Free Republic

That was the question that the major network correspondent of a major network morning show popped as her first query out of the box, to a soldier in a 155 MM howitzer artillery battery, during the opening days of the Second Lebanon War, against Hezb’allah terrorists in 2006. I was the reporter in question’s military escort officer. It was her first day in the war zone, in the first days of the war. Mind you there would indeed be incidents, later in the war, of inadvertent deaths of innocent civilians by Israeli artillery fire. Collateral damage, a euphemism for deaths...

South San Francisco Unified joined the Meatless Monday movement this year, joining Oakland, West Contra Costa and several other districts that have adopted the campaign within the last few years. There are billions of animals slaughtered for food production each year, said Kristie Middleton, food policy manager for the Humane Society of the United States. "By going meat free just one day a week we can prevent some of this animal suffering," she said. "And we tell them a little about the Humane Society and animals," she said. "I like how they talk about compassionate eating. I think the kids...

The pro-choicers don’t like the populists, who don’t like the…enough already! Factions of the left, please stop being so…factiony.On Tuesday, barring any surprises, Democrats in New York will nominate Andrew Cuomo to serve as the party’s nominee—making it highly likely Cuomo will eventually serve a second term in the governor’s office. In his first term, Cuomo lowered taxes for the rich, increased corporate subsidies, undermined public sector unions, championed charter schools, and blocked campaign finance reform. Were it not for progressive stances on marriage equality and abortion, Cuomo might easily be mistaken for a Republican. Yet for his second term,...

By the time Norma L. McCorvey was 21, she had abused drugs and was on her third child. While carrying that third child, her scheme to falsely claim she was raped in order to obtain a legal abortion put her in the path of attorneys seeking to challenge U.S. abortion laws. Those attorneys who would make her (as “Jane Roe”) the lead plaintiff in a landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case that would make abortion within the first three months of pregnancy legal for all women in America and halt the deadly practice of amateur, underground abortions: Roe v. Wade....

Fungal Parasitism Marked by Gene Loss, Not Gain by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * Certain types of fungi can be parasitic to both plants and animals. Two new studies show that this has developed, in part, by a loss of genetic information—not a gain as predicted by evolution.1,2 In the creationist model of origins, the world was not fraught with death, disease, and violence until after Adam and Eve’s rebellion. The whole of creation was then subjected to a negative turn of events, including the emergence of fungal pathogens that cause death and disease in plants and animals.

If you have been busy enjoying this summer’s unseasonably cool weather across much of the nation, you may have missed the National Clean Energy Summit last week. Sponsors of the one-day summit, held at the swanky Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in beautiful Las Vegas, Nev., included Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Center for American Progress, a leading liberal think tank. One of the summit speakers, Nevada Rep. Dina Titus, equated global warming skeptics with members of the Flat Earth Society, EAGnews.org reports.

LONDON: Stephen Hawking has recently warned that the God particle or Higgs boson has the potential to obliterate the universe. The 72-year-old cosmologist said Higgs boson could become unstable at very high energy levels, which would lead to a "catastrophic vacuum decay" causing space and time to collapse and that there would not be any warning to the danger, the Daily Express reported. Speaking in the preface to a new book called Starmus, the Cambridge-educated scientist said that the Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become mega-stable at energies above 100bn giga-electron-volts (GeV). However, Hawking did also...

My Latin is not what it once was and it was never much. So lately I have been making amends for schoolboy sloth by reading a few of the classics. I have just finished (in translation) and highly recommend The Annals of Imperial Rome, by Tacitus, which chronicles the years of Tiberius, Claudius, Caligula and Nero, (an) analysis of palace politics. Whoa! Excuse me: just where is all this going? Is this relevant to anything at all or is it just self-indulgent bloviation? Well, sort of. Be patient. Let me press on. It was a bit dismaying to read how...

Have you ever noticed that people who worry most about someone “imposing your morality” on them are often the same folks who speak almost entirely in moral terms? Statistics, logic, historical perspective and even biology are no match for the moral-heavy vernacular of victimhood. How else to explain the lunacy spreading through the federal judiciary like kudzu regarding voter-approved marriage laws, which the courts are striking down with mad abandon. Seventh Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner spoke for many of his colleagues in the bin, er, on the bench, when he characterized laws that recognize natural marriage solely as products...

Republican Greg Abbott says he grieves for Democrat Wendy Davis after his gubernatorial opponent revealed that she once had an abortion upon learning that the fetus had a severe brain abnormality. Abbott said Saturday in a statement that “the unspeakable pain of losing a child is beyond tragic for any parent.” He said he grieves for the Davis family and the loss of life. Davis, a state senator from Fort Worth, discloses the abortion for the first time in her new memoir, Forgetting to Be Afraid. She had become pregnant in 1996 but had the abortion after doctors told her...

