Free Republic

ATLANTA (AP) -- Students camped out with teachers in school gyms or on buses and commuters abandoned cars along the highway to seek shelter in churches, fire stations - even grocery stores - after a rare snowstorm left thousands of unaccustomed Southerners frozen in their tracks.

The Democratic National Committee will mount an aggressive messaging counteroffensive during New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s upcoming fundraising trip to Florida, a DNC official said Tuesday. Christie will visit the Sunshine State this weekend on a fundraising tour for Gov. Rick Scott, who is up for reelection later this year. This will be Christie’s first major fundraising effort as president of the Republican Governors Association and his first major trip out of New Jersey since becoming embroiled in the George Washington Bridge scandal.... Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chairwoman, will tail Christie in her home state, “rolling out the...

ajama Boy’s place in Internet infamy was secured as soon as the insufferable man-child was tweeted out by Organizing for America. He is the face of a web ad that is the latest effort by the Obama team to leverage the holidays for conversation about Obamacare. “Wear pajamas,” the ad reads. “Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.” And, sure enough, Pajama Boy is wearing pajamas—a zip-up onesie in classic Lamar Alexander plaid—and drinking hot chocolate. He is in his twenties, sporting hipster glasses he could have bought at Warby Parker and an expression of self-satisfied ironic amusement....

For Eddie Mason, the decision wasn’t difficult. The NFL veteran’s 10-year-old son, Tyler, won’t play tackle football until high school. Mr. Mason’s decision wasn’t a result of the burgeoning national discussion about football’s role in brain injuries. Instead, he believes children should learn the game’s fundamentals without tackling. Mr. Mason, who played three seasons at linebacker for the Redskins before retiring in 2003, sees a problematic culture infecting football’s lowest levels that’s inextricably connected to the safety concerns. “This brash kind of mindset, the underdog mindset,” Mr. Mason said, “this hard-core attitude kind of deal about who hits the hardest...

Last weekend I was on a soft foam playground with my little girl, and I reflected on how different things were when I was a kid, shortly after dinosaurs roamed the earth. Playgrounds then were asphalt-covered, jagged-edged death traps for kids, but we didn’t know any differently and our parents weren’t freaked out about it. I vividly remember once hanging upside down from monkey bars and dropping onto concrete directly on my head (now that I think about it, that hit probably explains quite a bit about me). It’s a wonder that my generation survived childhood. What concerns me today...

“[I] mean, Mitch McConnell’s line is now, ‘Oh, just let — Obamacare is going to be so self-evidently destructive that when we win our spectacular victory in the Senate election and the next presidential election, we will be able to repeal it and roll it back.’ When do the Republicans ever do that? Those Carter-era innovations like the entirely useless federal Department of Education, the federal Energy Department, even the National Endowment of the Arts — when for decades it has been mocked for giving public monies to crucifixes floating in urine, homoerotic photography involving bullwhips attractively positioned — none...

<p>Tino Martinez resigned as the Miami Marlins’ hitting coach on Sunday, hours after complaints by players that he verbally abused them became public.</p> <p>Martinez, the former Yankees star, was in his first year as a professional coach this year. He was in the dugout for the Marlins’ 3-2 win over the Pittsburgh Pirates on Sunday, then met with Marlins officials and resigned.</p>

Enlarge Left panel: Air molecules whiz around at a variety of speeds, and some are very fast. When they collide with both heavy and light elements - for example, xenon (purple) and silicon (orange) - these fast moving particles have enough momentum to affect both nuclei. Right panel: Dark matter particles are moving more slowly and are less able to affect the heavy xenon nucleus. As a result, detectors made from lighter materials like silicon may prove to be more effective at picking up signals of dark matter. Credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (Phys.org) —Now that it looks...

Memo to the Republican Establishment: the phrase "Don't bring a knife to a gunfight" does not mean "come unarmed."

Apparently Republican career politicians inside the Beltway have a collective death wish. Faced with what they believed to be political impasse, they opted to completely abandon their conservative base and give their full support to the abhorrent and fiscally reckless policies of Barack Obama and the Democrats. Of course Republicans would argue that since Obama won reelection in November, they must acquiesce to his uncontested leadership. Sadly, they give no thought to the possibility that perhaps it is their constant inexcusable capitulation to the liberal establishment which has, more than any other factor, empowered the left as the dominant political...

