Free Republic

FBI Director James Comey could do no wrong in his eyes yesterday on Capitol Hill. He was so full of himself and so cocky, I am sure he thought he was bulletproof. But I would say to him, you failed to tell the truth and the full truth; thus, you failed, Director Comey. You did succeed in in damaging the image of Mainstream News Media even worse than it already is. You failed to take the one criminal act we were certain of and investigate the leaking of classified information. We know that DID HAPPEN, but you seemed to care...

Excessive penalties and poor customer service at the E-ZPass electronic toll collection system have put some Marylanders on the path to “toll bankruptcy,” Sen. Roger Manno told the Senate Finance Committee last week.“Folks [are] exasperated because they’ve been caught in a system that is not working,” Manno said.Broad enforcement powers enacted in 2013 to address toll violations have led to wage attachments, financial hardship and non-renewal of vehicle registrations at MVA, witnesses testified. Sen. Roger Manno “The penalty structure that we set several years ago in the General Assembly was not intended to be punitive,” Manno said. “It was not...

Wolfgang Schäuble, a veteran ally of Angela Merkel, has admitted the cabinet made “mistakes” during Germany’s large intake of refugees in 2015. He wants lower standardized​ EU welfare payments for asylum-seekers. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble told a citizens’ panel brought together the “Welt am Sonntag” newspaper that the situation “got out of control” when Germany kept open its border to 890,000 refugees, mostly people who had fled violence in the Middle East and trekked through the Balkans to reach Germany. “We politicians are people and we also make mistakes,” said Schäuble, a former German interior minister, adding that “one can...

Analyses of the subjects ratings revealed three varieties of stupid mistakes. The first is when a person’s confidence outstrips their skill, as when a Pittsburgh man robbed two banks in broad daylight without wearing a disguise, believing that lemon juice he had rubbed on his face would make him invisible to security cameras. [..] The confidence-skill disconnect has been dubbed the Dunning-Kruger effect, after a study by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. Dunning and Kruger had Cornell undergraduates perform tests of humor, logic, and grammar, and then rate how well they think they performed compared to other subjects...

I have been making a mistake for most of my life. See, I'm an economist, and one of the things that attracted me to economics is the notion of the "ideal economy." Of course, there are valid objections to the use of markets. There are people who cheat and commit fraud, and there are problems with information and market power and externalities. Sometime consumers make mistakes.

TAMPA, FL (WFLA) – Driving on Florida toll roads is part of doing business for trucker Bill VanEpps. “Tolls are a huge expense, and it adds up to a lot of money at the end of the year,” Bill said. He noticed a lot of mistakes with his EPass account so he switched to SunPass in January. “I’ve discovered weekly mistakes,” Bill added. Between January and September, Bill found 42 mistakes by the SunPass electronic tolling system. “My rig is a five axle rig. I’ve been charged for as many as 7 at one time. I’ve been charged for as...

Tattoo-lovers have again been urged to get professional spellchecks and translations - to avoid embarrassing ink blunders lasting a lifetime. Clueless customers have been left branded with mis-spelled words and bizarre phrases in foreign languages. But a professional translation service has today launched a "Think Before You Ink" campaign to cut the terrible tattoo travesties. And the translators warned spelling horrors have come back to haunt the tattoo customers before they inked. Sharon Stephens, managing director of Veritas Language Solutions, said: "There are some hilarious examples of translation errors out there." One man wanted to show the world how "awesome"...

'After a string of newsworthy errors, a stumble through the annals of time to choose a few favourites from history. Allow me now, then, to present my Outstanding Mistakes of All Time, not to mock but to sympathise, remembering the words of John Bradford (1510-55): "There but for the grace of God, go I."'

The outgoing head of the IRS disputed Republicans’ suspicions that the tax-collecting agency’s targeting of conservatives was motivated by partisanship at the first congressional hearing on the scandal. **SNIP** “I do not believe that partisanship motivated the practices of the people described in the IG report,” Miller said. “I think that what happened here was that foolish mistakes were made by people who were trying to be efficient in their work.” GOP lawmakers also repeatedly sought to ferret out any information as to whether Miller had talked with White House officials about the targeting of conservatives, or – more ominously...

