Free Republic

Just got this in email tonight, and thought I'd pass it on to my fellow Texans. There's an important vote coming up on Wednesday, 8 May in the Texas Senate regarding smart meters. This is a call to contact your state Senator regarding this important vote. The email: To my Friends in Texas – I’m going to just ask you to trust me! Most of you on this list know that I’m not into “radical” stuff – and many know that although I have passed along a little info opposing Smart Meters in the past, it has definitely not been...

"I am not one of your locally home grown house negroes. I don’t shuffle, I don’t tap dance, and I don’t take out the garbage… Some of the citizens in Martinsville need to wake up because I am black. I am also a voice for black people and we are tired, we are fed up and we are not taking it anymore” said Sharon Brooks Hodge, a member of Martinsville City Council, speaking to a Martinsville television reporter.

Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette, a lead sponsor of the federal ban on personal defense-capacity magazines showed a Denver Post forum she doesn’t have a clue as to what it is she wants to ban, and the “clarifying” statement made by her spokeswoman served to confirm the ignorance of both women. “I will tell you these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now they’re going to shoot them, so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot...

I've seen this photo on my Facebook news feed with no text, which is fine because thinking people know how idiotic this sign is.The problem is there's more of them than there are of us, so it's good to see it modified to educate. From Super Conservative.

President Obama elaborated on his argument against the Keystone Pipeline project by making the case that cheaper oil would not increase jobs in America. “Let’s just consider one example,” the President suggested. “The portion of this oil that would go into fueling transportation would clearly have a negative impact on employment. Your typical motor vehicle engine has over 100 horse-power. That means if we didn’t have the means to fuel these engines we’d have to use 100 horses to achieve the same transportation result. Is there any question that breeding, raising, feeding, and housing 100 horses would employ more people...

Sheldon Richman and I spent a lot of time last week running through numbers from the Congressional Budget Office in order to gauge sequestration’s effect on federal spending. In the resulting column, Richman lays out the numbers and asks a pertinent question: How the $#!?% is the average voter supposed to have a clue about this stuff?  From Richman’s column:  I subjected myself to this pain because I’m a professional masochist. I’m paid to do it. How many people who are not so rewarded are likely to search for, locate, and download CBO spreadsheets to see the numbers for themselves?...

Last night on FOX, Bill O'Reilly confronted his guest General Colin Powell with the October 4, 2012 quote by John Sununu that "Obama is lazy." In the discussion that followed, the always accurate 'Jeff Foxworthy definition style' of the Liberal Media-shunned four letter word "Lazy" was not used. Thus, to correct this oversight, we FREEPERS are duty bound to allow the TRUTH about Hussein O. to rise to the surface! For example, Hussein Obama might be LAZY if he did NOT send in any US Military help to stop the seven hour murder of the four heros in Benghazi.

Let me see if I understand this correctly.  QE4 is announced and it was declared that bonds will be purchased for as long as the eye can see or until we achieve an unemployment rate of 6.5%.  Several weeks later, the majority of Federal Reserve officials announced that it would be “appropriate” to end QE4 prior to the end of 2013 or by the end of 2013.  So, what the heck happened to 6.5% unemployment?  The Fed, for almost 100-years, has operated with two mandated objectives, namely stable prices and full employment.  In order to achieve those goals, they can...

A few years ago, the big question for me was whether we should say that the public schools are bad because of incompetence or subversion. Incompetence is a pleasant cop-out. You have clumsy people who can’t do a job right. You have the gang that can’t shoot straight. You have F Troop, an old TV program. They’re clumsy and sort of ridiculous. But you don’t have to deal with that whole realm of intentional malfeasance, of evil. More and more, when I looked at the patterns over decades -- the same dumb methods and bad results--you couldn’t conclude it was...

Here's a which-is-better question for you. Suppose a New Jersey motel room rented for $125 a night prior to Hurricane Sandy's devastation. When the hurricane hits, a husband, wife and their two youngsters might seek the comfort of renting two adjoining rooms. However, when they arrive at the motel, they find that rooms now rent for $250. At that price, they might decide to make do with one room. In my book, that would be wonderful. That decision would make a room available for another family who had to evacuate Sandy's wrath. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and others...

