Free Republic

A year after announcing efforts to revise third-class medical certification requirements, no specific proposal has yet been developed, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta told the audience at the annual Meet the Administrator session at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh. “I know it’s extremely frustrating, and I know you want to hear something definitive about it, but it’s important to acknowledge the pilot’s perspective is not the only perspective on this issue,” Huerta said, as he addressed several topics critical to general aviation. Among the reasons for delay in moving forward, Huerta said, is getting sign-off from the executive and legislative branches, as well...

Leading Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton embraced Planned Parenthood on Thursday, defending the nation’s largest abortion provider during a campaign speech in Greenville, South Carolina, and later in a statement from that speech posted to Twitter. Planned Parenthood has been under fire recently after videos were released showing its officials glibly discussing trafficking in body parts of aborted babies. Hillary Clinton Defends Planned Parenthood as Corporations Flee Abortion Provider Kristinn Taylor Jul 24th, 2015 9:43 am 1 Comment Hillary Clinton Young Cons Leading Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton embraced Planned Parenthood on Thursday, defending the nation’s largest abortion...

Common sense seems to have eluded those who placed the following hypersensitive editor's note on an article in the UCLA student newspaper about gender inequality in health care. The author's argument for free or government subsidized tampons was silly to begin with but the note placed it way over the top. Editor’s note: This blog post refers to individuals who menstruate as women because the author wanted to highlight gender inequality in health care. We acknowledge that not all individuals who menstruate identify as women and that not all individuals who identify as women menstruate, but feel this generalization is...

Breaking: Discovery of ‘Habitable’ Earth-Like Planet Announced The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute and planet hunters from The National Aeronautics and Space Administration have made a startling discovery while exploring the Milky Way Galaxy By Robin Seemangal | 07/23/15 12:20pm  Comment Artist’s concept depicts the earth-like planet Kepler-452b (NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle) The SETI Institute and NASA have confirmed the discovery of Kepler 452b, the most Earth-like planet ever encountered. Located in the Goldilocks zone of its host star, this planet would have “just the right” conditions to support liquid water and possibly even life. This extraordinary world was spotted by...

ASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, for the second time in two years, the Little Sisters of the Poor must ask the Supreme Court to protect them from the government. The order of Catholic nuns and other non-profits have been forced to ask the Court for relief due to the government’s refusal to exempt them from a regulation that makes them choose between their faith—which prohibits them from providing contraceptives—and continuing to pursue their religious mission of serving the elderly poor (see video).“The government has lost every single time they have made these arguments before the Supreme Court—including last year’s landmark...

On July 20 2015, Moms Demand Action president Shannon Watts admitted, “we’re still learning the facts about what happened in Chattanooga,” then she called for more gun control. To do this, Watts took the few facts that are known, twisted them ever so slightly, then regurgitated them in a way she believes will support gun control. For example, she took the FBI’s statement that alleged Chattanooga gunman Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez passed a background check for at least “some” of the guns he had during the attack and interpreted it to mean Abdulazeez “took advantage of the online gun sale loophole...

In fact, it appears the growers don't appear to be very mellow at all. According to an editorial in the Fresno Bee, "Acres of ancient trees are disappearing and illegal marijuana farms are popping up in their place. Streams and rivers are being sucked dry, diverted sometimes miles away through plastic pipes into tanks. Several species of fish, along with a rare breed of wild rodent, are on the verge of extinction." Evidently this is because when you are an outlaw, it's cheaper to despoil parkland and steal water than it is to buy your own land and your own...

There’s a debate whether or not to allow U.S. Marine warriors and other trained American military heroes to be armed. Seriously? The United States of America has plummeted so embarrassingly, so criminally low as to question the trustworthiness of its armed forces? Freedom-loving hearts are breaking at a scary, record rate across the once-free world. What’s next? Whether to allow firefighters access to water? The planet of the apes flew over the cuckoo’s nest meets clockwork orange Mad magazine punk’d TV. Nice fundamental transformation, traitors. Well done. When laws mandating gun-free zones fail every time to reduce carnage and loss...

No, this is not satire. On July 29, a gay pride parade is scheduled in Sweden. But, you see, this is no ordinary gay pride parade. This gay pride parade was created by Jan Sjunnesson, former editor-in-chief for the Samtiden newspaper in Sweden, which is owned by the nationalist Sweden Democrats party (for our Canadian readers, think of the Sweden Democrats as being kind of like the Conservatives or the Canadian Action Party, which means that they’re considered “extreme far-right” in Sweden). The parade is scheduled to go through Tensta and Husby – two areas where Muslim immigrants are more...

If we were going to see a stock market crash in the United States in the fall of 2015 (to use a hypothetical example), we would expect to see commodity prices begin to crash a few months ahead of time. This is precisely what happened just before the great financial crisis of 2008, and we are watching the exact same thing happen again right now. On Wednesday, commodities got absolutely pummeled, and at this point the Bloomberg Commodity Index is down a whopping 26 percent over the past twelve months. When global economic activity slows down, demand for raw materials...

