Free Republic

It happens all the time. I head out to the nearest mall to work through my weekly honey-do list. After spending five minutes securing a parking spot, I walk to my destination. As I pass the handicapped parking spaces located a hop and a skip from the entrance — the spaces reserved for people in wheelchairs, or really old people with walkers, or other genuinely handicapped people — I notice a car pull into one. It’s one of those Seinfeld moments, and I turn into George Costanza. Almost. The first thing I do is stop and take a look at...

It’s a deeply felt conviction among liberals that they are the caring party. It’s not too much to say that liberals are quite confident that they are nicer, more moral people than conservatives. It must require truly titanic powers of denial for the “moral” and “compassionate” party to maintain its position on abortion — a position that leads them into some macabre rationalizations. Consciences among the morally superior party are agreeably quiescent. But recent headlines have not been similarly cooperative. In Florida the legislature is considering a variant of the “Born Alive Infants Protection Act,” which would require that abortionists...

Last week, I saw an article online that took my breath away. An average of Twenty Two U.S. Veterans are committing suicide each and every week! Is this true? I'm sorry, I can't refer you directly to that article, but it was not the first time I had heard something like this. I am not even sure the subject was active duty or in-active veterans, now chosing to end their lives. In spite of my spotty data, you must admit, have you not also heard of the many service people losing hope and leaving this existance 'ahead of schedule'? I...

George Washington warned us in his Farewell Address about a time in America's future when we might be tempted to discard the pillars of civility: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them."Let me give a great example of what Washington's words look like...

I need some advice for sitter services in the No. Alabama region. Father has just had open heart surg. Both he and mom are elderly.

Republicans find themselves in the unenviable position of being forced to agree to raise taxes on those earning more than $200,000 (the actual cutoff for those Mr. Obama refers to as “millionaires and billionaires”) or risk being blamed for a tax increase on all taxpaying Americans. They will probably agree, which means it’s a politically unavoidable policy, not a good policy. Why does Obama insist upon raising taxes? Not because he believes it will improve the economy, and not because he believes it will increase receipts to the Treasury. The proposed taxes would bring in about $80 billion a year,...

Right now, I'm in a lot of pain. I'm hurting. Everyone I love is hurting. Things just keep going from bad to worse. Today I received a call, a woman soliciting donations for a charity. I blew up. I told her that I'd just spent my entire morning canceling all of my monthly charitable donations. I'd given all I could give and I had nothing left. I'm bled dry. I almost hung up on her. She asked me what was wrong. I sighed and couldn't speak and she told me it was alright. I started to choke up and I...

I’ll bet you $10,000 that this term doesn’t get a round of applause from focus groups of voters struggling in these hard economic times: “self-reliance.” Throughout this campaign, Barack Obama cleverly set himself up as the alternative to a straw man who thought everyone in America could make it on his own, with no help from anyone. “We’re told by our opponents that since government can’t do everything, it should do almost nothing,” Obama said at a Miami campaign event in October. “It’s sort of a ‘You’re on your own’ philosophy. If you don’t have health insurance, hope you don’t...

I think I owe an apology to George W. Bush. William F. Buckley once noted that he was 19 when the Cold War began at the Yalta conference. The year the Berlin Wall came down, he became a senior citizen. In other words, he explained, anti-Communism was a defining feature of conservatism his entire adult life. Domestically, meanwhile, the Right was largely a “leave me alone coalition”: religious and traditional conservatives, overtaxed businessmen, Western libertarians, and others fed up with government social engineering and economic folly. The foreign-policy battle against tyrannical statism abroad only buttressed the domestic antagonism toward well-intentioned...

As anyone within range of a television set knows, Democrats have spent the last several months fixated on Mitt Romney’s taxes. One endlessly repeated commercial points out that Romney paid only 13.9 percent of his income in taxes in 2010, “probably less than you.” That ad is misleading on several levels. First, unless your household was earning more than $189,400 per year, it is unlikely that you are paying a higher federal income-tax rate than Romney. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the average middle-income American pays an effective federal income-tax rate of 1.3 percent. Recall that half of Americans...

