Free Republic

Let’s not hear this insipid and misleading talk from Washington Republicans anymore: “Barack Obama is incompetent and naïve.” That better describes them. Barack Obama is a committed leftist working through his agenda to “transform” America. Washington Republicans do injury to the cause of liberty with timid language. That the president and the left bungle or misstep at times detracts little from their successes. In terms of advancing leftist aims, the Obama presidency is historic. Remaking America didn’t start with Obama. It won’t stop without him, either, unless the left is stopped, period. Split differences with this foe? How so when...

As patriots on the front line for liberty, we need you to call out bad legislative behavior and poor leadership. A single Assemblyman in Nevada is holding the Convention of States resolution hostage. Believe it or not, the Constitution of Nevada actually requires Article V legislation like ours to be proposed and approved, yet because of his fear, Assemblyman Lynn Stewart is single-handedly stopping COS. The public support for Convention of States in Nevada is overwhelming. Support is running three to one on the Nevada Legislature’s website. Yet today, one Assemblyman stands in the way; Assemblyman Lynn Stewart. Here’s how...

Sorry, but a totally “safe space” is actually impossible. A student at Harvard University published an op-ed on Wednesday complaining that her school’s “safe spaces” are just not safe enough. According to Madison E. Johnson, her time spent in the “safe space” was really great at first — there were “massage circles,” “deep conversations,” and “times explicitly delineated for processing and journaling.” But then it all changed.

Exploding A Nuclear Bomb In The Sky Creates An Interesting Phenomenon In 1962, during the depths of the Cold War, the U.S. military exploded a nuclear weapon high above an atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Dubbed Operation Starfish, this exercise was part of a larger project to evaluate the impacts of nuclear explosions in space. The missile, launched from Johnson Island, 900 miles from Hawaii, was armed with a 1.4 megaton warhead, programmed to explode at 240 miles above the earth. It detonated as expected. What was not entirely expected was the magnitude of the resulting electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The...

Richard Martinez’s right wrist bulges with rubber bracelets, each one inscribed with a name and given to him by a grieving family shattered by an act of gun violence. Around his left wrist is the watch his son, Christopher, was wearing when he was killed. Martinez was given the watch when he went to the morgue to identify his 20-year-old son’s body. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” he said. It’s been almost a year since a killing spree in Isla Vista, California, left six people -- including Martinez’s only child -- dead, and more than...

Sarah Brady had been the face of Gun Control in America for more than three decades. However today at age 73 she has succumbed to a bout of pneumonia. Brady became the convenient standard bearer for the forces that hate all guns and gun rights. This after a armed madman wounded her husband James Brady who was President Ronald Reagan’s Press Secretary during a 1981assassination attempt. Brady led a very deceptive campaign that was intended to incrementally outlaw all firearms. She cleverly began to change firearm adjectives and successfully demonized firearms based on simple cosmetics. Like Brady most Americans were...

In all, 17 service pistols and shotguns belonging to Flint police are officially listed as stolen, while another 22 guns used by Flint police are listed as lost or missing -- including a sub-machine gun and a short-barreled shotgun.

<p>In 2012, then–Texas governor Rick Perry ran for president as a “states’ rights stalwart,” a vocal proponent of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution pledging, “I’ll work every day to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can.”</p>

On March 27 215 Gabby Giffords backed Oregon Democrats in pushing all future Oregon gun purchasers to pass the same background check Jared Loughner passed to acquire the firearm with which he attacked Giffords and eighteen others in Tucson. The legislation–SB 941, sponsored by [longtime gun banner] state senator Floyd Prozanski (D-Eugene)–would require a background check for every gun sale and/or transfer in Oregon–whether retail or private–except for sales between “close relatives,” which would continue to be a privilege the government allows.

It’s been my experience that while most gun-rights activists are wrong-headed, they are not inherently threatening or dangerous. But clearly this app is meant to intimidate people into not working towards what they think is right. And it only takes one person willing to step over the line to turn this app deadly.

