Free Republic

Believe it or not, the one line he devoted to abortion was one line more than he devoted to the subject of Jesus, who wasn’t mentioned at all in this morning’s speech according to the transcript. Maybe that was a deliberate choice made by Francis, to stick to politics and universal principles before a domestic television audience with many millions of non-Christians. (He did mention Moses.) Or maybe he just had more important things that he wanted to talk about, like the environment.This is exactly right: The Holy Father's politics, as w/his predecessors, defy easy right-left categorization. Not sure...

Pope Francis was not afraid to critique Congress in his historic address on Capitol Hill, calling on the body to do better in several areas of political debate. In a speech of about 40 minutes made in front of a joint meeting of Congress on Thursday, the pope commended positions supported by both parties. He nodded to the plight of immigrants and refugees, also noting the sanctity of human life "at every stage of its development" and hinting that Congress should take action to address these problems. And, as he did on Wednesday from the White House, he explicitly called...

A seemingly exasperated Donald Trump announced on Wednesday, "I'm so tired of this politically correct crap," telling a crowd of South Carolina business leaders that he's still the straight-talking, shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy that surged to the top of the polls this summer. The Republican presidential candidate is suffering a bit of a slump, due to some slippage in the polls, a lackluster debate performance, and another round of negative headlines due to his refusal to apologize for not correcting a questioner at a New Hampshire town hall who insisted President Obama is a Muslim and not an American.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon on Wednesday emphatically denied allegations that any recent graduates of its much-criticized train-and-equip program to combat the Islamic State in Syria had defected or that weaponry it supplied them had fallen into the hands of an al-Qaida affiliate. The Associated Press and other media reported earlier Wednesday that U.S.-aligned moderate rebel group Division 30 had launched an investigation into the disappearance of one of its commanding officers, Anas Ibrahim Abu Zayed. Additionally, the AP report stated, the group was investigating social media reports that some of the 70 recent New Syrian Forces program graduates who were...

TEMPLE TERRACE, Fla. - A viewer took video when a fight broke out at Publix in Temple Terrace. Jessica Jordan was at Publix, and grabbed her camera phone when the fight broke out. Jordan said the fight started when an older gentleman was being loud, obnoxious, and rude to deli employees. Other shoppers took offense and exchanged words with him. The viral video shows it ended in a group brawl with people being chased around the deli and out of the store. Publix released an official statement: “An altercation occurred involving our customers. A couple of our associates placed themselves...

BRUNSWICK, Maine — Civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson was welcomed back to Bowdoin College on Tuesday with the sound of hundreds of fingers snapping. This form of applause is reserved only for certain speakers with whom students feel a special kinship, according to Ashley Bomboka, president of the college’s African-American Society. Mckesson, a 2007 graduate of Bowdoin, returned to visit classes, meet with new college President Clayton Rose and speak about his experiences as perhaps the most visible face of the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Tuesday afternoon’s conversation, “The Intersection Between Education and Justice,” was moderated by Bomboka and Bowdoin...

Is there such a thing as a virtuous pedophile? That’s the claim made in a piece published Monday by Salon. But it’s worth asking just how virtuous the author really is. This Salon think-piece by self-described pedophile Todd Nickerson is written in the form of a redemption story, except Nickerson swears up front he has never done anything at all needing redemption. To confess a sexual attraction to children is to lay claim to the most reviled status on the planet, one that effectively ends any chance you have of living a normal life. Yet, I’m not the monster you...

Controlling Blood Pressure Requires an Irreducibly Complex System Howard Glicksman September 22, 2015 12:32 PM | Editor's note: Physicians have a special place among the thinkers who have elaborated the argument for intelligent design. Perhaps that's because, more than evolutionary biologists, they are familiar with the challenges of maintaining a functioning complex system, the human body. With that in mind, Evolution News & Views is delighted to present this series, "The Designed Body." Dr. Glicksman practices palliative medicine for a hospice organization. The body is a multi-cellular organism that requires the circulation of blood within its cardiovascular system to give...

Of all the points presidential hopeful Ben Carson made in defense of his position [1] that he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” the most poignant was his referencing of taqiyya, one of Islam’s doctrines of deception.According to Carson, whoever becomes president should be “sworn in on a stack of Bibles, not a Koran”: “I do not believe Sharia is consistent with the Constitution of this country,” Carson said, referencing the Islamic law derived from the Koran and traditions of Islam. “Muslims feel that their religion is very much a part of...

As if on cue, the Christian bona fides of President Obama were suddenly front and center, championed by every atheistic and/or secular media figure capable of reaching a camera or a microphone. This, apparently, is a significant part of their current job description. They serve and protect the president from scrutiny, and to smear and demean anyone who might express unflattering opinions based on their day to day observations. Actually exploring how such a question might arise in the first place, and whether there is any possible basis for suggesting that Barack Hussein Obama is not Christian, is a fool’s...

