Free Republic

This excerpt from the Clemente Report is very disturbing. For anyone who refuses to believe that Joe didn't know - I think this story will change their minds. Would anyone blame this Mom, like they blame Joe? Would she be fired? Would she be cast as a horrible, evil person? Should all of her life's good work be erased because of this episode? Was she demonized like Joe has been? And this molestation happened literally right in front of her eyes. Please watch the video, read the Clemente report, THEN please post your comments and let us know what you...

America is a seething hotbed of “Islamophobia,” filled with ignorant racist rubes who irrationally fear the benign Muslim religion, according to the Obama administration’s lead investigator into the Benghazi atrocities. So said former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering in more polished, diplomatic language during an Oct. 23 panel discussion at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The talk was on “what role the faith community can play in fighting Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental illness that Islamists would love to have listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Radical Islam’s stateside defenders frequently accuse anti-terrorism hawks of “McCarthyism,” hurling...

The Catholic Church should not fear scientific progress and possibly repeat the mistake it made when it condemned astronomer Galileo in the 17th century, a Vatican official said on Thursday in a rare self-criticism. Galileo, who lived from 1564 to 1642, was condemned by the Inquisition in 1633 for asserting that the earth revolved around the sun. Known as the father of astronomy, he wasn't fully rehabilitated by the Vatican until 1992, nearly 360 years later. At a news conference presenting a new volume of documents on the Galileo case, Monsignor Sergio Pagano, head of the Vatican's secret archives, said...

It is unconscionable that the likes of Reza Aslan and Hussein Ibish, sly and slick advocates for Israel's destruction, get a platform and a respectful hearing at universities all over the country, while freedom fighters seldom get invited at all, and when we do, leftist brownshirts do all they can to shout us down and shut us down. Bin Laden apologist (Hussein Ibish) to debate Ahmadinejad apologist (Reza Aslan) on Israel at UCLA Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch In light of the jihad doctrine and the stated goals of jihad groups like Hamas, there is no difference between a one-state...

There are two ways to analyze the violent eruption of global terrorist attacks that have marked the past three decades: analyze the nature of the threat and the culture supporting it, or blame it all on the evils of Western colonialism and American militarism. The latter analysis is the choice of the "politically correct," who say that terrorism is as rampant in the West as it is in the Muslim world. A truth check, however, will tell us that for every Western terrorist (such as Timothy McVeigh), there are hundreds almost exclusively from the Muslim world. If colonialism is the...

Americans are getting informed about the dangers Islamists pose to civilized societies -- stealth infiltration of Sharia (Islamic "law") into our legal/social system, "honor" killings, homicide bombings, support for terrorism... There are too many apologists for Islamist outrages amongst our university academe, primary and secondary educators, media elite, government officials, etc. But the blogsphere, activist organizations, and concerned citizens have learned about Islam, and are fighting back against political correctness gone mad (though we still have a long way to go). Thanks to the efforts of the Florida Family Association, The Learning Channel has pulled its shameless whitewash of Islam,...

Last week the Center for American Progress released the latest in an increasingly desperate series of reports by far-left and Islamist groups attacking my colleagues and me at the Center for Security Policy and others for our work educating Americans about Islamist terrorist threats and exposing the underlying doctrine — Shariah — that motivates them. In what could be called a “Shariah Defense Lobby,” a growing number of far-left groups have joined ranks with Islamist groups to whitewash and protect the political, legal, military, and religious doctrines of Shariah from scrutiny. This latest report joins previous efforts by the Center...

Centuries after the Spanish Inquisition led to the forced conversion of Jews to Catholicism, an ultra-orthodox rabbinical court in Israel has issued a religious ruling that recognizes descendants from the insular island of Majorca as Jews. The opinion focused narrowly on the Majorcan community of about 20,000 people known as chuetas and did not apply to descendants of Sephardic Jewish converts in mainland Spain or the broader diaspora of thousands of others who scattered to the Ottoman Empire and the Spanish colonies in South and North America. The island, isolated until a tourist boom that began in the late 1960s,...

When 9-11 took place, Muslim spokesmen in America and elsewhere (as well as their non-Muslim apologists), assured us that Osama did not represent "real Islam". They told us that Osama's actions made him anti-Islamic and a non-Muslim. If the above is true, then why was Osama given a Muslim burial? America had every right to wrap his body in pig skins, accompanied by strips of bacon and pork chops. How could Muslims have complained, when they assured us that Osama does not represent Islam? In any case, doesn't giving Osama a Muslim funeral increase his chances of going to the...

