Free Republic

Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday she will focus much of her attention on issues promoting early childhood development, women and children and economic issues as part of the foundation created by her husband, former President Bill Clinton. The former first lady and potential 2016 White House contender offered her most extensive description of her post-Obama administration agenda since leaving her role as the nation's top diplomat. Clinton walked out to applause on stage at a Clinton Global Initiative America meeting in Chicago.

Strobridge Elementary School in Hayward, Calif., held a toy-gun exchange program over the weekend, according to a report from CBS-5 San Francisco. Inspired by gun buy-back programs that focus on getting weapons off the streets, Principal Charles Hill felt a similar program for toys made a lot of sense. "Playing with toys guns, saying 'I'm going to shoot you,' desensitizes them," said Hill, "so, as they get older, it's easier for them to use a real gun." Students who participated were given books in exchange for their toy guns. They were also enrolled in a raffle to win a bike,...

When the Newtown shooting took the lives of 20 children, the nation was justifiably horrified. Journalists reported round the clock on ways to change public policy to prevent another shooting. But when seven children and a mother died in a Philadelphia abortion clinic dubbed a “house of horrors,” the major media couldn’t have cared less. It’s a news story that reads more like a Hollywood torture plot – “Saw” or “Hostel” or some other movie so foul that it makes you want to take a shower just having viewed it. Only this case is real and the media are keeping...

While Obama and the Democrats are sealing us blind with over Sixteen Trillion Dollars of debt pilled upon our children, now they want to take away our RIGHT to defend ourselves, with "gun control", yet they refuse to defend our children by arming our teachers. So it's time that Concealed Carry of the Beretta Model 93 Raffica machine pistol become every United States Citizen's RIGHT. No longer will we have to wait for an unbearable time for government officials to defend our children and watch them die, while waiting for socialists government officials to show up after the murder has...

Superintendents Paint Dire Picture If California's Prop. 30 Fails As Gov. Jerry Brown's revenue-raising proposition loses support, school superintendents say class sizes could grow, cherished programs could die and jobs will be lost. What we face is the biggest challenge in public education since the state of California was founded," said state Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson By Stephen Ceasar, Los Angeles Times October 26 As children peered at them through an elementary school fence in Cerritos on Friday, about a dozen school superintendents explained the consequences they will face if California voters fail to approve Proposition 30. In...

Chicago Teachers Vote to Continue Strike By STEPHANIE BANCHERO The Chicago public school teachers strike entered its second week after the teachers union declined Sunday to call off a week-long walkout that has catapulted the city into the national debate over teacher evaluations and job security. Only hours earlier, Chicago Teachers Union officials had trumpeted new concessions they said they had extracted from Mayor Rahm Emanuel during talks to settle the strike that started last Monday and has canceled classes for 350,000 students in the nation's third largest district. The vote to continue the strike came Sunday night by the...

The President told his supporters earlier this week at a fundraiser that Planned Parenthood should keep getting funding so that his daughters could “control their own health care choices.” Obama enthusiastically promoting Planned Parenthood is nothing new. But the radically pro-abortion President shamelessly including his 11 and 14 year old daughters in his Planned Parenthood pitch is a new low.   “Mr. Romney wants to get rid of funding for Planned Parenthood. I think that is a bad idea,” Obama said. “I’ve got two daughters. I want them to control their own health care choices. We’re not going backwards, we’re...

The ads are really obnoxious about how "big corporations" oppose limits on mercury and how Claire McCaskill "stood tall" against them. And, I kid you not, they ended with "For the Children." I am absolutely certain this is not a legitimate religious group, but a bunch of Lefties running a false-flag operation. Does anybody know anything about these goons?

The percentage of Californians who smoke has dropped to an all-time low of 11.9 percent, the second-lowest in the nation behind Utah's 9.1 percent. That's good news for the health of Californians, but bad news for the state's budget and First 5 program, which funds local services for children up to age 5. The decline in smoking was anticipated, but it has descended at a much sharper rate than predicted. As a result, California will face difficulty in funding $16 billion in bonds the state has issued since 2001. The bonds are supposed to be financed by payments from the...