TRIPOLI, Libya – The former Libyan intelligence officer Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, who was convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, has died in Libya, his brother told AFP on Sunday. "He died an hour ago," Abdelhakim al-Megrahi said, putting the time of death at shortly after 1:00pm local time. The UK Foreign Office could not confirm the report Sunday, however it said it was "seeking further information." Megrahi, 60, was convicted in a Scottish court in 2001 for his role in the December 1998 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Most of those killed in the bombing of the Boeing 747...

The outcome in Iowa was both electorally inconclusive and politically clarifying. There is a Republican Party, supporting Mitt Romney, that wants to win an election. And there is a Republican Party, supporting Ron Paul, that wants to make a point about limited government. This division is not entirely ideological. There are rock-ribbed conservatives who believe that the highest political priority is the early retirement of President Obama. There are evangelicals — uncomfortable with libertarianism and the foreign policy of Charles Lindbergh — who have nevertheless joined Paul’s protest against swollen government Based on recent history, the party of electability will...

  New Year’s Resolutions David C. Stolinsky Jan. 1, 2012 Many people make New Year’s resolutions. Often these include vows to eat less and exercise more. Rather than these healthful but self-centered goals, may I suggest a different set of resolutions: Use compassion for those who deserve it. After we have punished the criminal, expressed compassion for all his victims, and done our best to relieve their suffering, then we can feel compassion for the criminal. But till then, feeling compassion for both criminal and victim leads only to more criminals and more victims – who need more compassion....

Newt Gingrich wants to pay poor kids to clean toilets. And all of the right people are horrified. The Nation says Gingrich is running on “a platform that seems to have been written by the unreformed Ebenezer Scrooge.” The editors of the Newark Star-Ledger proclaim Gingrich wants to “bring back the days of Oliver Twist.” The host of “Meet the Press,” David Gregory, suggests Gingrich’s take on the inner-city poor is a “grotesque distortion.” This controversy started last month at Harvard, when Gingrich suggested in a speech that perhaps the best way to break the cycle of poverty in inner...

The famous quote attributed to Winston Churchill that, "If you're not liberal at 20, you have no heart...if you're not conservative by 30, you have no brain," may need some tweaking given the recent antics of the American left. Having built the credibility of their political movement on the grounds of compassion and empathy, their actions and policy proposals are reflective of just the opposite. Start with my home state of Indiana, whose Republican legislature and governor enacted a law to prohibit taxpayer dollars from flowing into the hands of any health clinic that performs abortions. Through entirely predictable demagoguery,...

Have you ever heard someone teach, preach, or say something that didn’t sound right? It was incorrect. It didn’t seem to agree with what you had been taught in the past. What was your response? Hopefully, like the Bereans of old in Acts 17:11, you picked up your scriptures and carefully searched through them and studied them to confirm what had been said. What did you do next? Some will remain silent and say nothing. Others will use this as an opportunity to spread gossip or rumors about the teacher/speaker in question with the intent of “tearing them down” and...

School choice, lower taxes, job creation: These, and not welfare payments, are what would really help the poor. In his autobiography, former British prime minister Tony Blair recounts the political epiphany that caused him to break with the old-style class-warfare–based Labour Party that he had grown up with. “In a sense they wanted to celebrate the working class,� he writes, “not make them middle class.� In many ways, the Obama administration and congressional Democrats appear to have the same attitude about the American poor. They talk frequently about the poor. They lavish programs upon them. (Last year the Obama administration...

Mrs Blair was merely performing an unpaid kindness in Albania, says Matthew Norman.Amid all the excitement of Eamonn Holmes's pioneering legal battle to stop the BBC broadcasting jokes about his obesity, and with Keith Chegwin under fire for nicking other people's gags, you could be forgiven for having missed the really significant comedic news of the week. In what leading scholars of mirth posit as Britain's most valuable comic export to that country since Norman Wisdom, Cherie Blair went to Albania. The great altruist made the trip, as you may already have guessed, to pay homage to her Albanian role...

