Free Republic

Center for American Progress wants mileage-based highway fee By Keith Laing - 07/11/14 12:08 PM EDT The Center for American Progress is calling for Congress to ditch the federal gas tax in lieu of a system where drivers pay fees for road construction based on how many miles they travel. The proposed mileage-based system has been controversial in previous transportation funding debates because critics question how government would monitor the traveling habits of drivers without infringing upon their privacy. ADVERTISEMENT But the Center for American Progress said Friday that taxing drivers based on how far they drive is a much...

The downsides of using poll data to understand the arc of historyIn one of the most ambiguous poll questions ever, Gallup has asked Americans to once again act as a tenuous bellwether for the impending death of religion. In a May survey, more than 1,000 people were asked to pick between two vague sense impressions of faith: "Do you believe that religion can answer all of today's problems, or that religion is largely old fashioned and out of date?" Shockingly, only 13 percent of people took the out of answering "no opinion" or "other," which is one way of saying...

Vasectomy can increase risk of developing lethal prostate cancer Scientists have identified a link between having a vasectomy and developing lethal forms of prostate cancer Laura Donnelly, and Claire Carter 10:00PM BST 10 Jul 2014 Men who have a vasectomy face an increased chance of developing prostate cancer and a higher risk of contracting the most aggressive form of the disease, a study has found. The Harvard research on 50,000 men, the largest study to examine the link between sterilisation and cancer, found that those who had the procedure had a 10 per cent greater chance of developing the disease....

Obama: treacherous or incompetent? by LAWRENCE SELLIN, PHD July 7, 2014 For many, it is difficult to decide whether Barack Obama is intentionally trying to destroy the United States or that he is doing so as a consequence of some type of ideology-induced stupidity. The damage wrought through the implementation of his absurd and impractical liberal "solutions" to national problems is readily evident. When Barack Obama was inaugurated on January 20, 2009 the national debt of the United States was $10,626,877,048,913. As of Jun 26, 2014, the debt was $17,512,592,730,102. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in 2007...

The Moral Crisis on Our Southern Border A perfect storm of special interests have hijacked U.S. immigration law. By Victor Davis Hanson No one knows just how many tens of thousands of Central American nationals — most of them desperate, unescorted children and teens — are streaming across America’s southern border. Yet this phenomenon offers us a proverbial teachable moment about the paradoxes and hypocrisies of Latin American immigration to the U.S. For all the pop romance in Latin America associated with Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, few Latinos prefer to immigrate to such communist utopias or to socialist spin-offs like...

A JP Morgan Chase bank employee says he’s not only puzzled by an internal company survey that asked workers if they considered themselves friend of the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender community — he’s fearful of losing his job. The unnamed employee reported to Professor Robert George of Princeton, who runs a law blog, that this year’s company survey — which is distributed to employees annually as a means of gauging work satisfaction — asked respondents to note if they were disabled, had children or spouses and domestic spouses with disabilities and were members of the LGBT community, Breitbart reported. But the last question...

Darwin's 'Special Difficulty' Solved? by Nathaniel T. Jeanson, Ph.D. * Darwin's hypothesis of evolution faced enormous scientific challenges from the very outset of its publication. Recently, a group of evolutionists, publishing in the journal Science, claimed to have simplified one of those challenges. Have they? In Darwin's seminal work On the Origin of Species he identified numerous examples of biological structures that, at first pass, seem very difficult to evolve. He even wrote a chapter titled "Difficulties on Theory" which he began with this wry comment: "Long before having arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties...

Anatoly Kalyuzhniy: "This war - it is not only the beginning of the end of Putin, and perhaps the beginning of our recent human history" Interviewed by Tatiana MUHOMOROVA Kaliuzhnyj.jpgPodiyi Square and risky negotiations with the government leaders of the Church have been left behind, giving way to an armed conflict in the East. However, the mission of the Church is only compounded, since religious organizations are trying to help the people during such hardships that have befallen the country. On the prospects of service on the current situation in Russia, the war in the east and on the spiritual...

New Jerusalem Eatery’s Uniform Pricing Seeks to ‘Help People Make It’ JULY 3, 2014 10:08 AM Deborah Fineblum JNS.org - Omelet sandwich: 5 shekels. Iced coffee: 5 shekels. Tuna sandwich: 5 shekels. Fresh-squeezed orange juice: 5 shekels. Cheese bureka: 5 shekels. There’s plenty more on the Cofizz menu, but you get the idea. Dani Mizrahi and Amir Amshalm, two Israeli men in their early 30s, asked themselves: Why not launch a take-out food joint in busy neighborhoods around Jerusalem where everything—and that means everything—goes for five shekels, or about $1.50. They’d seen the concept take off in Tel Aviv, where...

