Free Republic

Last week I delivered a guest lecture at a Christian liberal arts college entitled “Each Day Dies With Sleep: Literary and Theological Reflections upon Mortality.” As I thought through the topic over the previous weeks, two superficially disparate questions puzzled me. Why is it that the people most vocally committed to causes connected to death (abortion, assisted suicide, euthanasia) are often the same who are committed to progressive sexual causes? And why do abortion advocates frequently see it not as a necessary evil but as a positive good? As to the first question, that the same people often, though not...

If parents can't rescue their children from the indoctrination of public schools, we're headed down a dead end road as the march of Marxism through Western society will never be interrupted Dick and Jane, who used to teach children to read from the 1930s through to the 1970s in the United States, are no more. Wiped out from life in education, they’ve been transcended in class by the transgendered and other members of the LGBT ranks, who now become societal firsts. It’s a fast moving world, one in which the ideal of sending children to learn ‘readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmatic’...

Under current law, employers are required to pay time-and-a-half wages to employees working more than 40 hours a week only if they earn less than $23,660 annually. The Obama administration is intent on increasing - and likely more than doubling - that salary threshold, according to people briefed on the administration's plans. That change is likely to have significant impact on workers in retail and the food services industry, like a restaurant manger who earns $30,000 a year but works 60 hours a week. "We need a national wage floor that that rises each year, so that its purchasing power...

Martin O’Malley (D) says he plans to announce his presidential campaign in Baltimore. Perhaps he’ll used a burned-out police car or a looted storefront as his backdrop. The former Maryland governor and Baltimore mayor tried to blame last week’s unrest on structural problems in our economy, outsourcing and a failure to invest in infrastructure. Nice try. The fact is, O’Malley and the Democrats own Baltimore and the disaster it has become. As one resident who met O’Malley at an inner-city food drive last week put it, “He’s walking into the aftermath of his legacy.” It’s not his legacy alone. The...

Former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan wants you to eat more insects. Why? It’s better for the environment and your health, he argues. “Keeping meat consumption to levels recommended by health authorities would lower emissions and reduce heart disease, cancer, and other diseases,” Annan told The Guardian Sunday. “And of course there are alternative sources of protein. For example, raising insects as an animal protein source,” Annan said. “Insects have a very good conversion rate from feed to meat. They make up part of the diet of two billion people and are commonly eaten in many parts of the world.”

Changes in the Arctic Ocean are so profound that the region is entering what amounts to "a new era", according to Norwegian scientists. A switch from a permanent cover of thick ice will have far-reaching implications, they say. The Norwegian Polar Institute has been mounting an expedition to the Arctic Ocean during the year's coldest months. The director of the institute, Jan-Gunnar Wanker, said that measuring what happens in the winter was vital to improving scenarios for future climate change. "A new era has entered, we are going from old ice to young ice, thinner ice and the climate models...

It turns out that one of the most immediate impacts of global warming may be the loss of large herbivores. Renowned professor William Ripple, of the College of Forestry with the Oregon Sate University, led a team of global wildlife ecologists to conduct an inclusive study researching data on the largest herbivores to walk our planet today. In response to the study, he says, “I expected that habitat change would be the main factor causing the endangerment of large herbivores. But surprisingly, the results show that the two main factors in herbivore declines are hunting by humans and habitat change....

A Sacramento labor leader said Thursday he hopes the fate of a proposed $15 hourly minimum wage doesn't come down to a ballot-box battle. Fabrizio Sasso, executive director of the labor council, acknowledged that the ballot measure is a possibility. But he said the group is focusing for now on convincing the Sacramento City Council to adopt the minimum-wage proposal. An overwhelming majority of Sacramento residents favor the idea, he said. The labor group has set clear terms for the kind of council action it wants, however. Its leaders say a minimum-wage measure must: * Set a local minimum wage...

Holding global warming to a 2-degree Celsius temperature rise will fail to prevent many of climate change's worst impacts, a group of $cientists and other expert$ warned Friday. With a 2-degree temperature hike, small islands in the Pacific may become uninhabitable, weather-related disasters will become more frequent, workers in many parts of the world will face sweltering conditions and large numbers of people will be displaced, particularly in coastal cities, the expert$ warned. The 2-degree goal is "inadequate, posing serious threats for fundamental human rights, labor and migration and displacement" the expert$ said in a series of reports commissioned by...

San Francisco is getting ready to raise its minimum wage to $12.25 an hour, a rate that will have the city joining Oakland as the locales with the nation's highest legally mandated pay for non-salaried workers. San Francisco's new minimum is set to go into effect on Friday. It was approved by voters as part of an initiative that will increase the minimum wage to $15 in 2018. The National Employment Law Project estimates that 142,000 workers will receive the higher wages.