At the end of the article there is a video of a Black Bear with only 3 legs. Because she is missing a front leg she walks upright like a human. Interesting video. I can see how some Indian in the old days may have thought from a distance that the bear was half human, thus the name Sasquatch, or as we white men would say "Big Foot". Follow the link below and you will find the video at the end of the article towards the bottom of the page.3 Legged Black Bear Foraging With Her Cubs

Check out this video from Turkey of a stray cat comforting his fallen friend. Sometimes we forget that even animals can feel the loss of a loved one. I have known humans who displayed less emotion over the loss of a friend or relative than this cat does. On this, the day we celebrate our beloved Mothers, I ask that you remember to tell your friends that you love them also. After all, there will come a day when it will be to late. Follow the link below to see the video of theStray Cat Comforting A Fallen Friend

Check out this video from Turkey of a stray cat comforting his fallen friend. Sometimes we forget that even animals can feel the loss of a loved one. I have known humans who displayed less emotion over the loss of a friend or relative than this cat does. On this, the day we celebrate our beloved Mothers, I ask that you remember to tell your friends that you love them also. After all, there will come a day when it will be to late. Follow the link below to see the video of theStray Cat Comforting A Fallen Friend

Ben-Peter Terpstra writes on why conservatives tend to give more than left-of-centre liberals. I can see why Ann Coulter detests the compassionate conservative label. Indeed, it sounds as patronising as the articulate black label because conservatism is compassionate, period. In Makers and Takers Peter Schweizer explains (page 70): Over the past fifteen years, the General Social Survey has consistently shown that religious conservatives are 25 percentage points more likely than [left-of-centre] liberals to donate money to help the poor and are 23 points more likely to volunteer time for that cause. As Arthur Brooks points out, the annual gap in...

You can teach compassion, as Peter tried to do in 1 Peter 3:8. But you cannot demand compassion. You cannot force people to be compassionate. You cannot write a law. People either are or they are not.

The current polls are indeed pointless useless, she gets better and better on a daily basis, just think how good she'll be by this time next year. She'll kill on interviews, debates and speeches. The best part of it is that she knows it too! http://www.conservatives4palin.com/2010/02/governor-palin-on-oreilly-tonight.html

Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella Rome, Italy, Feb 8, 2010 / 03:02 pm (CNA).- The celebrated philosopher and theologian Monsignor Michel Schooyans has published his thoughts on the contemporary misuse of the concept of "compassion." According to Msgr. Schooyans, the Vatican newspaper and the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella, are complicit in promoting "pseudo-compassion."Msgr. Schooyans, professor emeritus of theology and philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium and an expert in bioethics and demography, outlined the "bogus" employment of the concept of compassion in contemporary society by way of his recent work "The Pitfalls of...

The air is still Heat is intense The sweating bodies Purposed and tense. Below the surface Unseen to the eye The power in the elements Begins to collide. A second, a minute A stifled scream Darkness descends The earth shakes free. The black-skins die The white-skins too Death knows no prejudice Neither pick nor choose......

During the quake, our three-year-old grandson told his mom that he thought a train was coming through their house. Our son’s reaction was that he knew something bad had happened but not until Wednesday morning did they know that something REALLY BAD had happened. Indeed, something REALLY BAD had happened. Having served on many mission trips to Haiti the area of the REALLY BAD was a very familiar place. I have walked on those streets, shopped in the stores and visited the Compassion country office that was right in the midst of the devastation. I could mentally picture these houses...

As of Wednesday morning, Compassion International reports that they have not yet made contact with their Haiti office, which is near the epicenter of Tuesday’s 7.0-magnitude earthquake. The quake has produced many aftershocks, including two of significant intensity - over 5.0 in magnitude. Communication to Haiti is virtually impossible with widespread damage to cell towers and communication lines. Compassion shared on Twitter that their reach in Haiti involves 230 churches helping 65,000+ children/families, 2,200 Child Survival Program moms and babies and almost 100 leadership students. “Based on the epicenter, media reports and our center locations, we expect centers have been...

This audio clip is from one of my recent shows, in which a caller wanted (I think) to publicly put me on the spot over why I "de-friended" him on my Facebook page. As you'll hear, the reason was because of something he said to some of the women there about their having had an abortion. The problem was that he branded such women as "murderers" because 1) abortion is murder and 2) they had aborted one or more of their children. His logic is correct, at least in a sense, because abortion is murder. But the way he put...

