Free Republic

NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission is still gasping along, but at least one space blogger suggests that its cancellation is all but inevitable. In the meantime, Space News just on Tuesday reported that the space agency has decided that the ARM must actually capture a boulder and take it to a retrograde lunar orbit to be considered a success. This metric was actually in doubt, with some NASA managers suggesting that as long as an unmanned probe, propelled by a solar selection propulsion engine, rendezvoused with an asteroid and then returned, even without anything resembling a rock, it would be a...

...Reading conservative sites the last week, I’m getting that vibe from both the chattering skulls and their readers who show up in the comments. There’s a state of shock at what has transpired over the two weeks.Their preferred party sold them out to please global finance. The court untethered itself from the English language and made itself the enforcer for the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Not only was the Right not winning, they were blown off the field. As I pointed out the other day, the gay marriage ruling is the biggest assault on religious liberty in the history of...

Ban the Racist Democratic Party The Democrats act like they own black people and their founder really did. June 29, 2015 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. Last week, Hillary spoke at a dinner named after two slave owners. The slave owners, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, not only owned over 760 slaves between them, but they remain the key figures in the founding mythology of the Democratic Party. At the event, Hillary Clinton blasted the Republicans as the “party of the past”, but it’s...

I can think of many ways to describe our relationship with Israel. Bipartisan is not one of them, although that is what Susan Rice–that paragon of veracity and honor–told Charlie Rose. However, because Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to Congress at the invitation of House Speaker John Boehner, it has become a very partisan affair and, according to Rice, there would be repercussions. On its face this is a laughable statement coming from someone who knows better. Rice’s boss, the White House Mullah Obama, has directed her to denigrate Israel at every opportunity and in every possible way. Obama’s refusal...

Supporters of the Obama administration and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are rightly thrilled by the 6-3 decision reaffirming the subsidies essential to the functioning of the statute. The decision likely cements the statute in place as part of the U.S. healthcare system. However, the way that Chief Justice John Roberts reached that decision may provide the seeds for judicial curbing of regulation in other areas, and could very easily come up in future court cases regarding Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations on climate change. Some background is necessary. A 1984 Supreme Court case, Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense...

On June 25th, 2015, the majority of Supreme Court Justices, lead by Chief Justice Roberts, ruled that what the law says does not matter.   What matters is what the Justices want the law to say. This is an important break down in the rule of law.  We have seen it before from the Supreme Court, particularly from the Warren Court, and during the Roosevelt revolution of the 1930's and on.   There seemed to be a brief period in the early 2000s when the Court might actually follow the law of the land.  This was labelled by the left as...

Freedom of religion and the government "qualified" church Last week’s Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges opens another can of worms that is driving rhetoric in a way that misdirects people from the reality of its affect on religion and the free exercise thereof. No, this does not come from a lawyer, it comes from a missionary who, for more than 20 years, has delved into the legal entities that churches have embraced, essentially transforming their structure. And the change occurred innocently by way of the non-profit organization enticement. Here are some salient points: There is only one Law...

Take government out of the equation and offer up "Civil Unions," "Free Choice" and "Benefit Distribution Licenses." The Supreme Court has ruled that gay marriage is the new norm. But the real question is, should the government have any say in what constitutes marriage at all? What if there was a way to stop the controversy? What if we took government out of the business of marriage completely? We have seen, over the past 6 years, government remove any signs of “Faith” from our schools, our government offices, our memorials, our military and our foreign policy. But why then, are...

An estimated over 1 million people turned out to cheer on Chicago's 46th Annual Pride Parade Sunday, which included at least three weddings and a guest appearance by the Stanley Cup. But the rainbow-bedazzled partiers also had their share of random mayhem, including a person who allegedly drove a car into the parade, a woman who attempted to streak in front of Rahm Emanuel on a public dare from a Greek billionaire and the much more pointed die-in protest staged by a handful of #blacklivesmatter activists to raise awareness about the perceived white-washing of the LGBTQ movement. With last Friday's...

MANILA, Philippines - Same-sex marriage is impossible to be legalized in the country, Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. said yesterday. “From the point of view of our culture, it’s an impossibility for quite some time,” he told reporters. He said he does not see Congress approving a bill allowing same sex marriage because it is against the Filipinos’ culture. “The law lives within the culture and not the other way around,” he said. In the same breath, Belmonte said he does not see efforts to have Congress pass a divorce bill succeeding. “I don’t think we are going into something like...

