Free Republic

NEW YORK — To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding of Priests for Life and to highlight its core mission of empowering clergy to be passionate advocates for the unborn, Father Frank Pavone, National Director, has released today his newest book, Proclaiming the Message of Life: Weekly Reflections from the Lectionary (Servant Books, 2016) The book guides clergy –and laity – through the pro-life themes found in the readings of every Sunday of all three liturgical years. Proclaiming the Message of Life provides an overview of the Scriptural, doctrinal and liturgical bases for preaching the pro-life message, presents homily...

It's still early days for the Affordable Care Act. But it may be dismaying to some consumers to learn that it appears 2017 may bring another year of big rate hikes. The first two states to release insurers' premium proposals for next year suggest that individual insurance premiums could rise by as much as one-third. In Oregon, the steepest requested rate hike is 32.3 percent. In Virginia, five of the biggest insurers are asking for increases of 9.4 percent to 37.1 percent for individual policies. The proposed rate hikes follow an average increase of 8 percent for 2016, and are...

It took the market over a day to appreciate the fallout from the devastating Canadian wildfire which has led to a state of emergency in Alberta, the evacuation of over 80,000 people in the oil sands gateway city of Fort McMurray, and the destruction of over 1,600 structures. According to insurance industry reports, losses from the fire are approaching $1 billion, and will likely set records for the country. The average cost of a single-family home in the community was recently around CAD$627,000 ($487,000), Aon said, citing data from the local real estate industry, and cited by CNBC. That would...

Three campaign advisers to 2012 presidential candidate Ron Paul were convicted Thursday in a federal case alleging they conspired to cover up the campaign’s payments to a former Iowa state senator who had agreed to endorse their boss. Prosecutors said it is illegal to cause a campaign to file inaccurate spending documents. They’ve pursued charges since July 2015 when a grand jury first indicted the men. Paul’s campaign chairman Jesse Benton, campaign manager John Tate and deputy manager Dimitri Kesari argued they broke no laws when they paid a video production company, which passed on $73,000 to former Sen. Kent...

Introduction: The provision of the Patriot Act, Section 326 - the "know your customer" provision, compelling financial institutions to demand identity documents before opening accounts or conducting financial transactions is a fundamental element of the outline below. That section authorized the executive branch to issue detailed regulations on the subject, found at 31 CFR 130.120-121. It's an easy decision for Mexico: make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country year after year. There are several ways to compel Mexico to pay for the wall including the following:

An East Coast abortionist and OB-GYN who delivered thousands of babies and aborted many more, died on April 22 at a family home in Maryland, according to the Washington Post. Thomas H. Gresinger, 82, died of cancer, according to the report. He worked for the northern Virginia abortion facility Falls Church Healthcare Center up until last year, the report states. Though he received an “Unsung Hero” award from the National Abortion Federation, Gresinger and the abortion facilities where he worked have a record of endangering women’s lives. Gresinger was named in a lawsuit in the 1990s after a woman said...

The bio-tech firm that purchases aborted baby parts and fully intact aborted babies from the Planned Parenthood abortion business is stonewalling Congress in its attempt to research and investigate the sales. It is failing to provide financial records so the panel can determine if federal law has been broken which prohibits profiting from the sale of aborted baby parts. To gain access to the records, the Select Investigative Panel has issued subpoenas to two financial entities — Scinto Group, LLP and Five Star Bancorp — in an effort to obtain StemExpress accounting and banking records, which the fetal tissue procurement...

ARAD, Romania — He reveled in tormenting members of the Bush family, Colin L. Powell and a host of other prominent Americans, and also in outfoxing the F.B.I. and the Secret Service, foiling their efforts to discover even his nationality, never mind his identity. Early this year, however, the elusive online outlaw known as Guccifer lost his cocky composure and began to panic. He smashed his hard drive and cellphone with an ax. That spasm of precautionary destruction, at his home in Romania’s Transylvania region, did not help him much — especially as he left pieces of what would later...

The state of Oklahoma is taking steps to divorce itself from the Planned Paethood abortion business after the company was caught selling the body parts of aborted babies. A Medicaid agency is canceling the contracts it has with the abortion company. Last year, Oklahoma pro-life Gov. Mary Fallin called for defunding Planned Parenthood after a state review discovered that the abortion giant’s state affiliates may be overbilling Medicaid. Fallin that the Oklahoma Health Care Authority end its contracts with the abortion business’s affiliates that operate in the state. Her call came after a state review of Planned Parenthood found a...

Russell Moore says the belief that the United States is a Christian nation in the respect of being a divinely ordained country is "theological liberalism." In a video posted to YouTube on Tuesday, the head of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention tackled the question of whether or not the U.S. is a Christian nation. "If what you mean by that is a nation in which most of the people profess to be Christians, then certainly the United States of America was and is a Christian nation," said Moore.