Now swallow your nice ObamaCare... it only tastes yucky for a second. No, don't throw it up! Now look what you did! Mommy will have to clean up after you. Again. Is there something disquieting about a president who only wants to spread love and compassion to all Americans -- or else? Or else he'll hate us forever? Or else he'll put us in jail? Or else he'll stamp his feet and cry? That's the feeling I'm getting. He is so intent on doing us all a big favor. ObamaCare is Just and Right and Compassionate --- and it has...

Pilot Lee Taylor of Eagle’s Nest Ventures of Diamondhead gives flying instructions to Sean Peneguy, 13, before their flight Friday. Sean was excited and a little nervous before his first airplane ride last Friday. He had a chance to take the controls during mid-flight. After spending most of last year checking in and out of hospitals battling cancer, one middle school student got a thrill of a lifetime. Sean Peneguy, a 13-year-old from Bay St. Louis, was diagnosed with bone cancer a year ago. Since then, he has been in chemotherapy and had surgery to remove a tumor from...

From an e-mail I recieved: I am stunned that the official White House Blog published this picture and that it is in the public domain. The body language is most revealing. Sergeant Crowley, the sole class act in this trio, helps the handicapped Professor Gates down the stairs, while Barack Obama, heedless of the infirmities of his friend and fellow victim of self-defined racial profiling, strides ahead on his own. So who is compassionate? And who is so self-involved and arrogant that he is oblivious? In my own dealings with the wealthy and powerful, I have always found that the...

What if a president, on his own initiative, under no demands from staff or from supporters or opponents, set out to spend an unprecedented amount of money on AIDS in Africa, literally billions of dollars, at a time when the nation could not afford it, citing his faith as a primary motivation and, ultimately, saved more than a million lives? Wouldn’t the story be front-page news, especially in top, liberal newspapers? Wouldn’t it lead on CNN, MSNBC and the “CBS Evening News”? Might statues be erected to the man in the nation’s more “progressive” cities? What if the president was...

NEW YORK — New York City is buying one-way plane tickets for homeless families to leave the city. It's part of a program by Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration to keep the homeless out of the expensive shelter system, which costs $36,000 a year per family. More than 550 families have left the city since 2007. All it takes is for a relative to agree to take them in. The city employs a travel agency for domestic travel and the Department of Homeless Services handles international travel.

PENSACOLA, Fla. – Investigators asked the public to be on the lookout Friday for a red van they believe carried three men involved in the deaths of a Florida Panhandle couple who were shot in their rural home while eight of their children slept. Surveillance cameras showed the van at the home of Byrd and Melanie Billings in Beulah, a rural area west of Pensacola near the Alabama border, Escambia County Sheriff David Morgan said. The children were unharmed. The sheriff's office released an enhanced but still grainy photograph of a red, 15-passenger van dating to the late 70s or...

It has been the aim of the Democrat party since they lost the Presidential election in 2004 to subvert the Christian doctrine with the claim that Jesus was a socialist. Their goal is to convince Christians that their Social agenda is morally equivalent with the teachings and life of Jesus Christ. Considering the lack of historical and Biblical knowledge most Americans have, it is not surprising that many have fallen for the misinformation on what Jesus taught (and for whom the teachings were given). These Biblical revisionists have become especially adept at cherry picking Scripture to suit their agenda. Hence,...

Our economy is broke due to inflationary compassion as much as it is from inflationary greed by Wayne Lusvardi What shall we make of the following? Homeless Sensitivity Sleep-overs Overhead at the Fuller Seminary Bookstore in Pasadena recently: Guy talking on cell phone: "Hello. Yes, we're organizing churches to have a homeless persons sleep-over at their church to sensitize congregations to the homeless problem. If I heard the following cell phone conversation correctly, someone at Fuller Seminary was organizing a revolving homeless persons sleepover at different churches. Which jogs my memory as to what year it was that mainline liberal...

Our economy is broke due to inflationary compassion as much as it is from inflationary greed What shall we make of the following? Homeless Sensitivity Sleep-overs Overhead at the Fuller Seminary Bookstore in Pasadena recently: Guy talking on cell phone: "Hello. Yes, we're organizing churches to have a homeless persons sleep-over at their church to sensitize congregations to the homeless problem. If I heard the following cell phone conversation correctly, someone at Fuller Seminary was organizing a revolving homeless persons sleepover at different churches. Which jogs my memory as to what year it was that mainline liberal Pasadena All Saints...