Donald Trump brought his in-your-face presidential campaign to Chicago audience on Monday, declaring that if is he is elected, he would make America “rich,” stop illegal immigration and “knock out” federal health-care reform that the U.S. Supreme Court last week ruled the law of the land. And even as NBC became the latest network to sever its ties to Trump after he characterized Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals, Trump insisted he had nothing to apologize for, saying his remarks were “100 percent correct.”(continued)

and to the United States? Oh, Any Day Now Video at the link or at https://youtu.be/6JD7hPM_yxg From IMDB:With unprecedented access, CARTEL LAND is a riveting, on-the-ground look at the journeys of two modern-day vigilante groups and their shared enemy - the murderous Mexican drug cartels. In the Mexican state of Michoacán, Dr. Jose Mireles, a small-town physician known as "El Doctor," leads the Autodefensas, a citizen uprising against the violent Knights Templar drug cartel that has wreaked havoc on the region for years. Meanwhile, in Arizona's Altar Valley - a narrow, 52-mile-long desert corridor known as Cocaine Alley - Tim...

Since being inaugurated in 2009, President Barack Obama has issued 30 Presidential Policy Directives (PPD), 19 of which he has ordered to be kept secret from Congress and the American people. The existence of these documents — along with the scores of executive orders and signing statements — represent a corpus of presidential fiats masquerading as laws. As demonstrated in the history of these directives, for generations, presidents have carried out a plan to consolidate all functions of government into the hands of one “unitary” executive, aggrandizing the office of the president and reducing Congress to mere plaintiffs in lawsuits...

Less than forty-eight hours after King Anthony sovereignly provided new theology for our secular, civil religion, the left is now publicly calling for the abolition of tax-exempt status for religious non-profits and churches. It will come. It has to come. If gay marriage is a fundamental right under the equal protection clause, it is going to trump a lot of the first amendment. As Chief Justice Roberts noted, King Anthony’s theology precludes “free exercise” of religion. But all of this is down the road a few years. Let me tell you what is going to happen first. Silence. A newspaper...

Freedom to Marry Campaign Director Marc Solomon .... on Monday’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.” Solomon was asked how he would respond to those who argue people with religious objections should not be forced to provide services for same-sex weddings, he answered “The way I would counter it is that in America, if you are open to business, you’re open to business for everybody. We’ve been through this debate 50 years ago, on other crucial civil rights matters. And you don’t have a policy where companies, businesses say yes to many people but no to some. That’s a non-American approach and I...

The Greek market may be shocked and defaults of various debt instruments may emerge. While Americans are eagerly signing petitions to ban the American flag on the heels of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam leader call to ban the Stars and Stripes “due to its links to racism” or are busily banning anything attached in any way to the Confederate flag and our history, the United States and the world are in serious financial trouble driven by out-of-control debt, particularly the most visible nation of all, Greece. Healthcare for illegals, gay marriage, and other non-stop crises occupy American overwhelmed minds,...

For those genuinely interested in understanding Given the nature of the discussion following the gay marriage ruling last week, one thing that’s clear to me as a Christian who opposes gay marriage is that very few secular people - and sadly, by no means all Christians - really understand why Christians take the position we do. That’s why there is so much being said that doesn’t really reflect what Christians think. Some say we hate or we judge. Others say we are against love. Some think we’re threatened by homosexuals. Some think we object too vociferously because we secretly want...

If the White House is disgusted with anything, it's that she got caught According to a report published this weekend, not only did Hillary lie about the YouTube video but she also lied when she said she turned over all of her non-personal emails. ....And at least a few of the emails that she did manage to turn over were sanitized to downplay some politically uncomfortable realities. As the Washington Examiner reports: Hillary Clinton withheld Benghazi-related emails from the State Department that detailed her knowledge of the scramble for oil contracts in Libya and the shortcomings of the NATO-led military...

And probably leave the Eurozone too. If you want to know what happens when a nation absolutely refuses to reform its insane spending - even when it finds itself at the brink of fiscal collapse - I give you Greece. Not that you want it. The International Monetary Fund doesn’t. The Eurozone doesn’t. The Greek banking system is now shut down, and we’re a day away from Greece defaulting on its IMF bailout loans. When the Europeans presented Greece with an ultimatum - reform the spending now or be cut off - the most the Greek politicians were willing to...

No, really? (smiley face) “The debt is not payable,” Mr. García Padilla said. “There is no other option. I would love to have an easier option. This is not politics, this is math.” Well I'll be damned. On the other side of the table, of course, are hedge funds that bought the debt when Puerto Rico got in trouble at a deep discount and expect 100 cents on the dollar. They're not inclined to bargain, and will now (of course) look to the government to hand them a gun to use on Padilla. Unfortunately that doesn't change the math either....