Maryland Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings has demanded that a group planning to challenge voter access to the polls on Election Day provide him with details of its planned operations. Cummings targeted the organization True the Vote, saying the group planned to deploy hundreds of thousands of personnel across the country on Election Day to challenge the status of citizens who they believe may be ineligible to vote. “There have been reports from multiple states during the past two years that your organization is targeting predominantly minority communities and coordinating with the Republican Party in an attempt to intimidate legitimate voters,”...

"Never heard of Benghazi. Yes I'm an Obama supporter!facepalm

While i do believe that most polls are over sampling democrats, i think it's clear Romney would lose if the election were held today...Rasmussen has him up only one but the swing state picture is much worse when you look at the individual states...especially Ohio. We are kiddig ourselves if we think were going to match the 2010 turnout model with Obama at the top of the ticket. It will probably be somewhere between 2008 and 2010. The only time Romney made progress in the polls was when he added Ryan to the ticket. THats the one of the few...

A Washington Post poll published on Monday shows that 74 percent of Americans favor requiring photo ID to vote. Significant majorities of African-Americans and the elderly -- two groups liberals claim are likely to be "disenfranchised" by such requirements -- support a photo ID requirement. But as Mediaite editor Noah Rothman noted yesterday, in the 19 segments on voter ID that the liberal MSNBC cable news network aired on the issue between Monday morning and Thursday evening, none of them noted the results of the poll (my emphasis added): On Monday, a Washington Post poll that asked Americans to voice...

The use of the word "gaffe" is getting on my last nerve. "Journalists" are paid to say what their words mean, or depending on the philosophic outlook, to lie. Using the word "gaffe" by "journalists" who consider themselves on the other side of center from the speaker, a misspeak is sometimes characterized as a "gaffe," and usually an embarassing gaffe. When the speaker is on the same side of center as the journalist, it is never a gaffe, but simply "misspeaking." When one misspeaks it is obvious, i.e. Obama arrives in Kansas and says it's good to be back in...

Twitter was filled with patriotic declarations, pictures of fireworks and descriptions of highly-caloric barbeques on the Fourth of July. For a few celebrities, however, the day served only as a reminder of past injustices. Comedian Chris Rock, followed by actors Don Cheadle and Zach Braff, brought the unsaid racial tensions of the country to the front burner by reminding his followers that slavery continued for many years after the Declaration of Independence was signed.

The first attempt to formalize the study of ignorance came recently with historian Robert Proctor of Stanford University who coined the neologism "Agnotology" to describe what he believed to be culturally produced ignorance. His purpose was to expose junk science used by tobacco companies. Proctor's best contribution may be rhetorical, however. Science has lots of junk in the trunk, as do many other disciplines. Where method masks error, historic examples are legion. Phrenology, graphology, and astrology were all, at one time, considered sciences. And reason or precedent is often used to promote falsehoods. Even Galileo capitulated when confronted with the...

Poland had earlier insisted that Washington must do more than simply express the "regret" offered by another White House spokesman late on Tuesday, hours after Obama's use of words deemed offensive by Warsaw.... Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Obama's words had hurt all Poles and he expected more from Washington than just regret. "I am convinced that our American friends can today allow themselves a stronger reaction than a simple expression of regret from the White House spokesman -- a reaction more inclined to eliminate once and for all these kinds of errors," Tusk told reporters in Warsaw. "Today,...

With Romney’s recent victory in the Texas primary, Obama’s campaign of ignorance will officially begin as the general election campaign for the presidency has begun in earnest. Don’t believe me! Let’s take a closer look.

Sometimes, media coverage of a story becomes a story in its own right. It happened with Occupy Wall Street this past fall. Now it is happening with the Trayvon Martin case, where an unarmed African American 17-year-old was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch captain who claims he acted in self defense. Much of the European media coverage portrays the incident as part of a larger trend: what they seem to see as the pervasive and enduring problem of American racism. .... European coverage seems to call out the racism in the Trayvon Martin case as a clear continuance...

Gainesville, Florida, police are investigating what they believe may have been a “racially motivated” attack early Tuesday morning stemming from the nationally covered Trayvon Martin case involving the tragic death of an unarmed 17-year-old. According to local news affiliates, a 27-year-old Gainesville man was walking home from the bars early Tuesday morning when he said he was jumped by five to eight men who yelled “Trayvon” before the attack. The call before the attack appears to be in reference to the Sandford case that has rocked national headlines, and led to broader societal discussions on crime and race.