Sen. John McCain today called a Newsweek article alleging tensions with Mitt Romney's presidential campaign "liberal left-wing trash." In the exclusive article, Newsweek Washington bureau chief and media critic Howard Kurtz reports that McCain has failed in his efforts to counsel Romney and is frustrated with his behind-the-scenes role on the campaign (Kurtz calls him a "caged lion"). "Four years after his own presidential bid, McCain’s luster as a Republican Party spokesman appears to have dimmed: a number of proposed campaign trips on Romney’s behalf have quietly evaporated, and there has been no offer of a speaking slot at the...

All the arguments have been heard. The debate, which has raged for years, comes down to Tuesday’s vote on Measure 4 – whether to retire the University of North Dakota’s Fighting Sioux logo and nickname. North Dakotans who understand the greatness of a university is not defined by flawed imagery should vote “yes.” North Dakotans who understand that UND has been hurt by the nickname flap – and will be further damaged if the debate drags on – should vote “yes.” It really is that simple. The questions every voter should ask: Is the future of the university more important...

Of the many roles Pat Robertson has assumed over his five-decade-long career as an evangelical leader - including presidential candidate and provocative voice of the right wing - his newest guise may perhaps surprise his followers the most: marijuana legalization advocate. "I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol," Mr. Robertson said in an interview on Wednesday. "I've never used marijuana and I don't intend to, but it's just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn't succeeded."

CHARLTON (CBS) – A Charlton mom says her local library crossed the line when they sent police to collect her daughter’s overdue library books. Her mom says the 5-year-old girl was so afraid that she burst into tears. Charlton Police Sergeant Dan Dowd stopped by the home of Shannon Benoit to let her know that her daughter had two books several months overdue which needed to be returned or paid for. ...

The Boston Tea Party was a direct action by colonists in Boston, a town in the British colony of Massachusetts, against the British government and the monopolistic East India Company that controlled all the tea coming into the colonies. On December 16, 1773, after officials in Boston refused to return three shiploads of taxed tea to Britain, a group of colonists boarded the ships and destroyed the tea by throwing it into Boston Harbor. The incident remains an iconic event of American history, and other political protests often refer to it.

Have your fun, Gulf Coasters. Go ahead, LOL at us. And Californians, please join in. It is a national pastime, apparently, to whip out our rulers and measure our natural disasters against one another in an endless, cross-country, chest-thumping smackdown. Yes, you’re totally right, America, about Washington’s wimpiness. We nearly crashed Twitter last week when the 5.8-magnitude earthquake knocked the political biographies off our bookshelves and tipped over our patio chairs. The horror! As Hurricane Irene churned toward the Mid-Atlantic, we bought enough dry goods to stock a humanitarian aid airlift for an entire continent and seriously discussed who could...

Playgrounds these days are usually brightly colored things, low-slung plastic-coated structures with short, gently sloping slides, set on surfaces covered with shredded rubber or wood chips. No see-saws. No hand-pulled twirling whirling rides. No super-high jungle gyms to climb. Swings (if there are any) often have safety bars and seat belts attached.

In their mission to erase all vestiges of masculinity once and for all, the fashion mavens have done away with the backpack, the briefcase, and the gym bag. The only accessory acceptable to the chic man about town is the murse. This purse-like man-pouch is all the rage in most metropolitan areas. At first, they weren’t as objectionable because they were modeled on satchels you’d expect to see on a World War I infantryman. But over the last few years, they have gotten more and more . . . well, feminine. The leather, canvas, and Naugahyde man-bags are now indistinguishable...

(PhysOrg.com) -- In a resent paper posted at arXiv.org and submitted to Astrophysical Journal, Dan Hooper and Jason Steffen, physicists at Fermilab in Illinois, present the theory that cold and dark planets, not heated by a star, could be heated by dark matter. In theory, this dark matter could produce habitable planets outside of what is known as a habitable zone. While no one knows exactly what dark matter is, it is believed to make up about 83 percent of the universe. The most accepted theory is this dark matter is made up of what are called WIMPs, or weakly...

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that it is "not for me or our government to determine" whether Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak should leave office amid massive protests against his rule. Gibbs said the United States is "not picking between those on the street and those in the government." Yet Gibbs also said the U.S. was seeking an "orderly transition" in Egypt. Asked what he meant with those words, the press secretary said the United States wanted to see "a process of negotiations with a broad cross-section of the Egyptian people.