Free Republic

Sunday, March 18, 2012 It's Time For Gingrich To Drop Out of Race For GOP Nomination EDITORIAL The time has come for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to drop out the Republican presidential race and allow Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum to battle it out for the GOP nomination. After an up-and-down campaign, Gingrich based his chances primarily on a Southern strategy. That worked, with wins in South Carolina and Georgia. Then Gingrich set his sights on Alabama and Mississippi, where voters make their decisions on Tuesday. Gingrich had been first or second in those two states in pre-election polls....

Internet pornography could conceivably become a thing of the past if Rick Santorum is elected president. The unapologetic social conservative, currently in second place behind Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination, has promised to crack down on the distribution of pornography if elected.

-excerpt- Valérie Pécresse, the French government spokeswoman, identified the dead as Marie Colvin, an American reporter working for The Sunday Times of London, and Rémi Ochlik, a French photographer. -excerpt- Video footage posted on social networking sites showed what seemed to be two bodies lying face down in rubble inside a building identified in news reports as a makeshift media center in a beleaguered neighborhood of Homs, where rebels have been under sustained fire for almost three weeks. Three other Western journalists were injured in the attack, activists said. According to his Web site, Mr. Ochlik, in his late twenties,...

The Energy Department (DOE) is not backing down in its efforts to support clean energy companies, despite a Republican push to pummel the Obama administration for approving a $535 million loan guarantee to a now-bankrupt solar firm. The department could approve as many as 15 renewable energy loan guarantees by the end of the month when a program launched under the stimulus law ends. The approvals could open up the Obama administration to more criticism from Republicans, who have raised broad concerns about the administration’s investments in clean energy in the aftermath of the bankruptcy of California-based Solyndra. The 2009...

An Arizona sheriff says U.S. Border Patrol officials have repeatedly told him they have been ordered to reduce -- at times even stop -- arrests of illegal immigrants caught trying to cross the U.S. border. Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever told FoxNews.com that a supervisor with the U.S. Border Patrol told him as recently as this month that the federal agency’s office on Arizona's southern border was under orders to keep apprehension numbers down during specific reporting time periods. “The senior supervisor agent is telling me about how their mission is now to scare people back,” Dever said in an...

This thread is only for freepers who want Sarah Palin to be President in 2012. Please all (TROLLS)other stay out.

The modest one-liners of the dangers of smoking, now featured on cigarette packs, may soon turn into gory images and messages that will cover nearly half the pack. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration unveiled 36 jarring labels Wednesday aimed at escalating efforts to warn smokers of the fatal consequences of cigarette smoking. These labels represent the agency's exercise of its new authority over tobacco products and the most significant change in cigarette warnings since companies were forced to add the mandatory Surgeon General's warning in 1965. Some of the proposed images include a man smoking from a tracheotomy hole,...

She was FORCED out for financial reasons. If anyone tells you she quit let them know otherwise. Her legal fee had accumulated higher than 500K. Her personal income was JUST OVER 100K a year. Financially her family was going under quickly. And they were filing another ethics complaint everytime she left the state. She was afraid to give interviews in the governors office. She was afraid to allow anyone other than staff in the Governors office after the TaserGate ordeal. They were destroying her. So, what were her options ? She tried to set up a legal defense fund. At...

I'm proud to be a Republican, but I'm pro-life first. After making a couple observations about two years ago, I decided to work harder at being a nonpartisan pro-lifer. First, it seemed to me Republicans were taking our support for granted and had wasted political capital, particularly when they owned all three branches of government from 2000-2006 (save for the 17-month Jeffords Senate flip blip). Second, I thought Rahm Emanuel gave us an opening in 2006 when forced to recruit pro-lifers to run in conservative districts so House Democrats might win back the majority. Could we germinate life in the...

Facilitated variation is the first comprehensive theory of how life works at the molecular level, published in 2005 by systems biologists Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart in their book The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma. It is a very powerful theory, is supported by a great deal of evidence, and the authors have made it easy to understand. It identifies two basic components of heredity: (a) conserved core processes of cellular structure, function and body plan organization; and (b) modular regulatory mechanisms that are built in special ways that allow them to be easily rearranged (like ®Lego blocks) into...

President Obama today stood by his comments that the Cambridge, Mass., police department acted "stupidly" in its arrest of Henry Louis Gates, telling ABC News that the Harvard University professor should not have been arrested....

Police in Cambridge have reacted predictably to having the President call them stupid, as ABC reports today. Their union lashed out at Obama for commenting without having the facts on hand, and witnesses dispute Obama’s recounting of the event: .... I’ve heard about five different reports [on the details of the arrest],” Cosby said on Boston’s WZLX. “If I’m the president of the United States, I don’t care how much pressure people want to put on it about race, I’m keeping my mouth shut.” “I was shocked to hear the president making this kind of statement,” Cosby said referring to...

Among scientists at the university of New Mexico that spring, rape was in the air. One of the professors, biologist Randy Thornhill, had just coauthored A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, which argued that rape is (in the vernacular of evolutionary biology) an adaptation, a trait encoded by genes that confers an advantage on anyone who possesses them. Back in the late Pleistocene epoch 100,000 years ago, the 2000 book contended, men who carried rape genes had a reproductive and evolutionary edge over men who did not: they sired children not only with willing mates, but...

The Frailty of the Darwinian Hypothesis, Part 1 Editor's Note: Ann Gauger is a senior research scientist at Biologic Institute. Her work uses molecular genetics and genomic engineering to study the origin, organization and operation of metabolic pathways. She received a BS in biology from MIT, and a PhD in developmental biology from the University of Washington, where she studied cell adhesion molecules involved in Drosophila embryogenesis. As a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard, she cloned and characterized the Drosophila kinesin light chain. Her research has been published in Nature, Development, and the...

Human-Chimp Similarities: Common Ancestry or Flawed Research? by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D.* In 2003, the human genome was heralded as a near-complete DNA sequence, except for the repetitive regions that could not be resolved due to the limitations of the prevailing DNA sequencing technologies.[1] The chimpanzee genome was subsequently finished in 2005 with the hope that its completion would provide clear-cut DNA similarity evidence for an ape-human common ancestry.[2] This similarity is frequently cited as proof of man's evolutionary origins, but a more objective explanation tells a different story, one that is more complex than evolutionary scientists seem willing to admit...

Next time someone tells you intelligent design is “based on religion,” you might point him to American Founder Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. As I explain in a special July 4th edition of ID the Future, Jefferson not only believed in intelligent design, he insisted it was based on the plain evidence of nature, not religion. Ironically, the critics of intelligent design often think they are defending the principles of Jefferson. The National Council for the Social Studies, for example, claims that intelligent design is religion and then cites Jefferson’s famous Letter to the Danbury Baptists calling...

June 16, 2009 — What kid hasn’t played with maple seeds to watch them spin in the air like helicopters? Scientists watch them, too. A team from the Netherlands and California found out how they stay in the air for so long without engines to drive them. One would think in an era of advanced aeronautical engineering the physics would all be worked out, but the abstract explains that the seeds know more than the engineers do...

June 17, 2009 — If you are a war-mongering beast who likes to burn things, you’re displaying your evolutionary past. That’s what a couple of news reports are claiming. New Scientist has a review...