Free Republic

The Old Farmer's Almanac, the familiar, 223-year-old chronicler of climate, folksy advice and fun facts, is predicting a colder winter and warmer summer for much of the nation. Published Wednesday, the New Hampshire-based almanac predicts a "super-cold" winter in the eastern two-thirds of the country. The west will remain a little bit warmer than normal. "Colder is just almost too familiar a term," Editor Janice Stillman said. "Think of it as a refriger-nation." More bad news for those who can't stand snow: Most of the Northeast is expected to get more snowfall than normal, though it will be below normal...

A young girl, who claims she was standing up for her religious beliefs in the classroom, was suspended after breaking a class rule of saying “bless you” after a classmate sneezed. When Dyer County High School senior Kendra Turner said bless you to her classmate, she says her teacher told her that was for church… Students sent WMC Action News 5′s Michael Clark a photo of the teacher’s white board that lists ‘bless you’ and other expressions that are banned as part of class rules. Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/20/tn-high-school-student-suspended-for-saying-bless-you-after-someone-sneezed/#ixzz3B30KHEag

Since the Aug. 9 shooting death of Michael Brown, the nation and the world have witnessed the unrest that has gripped Ferguson, Mo. At the core of these demonstrations is a demand for answers about the circumstances of this young man’s death and a broader concern about the state of our criminal justice system. At a time when so much may seem uncertain, the people of Ferguson can have confidence that the Justice Department intends to learn — in a fair and thorough manner — exactly what happened.

The wife of former Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi is the latest Muslim Brotherhood “insider” to threaten to expose the special relationship between Morsi and the Obama administration—a relationship the latter insists never existed. Nagla Mahmoud, Morsi’s wife, is reportedly angry at some statements recently made by Hillary Clinton, including that Morsi was “naïve” and “unfit for Egypt’s presidency,” as reported by Arabic media.

How liberal or conservative are America’s cities? TRUE to stereotype, San Francisco is the most leftie city in the union. But would people expect Washington, DC, to come second, ahead of Seattle (where it is legal to smoke pot) or the Democratic stronghold of Boston? On the other end of the scale, Mesa, Arizona is the most conservative large city, with a slew of Texan and Oklahoman municipalities high on the list.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) management just ran into a possible game-changing obstacle to its shameful pursuit of a fully privatized post office: labor solidarity. Here’s the background. For a decade the USPS has been aggressively shrinking, consolidating, and outsourcing the nation’s postal system. In July 2011 management upped the ante by announcing the rapid closure of 3600 local post offices, a step toward the eventual closing of as many as 15,000, half of all post offices in the nation.

A Texas woman has filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau after the staff of a pizzeria reportedly kicked her out for changing her baby’s diaper on a chair in the middle of the restaurant. In the report filed Thursday, Miranda Sowers informed the Houston branch of the BBB that she and her three daughters, including a 3-month-old, had visited Brothers Pizza Express in Spring, Texas. Was the restaurant right to kick out a mom for changing baby's diaper at the table? Yes 74%No 26% Total Votes: 9,334 Voting “When I asked about a changing table in the restroom,...

A Navy investigation finds the ailing skipper of a San Diego-based Navy cruiser retreated to his cabin for several weeks in the middle of a deployment, leaving the 330-member crew leaderless. The probe also revealed that the skipper of the USS Cowpens, Capt. Gregory W. Gombert, was having an improper and "unduly familiar" relationship with the cruiser's acting executive officer, U-T San Diego reported Wednesday.

The Department of the Navy plans to add enlisted women crewmembers to seven Ohio-class submarines starting in 2016 and to four Virginia-class attack submarines beginning in 2020. "I think this is just the next step in a process that started a number of years ago to tap into a talented part of the Navy to help run very sophisticated vessels, and to me that's a real huge advantage that the Navy is capitalizing on," said U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District. "... Women sailors do a great job on surface ships. They have been doing it for a long time,...

