Free Republic

You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... You can get arrested for expired tags on your car but not for being in the country illegally. You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... You have to have your parents signature to go on a school field trip but not to get an abortion. You know you live in a Country run by idiots if... An 80 year old woman can be stripped searched by the TSA but a Muslim woman in a burka is only subject to having her neck and head searched....

President Obama has an anti-colonial, pro-Islam policy. He maintains deafening silence about Islamic imperialism (manifested as jihad and sharia doctrines of Islam, which have always caused and continue to cause havoc across the world), but apologizes at every opportunity for Western colonialism. Whereas the Nazis killed six million Jews, Islamic Jihad has killed 120 million Africans, 60 million Christians, 80 million Hindus and 10 million Buddhists, according to the Center for the Study of Political Islam. Whereas Colonialism brought science and technology to many parts of the world, Islamic Imperialism brought no benefits to those it oppressed. President Obama maintains...

Georgetown University constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman has just about had it with the focus of his 40 years of academic study. As he writes in the New York Times on Monday, it is the Constitution itself which has allowed for the series of legislative follies that finally resulted in the “fiscal cliff.” Seidman says that it is time for Americans to realize what lawmakers have known since the constitution’s inception – it is okay to ignore it. “As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government...

... Another thing that brings the community together is the Christmas holiday. Christmas is my favorite holiday, and my family has adopted many different traditions over the years. ... Many of these traditions show how Christmas fosters a sense of community, bringing together people who have little else in common to share in the magic and promise of the season. For a little while, we can put aside our political, cultural, and social differences and just watch trains go around a track, sing Christmas carols, watch dancers and musicians marching down the street, or just admire the lights and decorations...

It's interesting (or maybe just kind of sad) that various government agencies see possible terrorists everywhere but rarely, if ever, catch one. Despite the large number of personnel being thrown at the problem (along with lots of money), actual terrorists seem to be in limited supply. But these agencies haven't let their lack of success temper their vision of a nation under constant imminent attack. Public Intelligence recently posted a Powerpoint presentation from the NYC fire department (FDNY) discussing the unique safety issues mobile food trucks present. Along with some actual concerns (many food trucks use propane and/or gasoline-powered generators...

Complete Headline: Why Was There No October Surprise? Because Every Freakin’ Day for the Last Four Years Has Been an October SurpriseWhere was the October Surprise? Almost everyone anticipated this year’s “October Surprise” — some last-minute, unexpected, shocking scandal to rock the presidential election and derail one of the candidates. But it never appeared. In an era of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink gutterball politics, this mysterious absence of any major scandal was itself noteworthy. How could nothing have happened? Sure, there was Hurricane Sandy. But that doesn’t count. Sandy was a natural disaster that dominated the headlines for a few days, but it...

DoughtyOne at 10:48 PM October 21, 2012

Join The Debate Could Biden hit Ryan too hard?

Editor's note: It's a presidential election year, so we thought we'd weigh in with our list of the five worst presidents. We start with, yes, the current incumbent. See our other choices at U-T Opinion online. He took office at a time when the U.S. economy was on its worst slide in 75 years, but pushed policies using borrowed money that were more meant to preserve government jobs than broadly help the private sector where the great majority of Americans work, ensuring the jobs crisis continued. He railed against the heavy spending and big deficits of his predecessor, but blithely...

We can’t rely on the media, even the alternative media. Free Republic is announcing a new initiative that gives you a platform. We want to leverage the most powerful minds on the right to make a difference. To do this, we want to bring a new level of activism, the citizen investigator. In the spirit of 1750’s The Pennsylvania Gazette published by Ben Franklin and of Andrew Breitbart. For the longest time, our primary focus has been on looking at what the media presents and investigating it or discussing it. We have been missing something, YOU! Jim has created a...

In more than 20 years I've spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics. That's because college football has no academic purpose. Which is why it needs to be banned. A radical solution, yes. But necessary in today's times. Football only provides the thickest layer of distraction in an atmosphere in which colleges and universities these days are all about distraction, nursing an obsession with the social well-being of students as opposed to the obsession that they are there...

Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith, so often described as an impediment to his political prospects, might work to his advantage with one crucial segment of the electorate: Jewish voters. The very fact that his Mormonism makes him less popular among evangelical Christians almost certainly makes him more popular among American Jews. Academic analysis of the intersection of religion and politics suggests that Jews maintain a distinctly—and surprisingly—favorable view of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ When comparing these figures with the exit polls from major primaries, Romney fares much better among Republican Jews than he does among any...

New Mexico insiders from both parties describe Wilson, an Air Force Academy graduate, as a tough and disciplined campaigner, a strong fundraiser and someone whose broad support, including among Hispanics, is in the mold of former Sen. Pete Domenici (R). There’s also no better wingman in the state than Gov. Susana Martinez, a likely surrogate whom Wilson has known for about 20 years. “I think New Mexico is always going to be a swing state on races like this,” said Jay McCleskey, a GOP media strategist in the state and former regional political director at the Republican National Committee. “But...

If I had to pick a date when the mainstream media became fully vested in protecting Democratic interests, it would be March 11, 1992, the day Bill Clinton swept the Super Tuesday primaries and established himself as the party’s standard bearer. With a Republican in the White House for the previous twelve years, the media had been, if anything, overly inquisitive. Even during the Jimmy Carter years, the media had done their job well enough to make his life uncomfortable. Over the last twenty years, however, our media have descended from the merely partisan to the fully Orwellian. To commemorate...

Now we know that computers don't help children learn and that drugs don't help them concentrate, because the establishment mandarins who sold us the computers and drugs have conceded failure. In the January 29 New York Times, [1] a prominent professor of child development shows that attention-deficit-disorder drugs only harm the three million children who take them. One out of 10 American children have been diagnosed with so-called Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and most of them have been medicated. [2] Some months ago, the Times reported that test scores lagged in school districts that invested massively in digital education. [3] It...

It is, of course, reason to celebrate that Flagstaff is on track to finish 2011 without a single murder inside the city. Flagstaff is hardly Mayberry, RFD, but violent crimes of all types have plummeted in recent years, thanks to more community policing and better use of neighborhood-level police reports. We'd like to think that the absence of a murder so far this year is due, in part, to those initiatives by the police and community leaders. But we are also realistic enough to know that lethal violence in a state with lax gun laws is hard to keep at...

Americans need to know why the Energy Department approved a loan guarantee for Solyndra when the company was so clearly troubled. But politicizing this mess to smear the entire renewable energy industry won't help the country or the jobless. This industry is estimated to have doubled its number of American jobs in the past two years. Demonizing it could cripple its job-creating potential. San Jose's SunPower is the latest victim. Fox News has made a series of outrageous claims about it, calling its $1.2 billion federal loan guarantee a scandal "bigger than Solyndra." This is utterly baseless. Fox, without a...

To win in 2012, Obama's going to have to act a bit more like the tyrants he's so proud of toppling. Barack Obama can't get away from talking about dictators. Four years ago, candidate Obama controversially asserted that his administration would be open to negotiations with autocratic governments like Syria, Iran, and North Korea. Today, responding to Republican criticisms that he has been weak or hesitant on foreign policy, the U.S. president's supporters are more likely to trot out the fact that three longtime dictatorships have fallen under his watch. How much credit the president deserves for this is certainly...

Reporting from Ogallala, Neb.— On the edge of the Nebraska sand hills is Lake McConaughy, a 22-mile-long reservoir that in summer becomes a magnet for Winnebagos, fishermen and kite sailors. But officials here in Keith County, population 8,370, imagined this scene: an Al Qaeda sleeper cell hitching explosives onto a ski boat and plowing into the dam at the head of the lake. The federal Department of Homeland Security gave the county $42,000 to buy state-of-the-art dive gear, including full-face masks, underwater lights and radios, and a Zodiac boat with side-scan sonar capable of mapping wide areas of the lake...

John Mueller and his students analyze the 33 cases of attempted [EDITED TO ADD: Islamic extremist] terrorism in the U.S. since 9/11. So few of them are actually real, and so many of them were created or otherwise facilitated by law enforcement. The death toll of all these is fourteen: thirteen at Ft. Hood and one in Little Rock. I think it's fair to add to this the 2002 incident at Los Angeles Airport where a lone gunman killed two people at the El Al ticket counter, so that's sixteen deaths in the U.S. to terrorism in the past ten...