Conservatives More Liberal Givers By George Will WASHINGTON -- Residents of Austin, Texas, home of the state's government and flagship university, have very refined social consciences, if they do say so themselves, and they do say so, speaking via bumper stickers. Don R. Willett, a justice of the state Supreme Court, has commuted behind bumpers proclaiming "Better a Bleeding Heart Than None at All," "Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Beauty," "The Moral High Ground Is Built on Compassion," "Arms Are For Hugging," "Will Work (When the Jobs Come Back From India)," "Jesus Is a Liberal," "God Wants Spiritual...

This holiday season is a time to examine who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but I’m unhappy with my findings. The problem is this: We liberals are personally stingy. Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates. Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an...

So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place. But many who saw them leaving recognized them and ran on foot...When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things. Mark 6:32-34 Jesus had taken His disciples aside to teach them and to find out exactly they had been doing (v30). As the disciples traveled in a boat, many followed them on foot. Picture this scene. Jesus is teaching in a boat on the way to a quiet...

Rent control, anyone? A resident of Brooklyn, New York is facing eviction. It’s a fairly common, nondescript occurrence in a city of eight million residents. This particular resident, however - sixty-six year old Ella Taliercio - has been attracting some attention. She has been living in her place of residence - in a neighborhood called Park Slope - for half-a-century. She currently pays $147.08 a month – a rate that has remained steady for two decades or better – in a neighborhood where $2000-a-month rents for two-bedroom apartments are not unusual. (The rent was $33 a month when she first...

HOUSTON (BP)--About 1,500 Southern Baptist disaster relief volunteers are setting up units in Texas and were expected to be operational by the end of the day Tuesday to serve victims of Hurricane Ike. The primary focus of the efforts currently is food preparation, with 39 kitchen units on site in the state. The American Red Cross has asked Southern Baptists to be ready to prepare up to 375,000 hot meals a day, while the Salvation Army has requested 125,000 meals a day, bringing the total to 500,000. In addition to the 39 feeding units, more than 40 other types of...

Dennis Kucinich is currently on the floor of the House presenting his bill to impeach President George W. Bush. C-SPAN, 8:00 PM 9 Jun 2008.

Dr. Weiss spoke exclusively to Catholic Online about his experience in the dramatic events which occurred in Suffolk on Monday. He told of a medical community and facility which, through their response, transformed tragedy into triumph.

Faith & Politics The Compassion Forum Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama face the hard questions on faith and politics. Join Campbell Brown for a 2-hour CNN special event..."The Compassion Forum" --Sunday at 8 p.m. ET.

Update: Despite efforts from Fox News to facilitate this dying girl's wish to have her father at her bedise when she passes, the imovable, cold-hearted, beauraucratic, red tape of the Jucidiary, Bureau Of Prisons and U.S. Attorney are intransigent in their unwillingness to bend the "rules" to allow this to happen.

A little girl fights for her life, and her last wish is to see her father. But that wish may not come true. "They didn't expect her to still be here. She's fighting, day by day, minute by minute," said Vonda Yaeger, mother. 10/11 has followed the story of 10-year-old Jayci Yaeger as she battled brain tumors. Now doctors say she is about to lose that fight. Her last wish is to spend what time she has left with her father, but he is in a federal prison for drug charges. Less than six months ago, Jayci was energetic, fun...

This primary season has encouraged some serious soul searching about what it means to be a conservative. The discussion is important, not just as the party selects a nominee, but as we at long last move beyond the Bush era of “compassionate conservatism.” An important part of this discussion began when then-candidate Fred Thompson was asked if, as a Christian and a conservative, he supported President Bush’s global AIDS initiative. Thompson responded: “Christ didn’t tell us to go to the government and pass a bill to get some of these social problems dealt with. He told us to do it.”...

A woman in her late teens died from an acute asthma attack triggered by secondhand cigarette smoke shortly after arriving at her job as a waitress in a bar in Michigan, researchers reported on Friday.