Free Republic

Outrage is growing after authorities in Italy, citing European-level decrees, brazenly threatened journalists who refuse to promote the homosexual agenda, ordering reporters and the news media to submit to the radical new “gay” mandates or face serious sanctions — and possibly even jail time. The deeply controversial move has already sparked fierce opposition among lawmakers and religious organizations, leading at least one member of the Italian Parliament to lambaste the mandatory pro-LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) scheme as part of a new form of “dictatorship.” Fascism has been mentioned more than a few times by critics, too. The outcry...

A federal judge in New Orleans has dismissed almost all remaining lawsuits against the federal government for damages caused by the failure of levees and floodwalls during Hurricane Katrina, ordering both sides to pay for their own legal expenses. The clean-up ruling by U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval Jr., filed Dec. 20, marks the end of an unprecedented series of class-action lawsuits aimed at collecting damages from insurance companies or the federal government that could have totaled billions of dollars. The final ruling was not unexpected. In earlier decisions Duval found the Army Corps of Engineers was immune from damages...

President Barack Obama has signed into law a comprehensive defense bill that cracks down on sexual assault in the military. […] The bill provides $552.1 billion for the regular military budget, plus $80.7 billion for the Afghanistan war and other overseas operations. …

Executive Orders: A liberal constitutional scholar warns of the concentration of power not only in the hands of one branch of government but in a single man who ignores the Constitution and acts of Congress on a whim. As the story goes, Benjamin Franklin emerged from Independence Hall at the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on Sept. 18, 1787, when a woman asked, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" Franklin is said to have replied, "A republic, madam — if you can keep it." The Founders designed a system of checks and balances...

Recordings of 911 calls from last year's Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting were released Wednesday, and they not only paint a picture of anguish and tension inside the building, they also show Newtown dispatchers mobilizing help, reassuring callers and urging them to take cover..... The calls were made public under a court order after a lengthy effort by The Associated Press. Prosecutors had argued that releasing the recordings would only cause more anguish for the victims' families.... One of the first callers to Newtown police was a woman who said in a trembling, out-of-breath voice: "I think there's somebody shooting...

There was a time in America when a physician had just two or three young adult patients with sexually transmitted diseases. In 2013 that number has become two or three dozen and is increasing as “hooking up” turns out to be a deadly sexual game.

When Dayna Morales, a restaurant server in New Jersey and former U.S. Marine, claimed a family wrote her a hateful note on a receipt, outrage ensued. "I'm sorry but I cannot tip because I do not agree with your lifestyle and how you live your life," read the note. Morales, who is gay, posted a photo of the receipt on Facebook. Morales went on news programs and showed off the receipt with the message. But now, a family has come forward saying it left no note and did leave the waitress a tip. The note, it claims, is a fake,...

The Army should use photos of “average-looking women” when it needs to illustrate stories about female soldiers, a specialist recommends — images of women who are too pretty undermine the communications strategy about introducing them into combat roles. That’s the gist of an internal Army e-mail an Army source shared with POLITICO. “In general, ugly women are perceived as competent while pretty women are perceived as having used their looks to get ahead,” wrote Col. Lynette Arnhart, who is leading a team of analysts studying how best to integrate women into combat roles that have previously been closed off to...

Wayne Allyn Root wrote: There are 2 major political parties in America. I’m a member of the naïve, stupid, and cowardly one. I’m a Republican. How stupid is the GOP? They still don’t get it. I told them 5 years ago, 2 books ago, a national bestseller ago (“The Ultimate Obama Survival Guide”), and in hundreds of articles and commentaries, that Obamacare was never meant to help America, or heal the sick, or lower healthcare costs, or lower the debt, or expand the economy. The GOP needs to stop calling Obamacare a “trainwreck.” That means it’s a mistake, or accident....

If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor under Obamacare — if you both belong to the same race. Obamacare’s spectacular flop of a rollout distracts from its crude calculus that encourages the allocation of healthcare resources along racial lines and a doctor-patient system splintered into ethnicities. While the 2010 Patient Protecion and Affordable Care Act’s language on diversity sounds innocuous, a review of the frankly separatist thinking of the law’s ardent supporters indicates Obamacare is aiming for a health care system that puts political correctness above the struggle against illness and death.

WILLISTON, Vt. (AP) — The ship captain being played by Tom Hanks in a Hollywood movie said on Tuesday before a benefit screening near his home that he never felt empathy for the Somali pirates who hijacked his vessel and took him captive four years ago. "That never entered my mind," Richard Phillips said in an interview. "We were always adversaries. I thought it was important to make sure we both knew we were adversaries in that. I thought that was important for me and my survival. There was no Stockholm syndrome."

