Free Republic

Adam Stinnett looks up to his older stepbrother – a soldier in the U.S. Army. So when it came time to get a haircut, the seven-year-old told his mother he wanted a basic military-style cut. And that’s exactly what he got – high and tight – just like his stepbrother. Adam got his haircut on March 8. On March 9, his mother got a letter from the principal of Bobby Ray Memorial Elementary School in McMinnville, Tennessee. It seems they were not all that thrilled with the second grader’s new hairdo. The principal told Amy Stinnett that her son’s haircut...

The world will run out of fresh water long before it runs out of oil, with the potential for major deficits by 2030, the chairman of bottled water giant Nestle said. "We have a major water management crisis," Peter Brabeck-Letmathe told CNBC on the sidelines of the Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference on Tuesday. "We are destroying 20 percent more water for human consumption than there is available." Around 1.2 billion people, or almost one-fifth of the world's population, live in areas of physical scarcity, and 500 million people are approaching this situation, according to data from the United Nations....

Lexington, Mass. The place where the “shot heard round the world” was fired, the birthplace of the American Revolution, and now, the home of a high school whose administration has vetoed an “American Pride” dance theme because it is “too American.” Students on the dance committee at Lexington High School voted on the theme for their junior/senior dance and chose “American Pride,” a seemingly appropriate theme for a school whose mascot is the Minuteman. Their decision was quickly vetoed, however, when the powers that be decided the theme was not inclusive enough. “Given the diverse demography of our community,” Assistant...

U.S. Sen. John McCain is running a “sponsored post” on Facebook with the intention of building support for a potential re-election campaign. While the intended audience is unclear, the paid post is boomeranging big time. “If I decide to stand for re-election to the United States Senate, I will give it everything I’ve got — and your continued support means a great deal to me. Please stand with me today,” the senator’s Facebook post reads.

A key European diplomat said Thursday that the letter to Iran from Senate Republicans “was not helpful” to ongoing international nuclear talks with Iran, as other officials lowered expectations for reaching a framework deal this month. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was reacting to a letter signed by 47 Senate Republicans warning Tehran that any nuclear deal it strikes with President Barack Obama will be non-binding and easily undone. Steinmeier added that to call the missive unhelpful was “an understatement.” Germany is among the six nations conducting talks with Iran in an effort to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear...

As KCAL9’s Stacey Butler reports, vocal crowds gathered outside the student center at UCI on Tuesday evening. A student government meeting at UC Irvine scheduled for Tuesday evening was canceled due what school officials described as a violent threat. Officials would not specify the threat, but described it as a “viable threat of violence” that was serious enough to cancel the meeting, which was planned in response to a vote last week to ban the display of all flags before a higher student panel overturned it. The meeting this evening was to discuss overriding the veto, according to UCI spokeswoman...

Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy. “On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged...

A friend recently sent out a link to an article in the Greensboro (NC) News and Record, in which a left-wing columnist by the name of Susan Ladd decries the notion of American exceptionalism. To her, the idea that the United States of America is better than anyone else, or has even been a positive force for good in world history, is "hypocritical" and just plain wrong. She is appalled that people would protest against the recent revisions of the AP History curriculum, a revision which was developed by left-wing activists and which leaves out large chunks of actual American...

The latest version of a top-selling study guide for the Advanced Placement European History exam explains the French Revolution with a chart which identifies Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as a fascist and pairs him with the Ku Klux Klan.“Barron’s AP European History” (7th edition) makes the claim, intended for consumption by American high school students, on page 168. The chart attempts to compare modern American political affiliations with the various factions involved in the French Revolution. The chart moves politically from left to right.The far right of the chart is labeled “fascist.” The authors demonstrate modern-day “fascists” by pairing “Clarence...

