Free Republic

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh famously said he hoped President Obama would “fail” in January, 2009. Almost a year later, when Limbaugh was rushed to the hospital with chest pains, Washington Post reporter David Weigel had a wish of his own. “I hope he fails,” Weigel cracked to fellow liberal reporters on the “Journolist” email list-serv. “Too soon?” he wondered. Weigel was hired this spring by the Post to cover the conservative movement. Almost from the beginning there have been complaints that his coverage betrays a personal animus toward conservatives. E-mails obtained by the Daily Caller suggest those complaints have...

WASHINGTON – Justice Department officials say that when senators were considering Eric Holder's nomination to be attorney general last year, he didn't given them all the legal briefs he had signed from his time in private practice. Holder now has told the Senate Judiciary Committee about the lapse in turning over copies of the legal filings.

The Extremism and Radicalization Branch of the Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division of the Department of Homeland Security issued a report last week. It’s called “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” I had no idea there even was an ERBHETAD of the DHS working on the RECEPCFRRR. Who among us doesn’t feel safer already? The problem with it is that it makes little effort to document or demonstrate its contention that “extremist” groups are resurgent, that they are right-wing, or that they may be formed from the ranks of “disgruntled military veterans.” Worse,...

The One-77 is Aston Martin’s definitive sports car, one that epitomises everything Aston Martin from technology, the hand-craftsmanship of the hand rolled aluminium panels to the attention to detail. A culmination of all the marque’s know-how, the One-77 delivers effortless beauty guaranteed to stir the senses with performance potential eclipsing any previous Aston Martin. Which makes the Geneva Auto Salon quite special because Aston Martin will be presenting a One-77 technical showcase with chassis no.1 will be on display as an exposé throughout the show detailing the quintessence of Aston Martin engineering and design expertise. Aston Martin's Press Release follows:...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- Hillary Rodham Clinton, President-elect Barack Obama's choice for secretary of state, rejected calls Tuesday for more details about donors to her husband's foundation, saying she has revealed enough to avoid even the hint of conflicts. An Associated Press review found that Clinton stepped in at least a half-dozen times on issues involving businesses and others who later gave to the charity. Clinton said as secretary of state she will not be influenced by her husband's contributors, which include foreign governments. "It will not be in the atmosphere," Clinton said.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - The former chief of a Khmer Rouge prison is willing to testify about the communist regime's atrocities that led to an estimated 1.7 million deaths in the 1970s, Cambodia's genocide tribunal announced Wednesday. Duch, 64, also known as Kaing Guek Eav, on Tuesday became the first top Khmer Rouge figure to be indicted for offenses committed when the Khmer Rouge held power from 1975-79. He was charged and detained by order of the U.N.-backed international tribunal's foreign and Cambodian judges. Duch headed the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, where some 16,000 suspected enemies of the regime...

Astronomers have made rare images of the heart of a popular comet and revealed jets of gas spiraling thousands of miles into space. Comet McNaught has been called the Great Comet of 2007 for the show it put on first in the Northern Hemisphere and then south of the equator. The ball of ice and dirt hung frustratingly close to the Sun, however, so many skywatchers never got a good look. The New Technology Telescope (NTT) at the European Southern Observatory in Chile was used to make detailed observations that were released yesterday. Scientists found sodium in the comet's emissions,...

Science Daily — The maneuverability of a bat in flight makes even Harry Potter’s quidditch performance look downright clumsy. While many people may be content to simply watch these aerial acrobats in wonder, Kenneth Breuer and Sharon Swartz are determined to understand the detailed aerodynamics of bat flight – and ultimately the evolutionary path that created it. They have taken a major step toward that goal by combining high-resolution, three-dimensional video recordings with precise measurements of the wake field generated by the bats’ wing movements. Their study, published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, marks the first such measurements made...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Today, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean called on ABC/Disney to reveal who poured $40 million into the slanderous 9/11 propoganda film they plan to start airing starting Sunday, and issued the following statement: "It's deeply disappointing that ABC would put something on the air that has been proven to have factual inaccuracies about one of the most important events in our nation's history. ABC should not air this distortion of history. "The fact that the writer/producer of the piece is a well known conservative raises additional concerns and questions. The American people deserve...

Spy pics reveal ancient settlements August 03, 2006 06:51pm AUSTRALIAN researchers studying declassified spy satellite images have found widespread remains of ancient human settlements dating back 130,000 years in Syria. The photographs were taken by United States military surveillance satellites operating under the CIA and defence-led Corona program in the late 1960s. The team of researchers travelled to the Euphrates River Valley in April and June and searched sites they had painstakingly identified using the images, which were only declassified in the late 1990s. Group leader Mandy Mottram, a PhD student at the Australian National University's School of Archaeology and...