Readers of this website may not realize it, but America’s foremost public intellectual, especially on matters of race, is a fellow named Ta-Nehisi Coates, who for the mainstream media and liberal elites is the go-to guy. If you’ve never heard of him, don’t worry, you don’t matter. Coates is a canny writer and blogger at the Atlantic magazine and the author of two widely praised books. Like President Obama’s books, one is a coming-of-age memoir, the other an “I’ve made it memoir -- but still got a lot to complain about.” He’s also written two influential articles on race. Generally,...

Do not worry about Donald Trump becoming president. Worry, instead, about what his current — emphasis on current — stratospheric standing in the polls says about two things: the Republican Party and the other GOP candidates. Granted, the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll has Trump at 24% among Republican and Republican-leaning voters. He was at 4% on May 31. The chart for the rest of the crowded field looks like a flat-line electrocardiogram. Who are these Trump supporters? The Post poll indicates they are not the most ideologically extreme. Among those who identify themselves as very conservative, just 17% put...

There is no way to know what is going on in someone else's mind. But sometimes their behavior tells you more than their words. The political left's great claim to authenticity and honor is that what they advocate is for the benefit of the less fortunate. But how could we test that? T.S. Eliot once said, "Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they...

Lou Lenart, a U.S. Marine Corps pilot during World War II who later helped thwart an Egyptian advance on Tel Aviv in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, died Monday at age 94. Lenart was born Layos Lenovitz to Jewish farmers in Hungary. His family moved to America when he was 10 years old and settled in Pennsylvania. He later enlisted in the Marine Corps at 17 and became a pilot, seeing action during the Battle of Okinawa and elsewhere in the Pacific. Following World War II, Lenart joined Israel’s nascent air force, which consisted of just four Czech-built German Messerschmitt...

Yes, Pope Francis is encouraging civil disobedience, leading a rebellion. Listen closely, Francis knows he’s inciting political rebellion, an uprising of the masses against the world’s superrich capitalists. And yet, right-wing conservatives remain in denial, tuning out the pope’s message, hoping he’ll just go away like the “Occupy Wall Street” movement did. Never. America’s narcissistic addiction to presidential politics is dumbing down our collective brain. Warning: Forget Bernie vs. Hillary. Forget the circus-clown-car distractions created by Trump vs. the GOP’s Fab 15. Pope Francis is the only real political leader that matters this year. Forget the rest. Here’s why: Pope...

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, late as usual, arrived in Rome Tuesday morning to pontificate at the Vatican about the dangers of climate change. Delayed by fog that forced his plane to land in Milan, de Blasio arrived 80 minutes after his allotted time to speak at the gathering of mayors invited by the Vatican. Once he was given time to speak, though, he waxed eloquent about “powerful corporate interests,” adding, “Is it not the definition of insanity to propagate corporate policies and consumer habits that hasten the destruction of the earth?”

“New poll: Trump 22, Bush 15, Walker 12. We did NOT see Trump’s numbers decline after his attacks on McCain -” Wilson wrote about details of the survey, including an important observation that Trump has gained support from an earlier poll taken this month, passing Jeb Bush who has lost support. “The Morning Consult survey, conducted July 17 through July 20 among 1,978 registered voters, includes a subsample of 754 self-identified Republican and Republican-leaning voters who say they will participate in the party’s presidential nominating contest, for a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points. “There is...

A convicted sex offender charged last week with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Santa Clarita is in the country illegally and had recently been released on bail from immigration custody, according to federal authorities. Keane Dean, 26, a citizen of the Philippines, was released in April on $10,000 bond so he could be free while he contested his immigration case. He had been targeted for deportation because of his criminal record. The 14-year-old girl, who was found in Dean's garage, told investigators that Dean befriended her at a grocery store the previous day, according to the Los Angeles County...

The outrage over another multiple murder of American military personnel on American soil by another Islamic extremist has been exacerbated by the fact that these military people had been ordered to be unarmed — and therefore sitting ducks. Millions of American civilians have also been forbidden to have guns, and are also sitting ducks — for criminals, terrorists or psychos. You might think that, before having laws or policies forcing fellow human beings to be defenseless targets, those who support such laws and policies would have some factual basis for believing that these gun restrictions save more lives, on net...

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley blamed climate change in part for the rise of the Islamic State terrorist organization Monday in an interview with Bloomberg’s With All Due Respect. “One of the things that preceded the failure of the nation state of Syria and the rise of ISIS was the effect of climate change and the mega-drought that affected that nation, wiped out farmers, drove people to cities, created a humanitarian crisis that created the symptoms, or rather, the conditions of extreme poverty that has now led to the rise of ISIS and this extreme violence,” he said.