ORANGE – Parents in Orange Unified received a letter at the beginning of the school year asking them to donate $40 for each day their child misses class to help offset the $5.5 million in attendance funding the district loses annually. Five months later, the district has netted $920.

New Playgrounds Are Safe—and That's Why Nobody Uses Them The problem with safety guidelines is that they make most playgrounds so uninteresting as to contribute to reduced physical activity. Playgrounds don't look like they used to. Steep metal slides and wooden towers have given way to slow, plastic slides and carefully penned-in climbing contraptions. And forget about seesaws -- they're a thing of the past. When kids are bored by unimaginative (read: safe) playground equipment, they're less active as a result, and with childhood obesity at epidemic proportions, that's a danger, too. An interesting new investigation looks into this phenomenon....

Proposition 103, the only statewide tax increase on the November ballot across the country, is going down tonight, according to number-crunchers in my home state of Colorado. If the results of this massive tax hike referendum had gone the big government/big labor lobby’s way, it would be front-page news tomorrow and Debbie Blabberman-Schultz would be crowing about it non-stop on MSNBC. Instead, crickets will chirp. White House, pay attention: Colorado voters have rejected an attempt to raise state income and sales taxes to fund education, The Denver Post has declared. Colorado voters were saying no to a major tax increase...

An Illinois judge ruled Thursday that the state can stop working with Catholic Charities on adoptions and foster care placements — something the state decided to do in July after the not-for-profit agency refused to recognize Illinois' new civil unions law. In his ruling, Sangamon County Circuit Judge John Schmidt said that no one, including Catholic Charities, has a legal right to a contract with the state government. He did not address the more sensitive issue of whether a state contractor that refuses to serve gays and lesbians is violating the state's new civil unions law. The state Department of...

Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday signed into law a measure ... addressing controversy over an anti-abortion demonstration. Assemblyman Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia) said he wrote the measure in response to a March 2003 incident in which graphic images of an aborted fetus were mounted on a vehicle and driven past a middle school in Rancho Palos Verdes. "Because of the disturbing nature of the photographs, some students at the scene became angry, some began to cry...’’ Mendoza said. The bill was signed three years after a federal court found that the 1st Amendment rights of anti-abortion activists were violated when they...

Boing-boing notices that “yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee voted 19-10 for H.R. 1981, a data-retention bill that will require your ISP to spy on everything you do online and save records of it for 12 months. California Rep Zoe Lofgren, one of the Democrats who opposed the bill, called it a ‘data bank of every digital act by every American’ that would ‘let us find out where every single American visited Web sites.’” The databank is “for the children”. HR 1981 is actually titled “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011″. Its sponsors say “the Protecting Children from Internet...

Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers' activities for one year--in case police want to review them in the future--under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today. The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall's elections, and the Justice Department officials who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements, a development first reported by CNET. A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses,...

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Monday refused to let California regulate the sale or rental of violent video games to children, saying governments do not have the power to "restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed" despite complaints about graphic violence. On a 7-2 vote, the high court upheld a federal appeals court decision to throw out the state's ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Sacramento had ruled that the law violated minors' rights under the First Amendment, and the high court agreed....

Ramesh, as an antidote to Maureen Dowd’s take, here’s Weiner’s former girlfriend Kirsten Powers. When the Twit hit the fan, Kirsten received certain assurances from him about his innocence and, based on those, went out on Fox and elsewhere and defended him. Unlike too many my-Democrat-right-or-wrong types, she’s done with him: As I have recovered from the shock of seeing an old friend’s life unravel and have had time to get my mind around the extensive and sociopathic lying in which he engaged, there seems to be no other choice than for him to step aside and stop hurting his family, friends, and...

The other day, Tommy Christopher published an interesting article regarding two underage girls who had claimed to have incriminating DMs from Anthony Weiner. Christopher called the girls “Betty” and “Veronica” and said that they had admitted to him that they had lied. That may be . . . but there are some aspects of their claims (and those of their parents) that I think merit some examination. (...)

TSA strip searches young boy.