JERUSALEM - An Albert Einstein letter decrying the attentions of a Berlin socialite is among newly unsealed documents that promise to shed light on the private life of the 20th century's greatest physicist. Ethel Michanowski was involved with Einstein in the late 1920s and early 30s, going so far as to chase him to England, said Barbara Wolff of the Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives, which on Monday unsealed more than 3,500 pages of correspondence written between 1912 and 1955, the year Einstein died at age 76. Wolff described their relationship as an affair, but disclosed little about Michanowski other...

INNSBRUCK, Austria -- It's been suspected for centuries, but a team of world-renowned scientists has finally confirmed it: Lawyers and leeches have identical genetic makeup. Dr. Andreas Volkenweiler of Austria's famed Innsbruck Institute of Genetic Research confirms that, "While studying the DNA sequences of many genes that control body patterns in various occupations, our research team observed that each lawyer gene contains a stretch of 180 nucleotides -- or structural components of DNA -- which exactly match the structure of those found in leeches. "Once we made that basic match, other similarities between the two species were fairly easy to...

WASHINGTON, June 29, 2006 – A key al Qaeda operative implicated in the February bombing of a prominent Iraqi mosque was captured last month, a senior U.S. military officer said in Baghdad today. Iraqi National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie announced yesterday that terrorist Abu Qudama had been seized by Kurdish pershmerga troops after a May 20 firefight north of Baghdad, Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell told reporters at a news briefing. Abu Qudama, a Tunisian, is an admitted participant of the Feb. 22 bombing of the Golden Dome, a holy Shiite mosque in Samarra, Caldwell said. The bombing set...

A space telescope scheduled for launch in 2007 will be sensitive enough to detect theoretical miniature black holes lurking within our solar system, scientists say. By doing so, it could test an exotic five-dimensional theory of gravity that competes with Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. That is, of course, if the tiny black holes actually exist. The idea, recently detailed online in the journal Physical Review D, is being proposed by Charles Keeton, a physicist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Arlie Petters of Duke University in North Carolina. Branes The Randall-Sundrum braneworld model, named after the scientists...

30,000-year-old Relics Reveal Pre-historic Civilization along Qinghai-Tibet Railway 2006-06-24 13:59:42 Xinhua Chinese archaeologists claim that relics unearthed in the areas along the Qinghai-Tibet Railway proved that human beings lived there at least 30,000 years ago. Archaeologists with the Qinghai Provincial Archaeological Institute said they collected large number of chipped stone tools including knives and pointed implements dating back 30,000 years in the Tuotuo River valley, Hoh Xil, a habitat for Tibetan antelopes, and Qaidam Basin, where the railway runs through, during recent excavations. More than 30 stone implements were also discovered at the site of Sancha River bridge on the...

Murals reveal aristocrats' lives 1,500 years ago Some well-preserved murals have been discovered in a tomb of more than 1,500 years old in Datong, North China's Shanxi Province, supplying rich first-hand evidence for the research of early ethnic apparel and rituals. The tomb was identified to belong to a general's mother who died in AD 435. Taking up an area of 24 square metres, it was found in a cemetery of 12 tombs excavated last summer by local archaeologists. Lying on a plateau in the rural suburbs of Datong, the cemetery dates back to the Northern Wei Dynasty (AD 386-534)....

Six groups, including the Anaheim-based Council on American Islamic Relations in Southern California, filed a Freedom of Information Act request Monday asking about suspected law enforcement monitoring of Islamic religious institutions. The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California filed the request on behalf of CAIR, the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, area mosques and six leaders in the Muslim community. Four from Orange County include: Muzammil Siddiqi, imam of the Islamic Society of Orange County in Garden Grove. Hussam Ayloush, executive director at CAIR. Sabiha Khan, CAIR spokeswoman. Shakeel Syed, executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of...

<p>Ship logs and pottery show how the geomagnetic field has changed.</p> <p>Old ship records of magnetic north have helped to unravel a record of our planet's field.</p> <p>While sailors plied the Seven Seas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, little did they know that their ships' logs would one day help scientists to reconstruct the history of the Earth's magnetic field.</p>

Artifacts in Ancient Chinese City Reveal Superb TechnologySuperb drilling technology and the world's earliest stone drill bits were found at site Epoch Times Staff Apr 01, 2006 A worker looks over an excavation site. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)In Lingjiatan, Hanshan County of Anhui Province in China, archaeologists have discovered a primitive tribal site that was inhabited 5,000 years ago. Superb drilling technology and the world's earliest stone drill bits were found at the site. Archaeology professor Zhang Jingguo said there are still many mysteries in the Lingjiatan ruins waiting to be solved. The Lingjiatan ruins are located in Lingjiatan Village,...

If you want to be among the first in San Diego to find out how much money the city must pay into its sagging pension system – and as a result the likelihood of service cuts and layoffs – show up early today. The pension board's meeting begins at 8:30 a.m. on the fourth floor of 401 B St., and a crowd is expected. “To think you have to get to the pension board meetings early, it just goes to show what a circus the city has become,” said Joan Raymond, president of the American Federation of State, County and...