Free Republic

When you use a coffeepot, do you need a warning label to tell you: "Do not hold over people"? Must a bicycle bell be sold with the warning: "Should be installed and serviced by a professional mechanic"? Of course not. Yet that bell also carries the warning: "Failure to heed any of these warnings may result in serious injury or death." This is nuts. It's a bell. The blizzard of warning labels means we often won't read ones we should, like the Clorox label that warns, do not use bleach "with other product ... hazardous gasses may result." No kidding....

Something wicked happened in Idaho's rural Magic Valley. The evil has been compounded by politicians, media and special interest groups doing their damnedest to suppress the story and quell a righteous citizen rebellion. On June 7, a brief news item appeared on local Twin Falls, Idaho-based KMVT about a "reported sexual assault that possibly occurred near the Fawnbrook Apartments" five days earlier. Unconfirmed accounts of the alleged crime on conservative-leaning websites, plus reports from area members of anti-jihad activist Brigitte Gabriel's Act for America group and longtime watchdog Ann Corcoran's Refugee Resettlement Watch blog, culminated in coverage on the powerhouse...

Warning: this video contains extremely graphic content.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VESsSJn88QTranscript: 49 people are dead in Orlando, in the worst mass shooting in the nation's history. Barack Obama initial public statement concerning this latest unspeakable horror can be summed up in a few sentences: First: Islam? What's that? Second: Easy access to guns caused the massacre Third: We Americans are to blame. Fourth: This is just another case of homegrown extremism. The word Islam never came up during the Presidents initial remarks to the nation, so let me see if I can fill in a bit of his educational deficiency. Mr. Obama, the word...

But those who constantly appeal to that sentence in the Constitution as an obstacle to reasonable gun regulation are ignorant about the Founders’ own views about gun regulation. Any honest historian of the early Republic will tell you that lax gun laws are not in fact pro-Second Amendment; they are anti-Second Amendment. -snip Pennsylvania, in its 1776 Constitution, was the first state to include an express provision affirming the right to bear arms. It also passed a stringent loyalty oath that disarmed a large proportion of its population. Similar oaths were in force in most of the other states. When...

My friend Kathy Shaidle has recently posted a no-holds-barred article on the disaster of “hate speech” legislation, focussing on a proposed Liberal bill to punish “anti-transgender speech” by up to two years in prison. She reminds us that such totalitarian interventions into a presumably democratic society are by no means unique to Canada. As she writes, “bear in mind that New York state, for one, already has similar laws on the books, and they carry fines of up to $250,000. And [an] Oregon 'transmasculine' teacher got $60,000 because her colleagues wouldn’t refer to ‘it’ as ‘they.’”The notion of “hate speech”...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Hey, look, folks, I don't care how you slice it out there, there's a degree of panic and concern on the Democrat side about Trump versus Hillary. And I have the telltale signs to back that up. They've got this CNN poll out there, and they're not happy about it. Now, the Drive-Bys are trying to present it as though it is just wonderful news for Hillary, but it isn't. When you factor everything in, it is not good news, and if you go to the right places in the Drive-By Media, you will see that certain...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Climate change. We have more on that today. John Kerry, the former Vietnam War veteran who served in Vietnam, has come out and finally admitted that ISIS is a bigger threat than climate change. This... I know it's funny, but Kerry admits that all this time he and Obama and everybody in the Regime have been claiming that climate change represents the biggest threat. But now it's ISIS! Now, why change? Why do this? I mean, climate change and the Democrat Party are inseparable. And the Democrats are making it the number-one issue. There are reasons --...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Then there's this Secret Service agent who has written this tell-all book about Bill and Hillary and so forth. This is dynamite. Well, the Secret Service is mad; some former agents are mad. But, you know, who is this guy? I can't remember his name? O'Neill. Robert O'Neill. He's the Special Forces guy who claims to have pulled the trigger, shot the bullet that killed Osama. Well, he came out and identified himself, and a bunch of people in the Special Forces community, the SEAL community, said, "You just don't do that. We don't do that." It's...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: A columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. This is so good. This guy is a columnist, and he was assigned the task of showing "how easy it is to get a gun." We had the Morning Update today about this CBS reporterette who wanted to do the same thing. They're all going into gun shops and trying to show how easy it is. "They'll sell a gun to anybody! You don't need to get a background check." It's all a bunch of BS. "You walk in, you fork over the money, and they'll give you a machine gun...

In the aftermath of the Orlando massacre, the Democrats applied a law that serves them well: "Never let a good crisis go to waste." So they used the bodies of the dead as leverage for their politics and framed the national debate in terms of gun control rather than terrorism inspired by the radical jihadists of Islamic State. It was all about protecting their presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. They had to protect her. So they shouted about the guns. All that emotion about gun control, much of it sincere and thoughtfully offered, was nevertheless used by party...

