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2 county officials make shift to GOP By Kurt Allen/Assistant Managing Editor When Robyn Flowers and Barbara Hale were trying to find their place in the world of politics, it was almost a given it would be the Democratic Party. Growing up in the South, Democrats ruled the region, and there was little thought given to being Republican. "I think probably, like most people my age, if you were born and raised in Texas, you've been a Democrat because that's what your family did," said Hale, Walker County's court-at-law judge. How the times do change. Now the South, and Texas...

Until the 18th century, there was basically only one kind of Judaism, that which is now called Orthodox. It meant living by the religion's 613 laws, and doing so suffused Jews' lives with their faith. Then, starting with the thinker Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) and moving briskly during the Haskala, or "enlightenment," from the late 18th century, Jews developed a wide variety of alternate interpretations of their religion, most of which diminished the role of faith in their lives and led to a concomitant reduction in Jewish affiliation.These alternatives and other developments, in particular the Holocaust, caused the ranks of the...

Throughout the 1990s, Turkish foreign policy analysts had an easy job. After all, Turkish foreign policy was predictable. Ankara cooperated enthusiastically with Washington, whether in the Middle East or in the Balkans. Turkey aligned itself with Israel and kept at arms length from Middle Eastern neighbors such as Syria and Iran. In Europe, Ankara traded heavily with the European Union (EU) but did not allow the EU to dictate foreign policy. The European Union's frequent allegations and criticism of human rights abuses in Turkey, especially with regard to Turkey's fight against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK, Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan) terrorists, soured...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Life After Daschle Will a 55-seat majority be enough to end Senate obstructionism? BY KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL Friday, November 5, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST The pressure builds on those red-state Senators up for election in 2006. Is New Mexico's Jeff Bingaman going to vote down a Miguel Estrada nomination, with a state home to the largest proportion of Hispanics in the country? Look too for Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Bill Nelson of Florida, and Kent Conrad of North Dakota to be heeding the Ghost of Daschle's Past. The GOP's best shot for leveraging this fear of home state voters is...

NEW YORK For the second day in a row, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today were the only newspaper sites to shift their electoral-college numbers in E&P's exclusive tracking of seven major newspaper Web sites with electoral-college maps. Sen. John Kerry lost votes on both sites. President Bush's vote count remained steady at USA Today and increased at the L.A. Times. Bush now has an average of 199 votes to Kerry's average 188 across the seven sites. At least 270 electoral votes are needed for election. The Los Angeles Times pushed Michigan's 17 electoral votes from Kerry to the...

In the past we became frustrated at Republicans when they tried too hard to make people like them by acting like liberals. Rush called it "trying to outliberal the liberals". But lately I have watched the Democrats, especially the 'Rats who have to run in tough races. The tone has shifted. The 'Rats are now trying to "out-conservative the conservatives"! We have seen about 30 states reverse their concealed carry policies to a more correct one of "shall issue". We have forced a liberal president to sign welfare reform. We have seen three tax cuts in three years. We have...

The "Inland Empire" region of Southern California - Riverside and San Bernardino counties - achieved a dubious distinction the other day. The Texas Transportation Institute elevated, if that's the word, the region into the list of the nation's five most traffic-congested areas - and it found itself in familiar company. The adjacent Los Angeles region (including portions of Orange and Ventura counties) retained its long-standing title as the nation's most congested, and the San Francisco Bay Area continued in its No. 2 ranking. Understanding California's dominance of the traffic jam sweepstakes doesn't take a degree in astrophysics. Simple arithmetic will...

US secret shift on West Bank attacked By Inigo Gilmore in Tel Aviv (Filed: 23/08/2004) Ahmed Qureia, the Palestinian prime minister, expressed alarm yesterday at an apparently secret shift in American policy after Washington indicated that it would accept the growth of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The move could "thwart and destroy" the "road map" peace plan and hopes of negotiations with Israel for a Palestinian state, he said. His comments followed reports in America and Israel that the Bush administration had modified its long-standing policy over the building of settlements in the West Bank to try to...

WASHINGTON - President Bush is to announce on Monday that the United States will withdraw up to 70,000 troops from Europe and Asia in the most significant rearrangement of the American military since the end of the Cold War, an administration official said Saturday.   Bush will also announce in a speech on Monday that the withdrawal will affect an additional 100,000 military support staff and family members, who will leave the regions as well.    Bush's plan, first reported by the Financial Times of London, comes at a time when the Army is stretched thin by large deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan,...