Independent U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described socialist and one of the most outspoken liberals in Congress, will seek the 2016 Democratic nomination for president, he told U.S. media on Wednesday. "I believe (voters) want a fundamental change so that government works for ordinary Americans and not just billionaires," Sanders told USA Today. He said he would make the announcement official on Thursday. Sanders also told the Associated Press in an interview he was running for president. With former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton looming as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in 2016, few other candidates have...

Wednesday was Anggie Godoy's 14th day since eating her last meal: French fries covered with grilled meat, cheese and guacamole. She hasn't had anything to eat since then - just water. "There are days where it's good and there are days where it's bad," she said about her fast. But what keeps her going is knowing that she's fighting for something just as critical to her survival. The 19-year-old daughter of Guatemalan immigrants is among a group of women who are close to completing a 15-day fast in Los Angeles. They hoped to persuade city council members there to raise...

A phased-in, $12-an-hour minimum wage will be proposed Thursday by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., with Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on hand to offer support. As many as half or more of the Senate’s 46 Democrats are expected to support the proposal. The $12 wage is higher than the the $10.10-an-hour minimum wage proposed by President Obama. Once a bipartisan cause — the last minimum wage increase was passed by a Democratic controlled Congress and signed by President Bush — efforts to raise the current $7.25-an-hour federal wage have been blocked in Congress. Speaker...

Soon more than 1 billion consumers in developing nations will be able to buy their first air conditioner, increasing energy demand, says co-author of new study. Global warming will increase sales of air conditioners, which in turn will increase climate change, according to a forthcoming study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The growth of global economies will allow more consumers around the world to buy more comforts, including air conditioners, according to the researchers from the University of California Berkeley. The increased use of air conditioners, however, will require significantly more electricity. Air conditioning and global warming,...

Florida has filed a lawsuit charging the Obama administration is trying to force it to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. Kicking off a legal battle involving both Medicaid expansion and a separate pot of federal funding for hospitals, Attorney General Pam Bondi filed suit Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida. The lawsuit was threatened last week by Gov. Rick Scott, who accuses the administration of trying to coerce him into expanding Florida's Medicaid program. Scott contends officials are pressuring him by threatening to halt an existing flow of federal funds used to reimburse hospitals for...

The untold – and terrifying – story behind the earthquake that devastated Nepal last Saturday morning begins with something that sounds quite benign. It’s the ebb and flow of rainwater in the great river deltas of India and Bangladesh, and the pressure that puts on the grinding plates that make up the surface of the planet. Recently discovered, that causal factor is seen by a growing body of scientists as further proof that climate change can affect the underlying structure of the Earth. Because of this understanding, a series of life-threatening “extreme geological events” – earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis –...

“We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth…We can and we must write in a language which sows among the masses hatred, scorn, and the like towards those who disagree with us”, wrote Vladimir Lenin. The basis of Lenin’s statement is very much alive today within the Democrat party as they relentlessly attack and sow hatred towards cultural, moral, and religious institutions that conservatives hold dear. “This is the basis of the great cultural war we’re undergoing…. We are two countries now. We are two countries morally, culturally, socially, and theologically. Cultural wars do not...

HARTSVILLE, Tenn. — Lynda Douglas thought she had a deal with Tennessee. She would adopt and love a tiny, unwanted, profoundly disabled girl named Charla. The private insurance companies that run Tennessee’s Medicaid program would cover Charla’s health care. Douglas doesn’t think the state and its contractors have held up their end. In recent years she says she has fought battle after battle to secure essential care to control Charla’s seizures, protect her from choking and tube-feed and medicate her multiple times a day. Washington regulators are about to initiate the biggest overhaul of Medicaid managed-care rules in a decade....

Japan used to have a pretty good reputation on climate change. Thanks to its robust industrial economy, it has the fourth-largest carbon footprint in the G20 nations. But it gets a sizeable chunk of its power from zero-carbon sources like hydro dams and, at least until the 2011 disaster at Fukushima, nuclear plants. In the aftermath of that disaster Japan decided to indefinitely shutter all of its nuclear power plants. The last one closed in September 2013, completely eliminating an energy source that had once provided nearly a third of the country's power. That hole has since been filled by...

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is spending $84,000 to study how churches can be used to combat climate change. A taxpayer-funded graduate fellowship at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is examining 17 faith-based institutions that have implemented "sustainability initiatives" in the hopes of developing workshops to teach pastors and other religious leaders how to change the behaviors of their congregants. "Climate change-which affects traditional faith-based efforts to improve human health, mitigate poverty and redress social inequity-is inspiring religious organizations to advocate for clean air and water, restore ecosystems, and conserve resources," a grant for the project, which began...