Pope Francis told journalists before he landed in America on Monday that people are mistaken if they think he's a liberal. The Hill: Some people might say some things sounded slightly more left-ish, but that would be a mistake of interpretation,” Francis said aboard his flight from Cuba to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. “It is I who follows the church ... my doctrine on all this ... on economic imperialism, is that of the social doctrine of the church," Francis added,according to Time.  Francis arrived to cheers and chants welcoming him to the U.S. when he landed outside Washington, D.C., where...

He wasn’t the Messiah they were expecting. There are many (many, many) competing analyses of the life of Jesus, of what happened and what it meant, and some of those are, inevitably, political. Many scholars hold that the Jews rejected Jesus’ claim of being the Messiah because they were expecting a political and military leader, a great liberator who would drive out the hated Roman occupation and restore Jewish sovereignty over Israel. Pontius Pilate and Herod both seem to have been perplexed by Jesus’ understanding of His own kingship — “My kingdom is not of this world” — because they...

Only The Blind And The Stupid Can’t See It By Col. Tom Snodgrass (Ret.), Right Side News Samuel Huntington’s Thesis In 1993 the late Harvard professor of political science, Dr. Samuel P. Huntington, published an article, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” that has provoked continuing heated controversy in both the academic world and in the halls of government. Dr. Huntington’s contentious thesis, in light of the end of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet Union, was: It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great...

The notorious Tea Party plant wore a Nazi shirt at the St. Louis Tea Party rally and an anti-Glenn Beck Obama-Muslim shirt at another rally. He may have been the plant at Donald Trump’s event last week?** REMEMBER– TO ALWAYS FILM THESE PLANTS — FOLLOW THEM TO OUT OF EVENT AND GET THEIR NAMEAnti-Tea Party plant carrying an impeach the Muslim Marxist sign at a Tea Party event.The unknown man who recently questioned Donald Trump about Muslims and President Obama has been featured on left wing blogs and an anti-Tea Party website for years.When Joe the Plumber questioned Obama in...

Rick Perry - He's no longer a contender, but here's what he believes. Rick Perry often gives speeches about illegal immigration, but when you look at the facts, he has been incredibly soft on the issue. Eric Holder was soft on immigration and against AZ SB 1070. So was Perry. Eric Holder talked a tough game while loosening enforcement. So did Perry. A little ritual troop marching on the border does not block illegals from jobs and entitlements. Perry worked on watered down laws to please his Latino constituency. He did not plan to secure the border, and he should...

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump responded in top Donald Trump form to Scott Walker’s primary concession speech–which called on conservative candidates to coalesce against the race’s current frontrunner. “The voters have focused on my proven ability to get things done and my positive vision to Make America Great Again,” Trump said in a statement exclusive to Breitbart News. “That is why I am leading in every poll. I look forward to Governor Walker supporting my campaign when I am the Republican nominee.” Approximately 20 minutes before Walker announced he was dropping out of the race, Trump tweeted well wishes toward...

An invigorated Jeb Bush defied his party’s lurch to the right over immigration on Monday with a passionate speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, in which he called for a path to legal citizenship for undocumented migrants. Fresh from a presidential debate that saw him criticized for speaking Spanish, lacking energy and having a Mexican wife, the former Florida governor took the jibes from Donald Trump and appeared to feed off them before an audience of business leaders in Houston. “Earned legal status is the dignified way, the practical way, the American way of solving the problem of 12...

The former director of the Nobel Institute regrets his decision to award Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. Recall this was prior to Obama accomplishing anything other than pulling the wool over the eyes of the Nobel committee and the majority of Americans. Geir Lundestad, who also awarded the prize to terrorist Yassir Arafat, stated in his memoir, “We thought it would strengthen Obama and it didn’t have this effect.” I beg to differ. The Nobel Prize no doubt bloated Obama’s already overinflated ego. Perhaps it also empowered him to ignore the wishes and values of the American...

A macaque monkey who took now-famous selfie photographs should be declared the copyright owner of the photos, rather than the nature photographer who positioned the camera, animal-rights activists contend in a novel lawsuit filed Tuesday. The suit was filed in federal court in San Francisco by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It seeks a court order allowing PETA to administer all proceeds from the photos for the benefit of the monkey, which it identified as 6-year-old Naruto, and other crested macaques living in a reserve on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The photos were taken during a 2011...

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on 18 August 2015 proposed regulations to reduce emissions of methane. These regulations would be the first to directly restrict methane emissions by the oil and gas industry; they build on a 2012 rule that sought to curb volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to extract natural gas. Combined, the two regulations could reduce the oil and gas sector’s methane emissions by up to 30% by 2025, compared with 2012 levels, EPA says. The proposed EPA regs are part of a larger effort by the White House to reduce national methane emissions...