Free Republic

For those of us who have managed to survive 2014 with our lives intact and our freedoms hanging by a thread, it has been a year of crackdowns, clampdowns, shutdowns, showdowns, shootdowns, standdowns, knockdowns, putdowns, breakdowns, lockdowns, takedowns, slowdowns, meltdowns, and never-ending letdowns. We’ve been held up, stripped down, faked out, photographed, frisked, fracked, hacked, tracked, cracked, intercepted, accessed, spied on, zapped, mapped, searched, shot at, tasered, tortured, tackled, trussed up, tricked, lied to, labeled, libeled, leered at, shoved aside, saddled with debt not of our own making, sold a bill of goods about national security, tuned out by those...

Local activist DaRius Ali of Operation Help or Hush arrives in Dutchtown to look at apartments for the organization's transitional housing program on Thursday, Dec. 18, 2014. Ali is among a group of protesters living in area motels, preparing to stay in St. Louis long-term by moving into apartments subsidized by the organization.A group of protesters stormed St. Louis police headquarters on New Year’s Eve, shouting and pushing their way inside, only to be met by a line of aggressive police and pepper spray. Their plan for a sit-in inside the lobby was one of the boldest actions they’ve taken...

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is a “victim” of bad publicity, according to Bill Richardson, the former New Mexico governor and U.N. ambassador. “He has been the victim, Kim Jong Un, of a lot of bad press, a lot of bad international attention, with the Sony hacking, with [being] taken to the International Criminal Court by some U.N. countries, a number of other very destabilizing moves that he has made, shooting the missiles, nuclear testing,” Richardson said on Friday on MSNBC’s “News Nation with Tamron Hall.”

All of the hallmarks of National Public Radio – the cosmopolitanism and the sexual progressivism – come together in the subject of abortions worldwide. On New Year’s Eve, NPR.org posted a photographer’s record celebrating an abortion clinic in a primitive part of eastern India, titled “A Haven In A Land Of Unsafe Abortions.” NPR sent documentary photographer Poulomi Basu to spend time at the clinic in Khunti for a window into the world of legal and safe abortion in this remote part of India. Palo Khoya agreed to be photographed during her visit. It may be hard for a Westerner...

Jonathan Gruber, sage of MIT and proud champion of the Affordable Care Act, may well have had the worst year in American public life. His repeated demonstrations of arrogance, contempt for the American people and smug self-satisfaction brought mortification to his party and president. His glib references to the redistributionist aspects of the Affordable Care Act gave the lie to the Democratic Party's dubious claim that the mandate was not a tax, along with the excruciating (to Democrats) acknowledgment that -- presidential oaths to the contrary notwithstanding -- Democrats regard "nontransparency" as their friend. So, all hail the verbally incontinent...

It was as if the editorial board over at the Washington Post suddenly stopped what they were doing, looked up from their work, and dropped their jaws as a (rare) coherent thought suddenly manifested inside their collective brains. “Wait a minute…” they muttered, as the thought of Obama using executive action played over and over again in their minds. “If he can change the law unilaterally,” a gradual expression of horror engulfed their faces, “then if Republicans end up winning in 2016, they could just -- ” I imagine the rest of that thought was almost unbearable for the liberal...

It neither “exonerates” nor “debunks.” It specifically states that it is not the final word on Benghazi. Yet national press outlets claimed all of the above about the House Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi released on Nov. 21. (Snip) The [news media] articles advance limited and sometimes inaccurate representations of the committee report. They fail to acknowledge the countless documented instances in which the Obama administration provided false or conflicting information about Benghazi, and hid information entirely from public view.

Which offense is more serious? Denying a lesbian communion at a Catholic funeral? Or a female Episcopalian bishop hitting and killing a bicyclist? The Washington Post has picked (A). In 2012, they splashed across the front page (with a picture) that lesbian activist Barbara Johnson was denied communion at her mother's funeral. On December 30, the Post buried a hit-and-run-bishop story on page B5 with the headline “Bishop put on leave after fatal crash: Episcopal diocese says Heather Cook drove car that killed bicyclist.” .......

After the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, it didnt take long for environmentalists to cry gloom and doom and for the media to hype those claims. From caribou dying to earthquakes to all hell breaking loose, there was no shortage of catastrophic predictions though the Alaska pipeline now boasts great success roughly 30 years later.      Construction on the pipeline began in 1975, and oil first moved through it on June 20, 1977. Former Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton summed up its success in 2003 that Today the pipeline produces 17 percent of our domestic petroleum. It...

