Free Republic

"And it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark" (Rev. 13:16-17, ESV). A baker in Oregon is fined $150,000, told he needs "rehabilitation," and put out of business for declining to bake a cake for a lesbian wedding. A baker in Colorado is fined, ordered to bake a cake in violation of his own conscience, and sent to re-education camp for the same offense. A florist in Washington is pursued...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Yesterday we had this -- we lifted the temporary ban. Well, no, we lifted the permanent ban on PMSNBC temporarily yesterday for an audio sound bite from Tina Brown in which she said that Barack Hussein O, Democrat, first African-American president, is making women feel unsafe. He makes them feel unsafe. His policies are making them feel unsafe, and this is why women are abandoning Obama. Now, try this coincidence. Obama voted yesterday in Chicago. First day of early voting. So, you know, Obama's a stud, right? I mean, everybody thinks he's a stud. Everybody knows this...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: So how about Barack Obama, how about this guy? You've got all these Democrats, these Democrat incumbents, and they're running for reelection, and they don't want him anywhere near them. They're doing everything they can to distance themselves from his policies, because the polling data is what it is. We talked yesterday about people who think the country's wandering aimlessly, no direction, things are spiraling out of control. There's no accountability. There's no reliability. Everything, all these traditions, all these institutions that people used to be able to count on and rely on have gone kaput now....

This isn’t the sort of breaking news, horror show healine which generally makes the rounds when talking about kids and guns, but it’s a nice story which deserves a little more visibility. An “iReport” feature on CNN describes the education and competitive record of ten year old target shooter Shyanne Roberts of New Jersey. Meet Shyanne Roberts, a 10-year-old competitive shooter who is out to prove something: Children with guns don’t always mean disaster.“I want to be an inspiration to other kids and be a leader,” said the girl. “Kids and guns don’t always mean bad things happen.”The Franklinville, New...

Leaning on his cane, the old boy walked out his front door, took in the morning light, and was surprised. That's when the realization hit him: The weather's turned. It's cool. He felt it, but couldn't quite believe it, not at first. It had been a light summer this year, with plenty of rain and cooling breezes. It hadn't been unbearable, like some he had known. But still it had been summer in these latitudes: hot. And now... Fall had taken him by surprise. It shouldn't have. It happens every year. And every year it still surprises him. The suddenness...

I wrote last year about the remarkable acknowledgement by Bono that free markets were the best way to lift people out of poverty. The leader of the U2 band and long-time anti-poverty activist specifically stated that, “capitalism has been the most effective ideology we have known in taking people out of extreme poverty.”As the old saying goes, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Too many politicians and interest groups want us to believe that foreign aid and bigger government are the answer, but nations that have jumped from poverty to prosperity invariably have followed a path of free markets...

<p>The value of deals that fail to complete has reached its highest level since 2008, in the latest sign that the best year for mergers and acquisitions since the financial crisis will also feature a number of high-profile failures.</p> <p>Three large deals collapsed last week, adding to the list of wrecked deals and coinciding with a sharp jump in equity market volatility that sapped confidence in stocks and put a chill on the market for initial public offerings.</p>

The problem of pain, to borrow a title from C.S. Lewis, is that with regard to our enormous national debt, there is none. As great an impending disaster as it’s alleged to be, you’d think there’d be signs of suffering. No less a luminary than Rush Limbaugh speaks of his Dad’s warning when Rush was a kid that this immense obligation, only $1 trillion at the time, would be our undoing. Yet now at 17 times that size, it appears just a calamity without a consequence. But the reason for this is simple: we’re engaged in the biggest can-kicking endeavor in...

Why do some things scare people more than others? One reason is that people engage in a rational assessment of risk and conclude the appropriate level of fear. For example, people feel free to walk alone at midnight in Times Square but not in Central Park because they have made a rational assessment: Times Square, which at midnight is almost as bright as day and filled with people -- usually tourists -- is safer than Central Park. A second reason is that emotions rather than reason cause people to fear something. Some years ago I was a guest on the...

Houston recently passed an ordinance through its city council that has sparked quite a bit of controversy amongst conservative evangelicals. The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), a broad-sweeping, left-leaning law trumpeted by the City of Houston and its openly gay mayor, Annise Parker, is supposed to protect gay, lesbian and transgender people from discrimination. All well and good, but according to the Independent Journal Review, the ordinance to ensure nondiscrimination, discriminates against those of faith who oppose it. Five pastors, members of Houston's conservative, evangelical base, oppose HERO, as does the liberal Americans United for the Separation of Church and...