Some are still stunned with the speed at which Donald Trump suddenly elevated himself from front-runner to presumptive nominee following Mr. Trump’s landslide victory in Indiana on Tuesday. Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s campaign supervisor, a man who has navigated the often turbulent waters of national politics for several decades, is likely not a bit surprised, for it was Manafort who just a few short weeks ago put the fear of God into a collection of anti-Trump GOP Establishment figures during a posh resort retreat in Florida – a meeting which it can now be said altered the trajectory of the...

Huckabee: "Donald Trump broke the code, owned the media, and inspired the masses. I will be all in to help him defeat Hillary Clinton and I call upon all fellow Republicans to unite in defeating Hillary and abandoning and repudiating the hapless “Never Trump” nonsense. The dirty little secret is that the Never Trump movement was more about providing high dollar work for the political consultants than stopping the disaster of an Obama third term which is the result of electing Hillary Clinton."

The primary is over. I would like to congratulate and thank candidates Cruz, Fiorna, Kasich, Rubio, Carson, Bush, Christie, Huckabee, Santorum, Jindal, Graham, Gilmore, Walker, Pataki, Perry, Paul and Paulsen for running magnificent campaigns and wish them all the very best in their future endeavors. Well done lads and lass. And great job to their fans and supporters! You've poured your heart and soul into the task of promoting your guy or gal and he or she came up second, third, fourth, fifth.... or seventeenth, but we're all winners as long as we continue placing our faith and trust in...

Absolute and simple, the message blasted across social media this year, a shield worn by Republicans horrified by Donald Trump. Anyone not on board was a sellout. On Wednesday, the movement was in shambles. John Kasich followed Ted Cruz in getting out of the way of the #TrumpTrain. Some vowed to continue to oppose the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, but the failure was, in retrospect, evident from the start. The effort began too late, lacked organization, misread voters' appetite for change and Trump's unscripted style and overestimated the ability of social media and TV ads to change minds. "It was...

After Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination on Tuesday night, the BBC rounded up the reactions from the global press to Trump's victory. Aside from some gloating in authoritarian Russia and China, the reaction was pretty shocked. "The craziest US presidential election campaign begins," Germany's Die Welt daily wrote. "The unthinkable has come to pass."

Trumped! Why It Happened And What Comes Next, Part 1   Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blogFirst there were seventeen. At length, there was one.Donald Trump’s wildly improbable capture of the GOP nomination, therefore, is the most significant upheaval in American politics since Ronald Reagan. And the proximate cause is essentially the same. Like back then, an era of drastic bipartisan mis-governance has finally generated an electoral impulse to sweep out the stables.Accordingly, the Donald’s patented phrase that “we aren’t winning anymore” is striking a deep nerve on main street. But that is not on account of giant trade deficits or a faltering foreign policy and failed military adventures per se.Indeed, it...

This has been an exceedingly unpredictable year. Although we remain convinced that Hillary Clinton is very vulnerable and would probably lose to most other Republicans, Donald Trump's historic unpopularity with wide swaths of the electorate - women, millennials, independents and Latinos - make him the initial November underdog. As a result, we are shifting 13 ratings on our Electoral Vote scorecard, almost all of them favoring Democrats. Our assessments are based on publicly available polling, data on demographic change and private discussions with a large number of pollsters in both parties. Much could change, but undecided voters begin more hostile...

<p>Two months ago, Mexico’s top diplomat made international headlines for calling Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s policies “ignorant and racist.”</p> <p>“When an apple’s red, it is red. When you say ignorant things, you’re ignorant,” Secretary of Foreign Affairs Claudia Ruiz Massieu told The Washington Post. She added that Trump’s proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border was “absurd” and “not a proposition we would even consider.”</p>

Supercharged by winds of up to 70 km/h, the Fort McMurray wildfire ballooned to 85,000 hectares overnight and is now raging across a wide front south of the city. Alberta Premier Rachel Notley and wildfire officials say the fire is expected to continue to burn out of control today as more than 100 firefighters, 10 helicopters and 16 air tankers work to protect homes and critical infrastructure. One major task on Thursday will be to move up to 25,000 people now sheltering in oilsands work camps north of the city. The province hopes to transport many of those people, who...

When you first wrap your head around its plot, the new film Captain America: Civil War seems to have abandoned most of the pointed political content of Marvel's 2006 comics series Civil War, on which it's based. ("Loosely based"? Let's say "semi-loosely based.") In the books, the conflict between Captain America and Iron Man is fundamentally about the Registration Act that would require superheroes to abandon their secret identities, be registered and tracked, and become government employees subject to oversight. The Act follows a tragic series of events that are not actually the fault of The Avengers; in a way...