Police seized some guns in Nashua, NH, writer Carl Bussjaeger noted over the weekend on Bear’s Blog. “At least two papers and a TV station are carrying the story on their web sites,” he explained. “Notice that I used the singular form of ‘story’ despite multiple venues. All three ‘reports’ look to be slightly paraphrased re-issues of the same law enforcement press release.” Why was Bussjaeger concerned, and why should we be? “What originally caught my eye in this story was the claim that three ‘AK-47 assault rifles’ and a submachine gun (UnionUseless Leader says ‘Tec 9 machine pistol"’, Nashua...

In the James Madison monument controversy [Letters, “Monument Muddle,” Winter 2011], the important thing is not at all anything about some stones (or whatever); it is the marvel that we are still honoring authors of the disastrous Constitution that some Virginians wrote in the 18th century and which is going to inevitably wreck the United States. These Southern gentlemen thought they knew everything that would be valid forever and that nothing should ever be changed. It shows: In 220-plus years, only three amendments of significance have ever been made while Southerners were sitting in the Congress. The three we got...

Video at the link: O’REILLY: Congressman, the reason we like you as a guest is because you’re an honest man, But I will point to history. I will point to history. The same mindset was taken when dealing with Nazi Germany. We’re not going to go in aggressive action. We don’t believe they’re going to do this. We don’t believe they’re going to do that. And they absolutely did everything. So I think you’ve got to learn from history. ELLISON: Let me tell you in World War II, in World War II they attacked Pearl Harbor. That would be enough....

President Barack Obama tried to console frustrated supporters by placing blame for the slow pace of change on the nation’s “founding fathers.” “You and I know what needs to be done to bring social justice to every American,” the President observed. “But our enemies in Congress and the states are exploiting loopholes left in the Constitution by our nation’s early leaders. The requirement that laws must be approved by both houses of Congress enables obstructionists to block the mandate I received from voters in 2008. The autonomy granted the states under the Tenth Amendment insulates them from total compliance with...

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is warning employers that requiring new hires to have a high school diploma violates federal law. “The deplorable performance and almost total lack of standards exhibited by the nation’s public schools cast a pall of considerable doubt over the equity and utility of using high school graduation as a criteria for employing a person,” declared Daniel Blunt, spokesman for the EEOC. “Supposing a person has a diploma, what does this signify?” Blunt asked. “Standardized tests reveal that a remarkably large percentage of high school graduates are distressingly stupid. Even if graduates are less stupid...

"A woman who wanted to work at a nightclub started searching for someone who could perform plastic surgery at a cheap price to give her a curvier body. Police say what she found was a woman posing as a doctor who filled her buttocks with cement, mineral oil and flat-tire sealant."

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Rick Perry. Let's do this. Let's go back October 20th on this show, and I said this. Number three, audio sound bite number three. Go back in order. RUSH ARCHIVE: Rick Perry -- and I mean this in a complimentary way. People are gonna find this not strange or not hard to believe, but you might be confused by this. Rick Perry makes me laugh. But not at him. I laugh with the guy. RUSH: I gotta tell you: Rick Perry, to me, is funny. During the debate when he decided to go after Mitt Romney for...

PRINCETON, N.J., Oct. 24 (UPI) -- Most Americans say they would amend the Constitution to swap the Electoral College with a popular-vote system to elect the president, a poll indicates. Sixty-two percent of Americans prefer replacing the Electoral College and 35 percent would keep the current method for electing presidents, results from a Gallup poll released Monday indicated. For the first time since the disputed 2000 presidential election, the majority of Republicans said they favor amending the Constitution, the Princeton, N.J., polling agency said. That year, Democrat Al Gore won the national popular vote but Republican George W. Bush wound...

Texas Gov. Rick Perry doesn’t have a reputation as the most scientifically inclined of candidates..... But there’s one kind of science that Perry is willing, even eager, to run on: political science. And that should have his opponents worried. In...“The VictoryLab,” Sasha Issenberg digs deep into Perry’s campaign organization, which he calls “the brainiest political operation in America.” After seven straight wins at the ballot box, Perry’s organization is also among the most fearsome in America. And there’s nothing unscientific about it. In fact, compared with Perry’s organization, every other campaign in America appears in denial of the evidence. The...

We live in an age of babies. It's official. And I HATE it. Today, as I was fundraising for the YAF 9/11 Never Forget Project, I was pulled into the office of my head of school. I was told to take down the posters we had up, that read "Never Forget" with pictures of various attacks on Americans, such as 9/11, the bombing of the Marine barracks, and a picture of Daniel Pearl with a gun to his head. Now, my head of school said that the picture with the gun was inappropriate. Granted, I do go to a school...