In the aftermath of the Islamic terrorist attack on the gay night club in Orlando, some basic facts about gay-on-gay hate crimes are once again coming to light. Not long ago, the Center for Disease Control published a study documenting that individuals in the LGBT community experience far more violence from one another than individuals involved in heterosexual relationships. In fact, the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming will always be a gruesome reminder of the gay-on-gay hate and violence that has long plagued the LGBT community. After nearly two decades, most Americans still remain totally clueless that Shepard...

And they're off and running! Duh-duh-dump-duh-duh-dump ... and so on: The presidential horse race so beloved by media types. Who's ahead? Who's behind? What do the polls say? Which polls? Hey -- Donald Trump fired his campaign manager! How will the gun control debate affect things? None of which is irrelevant to general concerns, but very little of which suggests the nature of the stakes in the campaign, such as the future and durability of Social Security. Credit The New York Times with trying at least to engage public attention as to what might happen, depending on the election outcome,...

In all the talk about income inequality, a more important kind tends to be forgotten: cultural inequality. But it's finally dawning on some of our luminaries that the cultural deficit in our society can be as detrimental, if not more so, than the material one. There's only one way for us all to be equal in terms of income, and that's for us all to be equally poor. And there's only one way for all of us to be equal culturally, and that's for all of us to be equally ignorant. When that old truth finally occurs to our commentariat,...

A presidential campaign puts the country through a rugged exam. It not only tests the candidates against each other, this year Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton. It also tests the parties, Republicans warning of what government can do to you versus Democrats purring of what government can do for you. But most of all, America itself is put to the test: What do we the people value and desire as free citizens? Where do we want to be heading as a nation? Though Trump was my last choice in the GOP primaries, I believe he is the best and only...

No matter how dark or evil the moment, love wins. It always has. But evil wasn't part of the original plan. "In the beginning God created..." Earth and man and woman and plants and animals...and every last bit of everything he created...was good. God said it was good...perfect...love-filled...free. Because there was freedom there was also free choice. So man and woman were created with the ability to freely choose between right and wrong...darkness and light...good and evil. And that's how we arrived at the very dark moment in the early hours of June 12 in Orlando, Florida when evil momentarily...

If you want to understand the catastrophe of education during the Obama administration, a new book by Dr. Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, is a must-read. His book is entitled "Drilling Through the Core: Why Common Core Is Bad for American Education." Common Core is the education fad that swept the nation with the deceptive slogan "higher standards." Everyone is for "higher standards," right? Who could possibly object to higher standards for all our kids? As Dr. Wood explains, though, the word "higher" did not mean higher intellectual content of the standards, but a higher percentage...

While conservatives identify the Orlando massacre as an Islamic terrorist attack and the left blames a variety of factors including conservatives and guns, the Black Lives Matter movement has published its own unique perspective on the cause of this atrocity. "Despite the media's framing of this as a terrorist attack, we are very clear that this terror is completely homegrown, born from the anti-Black white supremacy, patriarchy and homophobia of [sic] the conservative right and of those who would use religious extremism as a weapon to gain power for the few and take power from the rest." Although the Orlando...

Every American student learns that our government has three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. The legislature makes the law, the executive enforces the law, and the judicial branch adjudicates disputes arising under the law. In recent decades, however, there has been a dramatic shift in lawmaking power away from the people’s representatives in Congress to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats in the executive branch. The House’s new policy reform agenda to address this, “A Better Way,” cannot come soon enough for the farmers, miners, consumers, and power plant workers I represent in Western Pennsylvania. People like a father of three young...

Some 50 State Department officials have signed a memo calling on President Obama to launch air and missile strikes on the Damascus regime of Bashar Assad. A "judicious use of stand-off and air weapons," they claim, "would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process." In brief, to strengthen the hand of our diplomats and show we mean business, we should start bombing and killing Syrian soldiers. Yet Syria has not attacked us. And Congress has not declared war on Syria, or authorized an attack. Where do these State hawks think President Obama gets the authority to...

In 1862, a man named Lt. Charles H. Colley of Gray, ME was killed during the Battle of Cedar Mountain. When his grieving family opened up the casket that was supposed to contain their son, they were stunned to discover that a fully uniformed Confederate soldier had been shipped to them instead. Having no way to identify the soldier, and also lacking the means to ship him back to Virginia, Lt. Colley's family decided to bury him in Gray Village Cemetery alongside the Union soldiers who had been killed in the war. They figured that this unknown Confederate's family would...