Free Republic

The Sandy Hook shooter had this shocking amount of weapons and bullets tucked away into the house he shared with his mother. There's absolutely no reason for anyone to have this much ammo.The warrant released represents everything found in Adam Lanza's house that he shared with his mother as well as his car. However, the paperwork had a lot of errors. We tried to re-create the list of items seized to the best of our ability. "Numerous" bullets were found scattered throughout the house. Because there's no way to know exactly how many there were, they're represented by the bag...

America is heading into a retirement crisis, an economist says. Most retirees haven't saved enough money to retire and Teresa Ghilarducci blames America's entire system for retiring. It’s been 30 years since the Individual Retirement Account model became the standard way for Americans to save for retirement. But many people who saved for three decades watched a lot of that money disappear during the financial crisis. And now, more than half of American workers have saved less than $25,000 for their golden years, and about 30 percent have saved less than a thousand dollars. Overall, the system is failing, says...

Fareed Zakaria has tried to make “The Case for Gun Control” in Time. The results are not pretty. Virtually every argument he makes misrepresents the underlying data. After a lead that cites the Sikh-temple shooting, the Aurora massacre, and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others, Zakaria trots out the usual international comparisons: “The gun-homicide rate per capita in the U.S. is 30 times that of Britain and Australia, 10 times that of India and four times that of Switzerland. When confronted with such a large deviation, a scholar would ask, Does America have some potential cause for this...

The letters ‘NHS’ dazzled in bright red, like some triumphant advert. All around pranced self-indulgent nurses who had volunteered to take a few days off to be part of the ceremony. And how long did this shameful propaganda last for? A whole 15 minutes at the top of proceedings before viewers dozed off to the procession of banana republics and far-flung destinations nobody has ever heard of or even cares for. That such a politically divisive subject was included at all is utterly shocking. Not least because it glossed over the cracks in a system that is creaking at its...

One of the shots hit a junk car in his yard and must've ricocheted and struck the (container) that contained $80,000 worth of fireworks. . . . He knew the container was there, he knew the container contained fireworks, he accepts responsibility. But we don't think the insurance will cover it, because it happened on business property and shooting a gun at 1 in the morning has nothing whatever to do with his business of auto wrecking . . . .

In North Korea, the systematic indoctrination of anti-Americanism starts as early as kindergarten and is as much a part of the curriculum as learning to count. The sentiment of the U.S. - known as American b******* - is reflected in a framed wall poster inside a North Korean kindergarten classroom where children brandish rifles and bayonets as they attack a hapless U.S. soldier, his face bandaged and blood spurting from his mouth. .... 'We love playing military games knocking down the American b*******,' reads the slogan printed across the top with the phrase so common that it's become an acceptable...

A blind Chinese legal activist who was at the center of a diplomatic tussle between Washington and Beijing left the U.S. Embassy Wednesday to receive medical care in Beijing and be reunited with this family. Guangcheng said via his lawyer that he is free and has received "clear assurances" from the Chinese government. A U.S. official said Chen did not ask for asylum and is staying in China after receiving assurances that he will be treated as a normal citizen. The U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters that Chinese authorities promised that Chen would be relocated to...

Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist slammed for radicalizing Washington Washington is more dysfunctional than it has been in 40 years, and while Democrats have deserved their share of the blame over the years, today "the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party," write Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein in the Washington Post. What makes their column particularly interesting is that Ornstein is not liberal, but a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Together, they call the GOP an "insurgent outlier in American politics" because of the...

EGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — Former President Manuel Zelaya has arrived in Honduras, ending a long political crisis caused by his ouster in a military-backed coup almost two years ago. Zelaya's flight from Nicaragua landed on Saturday at Tegucigalpa's airport where he was greet by thousands of supporters who had set up a tent camp nearby. Zelaya's comeback paves the way for Honduras to re-enter the international community, which rejected the June 2009 coup that forced him from office and out of the country.

Welcome to the latest use of taxpayer dollars to shove Obama propaganda down your throat, on your dime. The White House has moved a staffer from the White House New Media Department into a position of "rapid media response," with a goal of squashing, or cleaning up negative stories about President Obama on the internet. The Obama administration has created and staffed a new position tucked inside their communications shop for helping coordinate rapid response to unfavorable stories and fostering and improving relations with the progressive online community. "This week, Jesse Lee will move from the new media department into...

On Sunday I was honored to be a speaker at the rally against building the mosque at ground zero put on by the Coalition to Honor Ground Zero. As the rally concluded, thousands of the participants marched the one block from the rally site to the actual site of Ground Zero. I noticed a man in black shirt with a phone camera aggressively questioning and haranguing a gentleman with the sign, “No Sharia Here.” He was very aggressive, disrespectful and condescending; apparently, he did not like the man’s answers about Shariah and pushed the point: “Why do you feel threatened?...

What's up with that mono-brow lady on Google today? Anyone have any idea who that is?

There's something about former Vice President Dick Cheney that's been struggling to get out like a rare bald eagle chick ready to hatch. After listening to his remarks this weekend about Rush Limbaugh (loves him) and Colin Powell (doesn't), and his jut-jawed "I don't regret anything" moment on CBS, I know what it is: Mr. Cheney is now replacing Richard Nixon in the national political and cultural consciousness as the Gorgeous George of our era, the guy whose very existence makes some people furious and who brings to the surface all those intense and complex emotions about power and the...

Americans have watched in horror as President Bush has trampled on the Bill of Rights and the balance of power. The list of abuses that President-elect Barack Obama must address is long: once again require the government to get warrants to eavesdrop on Americans; undo scores of executive orders and bill-signing statements that have undermined the powers of Congress; strip out the unnecessary invasions of privacy embedded in the Patriot Act; block new F.B.I. investigative guidelines straight out of J. Edgar Hoover’s playbook. Those are not the only disasters Mr. Obama will inherit. He will have to rescue a drowning...

It seems many people are afraid of socialism. But following the outcome of the election, I've found many are ill-informed about what socialism is, so I'd like to clear things up and show people there is nothing to fear. Socialism is a social organization in which the government owns and operates the means of production. Its opposite is capitalism, where private companies and individuals control the economy. Socialism contends that capitalist societies unjustly concentrate wealth and power within a small group; thus, socialism is an attempt to create a more equal society to live in. That's the technical definition. For...