Durbin: Maybe Illegal Alien Will Become President Someday Wednesday, June 29, 2011 By Terence P. Jeffrey (CNSNews.com) - Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.) said in a congressional hearing Tuesday that a young person who is an illegal alien in the United States today may someday become president. “When I look around this room, I see America's future, our doctors, our teachers, our nurses, our engineers, our scientists, our soldiers, our congressmen, our senators, and maybe our president,” Durbin said immediately after having asked all young persons in the room to stand if they were currently undocumented aliens who would...

Robert Allison Chairman of History Department of Suffolk University when interviewed by NPR specifically supported Sarah Palin on Paul Revere.

California's attempts to switch to green energy have inadvertently put the survival of the state’s golden eagles at risk. Scores of the protected birds have been dying each year after colliding with the blades of about 5,000 wind turbines. Now the drive for renewable power sources, such as wind and the sun, being promoted by President Obama and state Governor Jerry Brown has raised fears that the number of newborn golden eagles may not be able to keep pace with the number of turbine fatalities. The death count along the ridgelines of the Bay Area’s Altamount Pass Wind Resource Area...

Ignorance, hatred, and meanness of spirit. DUmmie Family Values? No, this is what DUmmie Cyrano says America is like under our fascist overlords with their ready supply of mindless drones. It is only the superior advanced state of enlightened progressives that keeps our country from being a complete hellhole. But it is hanging by a thread. As we see in *this* THREAD, "Ignorance, hatred, and meanness of spirit." So let us see what Cyrano du Brainiac and the rest of the highly evolved DUmmies have to say, in Bolshevik Red, while the commentary of your humble guest correspondent, Charles...

According to a report posted by Yahoo, it appears that most teens do not know who Osama bin Laden is. Two thirds of people who searched “who is Osama bin Laden” on Sunday turned out to be teenagers: Teens ages 13-17 were seeking more information as they made up 66% of searches for “who is osama bin laden?” More from the Yahoo report: According to Yahoo!, The Top Searched Questions on Osama bin Laden are (based on Sunday, 5/1): Is Osama bin Laden dead? How did Osama bin Laden die? Who killed Osama bin Laden? How old is Osama bin...

The south is still realizing the full extent of the damage caused by this week’s storms. Nearly 300 people are dead. The country is rallying in support of the devatated areas, and President Obama (who must have learned something from ignoring Nashville’s flood last year) is set break character to visit the very red state today. Anyone with a soul feels pain for those affected. Thousands have lost everything. Lives were destroyed. Think Progress (via Da Tech Guy) has instead chosen to adopt the Pat Robertson model and claim Divine Justice for those redneck Republican climate change deniers in the...

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Three people were struck by a car and police are searching for the individual they say was responsible after a melee broke out at the McDonald's 'National Hiring Day' event at St. Clair Ave. and East 105th St. Det. Theodore Perez with the Cleveland Police Department tells Fox 8 News' Melissa Reid, a fight broke between two females outside the event. Sgt. Joseph O'Neal with the Cleveland Police Department says one of the women was asked to leave by the owner and operator of the McDonald's and the store's manager. Sgt. O'Neal says the woman who was...

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL), who admits to owning an iPad, blames the Apple Inc. product for "eliminating thousands of American jobs." "A few short weeks ago I came to the House floor after having purchased an iPad and said that I happened to believe, Mr. Speaker, that at some point in time this new device, which is now probably responsible for eliminating thousands of American jobs. Now Borders is closing stores because, why do you need to go to Borders anymore? Why do you need to go to Barnes & Noble? Buy an iPad and download your newspaper, download...

The Electoral College, the means by which Americans chose their President throughout the nations history, is facing its most serious challenge yet. Polling shows that 75% of Americans no longer see the value of the institution, and want to switch over to direct democratic elections where the winner of the national popular vote also wins the Presidency. There are two ways of achieving this end. The first, a Constitutional Amendment, is a long and difficult process that requires the approval of 3/4 of the states. However, there exists an alternative method that goes around the Electoral College by abolishing it...