A physics professor will try to turn back time in an experiment at the Miami Museum of Science. It's back to the future all over again -- at least, that's what Carlos Dolz has in mind. The Florida International University physics professor plans to take time to task at 10 a.m. Wednesday, when he presents an experiment that involves using acceleration to speed up a digital clock by four seconds. Dolz's experiment -- which takes six hours to finish -- will become part of Playing With Time, the current exhibit at the Miami Museum of Science. Dolz, who has been...

Scientists Find Another Huge Mini-World in Outer Solar System The most distant object ever seen orbiting the Sun is nearly as large as Pluto, expanding astronomers notions of how the solar system formed and what resides in its outskirts. The round world is currently three times farther away than Pluto from the Sun, a distance that expands even further on its 10,000-year orbit. It sits in a part of the solar system that some astronomers had thought empty. It is redder and brighter than anything astronomers have seen in the outer solar system, and scientists don't know why. The object...

 As the author of these columns describing cutting edge physics and astronomy, I get quite a few letters and E-mail from readers who are more interested in ?over-the-edge physics and astronomy?.  One recurring theme is various alternatives to the standard model of Big Bang cosmology.  Perhaps the universe is not expanding; it?s just that light ?gets tired? on its path from far away and loses some of its energy.  Perhaps quasars are closer than we think, particularly since some of them appear to be linked to closer galaxies.  Perhaps relativity is wrong, and it?s the speed of light that is...

<p>WASHINGTON - The Bush Administration's push for wholesale change in U.S. nuclear weapons policy was put into motion Thursday, after the House Armed Services Committee passed a sweeping set of policies that move toward development and testing of nuclear weapons.</p>

In 1904, geographer Sir Halford John Mackinder unveiled his famous thesis entitled the "Geographical Pivot of History," in which he argued there existed a pivotal area "in the closed heart-land of Euro-Asia" that was isolated from sea power, and thus immune from the influences of oceanic states. In Mackinder's famous three-point summation: Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World. Mackinder envisioned a struggle between Germany and Russia for the "heartland," essentially dismissing the effects of sea power, which already had been touted by the...

Moon model: a superplume from inside the Moon when it was just 500 million years old might explain a lot - and not just about the Moon (Pic: University of California).  A mighty 'burp' early in the Moon's life may explain something that has puzzled scientists ever since Apollo astronauts brought back rock samples; why are there so many ancient magnetised rocks lying on the surface? Research published in the journal Nature this week from the University of California at Berkeley, in the United States, suggests that an expunged column of hot rock - like a blob rising to...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) -- The 1994 revolution that gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives produced a seismic shift in federal spending, moving tens of billions of dollars from Democratic to GOP districts, an Associated Press analysis shows.</p> <p>Rather than pork barrel projects for new GOP districts, the change was driven mostly by Republican policies that moved spending from poor rural and urban areas to the more affluent suburbs and GOP-leaning farm country, the computer analysis showed.</p>

Al Qeada appears to have shifted its strategy away from the United States and against Israel, a report said.The shift in Al Qaeda policy was first detected in April.Al Qaeda members have made intensive use of the Internet and launched electronic journals in response to criticism by Egypt that Saudi fugitive Osama Bin Laden has ignored the Palestinians.Focus on Al Qaeda-Many Al Qaeda relocating in North Africa: Algeria May Become New Base.Backgrounder Column: Ukraine Arrests Smuggler Attempting to Send Missile Guidance Components to IranPutin Orders Arms Sales SecretEgyptian Ministers Warns of New Al Qaeda AttacksTerror Alert in Nothern EuropePakistan Ready...

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea denied on Wednesday that it had invited former U.S. President Bill Clinton to visit the country to play a role in mediating with the United States and to cool rhetoric from Washington. A North Korean official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters on Monday that the North's leader Kim Jong-il had hoped Clinton could play a mediating role similar to one played by another former Democrat president, Jimmy Carter, who visited Pyongyang amid a nuclear crisis in 1994 to broker talks. In a statement issued a day after the United States confirmed that North...