Video cameras? Yes please! Give me one. Maybe two or three. I am absolutely a HUGE proponent of law enforcement using in-car and body mounted cameras. Some ask why I feel so strongly about the subject, and to them I offer the following personal anecdote. I have personally benefited greatly from the video obtained by a digital video camera, the in-car camera system in my patrol car. A number of years ago, I was involved in an incident where, as I arrived at the scene of a call, I came under fire by a suspect armed with a rifle. I...

Can you walk out on the messiah? Appearing at a campaign rally for gubernatorial candidate Anthony Brown in Maryland on Sunday, President Obama sought to capture the magic that had electrified audiences in 2008 and, to some considerable degree, even in 2012. Obama isn't doing much stumping this year. He limits his campaigning mostly to fundraisers. This is the year, after all, when Democratic candidates are announcing how important it is in our system of government to have honest disagreements with the president. They're hastening to say that they would be tougher than he is on ISIS. They are declaring...

When presidents become unpopular, they are no longer welcome on the campaign trail. They're trapped in Washington, watching their party abandon them. Now, the same oppressive walls are closing in on President Barack Obama. He is welcome only in the palatial homes of Hollywood stars and hedge-fund billionaires or the well-kept fairways of Martha's Vineyard. The contrast with 2008 is striking and painful. Six years ago, his acolytes fainted as he read from the teleprompter. What went wrong? Ideology, say the true believers and their staunchest opponents. The left says he compromised too much, desperate to pass his agenda. The...

"....Every insider in Chicago told Klein the same thing: Jarrett has no qualifications to be the principal advisor to the president of the United States. She doesn't understand how Washington works, how relations with Congress work, how the federal process works. She doesn't understand how the economy works, how the military works, how national security works. But she understands how Obama works. The president turns to Valerie Jarrett for definitive advice on all these issues. She has given him terrible advice over and over, and still he turns to her. Her true job is to make Obama feel proud of...

Despite an administration that has no energy policy, free market forces in the United States are finding a way to provide relief from high prices for an economy that greatly needs the respite. Oil prices are heading the right way for consumers even if the wrong way for the wildcatters, explorers and developers of domestic energy. It’s been planned that way.Now that the worldwide economy is slowing, Saudi Arabia is intent on testing American resolve to become energy independent. The oil-rich kingdom has decided on a price war—a method that would be illegal in the United States—to see if American...

Reprinted from RedState.com. When conservatives consider the casualties of Obama’s national security policies, their attention is drawn quite naturally to Benghazi. In this shameful episode, the Obama Administration sacrificed an ambassador and three American heroes to protect a deceptive presidential campaign message in which Obama claimed that the war against al-Qaeda was over and won (“Osama bin Laden is dead, and al-Qaeda is on the run”). The facts are these: Ambassador Chris Stevens and three American heroes were sent into an al-Qaeda stomping ground that the British and other diplomatic consulates had already evacuated; they were denied the security they...

Since he assumed office nearly six years ago, US President Barack Obama has been dogged by allegations of managerial incompetence. Obama, his critics allege, had no managerial experience before he was elected. His lack of such experience, they claim, is reflected in what they see as his incompetent handling of the challenges of the presidency. In everything from dealing with the Congress, to reining in radical ideologues at the IRS, to handling the chaos at the Mexican border, to putting together coordinated strategies for dealing with everything from Ebola to Islamic State (IS), Obama’s critics claim that he is out...

Where are all the atheist freedom lovers we always hear about? It's time for them to start standing up for religious liberty. The left and militant gay movement are getting bolder and bolder, and too many Christians are stewing in their apathy. It seems that with each passing month, this senseless tyranny advances. The latest is that two Christian ministers in Idaho, Donald and Evelyn Knapp, have allegedly been ordered to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies at their chapel or face fines or jail sentences. This nightmare began Oct. 7, when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated Idaho's marriage...

Francis Fukuyama picked an auspicious publication date for his latest book, "Political Order and Political Decay." The news is full of stories of political decay: the Centers for Disease Control and Ebola; the Department of Veterans Affairs' health service; the Internal Revenue Service political targeting. Europe gives us the dysfunctional euro and no-growth welfare states. Not to mention failed states in the Middle East and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Critics have lambasted Fukuyama for proclaiming, in the title of his 1992 book, "The End of History." That's not entirely fair. His argument there was that the battle of ideas...

".....For instance, Burke has been traversing the state telling voters that Walker’s policies have led to a $1.8 billion deficit. This is demonstrably false; Democrats essentially took a brief one-time revenue downtick and extrapolated it over the course of four years, saying the hiccup would extend to 2017. But that number assumes state revenues wouldn’t grow a dime in the next four years. Heck, why not stretch it out over eight years and call it a $4 billion deficit? Or Burke could warn voters of the impending $1 trillion deficit due around the corner in 4236..... ....But this is campaign...