Free Republic

Men who are physically strong are more likely to take a right wing political stance, while weaker men are inclined to support the welfare state, according to a new study. Researchers discovered political motivations may have evolutionary links to physical strength. Men's upper-body strength predicts their political opinions on economic redistribution, according to the research. The principal investigators - psychological scientists Michael Bang Petersen, of Aarhus University in Denmark, and Daniel Sznycer, of the University of California in the U.S., believe that the link may reflect psychological traits that evolved in response to our early ancestral environments and continue to...

“I still remember Colonel Gibson, he said, ‘I have never been so embarrassed in my life that a State Department officer has bigger balls than somebody in the military.’ A nice compliment.” -- Greg Hicks, formerly the second-ranking U.S. diplomat in Libya, talking to congressional investigators about receiving word from a commander on the ground that Defense officials had refused a request to send troops to aid Americans besieged by Islamist militants. The biggest news this week about the 2016 presidential election is not New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s weight-loss surgery. Nor is it those on the right rallying against...

Former Rep. Todd Akin said he regrets the comments he made about “legitimate rape” which derailed his Missouri bid for U.S. Senate last year. In an interview with KDSK-TV on Thursday, the 65-year-old was asked whether he would take back the controversial comments. “Of course I would,” the former congressman replied. “I’ve relived them too many times. But that is not reality.” …

House Republicans have concluded that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was responsible for cutting security at the consulate in Benghazi ahead of last year’s attack there, and that the administration lied about why it downplayed terrorism as the cause of the assault. A new report — the result of months of investigation by five different House committees — says there was plenty of intelligence that presaged the attack, but the State Department and President Obama failed to heed the warnings or give the Defense Department the authority to respond to such an attack. The report exonerates the Pentagon itself,...

Researchers at the University of Cambridge say that, using publicly-available Facebook Likes only, it's possible to get surprisingly accurate estimates of users’ race, age, IQ, sexuality, personality, substance use and political views. "I am a great fan and active user of new amazing technologies, including Facebook. I appreciate automated book recommendations, or Facebook selecting the most relevant stories for my newsfeed," says said Michal Kosinski, Operations Director at Cambridge's Psychometric Centre. "However, I can imagine situations in which the same data and technology is used to predict political views or sexual orientation, posing threats to freedom or even life." The...

After four years of pretending there is no jihad against the free world, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blurted out the truth during her testimony on the Benghazi jihad massacre Wednesday: “We now face a spreading jihadist threat,” she said, adding: “We have to recognize this is a global movement.” We do? Yet the Obama administration has for years steadfastly and repeatedly denied both that there was a jihadist threat at all and that it was a global movement. So far has the Obama administration been from acknowledging that there was a jihad threat that less than two months into...

There aren’t more, because some people just don’t like to pay tolls, and others haven’t figured how they can take advantage of the lanes. Transurban is happy to have anybody’s toll money, whether they are locals or long-distance travelers, but the lanes are designed largely for the benefit of local travelers. The entrance and exit system reflects that. The Tysons area business and civic leaders with whom I’ve talked express optimism about the lanes and seem hopeful about the two new access points at Westpark Drive and Jones Branch Drive. At this early stage, the most vexing thing about the...

December 4, 2012 '2016' Oscar Snub Has Filmmakers Claiming Political Bias Paul Bond Gerald Molen, who produced the Academy Award-winning 'Schindler's List,' said the box-office success of the anti-Obama documentary proves the film was a hit: "The action confirms my opinion that the bias against anything from a conservative point of view is dead on arrival in Hollywood." ..Gerald Molen, the Oscar-winning producer of Schindler’s List, is claiming political bias because a documentary movie he produced this year isn't up for an Oscar, even though that film, 2016: Obama’s America, made more money at the box office than the combined...

In light of the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, restaurant companies and franchisees are looking into ways to lower costs to save money, including cutting employee hours. “What we’re seeing is that this health care law puts unique challenges on chain restaurants,” said Rob Green, executive director of the National Council of Chain Restaurants. “The law will have cost implications on a lot of different business sectors, but restaurants and retail are in the bull’s eye.” Specifically, two parts of the PPACA may raise costs for restaurant chains: The definition of full-time employees as those who...

...Are black people supporting Obama mainly because he's black? If race is just one factor in blacks' support of Obama, does that make them racist? Can blacks' support for Obama be compared with white voters who may favor his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, because he's white? ...Stacey Dash, who also has Mexican heritage, is best known for the 1995 film "Clueless" and the recent cable-TV drama "Single Ladies." On Twitter, she was called "jigaboo," "traitor," "house nigger" and worse after posting, "Vote for Romney. The only choice for your future." ...Twitter users are by no means representative of America, and...