“If everybody had arms then there wouldn’t be these problems…my son was at … Navy Yard yesterday (9/16/13) and they had weapons with them, but they didn’t have ammunition. And they said, ‘We were trained and if we had had the ammunition we could have cleared that building. Only three people had been shot at that time and they could have stopped the rest of it.’” No 2nd Amendment for the U.S. military? Only Liberals can take violating our Constitutional rights to beyond the absurd. So, Homeland Security gets a couple billion rounds of ammunition, but the military doesn’t get...

Found this via an anti-gun group which links to the Soros puppet media 'Think Progress'.  The study, by Professor Michael Siegel at Boston University and two coauthors, has been peer-reviewed and is forthcoming in the American Journal of Public Health. Siegel and his colleagues compiled data on firearm homicides from all 50 states from 1981-2010, the longest stretch of time ever studied in this fashion, and set about seeing whether they could find any relationship between changes in gun ownership and murder using guns over time. Note the adjectives,  'two coauthors'... and 'colleagues'.... Interesting terminology, don't you think?  Let's take...

**SNIP** Democratic minority leader of the House stoked up the crowd with her speech. Pelosi urged Congress to act on MLK’s agenda by saying, “He would want us to celebrate him, his birth and his legacy by acting upon his agenda. By realizing the dream. By making the minimum wage a living wage. By having not just family and medical leave, but having paid sick leave for our workers. By having quality affordable childcare so that our families, the power of women can be unleashed in our economy and our society.” Democrats are on the warpath, pressing their advantage...

SAN ANTONIO – A Christian Air Force Veteran has been relieved of his duties after declining to affirm homosexual marriage.Senior Master Sergeant Phillip Monk has served in the Air Force for 19 years, and has been stationed at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. When he recently returned from deployment, he found that he had a new commander, who was a lesbian.Monk says that in his early communication with the commander, he knew there would be concerns.“She said she wanted a chaplain but objected to one particular chaplain that she called a ‘bigot’ because he preached that homosexuality is...

Francine Busby, Chair of that San Diego Democrat Party, told the New York Times that the party was giving Mayor Filner the "benefit of doubt" because they were so excited to have someone in office pushing a progressive agenda. "Democrats aren’t going to give him a pass, but may be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because we’ve waited so long, nearly 20 years, for a mayor who could put forward a progressive agenda," she said. "But this doesn’t erase what he’s done," she said. "I don’t know if it’s enough at this point." (Translation: Close...

When asked about their prospects for 2014, most Republicans will say that whatever happens with the Senate, the GOP is a virtual lock to keep control of the House. The House majority is the GOP's single hold on power in Washington, and the only way the party has been able to shape national policy during Barack Obama's presidency. Republicans haven't worried about losing the House because, first, having won by a landslide in 2010, they got to control the redistricting process, and they have used that power to draw districts that give them an advantage. Second, Barack Obama, having won...

As with most things his administration does, I’m sure Obama will be shocked when he reads in the newspapers about the State Dept. declaring a $10 million bounty on the head of what it calls an “enemy of Islam.” From a State Department Press release: The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms the cowardly attacks today in Baghdad. These attacks were aimed at families celebrating the Eid al-Fitr holiday that marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The terrorists who committed these acts are enemies of Islam and a shared enemy of the United States,...

Thousands of small-business owners have received letters from the Internal Revenue Service questioning whether they are underreporting their business income, a harbinger of a broader initiative aimed at boosting federal tax receipts and ensuring compliance. The program is the latest move in the agency's effort to combat what it sees as a widespread problem: failure by businesses, including mom-and-pops, to report all cash sales in order to minimize tax bills. Tax officials say the letters don't constitute an audit and instead are simply a request for more information. Some business owners and some lawmakers, however, call the new IRS program...

Larry Grathwohl, who had just come back to Cincinnati from Vietnam, was infiltrating the domestic terrorist group Weatherman, the only one to have done so. Larry saved potentially hundreds of lives when he alerted the FBI to a bomb placed near a Detroit police station and a restaurant. Bill Ayers, Education Secretary of Weatherman, told him that in the revolution, lives would have to be sacrificed. ... My interest in Bill Ayers began a few years ago when I learned about his career as a “Distinguished Professor of Education.” In reality he was working to destroy everything that was good...