With a government shutdown looming, Capitol Hill was a pretty serious place on Wednesday afternoon. But for Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.), what better way to ease the tension than with a congressional ladies personal shopping trip in Arlington, Va.? According to an email from Brown’s scheduler titled, “Outing with Congresswoman Corrine Brown,” staff member Cathy Gass invited Brown’s fellow female Congressional Black Caucus members to join the lawmaker at a boutique in Crystal City, Va. on Wednesday afternoon. According to the email, which was addressed to “CBC Schedulers,” Brown “would like to invite the woman [sic] CBC Members to go...

Conservative women who hate Sarah Palin confound me. What has especially alarmed me has been the amount of women who hate her as a woman. I know that is the reason, because – and this is the important part – when you ask them WHAT “scares” them about her (a favorite “Halloweeny” term used in place of the word “hate”), the answer is the same from conservative and liberal women alike. “She’s so dumb.” How? Uh, crickets chirping.

With Christopher Hitchens teetering on the brink of eternity, revisit this query from 2007: Do we have any prayer volunteers for Christopher Hitchens? He’s the self -proclaimed “atheist/anti-theist,” and stunningly clever wordsmith. He leapfrogged puzzled agnosticism to a pledged rebellion against God. He’ll be a tough turn-around, so thick is his iron-clad ignorance of the divine. In a recent Newsweek he cynically dissects Mother Teresa’s dark theological struggles, a postscript to his derisive 1995 book, “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.” A week ago he was a featured speaker for an Atheist Alliance conference in Washington DC....

A Department of Education study indicating that 82% of the nation’s public schools could be labeled “failing” under standards set by the No Child Left Behind Act has sparked a discussion of the need for “change.” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan characterized the Act’s approach as “fundamentally flawed.” “What other government service demands such strict standards of accountability?” Duncan asked. “Do we penalize public transit because it can’t deliver cost-effective transportation? No, we invest more resources to keep it going. We ought to do the same thing for our public schools.” Duncan also maintained that the goal of having all...

Charles Darwin observed “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” That was certainly true in 1995 when a man named McArthur Wheeler boldly robbed two banks in Pittsburgh without using a disguise. Security camera footage of him was broadcast on the evening news the same day as the robberies, and he was arrested an hour later. Mr. Wheeler was surprised when the police explained how they had used the surveillance tapes to catch him. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled incredulously. He seemed to believe that rubbing his face with lemon juice would blur his image and make...

StandWithUs, an international organization that seeks Middle East peace by challenging the widespread ignorance about the issues, has released the following video - highlighting the utter ignorance about Israel, Hamas and related matters in one of America's top universities. Israel IQ at UCLA

Does God exist? Are there multiple gods? Is man his own god? These questions have drawn lines across the world. These questions affect not only relationships between people, but those between people and their governments. Under some governments, certain religions are forbidden and persecuted, while others are promoted or enforced. In the United States, a government founded on Christian principles and a trust in God, the government is increasingly allowing persecution of all forms of Christianity while enabling the progression of Islam. This is quite ironic considering adherents of Islam have been actively engaging in terrorist actions against the United...

Question: What do you call the Director of National Int Director of National Intelligence when he seems to be short of intelligence? Answer: James Clapper. On Monday, Diane Sawyer asked the White House's top anti-terrorism brains about the fallout from the sweeping arrests of 12 men in the UK early that morning. Clapper's response: Silence. Crickets. The sound of one career, well, imploding. Pressed by Sawyer, he admitted he simply hadn't heard of the matter. It was a mortifying lapse given Clapper's position: As DNI, he oversees all 16 US intelligence agencies and serves as chief intel adviser to the...

Invincible IgnoranceBy PAUL KRUGMAN December 15, 2010, 9:24 am So Republican members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission are going to issue their own report, placing primary blame on the government — because it’s always the government’s fault. And according to reporting at the Huffington Post, all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases “Wall Street” and “shadow banking” and the words “interconnection” and “deregulation” from the panel’s final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by Brooksley E. Born, one of the six commissioners who voted against the proposal. Yep. It was all...

An audio clip from about two months ago has been uncovered by The Blaze which clearly demonstrates that, even with all of his opining and public speaking skills, there is a reason that Howard Dean’s most notable quote will always remain a timelessly incoherent scream.  Despite being a one-word definition of ignorance, Dean doesn’t mind discussing how to control the media in an effort to educate what he considers to be the ignorant masses – Americans. What would he do about the media? “I would bring back the Fairness Doctrine so you couldn’t have a spectacle of a Fox Flooze, which...