Free Republic

White further defines Prop 2 changes He wants to exempt funds for public safety from the revenue cap Mayor Bill White released new details Tuesday about his proposed changes to a 2004 charter provision that capped all city revenue, saying he would amend it to exempt funds for public safety. White has already said he wanted to generally limit the cap, known as Proposition 2, to apply only to revenues collected into the city's general fund. That fund gets most of its money from property and sales taxes, and it supports basic city services like police, firefighting, parks and libraries....

July 27, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In his July 2006 Interim newspaper article, “How to Chip away at abortion”, Interim editor Paul Tuns explains at length the logic and crucial continuing need of what are now called pro-life incremental strategies and which are often misunderstood by pro-life North Americans. Tuns presents these step-by-step law changes, such as banning partial-birth abortions and requiring parental consent for abortion of a minor, as being “incremental” tactics necessary for paving the way for an eventual prohibition of all abortions. The United States pro-life movement has successfully fought for a series a these legislative changes...

LINCOLN PARK, Mich. (AP) — A chain of fitness centers has put up partitions in response to complaints by Muslim women about a lack of privacy while they work out. Fitness USA agreed to the changes at its Lincoln Park gym after meeting with a concerned Muslim member of the gym and Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Some Muslim members of the gym said they need to work out in single-sex rooms to meet Islam's standards of modesty. They said they joined Fitness USA because it accommodated this need. But the...

SURVEY Should People Be Allowed To Have Pit Bulls At Pets? Yes No Results so far: Yes 57% No 43% Poll Link Here

WASHINGTON -- The Senate has agreed to put an additional $1 billion this year into a program to help poor people with energy costs, but only after overcoming resistance from warm state senators who said those suffering from summer heat weren't getting their fair share.The additional spending would increase to $3.1 billion the amount the federal government will have this year for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, a decades-old program that subsidizes heating and cooling costs for poor families.The legislation, which still must be considered by the House, passed by a voice vote Tuesday, but only after a...

Many of you have heard conservative traditionalists rant about "The Gay Agenda." But no one really knows what that agenda is. Well, I've discovered a copy, and I will summarize it for you: 8am - Protein shake 9am - Work out at the gym 10am - Rape straight men, give pornography to children, bulldoze all churches and destroy the sanctity of marriage (or what's left of it after Fox's "Married By America.") Hey, wait a minute... Some of the most important people in my life are gay men and lesbian women. And I can assure you, being gay does not...

Do we deserve it? http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Philosopher David Hume warned that, "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." That's why we should guard against any encroachment on liberty, no matter how small. Let's look at a couple of instances where, at our peril, we've failed to do so. ... Suppose, in 1963, America's atheists had revealed and demanded their complete agenda: elimination of religious Christmas symbols in public places, elimination of the words "under G-d" in our Pledge of Allegiance, elimination of "In G-d We Trust" from our currency and elimination of caroling in...

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The nation's largest companies have become leaders in extending rights to gay, bisexual and transgender employees, according to a published report Monday. The Washington Post, citing a study by the advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, reports that among the Fortune 500, 216 companies, or more than 40 percent, provided domestic partner benefits. That's about 10 times the number that offered those benefits a decade ago.

When Incrementalism Really Means Compromise I was a mere high school student when I attended my first "contemporary" church service during the "Jesus Freak" movement of the early 1970's in Costa Mesa, California.  Up to that point in my life, I was exposed to more formal type church services only.  Nevertheless, this new kind of church service shocked me very little, because I was made aware (many times, until the point was driven home), of the "logic" behind this modern type worship. The example I heard most promoting the positive aspects of this new movement was, "we are building bridges to...

www.gunowners.org May 2003 Descent Into Madness: 48 Hours In The California Legislative System by Michael Marks Stereotypes are a common part of American culture. Often as not they are based on a grain of truth wrapped in a mile of exaggeration. While most of us enjoy a good laugh at the wacky world of California politics, a rational man might think that accounts of strange thinking on the Left Coast, like any good bass fishing story, were a little larger than life. After spending two days in the halls of California state government in Sacramento, it is apparent that the...

…but that's not possible. Here's how the Washington Post's Dana Milbank began his Page 1 analysis of the White House's newly announced position on gay marriage: "With President Bush's embrace yesterday of a marriage amendment, the compassionate conservative of 2000 has shown he is willing, if necessary, to rekindle the culture wars in 2004." This neatly encapsulates everything that's wrong with inside-the-Beltway discussions of the culture war we currently find ourselves in. Presidents do not start culture wars; they react to them. They can fan or soothe passions, but they cannot create divisions that don't already exist. Indeed, both Bush...

Likening tax to Holocaust outrageous THIS is the way things happen in my business. In October, an extremely influential GOP activist and White House insider, Grover Norquist, was interviewed by Terry Gross on her National Public Radio program, "Fresh Air." By December, a portion of that interview was reprinted in Harper's Magazine where, over the holidays, I happened to see it. I am writing about it today because, among other things, Norquist compared the estate tax to the Holocaust. This remark — so bizarre and tasteless that I fell it deserved checking — sent me to the show's transcript, which,...

"When I began entering into the give and take of legislative bargaining in Sacramento, a lot of the most radical conservatives who had supported me during the election didn't like it. "Compromise" was a dirty word to them and they wouldn't face the fact that we couldn't get all of what we wanted today. They wanted all or nothing and they wanted it all at once. If you don't get it all, some said, don't take anything. "I'd learned while negotiating union contracts that you seldom got everything you asked for. And I agreed with FDR, who said in 1933:...

Jews are once again visiting the holiest site in Judaism. Israeli police have begun to allow non-Muslims, under police escort, to enter the Temple Mount grounds in the Old City of Jerusalem, despite threats of violence by Muslim leaders. About two weeks ago, Interior Security Minister Tzachi Hanegbi announced Jews would soon be allowed on the Temple Mount, "even if no agreement is reached with the Waqf." The Waqf is the Muslim Religious Trust, a group of Islamic clerics appointed to administer the site by the Palestinian Authority's Yasser Arafat. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon reportedly expressed skepticism about the plan...

Abstract This working paper presents an agent-based computation model of civil violence. We present two variants of the Civil Violence Model. In the first, a central authority seeks to suppress decentralized rebellion. In the second, a central authority seeks to suppress communal violence between two warring ethnic groups.   Full Article as a .pdf file