They’re calling it the Michele Bachmann effect. And no, it’s not the Minnesota congresswoman’s crusade to ban falafel from public schools. It refers to the relationship between a woman’s politics and her face. Allison Yarrow hit the Highline to see if people could tell a difference between Democratic and Republican female politicians. Women politicians with “stereotypical feminine facial features” are more often Republicans, found researchers at UCLA]. And the more feminine their features, the more conservative their voting records. They also found the reverse—that women with more masculine facial features tended to be Democrats. Less gender-typical visages tracked with more...

Andy williams was not my favorite. But he was awesome. There was at least one song we did as a marching band in High school that was his. I'm sure there were a few movies he did the theme song to. I do not know what they were. You guys tell me.

An anti-Islam film that sparked violent protests in many countries had "nothing to do with" a deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi earlier this month, Libya's president told NBC News. In an exclusive interview with NBC News' Ann Curry, President Mohamed Magarief discounted claims that the attack was in response to a movie produced in California and available on YouTube. He noted that the assault happened on Sept. 11 and that the video had been available for months before that. "Reaction should have been, if it was genuine, should have been six months earlier. So it was postponed...

Teenagers who regularly smoke cannabis are putting themselves at risk of permanently damaging their intelligence, according to a landmark study.

Virus Transmits much more Easily Via Anal Intercourse, Research Shows New research pinpoints a major reason why gay and bisexual men remain so vulnerable to the AIDS epidemic: When it comes to the transmission of HIV, a man who has unprotected anal intercourse is at especially high risk. In fact, if that kind of intercourse was only as risky as vaginal intercourse, researchers report, HIV cases among gay and bisexual men would shrink dramatically. It would go down even more, they added, if their rates of casual sex declined. [. . . ] According to UNAIDS, HIV is more common...

At Big Journalism, William Bigelow writes, “According to a new Gallup poll measuring Americans’ confidence in television news, the level is the lowest since the poll was begun in 1993:” 21% of adults expressed a great deal of confidence in television news reporting. No wonder CNN’s ratings are in the toilet. Gallup tested 16 institutions, including newspapers, and TV news ranked 11th. Newspapers were ranked 10th. There was an interesting divide among those on the left; Democrats were the most confident in television news of all the groups surveyed (now there’s a shock) but postgraduates, who are more generally Democrats,...

In light of President Obama’s exhortation to hike taxes on those making more than $250,000 a year earlier today, here’s a well-timed piece of evidence demonstrating what happens when you decide you’d rather engage in populist persecution and punish the wealthy for their economic contributions rather than make tough budget-cutting decisions. A new report indicates that the state of Maryland is bleeding residents and tax revenue — an emigration likely due to the wildly blue state’s recent tax hikes. "The study, by the anti-tax group Change Maryland, says that a net 31,000 residents left the state between 2007 and 2010,...

In light of President Obama's exhortation to hike taxes on those making more than $250,000 a year earlier today, here's a well-timed piece of evidence demonstrating what happens when you decide you'd rather engage in populist persecution and punish the wealthy for their economic contributions rather than make tough budget-cutting decisions. A new report indicates that the state of Maryland is bleeding residents and tax revenue — an emigration likely due to the wildly blue state's recent tax hikes. The study, by the anti-tax group Change Maryland, says that a net 31,000 residents left the state between 2007 and 2010,...

In his new Social Science Journal study...Mark Regnerus set out to answer the question of whether children who have parents in a same-sex relationship experience disadvantages when compared with children raised by their biological, married parents. The answer, contra the zeitgeist, appears to be a resounding yes. Children with a parent in a same-sex relationship “underperform” in almost every category. Some of these differences may be relatively benign — whether one voted in the last presidential election, for example — but most are decidedly not. One deficit is particularly worrying: Less than 2 percent of children from intact, biological families...

Study: Children Fare Better In Traditional Mom-Dad Families By Cheryl Wetzstein- June 10, 2012 Two studies released Sunday may act like brakes on popular social-science assertions that gay parents are the same as — or maybe better than — married, mother-father parents. “The empirical claim that no notable differences exist must go,” Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said in his study in Social Science Research. Using a new, “gold standard” data set of nearly 3,000 randomly selected American young adults, Mr. Regnerus looked at their lives on 40 measures of social, emotional and...