Honorable Mentions: Sheldon Adelson, Roger Ailes, Brent Bozell, Ben Carson, Tucker Carlson, Todd Cefaratti, Chris Chocola, Jim DeMint, Jonathan Garthwaite, Trey Gowdy, Greg Gutfeld, Darrell Issa, Bobby Jindal, Matt Kibbe, Charles Krauthammer, Mike Lee, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Michelle Malkin, Alex Marlow, Jenny Beth Martin, Bill O'Reilly, Tony Perkins, Judson Phillips, Reince Priebus, Glenn Reynolds, Marco Rubio ,Christopher Ruddy, Sal Russo, Antonin Scalia, Thomas Sowell, Dustin Stockton, Erik Telford, Joe Wierzbicki 25) Paul Ryan: The former VP candidate has been a difference-maker in the House, although not in a way a lot of conservatives have been pleased to see. Ryan was...

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com PRINT September 3, 2014 1:22 PM How Should Christians Expect Our Nation to Respond to ISIS? With Wrath and Vengeance By David French Even in the face of jihadist horror, it’s surprising how many Christians are deeply confused about issues of war and peace, with the root of the confusion embedded in the distinction between personal and governmental responsibilities. Admonitions to turn the other cheek, to love our enemies, and to repay good for evil are at core individual responsibilities — responsibilities that not only call on us to imitate Christ’s own example as he forgave...

Venezuela's Roman Catholic Church has admonished the ruling Socialist Party for re-writing the Christian "Lord's Prayer" into an ode to its beloved late leader Hugo Chavez. "The Lord's Prayer, the typical prayer for Christians around the world, comes from the very lips of our Lord Jesus Christ... and is therefore untouchable," the local Catholic Church said in a statement. A party member introduced the prayer on the podium of the party congress on Monday, imploring Chavez for protection from the evils of capitalism."Our Chavez who art in heaven, the earth, the sea and in us delegates," red-shirted delegate Maria Estrella...

The beheading of Steven Sotloff and James Foley are not isolated incidents. From northern Iraq and Syria come gruesome videos of piles of severed heads, heads stuck on fence spikes, teenagers beheading prisoners and even children laughing and carrying severed heads in the streets. In this article I asked “Why Do Muslims Behead People?”  Douglas Murray, writing in the Spectator here argues that beheading is commanded in the Quran. He quotes Quran 8:12 which says, “When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts...

BALDWINSVILLE, N.Y. – Another two bite the dust. Central New York’s Fayetteville-Manlius and Baldwinsville school districts are the latest to ditch the National School Lunch Program, which was revamped in 2010 under the guidance of First Lady Michelle Obama in an effort to fight childhood obesity. Strict limits on calories, fat, sugar, carbohydrates, sodium and other aspects of the school lunch imposed by the federal government on schools participating in the free and reduced lunch program has not only increased cafeteria costs, they’ve resulted in a drastic drop in the number of participating students. At Fayetteville-Manlius, Baldwinsville, and thousands of...

“When women go wrong men go right after them.” – Mae West “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” Winston Churchill wrote this over a century ago. During my junior year in high school, the nuns asked about our plans for after we graduated. When I said I was going to attend State University, I noticed their disappointment. I asked my favorite nun, “Why?” She answered, “That means you’ll leave four years later a communist and an atheist!” What a giggle we girls...

Francois Hollande's former partner says that France's socialist president hates the poor, in her potentially explosive memoirs she penned after the collapse of their relationship earlier this year. In Merci Pour Ce Moment ('Thank You For This Moment') Valérie Trierweiler claims that, in private, the leftist leader refers to the less wealthy with scorn, calling them "the toothless". "He portrays himself as a man who does not like the rich. In reality, the president does not like the poor," Trierweiler wrote. "He, the man of the left, calls them 'the toothless', very proud of his humour." In another passage leaked...

There are no words for the horror of Rotherham.More than 1,400 young girls have been raped and brutally exploited in the northern England town of roughly 250,000 over the past 16 years,while nearly everyone in authority did all he or she could to look the other way.An independent investigation released last week says: “It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated.”In other words, the local government tolerated sexual violence on a vast...

Back in 2002 American journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and beheaded by an Islamist gang. Before he was murdered he was forced to "confess" that he was a Jew. Pearl had been eager to tell the Pakistani story, the Islamic story, to build bridges and bring peace. He was, if anything, on the political left. Not that different, in fact, from the recent tragedy of James Foley. I mention this because of one of the people who kidnapped Daniel Pearl was from my hometown in England. He was raised in London with the health service, toleration, police protection, human rights...

The former American footballer and movie star has been imprisoned in Nevada since 2008 on charges of kidnapping and armed robbery in relation to an armed robbery that took place at the Palace Station hotel-and-casino in Las Vegas in which sports memorabilia was taken. After seeing his appeal for a re-trial quashed last and being informed in July 2013 he will serve at least another four years, Simpson has embraced the religion in a bid to change his life. A source told National Enquirer magazine: "O.J. really thought that he was going to be successful in a bid for a...