What on earth was Sarah Palin thinking when she posed in a pair of teeny-tiny gym shorts for a photograph that ended up on the cover of Newsweek -- a cover she has called "sexist"? Perhaps she was thinking that her image would only appear in the magazine she was posing for, Runner's World, and nowhere else, at least not for months and months. If so, she had good reason -- since, as DailyFinance has learned, the photographer who shot the picture violated his contract by reselling them to Newsweek. That photographer, Brian Adams, could not immediately be reached, and...

What does the Liberal Left have against 13-year-old girls? Within the space of a month, the Left has been--well, not exactly--forced to defend both Roman Polanski and ACORN. While most politicians have remained mum, an assortment of liberal bloggers, pundits and Hollywood celebs have rushed to the defense of ACORN, Roman Polanski or both. ACORN, shown on hidden camera instructing how to facilitate the importation of underage girls into the United States for the sex trade, rallied the Left first. Roman Polanski, convicted of drugging and anally raping a 13-year-old girl, is the latest to cause the Left, especially Hollywood,...

The Obama rump-swab government-run media are so shaken by the persistence of those among the American electorate who would still like to see proof of Obama's Natural-Born American Citizenship that they have adopted the Nazi propaganda tactic of referring to such inquisitive individuals as "conspiracy theorists." In fact, the only true "conspiracy theorists" in the room are the ostrich-imitating media, who use such perjorative and insulting terminology to refer to patriotic Americans who merely request a modicum of assurance that our president is actually our president under the simple and unchallenged rules set forth in the United States Constitution. People...

I am as sick to death of RINO apologists as I am the RINOs themselves. Too many real conservatives took a lot of flack here on FR during the last mid term and presidential election cycles for expecting Republicans to actually legislate like Republicans rather voting for every Obama-lite candidate with an “R” after their names who just might be electable. To too many, elections are about partisan score keeping and not about the direction and future of the country. Many conservatives received a lot of undeserved criticism because they refused to vote straight party line or choose the lesser...

MONROE – At first glance, it’s an unlikely combination. A black family seated under a tent facing a line of Civil War re-enactors, proudly holding Confederate flags and gripping their weapons. But what lies between these two groups is what brought them together: An unmarked grave about to get its due, belonging to a slave who fought for the Confederacy. Weary Clyburn was best friends with his master’s son, Frank. When Frank left the plantation to fight in the Civil War, Clyburn followed him. He fought alongside Frank and even saved his life on two occasions. On July 18, the...

Terry Lynn Barton has been released from prison after serving a six-year term for starting the worst wildfire in Colorado's recorded history. Barton, 44, pleaded guilty to arson charges stemming from the 2002 Hayman Fire, which blackened 138,000 acres, destroyed 133 homes and forced more than 8,000 people to evacuate. She was a fire spotter for the U.S. Forest Service at the time

In an interview yesterday with the San Francisco Chronicle, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi claimed the U.S. troop surge failed to accomplish its goal. She then partially credited the success of the troop surge to “the goodwill of the Iranians,” claiming that they were responsible for ending violence in the southern city of Basra. Asked if she saw any evidence of the surge’s positive impact on her May 17 trip to Iraq she responded: Well, the purpose of the surge was to provide a secure space, a time for the political change to occur to accomplish the reconciliation. That...

Scientists find a fingerprint of evolution across the human genome The Human Genome Project revealed that only a small fraction of the 3 billion “letter” DNA code actually instructs cells to manufacture proteins, the workhorses of most life processes. This has raised the question of what the remaining part of the human genome does. How much of the rest performs other biological functions, and how much is merely residue of prior genetic events? Scientists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and the University of Chicago now report that one of the steps in turning genetic information into proteins leaves genetic...

Last August, during an appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists, Barack Obama was asked whether he'd lead the nation in a "conversation about race" if he were elected president. He demurred, suggesting that Americans were more interested in having a president who would fight terrorism and economic decline than one who acted as therapist-in-chief. It was a pragmatic response from the man trying to become the nation's first black president. He'd never win over substantial numbers of white or brown or even black voters if he seemed overly focused on America's racial divide. But the issue of race...

African slavery is so much the outstanding feature of the South, in the unthinking view of it, that people often forget there had been slaves in all the old colonies. Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant's Coffee House of New York. Such Northern heroes of the American Revolution as John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin bought, sold, and owned black people. The family of Abraham Lincoln himself, when it lived in Pennsylvania in colonial times, owned slaves.[1]...

Last week, a reporter of the Kuwait News Agency accused Sen. John McCain and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee of “linking Islam with terrorism as a tool to scare up support among US voters, an election style experts describe as ‘shameful.” ... Shameful style? Yes, if measured by Islamic standards and not those of American politics and free speech. Last Monday it was reported that the British government has drawn up a new handbook for government officials that forbids them to use phrases like “Islamist extremism” or “jihadi-fundamentalist” -- instead, police and others must refer to “violent extremism” and “criminal...