Free Republic

Bill Clinton sought to persuade Rep. Kendrick Meek to drop out of the race for Senate during a trip to Florida last week — and nearly succeeded. Meek agreed — twice — to drop out and endorse Gov. Charlie Crist’s independent bid in a last-ditch effort to stop Marco Rubio, the Republican nominee who stands on the cusp of national stardom. Meek, a staunch Clinton ally from Miami, has failed to broaden his appeal around the state and is mired in third place in most public polls, with a survey today showing him with just 15 percent of the vote....

b>Conference focuses on creating "architects of change (LOL) California first lady Maria Shriver will host the annual Women's Conference beginning Sunday in Long Beach, with the event featuring more than 140 speakers and participants, including Oprah Winfrey, first lady Michelle Obama and second lady Dr. Jill Biden. The event, which runs from Sunday to Tuesday, is expected to attract 30,000 participants to the Long Beach Convention Center. Among the speakers expected to take part are Erin Brockovich, Campbell Brown, Deepak Chopra, Giada De Laurentiis, Linda Ellerbee, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Arianna Huffington, Billie Jean King, Matt...

MANCHESTER, Conn. — Omar Thornton sat calmly in a meeting with union representative and his supervisors as they showed a video of him stealing beer from the distributor where he worked. Busted, he didn't put up a fight, company officials said. He quietly signed a letter of resignation and was headed for the door when he pulled out a gun and started firing — "cold as ice," as one survivor described it. In the end, Thornton killed eight people and wounded two, then turned the gun on himself in a rampage Tuesday at Hartford Distributors where at least some of...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama has signed a bill to reduce the disparity between federal mandatory sentences for convictions for crack cocaine and the powder form of the drug. Obama’s signing of the bill in the Oval Office was open only to news photographers but not the rest of the media. He made no remarks. But as a longtime thorn for the black community, the matter is important to a key Obama constituency. The quarter-century-old law that Congress changed with the new bill has subjected tens of thousands of blacks to long prison terms for crack cocaine convictions while...

PHOENIX - Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is asking others to join her in sending President Obama a cake with a special message for his birthday on Wednesday . . .