Obama administration officials who were in key positions on Sept. 11, 2012 acknowledge that a range of mistakes were made the night of the attacks on the U.S. missions in Benghazi, and in messaging to Congress and the public in the aftermath. The officials spoke to CBS News in a series of interviews and communications under the condition of anonymity so that they could be more frank in their assessments. They do not all agree on the list of mistakes and it's important to note that they universally claim that any errors or missteps did not cost lives and reflect...

Republic of Korea: For the record. Pak Ku'n-hye (Park Geun-hye) of the New Frontier Party won South Korea's presidential election on 19 December, media reported. She is the daughter of Park Chung-hee and the first woman elected to be president of the Republic of Korea. That should confound the North! North Korea-Iran: According to a Japanese news service, an Iranian lawmaker told the service that North Korea informed Iran in October of its plan to launch a satellite. The head of an Iranian parliamentary delegation to North Korea, Hamid Reza Taraghi, revealed talks took place mid-October with the North's delegates...

When there is a plane crash in the U.S., even a minor one, it makes headlines. There is a thorough federal investigation, and the tragedy often yields important lessons for the aviation industry. Pilots and airlines thus learn how to do their jobs more safely. The world of American medicine is far deadlier: Medical mistakes kill enough people each week to fill four jumbo jets. But these mistakes go largely unnoticed by the world at large, and the medical community rarely learns from them. The same preventable mistakes are made over and over again, and patients are left in the...

I’m going to assume you’re a reasonable person. You do not provoke or engage in physical confrontations for the sport of it. You are legally authorized to possess a firearm. Further, your self-defense case does not hinge upon your alcohol consumption, your right to stand your ground or some off colored remark you may have made a week ago. Regardless of all of these things, you may still end up seeing the inside of a courtroom after you fire your gun defensively and there are still three big things in particular that can land you into blistering hot, legal and...

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, with a number of Bay Area executives, economists and campaign contributors in his corner, has made it quite clear he'll be campaigning almost exclusively on the sitting president's handling of the economy. .. let's get straight to the points where, in my humble opinion, Obama is vulnerable. -- "Misunderestimation": In Vice President Biden's words, "we misread how bad the economy was." That is, they misread how deep the recession went, the extent to which its roots preceded the Bush administration and how long the recovery would take. -- Too little: The $787 billion stimulus package...

While speaking at the National Press Club, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that "the key question" is to make sure that the mistakes made "never happen again."

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t—you’re right,” said Henry Ford. A new study, to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people who think they can learn from their mistakes have a different brain reaction to mistakes than people who think intelligence is fixed. “One big difference between people who think intelligence is malleable and those who think intelligence is fixed is how they respond to mistakes,” says Jason S. Moser, of Michigan State University, who collaborated on the new study with Hans S. Schroder,...

Peter Robinson, a former Reagan speechwriter, agrees. "It was in Ronald Reagan's bones — it was part of his understanding of America — that the country was fundamentally open to those who wanted to join us here." Reagan said as much himself in a televised debate with Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale in 1984. "I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally," he said. ---------------------------------------- "He was a Californian," Robinson says. "You couldn't live in California ... without encountering over and over...

There are perils associated with apparently using Google Image Search to get material for your official news broadcast. When a German television news channel, N24, was reporting a story on Navy SEAL Team Six, the unit which spearheaded the operation which ultimately killed Osama bin Laden, the channel accidentally used a fan-made logo for the Maquis, an anti-Cardassian rebel group which originally appeared in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, in place of the SEAL Team Six emblem.

Seven years ago, in April 2004, President George W. Bush held a formal news conference in which he was asked, "What would your biggest mistake be…and what lessons have you learned from it?" Bush's hemming and hawing answer -- in several minutes of flailing about, he never managed to come up with a single mistake to cite -- was widely criticized in the days that followed. On Wednesday, President Obama held a town hall at the headquarters of Facebook in Palo Alto, California, during which he was asked, "If you had to do anything differently during your first four years,...

----- Forwarded Message ---- From: GODS VOICE Sent: Thu, January 20, 2011 12:41:50 PM Subject: Strive for Progress, Not Perfection ... It is no trouble for me to write the same things to you... Philippians 3:1NIV Have you any idea how often the people you admire got it wrong, half right, almost right, before they got it right? Making mistakes is the unenjoyable, unavoidable part of making progress. That's why Paul said, '... It is no trouble for me to write the same things to you again, and it is a safeguard for you.'(Philippians 3:1 NIV) He understood that you...