In 1977, William McPherson earned the top honor in the writing world when he was honored with a Pulitzer Prize.But nearly four decades later, the former Washington Post critic now hovers on the brink of poverty thanks to a failing pension and a bit of bad luck on the stock market.In a heartbreaking essay for The Hedgehog Review, McPherson describes what it's like to become poor in old age-as part of a overlooked group who are neither middle or lower class.Former teachers and even lawyers who can't pay their bills but aren't on the streets begging for change.Surprisingly, he says...

The metropolitan police department for the largest city in the United States is ceasing to function, according to a report in The New York Post.While the New York Police Department has continued its work of policing dangerous and violent criminal activity, quality of life policing has nearly come to a complete halt when statistics from December 20 to December 30, 2013 are compared with that same period this year. Citations for traffic violations fell by 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587, during that time frame.Summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination also plunged 94 percent — from...

It’s happening again … and there doesn’t appear to be anything anyone can do to stop it. We’re referring, of course, to the quadrennial election of an American president – which has followed an eerily predictable pattern in 2008 and 2012. It’s gone like this: An “electable” status quo candidate with support from the left-leaning media and the “Republican” establishment gets swept to the GOP nomination – via Borg-like assimilation. At that point, the media shifts its narrative on a dime and begins perpetuating marginal distinctions between two eerily similar ideologues – hoping to portray the big government “Republican” nominee...

House Speaker John Boehner's not waiting until New Year's Day for a hangover -- his headache is already here. Back-to-back House Republican dramas in the final week of the year are the latest indication that many of the issues the GOP hoped to leave behind when they take full control of Congress next week — an unruly base and scandal-prone members — will continue to dog them in the new year, and might even kick off 2015 with an attempted coup on the Speakership. Though Boehner was successfully able to convince Rep. Michael Grimm to resign on Monday after pleading...

Since the moment when police officers turned their backs in protest on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, we’ve seen the type of escalating activity in the city which would be more recognizable as the preview to a messy Latin American coup d’etat. The latest is a form of purposeful sabotage on the part of the NYPD, which is now actively shirking its duty to enforce the law. According to the New York Post, traffic tickets and summonses have plummeted by 94 percent, and overall arrests are down 66 percent for the week compared to the same period...

I am a white, privileged, well-off, 61-year-old former Republican religious right-wing activist who changed his mind about religion and politics long ago. The New York Times profiled my change of heart saying that to my former friends I’m considered a “traitorous prince” since my religious-right family was once thought of as “evangelical royalty.” You see, only in the Mafia, the British Royal family and big time American religion is a nepotistic rise to power seen as normal. And I was good at it. And I hated it while hypocritically profiting from it—until, that is, in the mid-1980s, I quit. These...

They want peace. No really. And the New York Times is just a dispassionate observer looking for reform and change. Not mass murder.But Nicholas Kristof had one of his “Take the Mask Off Moments” when the radical left shows how ugly and unhinged it really is despite its facade of dinner parties and book clubs and that its media outlets promote violence.And so he invited readers to send in poems about the usual stuff. Bunnies. Flowers. Killing all white people and burning America to the ground. And the emphasis was not on the bunnies and flowers.Here’s a deranged screech of...

Channel 10 went dark on Sunday night at about 10:30 p.m. Israel time, at the instruction of the channel’s employees union. Instead of regular programming, the channel displayed a picture of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, alongside the words, "In three days, Channel 10 will close. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who serves as Minister of Communications, refuses to find a solution. Due to this the employees union has decided to cease Channel 10’s broadcast for the night. We will resume broadcasting at 6:00 a.m." The channel has been facing financial difficulties for several years. In December of 2012, the Knesset held...

ABC’s Sunday show, This Week, used its last edition of the year to review 2014’s key stories, and given the media coverage of the Catholic Church and Pope Francis this year, it’s fitting that one of This Week’s contributors, radio host Michael Smerconish, labeled a few things Pope Francis didn’t say as one of the key stories. Smerconish dubbed Pope Francis a “game changer” of the year “because on issues from the treatment of women to the treatment of gays to even whether our pets are going to make it through the pearly gates, he put a soft, overdue face...

Who Was Mike Brown? 13 Things You Didn’t Know About Him.

Who Was Mike Brown? 13 Things You Didn’t Know About Him.