, August 7, 2007 9:45 AM EDT The county elections board approves the language on a petition calling for the recall of U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg. By Dennis Pelham Daily Telegram Staff Writer ADRIAN — The path was cleared Monday for a retired teacher in Jackson to begin collecting signatures on petitions for the recall of 7th District Rep. Timothy Walberg, R-Tipton. After a two-week delay, the Lenawee County Election Commission voted Monday afternoon to give petition language a passing grade on clarity. The language proposed by James R. Carr faults Walberg for voting in favor of continuing U.S. military...

NEW YORK (AP) - Four presidential candidates are lined up to visit Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" over the next three weeks as Comedy Central's satirical news review ramps up its "Indecision 2008" coverage. Sen. Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat, is first up this Wednesday. Biden appeared on "The Daily Show" last winter on the day he announced his candidacy. Republican John McCain makes his 10th appearance on Aug. 16, followed by another Republican, former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, on Aug. 20. On Aug. 22, Democratic contender Barack Obama comes back to the show for a second time, his...

In the wake of President Bush's commutation of prison time for convicted felon Lewis Libby and a developing constitutional clash over important subpoenas, influential Democratic activists are pressing Congress to put impeachment back on the table. Today MoveOn.org, the powerhouse group of 3.2 million political activists, launched an unprecedented petition calling on Congress to impeach Vice President Cheney if he defies congressional subpoenas issued to investigate the Bush administration's purge of prosecutors at the Justice Department. Leading bloggers have also launched a targeted campaign to specifically lobby Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee to put impeachment back on the...

Rumors of the Republican Party’s imminent meltdown in 2008 are rampant. Websites and blogs bristle with headlines like “They’re screwed,” “Licking their wounds,” “Republicans really are the stupid party” and “What are Republicans thinking?” And those are from the friendly conservative sources. Some wags say the party is hopelessly divided over issues ranging from abortion and Iraq to gas prices and immigration. Other observers focus on the dissident voices of GOP moderates. Some pundits point their fingers at a president who’s too distracted by war and low approval ratings to provide much party leadership. And there’s a persistent sense on...

If anti-war protesters invaded your city and forced your local government to spend an additional unbudgeted $500,000 on increased police presence, to whom would you send the bill? The city of Tacoma, Wash., decided that the U.S. military should cover the expense. According to an AP story on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website: Tacoma police say last month's 12-day anti-war protests cost the city an unbudgeted $500,000 to provide a large-scale law enforcement presence. The rough estimate covers overtime, regular compensation, equipment and food for hundreds of workers from Tacoma police and other agencies. . . . "That's a tremendous hit...

<p>ON CAPITOL HILL Valerie Wilson Testifies Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) chairs a House Oversight and Government Reform Ctme. hearing on the disclosure of CIA Agent Valerie Plame Wilson's identity. The hearing will look into whether White House officials followed appropriate procedures for safeguarding the identity of Ms. Wilson.</p>

In a rare vanity for me, I'm asking for assistance from the FreeRepublic community. Please help me elaborate the concept of "nonsense offset credits", which I originated here on FreeRepublic. I'd like some ideas for: what kinds of activities would require "nonsense offset credits" what the analogy would be for a Kyoto treaty for nonsense who would adjudicate nonsense what kinds of activities would offset nonsense (such as composting copies of "An Inconvenient Truth") a title for the movie supporting Nonsense Offset Credits

Exasperated by what they see as federal inaction over global warming, governors of five western American states have come together to pledge a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington will develop a regional pact to cut greenhouse gases and create a market-based programme to help businesses reach the goals. While these have yet to be set, the move illustrates how individual states are acting to tackle climate change and promote alternative energy rather than wait for initiatives from Washington. "Thankfully the country has reached a tipping point on this issue. I wish we had...

What a mess: A Feb. 9 front-page article about the Pentagon inspector general's report regarding the office of former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith incorrectly attributed quotations to that report. References to Feith's office producing "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" and that the office "was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda" were from a report issued by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) in Oct. 2004. Similarly, the quotes stating that Feith's office drew on "both reliable and unreliable reporting" to produce a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq "that was much stronger than that assessed...