Imagine a company hiring a debt collector that sends armed representatives to customers’ homes and threatens to put them in cages if they don’t pay up. That’s not allowed in America, unless your company is the government. NBC Philadelphia reports on the latest instance of police brutality during petty law enforcement to make the news:

When Gov. Rick Perry of Texas announced plans to deploy 1,000 National Guard troops to help with the border crisis, it came with a power unexpected by some. By deploying them himself rather than through Washington, he has the power to order the troops to make arrests and apprehensions, something Guard troops in past border deployments have been prohibited from doing. Immigrant rights advocates and others, including former federal officials involved in previous National Guard mobilizations, said the troops would lack both training and federal oversight, creating a risk of civil rights violations and deadly encounters with immigrants.

An Egyptian cleric formerly known as the "preacher of the revolution" during the revolt against President Hosni Mubarak warned Egyptian television viewers this week that Muslim Brotherhood sheiks have issued a fatwa permitting "anal jihad" for terrorists far from their wives, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Attorney General Eric Holder insists that the the Obama administration is enforcing the country’s immigration laws, as a flood of illegal-immigrant children from Central America pour across the southern border. “Yes, the immigration laws are being enforced,” Holder told ABC correspondent Pierre Thomas in an interview airing on ABC’s This Week Sunday.

The military might have been able to prevent two of the four U.S. deaths in Benghazi if commanders had known more about the intensity of the sporadic gunfire directed at the CIA installation where Americans had taken refuge and had pressed to get a rescue team there faster, according to senior military leaders. In closed-door testimony to Congress earlier this year, top military officers said that after the first attack on the main U.S. diplomatic outpost on Sept. 11, 2012, they thought the fighting had subsided and the Americans who had fled to the CIA base about a mile away...

President Barack Obama’s approval rating is higher among Muslims than any other religious group, a new poll says. According to a Gallup poll released Friday that tracked responses for the first six months of 2014, 72 percent of Muslims said they approve of the president, compared with just 20 percent who disapprove. Mormons were the least approving religious group, with 18 percent of Mormons approving and 78 percent disapproving of the president. Mormons in the past have ranked as the most conservative major religious group in the U.S.

Reuters published these two photos from President Obama’s meeting with Texas Gov. Rick Perry Wednesday. The president and the governor met in Dallas to discuss the humanitarian crisis on the Texas-Mexico border. The federal government estimates that 57,000 unaccompanied children have been taken in after illegally crossing into the United States. In the two photos, Gov. Perry and his team appear to be taking the moment seriously. President Obama is grinning and laughing.

On the same day President Obama asked Congress for $3.7 billion dollars to deal with the crisis at the Southwest border, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) called it "the wrong approach." "Look, for $8 million, we can put them all on a first-class seat back to their homes. That's $8 million. That's a first-class seat, one way, to each of their homes," Coburn told CNN's "Crossfire" on Tuesday.

An ongoing lawsuit has pried loose new records linked to a family of Sarasota Saudis who left home in a hurry just before 9/11. It was Halloween night, 2001. The horrors of 9/11 were still fresh on the the minds of Americans. At a time when everyone was on edge, the sight of a man disposing documents in a dumpster behind a Bradenton storage facility aroused suspicion. Summoned to the scene, Manatee County sheriff’s deputies confronted the man, who had a Tunisian passport. According to FBI records, authorities searched the dumpster and found “a self-printed manual on terrorism and Jihad,...

More than two-thirds of America's youth would fail to qualify for military service because of physical, behavioral or educational shortcomings, posing challenges to building the next generation of soldiers even as the U.S. draws down troops from conflict zones. The military deems many youngsters ineligible due to obesity, lack of a high-school diploma, felony convictions and prescription-drug use for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But others are now also running afoul of standards for appearance amid the growing popularity of large-scale tattoos and devices called ear gauges that create large holes in earlobes.

Since its birth in the 1920s with the first national radio networks, the modern MSM has always had a cozy relationship with power, and until the creation of Fox News, one channel on your TV dial or satellite guide, that power has almost exclusively meant their fellow Democrats. The media have long voted overwhelmingly Democrat in presidential elections; as Walter Cronkite once said at a Radio & TV Correspondents Dinner in the mid-1990s, in-between feting the Clintons on his yacht in Martha’s Vineyard, “Everybody knows that there’s a liberal, that there’s a heavy liberal persuasion among correspondents.” But in the...