Rev. Jeremiah Wright spoke at Fresno State on Monday night, and in the mold of his protégé, Barack Obama, bent the truth for his audience. Wright, who infamously called the United States the “U.S. of K.K.K.A.” while he was the pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago; and who snapped that the nation’s “chickens are coming home to roost” after the 9/11 terrorist attacks

Yesterday’s news became big news on the Fox News Channel last week when former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani brought up the name of President Barack Obama’s childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis. It was almost seven years to the day when we published our seminal piece about Davis, “Obama’s Communist Mentor.” Davis was a member of the Communist Party and a suspected Soviet espionage agent. He was included in the FBI’s security index, meaning that Davis could be arrested or detained in the event of a national emergency. The FBI file on Davis documents his anti-white and pro-Soviet views,...

A retired four-star admiral who commanded the U.S. Pacific Fleet during several Middle East flare ups is charging that President Obama’s strategy in the area is “anti-American” and instead “pro-Islamic.” Retired Adm. James “Ace” Lyons, also a former deputy chief of naval operations, said that the administration’s approach to the multiple confrontations with Muslim-based enemies follows a string of White House failures to strike Islamic terrorists stretching back to the Carter era’s failure to strike at Iran's leadership after the 1979 hostage taking. "We’ve had many opportunities to changed the course of history. It hasn’t mattered whether it’s a Democratic...

Oklahoma lawmaker seeks to do away with AP history courses, says they emphasize ‘what is bad about America’ Lawmakers argue that AP courses are similar to Common Core and that they violate legislation since Common Core was repealed last year.

Joe Scarborough opened today's Morning Joe with a protracted and impassioned plea for America—and in particular President Obama—to call out radical Islam by name. Mika Brzezinski was dubious, citing unspecified "difficult times" in the past when presidents used the wrong language. But taking Mika's misgivings a giant step further, Mike Barnicle flatly declared that we can't call radical Islam by name because "we're the Crusaders." View the video here.

I figure it is inevitable. Could have never happened before in the history of this planet, but this is what "liberal/progressive" politics will bring us. I blame the Democrat party for destroying the moral fiber of this beautiful country, and that is the camel's nose under the tent of what I am saying here.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has proposed to Cuba the construction of a mosque on the Caribbean island during a visit to Havana, pushing ahead with a plan apparently inspired by his belief that Muslims discovered the Americas. After talks with Cuban President Raul Castro, Erdogan said on Wednesday he had sought approval for Turkey to build the place of worship in Havana that would be based on the model of a mosque in the Ortakoy district on the European shore of the Bosphorus strait in Istanbul. Erdogan also told reporters the Cuban government had agreed with Saudi Arabia on a...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Marines handed over their remaining weapons to Yemenis at the airport in the capital, Sanaa, on Wednesday before boarding commercial aircraft to leave the country following the closure of the U.S. embassy, the Pentagon said. The Pentagon said the Marines destroyed heavy weapons in their embassy arsenal, including machine guns, before leaving for the airport but remained armed with smaller weapons until the end to ensure a safe exit from the country. "The movement from the embassy to the aircraft required armed Marines," Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said at a briefing. The U.S....

In his recent trip to India, President Obama repeated a long-standing pattern of his — denigrating the United States to foreign audiences. He said that he had been discriminated against because of his skin color in America, a country in which there is, even now, "terrible poverty." Make no mistake about it, there is no society of human beings in which there are no rotten people. But for a President of the United States to be smearing America in a foreign country, whose track record is far worse, is both irresponsible and immature. Years after the last lynching of blacks...

The “military hero as coward” motif has a long tradition with Michael Moore. But his earlier oinkings in this regard--well before the release of American Sniper-- were aimed at much safer targets. “Wimps,” writes Moore in Downsize This. “These Cuban exiles, for all their chest-thumping and terrorism, are really just a bunch of wimps—that’s right: Wimps.”In a manner that would instantly arouse and mobilize the politically–correct police (were it any minority group except overwhelmingly Republican Cuban-Americans) Moore was dissing Cuban-Americans in general but singling out the Bay of Pigs freedom-fighters for special spite and scorn. “Ex-Cubans with a yellow stripe...