<p>GAINESVILLE, Fla. — As he courts Republicans across the country, Jeb Bush boasts that an executive order he signed that ended race-based college admissions in Florida upheld conservative principles while helping minorities.</p> <p>“We ended up having a system where there were more African American and Hispanic kids attending our university system than prior to the system that was discriminatory,” the former governor and likely presidential contender said recently at a conference of conservative activists.</p>

President Barack Obama will ask Americans to think of climate change as a threat not just to the environment, but also to their health. Obama on Tuesday was to announce a series of steps that private entities like Google and Microsoft are taking to better prepare the nation's health systems for the inevitable effects of a warmer, more erratic climate. He was to be joined at Howard University Medical School by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy.

No Evolution Is Proof of Evolution? by Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D., Tim Clarey, Ph.D., and Jason Lisle, Ph.D.* Scientists recently discovered a community of fossilized sulfur-metabolizing bacteria that are alleged to be 1.8 billion years old.1 Surprisingly, the microbes are virtually identical to their modern counterparts, yet the study authors claim that the microbes are proof of evolution.

The potential loss of the EPA in their anti-fracking campaign probably has environmentalists scrambling to rehash their stance on the well-stimulation process. Too bad for them they’ve already made some pretty ridiculous claims about fracking. The Daily Caller News Foundation has taken the liberty of listing the top five most ridiculous anti-fracking claims here:

It is difficult to define a whole school of political ideology precisely, but one may reasonably define liberalism (as opposed to conservatism) in the contemporary United States as the genuine concern for the welfare of genetically unrelated others and the willingness to contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others. In the modern political and economic context, this willingness usually translates into paying higher proportions of individual incomes in taxes toward the government and its social welfare programs. Liberals usually support such social welfare programs and higher taxes to finance them, and conservatives usually oppose them....

No, the Texas senator isn't likely to capture the GOP ticket. But his brand of conservatism poses its own threat. Since Ted Cruz first announced his candidacy, much has been made of his chances of winning, his arrogance and his extreme conservative views. But most of the controversy over his candidacy centers on his lying. It is no surprise to any of us that politicians lie. We generally assume they stretch the truth to get elected, to denigrate their political foes, and to bolster their images. But Cruz may just represent one of the biggest liars in recent history. In...

While the media was busy selling a false narrative about RFRA in Indiana (specifically that it was targeting the LGBT community while entirely failing to mention anything to do with them) the rest of the Left was paying close attention. Even though the state level representatives elected by the citizens were willing to craft a bill which ensured the right to observe the religious convictions of all the state’s residents – yes, even the Christians – and the governor they elected was willing to sign it, they were quickly sent scurrying for the trenches when some well monied interests...

Eric Alterman writes in the 150th anniversary issue of The Nation: The primary difference between liberalism and conservatism, at least in theory, is that the latter is an ideology and the former isn’t. Conservatism, as Milton Friedman argued, posits that “freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself.” Liberalism, however, as Lionel Trilling observed, “is a large tendency rather than a concise body of doctrine.” And while John Kenneth Galbraith helpfully pointed out that only those programs and policies that honor “the emancipation of belief” are worthy of...

HOUSTON, Texas — About six or seven hundred hardcore conservatives gathered outside the new Houston campaign headquarters for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) last Tuesday, an event at which he showed off his presidential prospects as the first declared candidate for 2016. Cruz, the true Washington outsider, has had a hugely successful first two weeks as the first declared candidate for the White House—raising millions of dollars, hiring key staff, and building a formidable operation, all while sticking true to his aggressive conservatism. Cruz has shaken up Washington, the political class, and the media establishment by essentially proving since his announcement...

Another Horizontal Gene Transfer Fairy Tale by Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. * As the genomes of many new creatures rapidly fill the public DNA sequence databases, the problems for the grand evolutionary story are becoming overwhelming. One issue is the fact that different creatures have unique sets of genes specific to their kind with no apparent evolutionary history. To explain this glaring problem, evolutionists have resorted to the myth of pervasive horizontal gene transfer. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is the process whereby genes are transferred from one type of creature to another without sexual reproduction. Earlier in my career, I...