Free Republic

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...

People seem to act irrationally when they have nothing to lose. Often we observe in wars that the losing side expends more blood and treasure after its position becomes hopeless. The American South sustained most of its casualties in the Civil War after July 1863, when the dual defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg made its position untenable. Athens suffered its worst casualties in the Sicilian gamble at the end of the Peloponnesian War. The Spanish ruined their empire and depopulated their core provinces during the second half of the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648 rather than cede dominance to France....

When President Barack Obama announced an agreement to double fuel-economy requirements Friday, standing with him were industry executives and environmental, public health and labor leaders, all of whom, remarkably, had signed off on the deal. But the real credit for this historic achievement, which is expected to cut oil consumption by 1.5 million barrels per day and eliminate half of all carbon pollution nationwide, doesn't go to the White House. Instead, thank California. For decades the state has set the nation's clean-energy agenda; it's been the tip of the spear in the fight for higher fuel standards. Its huge automobile...

No man is an island, especially in the markets. Our consumption basket includes the efforts of hundreds of millions of people around the world, and our right to consume depends on our ability to sell to hundreds of millions of people around the world. During the present century the number of adults in affluent and productive countries will shrink by about a third. All of us will be poorer. There will be a third fewer people earnings profits for businesses, paying taxes to governments, buying homes or cars, or taking vacations. Starting around 2015 the adult population will start to...

The lies are flying fast and furious this weekend (and all last week for that matter) related to the "debt ceiling" and partisan wrangling has reached a fever pitch, with some representatives now claiming that the Republicans are "racist" for refusing to raise it.Let's look at the facts, and deal with them - because we really have no other choice here.  I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but there's simply no way to make it shorter.I'm going to start with some indisputable history.  We'll begin with this chart, because it tells us exactly what the outcome of...

In the wake of the recent memo from the Obama administration which announced “prosecutorial discretion” in dealing with illegal aliens, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents across the country have been speaking out what many of them are calling a “backdoor amnesty.” On Wednesday, ICE Union president Chris Crane told PRNewswire: “Any American concerned about immigration needs to brace themselves for what's coming. This is just one of many new ICE policies in queue aimed at stopping the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws in the United States. Unable to pass its immigration agenda through legislation, the Administration is now implementing it...

June 5, 2011Liberal vs Conservative: A Spiritual Battle By Lloyd Marcus Without beating around the bush, I believe the battle being fought in America today goes beyond politics; right vs. left.  It is a spiritual battle; good vs evil."For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."  Ephesians 6:12The mindset of the American left is a spirit of Antichrist which is man making himself God.Before writing me off as a Bible nut, please hear me out.  Understanding this reality will...

The New York Times print plenty of anti-Scott Walker pro-Union stories, Op-eds and the like, so why not give the Governor ot Wisconsin equal time? That's right, giving the Governor a chance to write on his own behalf would be fair and balanced. We know that their is only one media organization that's model is "fair and balanced," and it's not the New York Times! (see Op-ed below)

At least three White House advisers and officials, including President Obama's regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, have ties to an effort funded by billionaire George Soros to push for a new, "progressive" U.S. Constitution WND first reported last week that Sunstein's wife, Samantha Power, has been a champion of a Soros-funded doctrine, entitled "responsibility to protect," which was used by Obama to justify engaging in an international military alliance to bomb Libya. As the National Security Council special adviser to Obama on human rights, Power reportedly influenced Obama in his decision. Now it has emerged that Sunstein has maintained extensive ties...

In the weeks since Governor Walker introduced his reforms to balance the budget and protect middle-class taxpayers the New York Times has repeatedly used its editorial pages to opine on the reforms. All told there have been at least seven editorials, op-eds or columns in the paper about the Wisconsin reforms. Below is the Op-Ed that Governor Walker wrote that the New York Times chose not to run: -SNIP-