'They Want to Cleanse the Christians:' 10,000 Flee Christian Communities in Northern Iraq as ISIS Takes Over Mosul, Says UNHCR BY LEONARDO BLAIR , CP REPORTER June 27, 2014|3:07 pm Some 10,000 people fled this week from predominantly Christian communities in Qaraqosh, Iraq, a neighboring city to Mosul where members of the militant group, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have reportedly overrun and are now viciously attacking Christians who fail to pay a poll tax. "Community leaders say the residents of Qaraqosh fled by bus, car and taxi into northern Iraq's Kurdistan region on Wednesday night. Many are...

Starting next year, Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis will require potential employees to pass a drug test–detecting nicotine. This so-called “job screening” will bar any applicants who smoke cigarettes, cigars, pipes, snuff, hookah, and even e-cigarettes from being eligible for employment. While the hospital already has a smoking ban on the premises and surrounding sidewalks, this policy forbids new employees from consuming tobacco anywhere, at any time.

Goodbye caped crusader, hello prophet! We’ve got an exclusive poster reveal of Christian Bale playing Moses in director Ridley Scott’s upcoming Old Testament epic Exodus: Gods and Kings. Bale’s armored warrior get-up is a far cry from the iconic beard-and-robe look sported by cinema’s most famous Moses, Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. But that’s by design: One of Bale’s conditions for taking the role, he told Entertainment Weekly, was “no fake beards.” “The biblical account of Moses is extraordinary, and there was lots of room for us to go to places that The Ten Commandments never dreamed of going,” the Oscar-winning actor...

Mentioning the “gay” agenda in the presence of an LGBT activist or any other Cultural Marxist is like pulling the string on a Sheriff Woody doll, you hear precisely the same recording each time: “What gay agenda? There is no gay agenda.” But, of course, the audacious lie that the now-global LGBT political movement has “no agenda” is as transparent as the Emperor’s new clothes. Indeed, their agenda is not only undeniable, it has unfortunately become unavoidable! An agenda is simply a plan or list of matters to be acted upon by a person or group related to a strategic...

Ayers the Guilt Monger: “And we did enslave people for 250 years” In the recent debate between Ayers and D’Souza on "The Kelly File", with Ayers, former anti-Vietnam war activist and sometime mentor of President Obama, representing the leftist ashamed-to-be-an-American crowd and D’Souza, defending American exceptionalism, Ayers claimed that Americans should be ashamed of their record of 250 years of slavery.

It is good to remember, at least once a year, that Independence Day is more than an old movie with Will Smith. “The enemy fleet was nearing Philadelphia,” Bob Morrison, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council writes. “Many delegates to the Continental Congress knew that if they were arrested, they would be tried for treason against the British Crown.” “The punishment for treason was hanging, drawing and quartering. Massachusetts’ Samuel Adams was not afraid. He moved that the delegates pray for God’s protection and guidance. But we are not all of one denomination, responded the devout young New...

Do Americans understand the scientific consensus about issues like climate change and evolution? At least for a substantial portion of the public, it seems like the answer is no. The Pew Research Center, for instance, found that 33 percent of the public believes “Humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time” and 26 percent think there is not “solid evidence that the average temperature on Earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades.” Unsurprisingly, beliefs on both topics are divided along religious and partisan lines. For instance, 46 percent of...

In a front page story about a new Supreme Court decision involving birth control and Wheaton College, a conservative Christian school, the Post story by Robert Barnes began this way: “The three female justices of the Supreme Court sharply rebuked their colleagues Thursday for siding with a Christian college in the latest battle over providing women with contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act, saying the court was retreating from assurances offered only days ago.” What is the Post trying to communicate here? Every conservative in the land gets it. This Supreme Court majority is not composed of five Justices....

Independence Day is the yearly pinnacle of patriotism. But, as the media in the 1960s and 70s reported, Americans did not seem very patriotic when it came to the Vietnam War. What if what we know about Americans’ lack of support for our troops in Vietnam is wrong?

It may be nothing, but when Prime Minister Stephen Harper thanked God for keeping the country safe on Canada Day, he did so with the heaviest of thumbs and it did not go unnoticed. In one tweet, Canada's leader nearly doubled the amount of Godly references he has made this year, hammering the reference into a Canada Day message, twice. "God bless you all, and God keep our true north, strong and free!" reads a message posted to Harper's official Twitter account.

On this Fourth of July, 238 years after Congress declared independence from the British Empire through the Declaration of Independence, it’s well worth reminding ourselves of a number of things about the Founding era. In 1776, numerous individuals, families, committees, congregations, localities, and states had already proclaimed their independence, and almost no remaining imperial structure could continue to operate with any legitimacy in what would very soon become 13 states.  By the very beginning of July of 1776, it became clear that members of Congress would have to catch up quickly to the more activist localities if they hoped to...