Free Republic

Purim celebrates the salvation of the Jews from the wicked Haman's scheme to exterminate all the Jewish men, women, and children living in the Persian empire, which essentially meant all the Jews in the world. On Purim we are obligated to hear the Book of Esther which recounts the Purim story and enjoy a festive meal. We are also required to give charity to the poor, send two food items to a friend, and get so drunk that we do not know the difference between Haman, the villain, and Mordechai, the righteous hero of the story? (This last commandment, I...

I wrote last week about Police Chief Mark Kessler’s call to citizens of Gilberton Borough, Pennsylvania to join him and his police department in putting together a “reserve force” that could be called upon to help defend the city in the event of a foreign invasion or more precisely an invasion of the Federal government to confiscate firearms. Well, the response by readers and police departments across the country has been nothing short of incredible and as a result Kessler has expanded his small town “reserve force” to now include states nationwide. He is now referring to the movement as...

A new commercial promoting same-sex marriage is set to feature comments from Barack Obama, former First Lady Laura Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. The advertisement is produced by the Respect for Marriage Coalition, which is co-chaired by the Human Rights Campaign, and is part of a million-dollar effort that also includes print advertising in. It features clips of past comments from various political leaders in an attempt to demonstrate that both Democrats and Republicans support homosexual “marriage.” “None of us would want to be told that we can’t marry the person that...

When it comes to our God-given, constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms, the American people aren’t messing around, and the criminal, communist administration in Washington knows it. Maybe that’s why non-Defense Department federal agencies have been planning ahead, snapping up billions of bullets, as well as thousands of guns, without explaining why they would need this amount of firepower here in our own country, other than to say it’s for “training purposes.” Many rounds are reportedly hollow points. Why would you use the more expensive hollow point bullets for “training purposes”? I’ll have more on that in a...

Some wars are lost in a matter of moments, others stretch on indefinitely. The defeat in Afghanistan crept up silently on the national consciousness and even though we are negotiating with the Taliban, the "D" word is hardly used by anyone. According to Obama, in one of his interminable speeches which all run together and sound the same, there really isn't a war, just a mission, and the old mission is now becoming a new sort of mission, and the missions, all of them, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, have been successful which is why we are wrapping them up,...

For most of human history the family was the basic social unit of the species. Family was a way of passing down genes, beliefs and wealth. It was a retirement plan that you paid into by keeping your children alive long enough for them to grow up and support you. It allowed the individual to pass on his ideas to people who would care about them because they were part of their heritage. Family was a collective endeavor, small enough to reflect the individual. It was a practical and philosophical aim that made life beautiful and meaningful. But who really...

This is a bad situation of lesbian induced accidental incest. I don't want to go all spoiler warning on you so just check it out from Slate Magazine: Q. Nasty Surprise: When my wife and I met in college, the attraction was immediate, and we quickly became inseparable. We had a number of things in common, we came from the same large metropolitan area, and we both wanted to return there after school, so everything was very natural between us. We married soon after graduation, moved back closer to our families, and had three children by the time we were...

There was a MoveOn protest outside of NJ Rep Leonard Lance’s Office today, by looks of it, you’d be hard pressed to figure out who the haters are….. Here’s a report from the “Front Lines” in Westfield NJ: from one of our members Dave R. The Move On crowd was very disappointed that we were there, and WE WERE STRONG! It started-out about equal in numbers, and then we got more people to show-up than they did! We out-powered their PA system with our chanting, we had more people & more signs. We had several Gadston flags. NBC-4 from NYC...

Brendan O'Neill totally missed the point. He compares the gay radicals of the past who did not want marriage because they saw it as a form of oppression to the LGBT movement of today who demand same-sex wedlock, and concludes that the latter have become bourgeois and integrated, renouncing the radical ideology of the beginning, when Stonewall was young and fighting for liberation from matrimony, not enslavement by it. The point he misses is that the homosexual activists have become more radical, not less. What they demand from society now is a total redefinition of marriage, something that goes to...

This Wingnut Conspiracy Theory Has a Point This might be a good rule of thumb for presidential policy: if the factual truth of what you are doing is so gob-smackingly ridiculous that it makes whacko conspiracy theories about it sound reasonable, it's probably bad policy. Digby: I suppose it was inevitable: What do you get when you combine the president's ability to secretly kill American citizens and the recent push to restrict gun access? One of the most bizarre anti-Obama conspiracy theories ever—and it takes a lot to win that prize. Various tea party activists, libertarian websites and other conspiracy-minded...

The American Left and the Islamists work together to sabotage American, spreading their social justice (or sharia) values in a way that is inimical to American values, argues Andrew C. McCarthy in his book The Grand Jihad. For the hard left, social justice translates into Marxism and communism. For the Islamist, social justice leads to implementing Sharia and an Islamic state. These two are natural partners, he argues, because of their pursuit of “power” and opposition to American liberties. (McCarthy’s newest book is Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.) A riveting tale of Islam in America and abroad, in...

A Colorado elementary school has restricted its after-school tutoring program to exclude whites from participating. Andre Pearson, principal of Mission Viejo Elementary in Aurora, Colorado explained that “only students of color are eligible for the program. Too few white students are failing for us to justify including them in the program.” Pearson said he rejected race-neutral criteria based on performance because “that wouldn’t provide the maximum leverage for equalizing outcomes between whites and minorities. By focusing our efforts on bringing up the performance of our minority students through tutoring while allowing that of whites to continue to drift downward we...

Like stray dogs drawn to an open sewer, after a bitter election, the Democrats and Republicans have found themselves drawn together to illegal alien amnesty. Amnesty has an obvious appeal for both Democrats and Republicans. It's a means of putting a lot of cheap votes on the table. The Democrats have been using immigrants as cheap votes before the invention of the telephone. And the Republicans think that they can begin scoring 39 percent of the Hispanic vote in all their elections again without considering what 11 percent of 11 million will do to their margins in even the reddest...

Tough choice made by young citizen of Afghanistan Rui Ivaz Ali. Came to Russia with his parents at the age of 16, she secretly gave up their Muslim faith and converted to Christianity. Now this decision could cost her her life. Migration Service to deport her back to Afghanistan, where under Sharia law she could face the death penalty. Rui fled to Russia with her parents and younger brother three years ago. Breaking the border, the family settled in Ocher, Perm region. To learn the Russian language and get the basic knowledge, 16-year-old migrant went to sunday school. After her graduation, she...

The Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA), thinks Chicago's embattled police superintendent dug himself deeper into a pit of controversy today by claiming that lawful firearm owners are agents of political corruption. Appearing on a Chicago Sunday morning talk show, superintendent Garry McCarthy expressed his conviction that firearm owners who lobby their elected representatives or who donate money to political campaigns are engaged in corruption that endangers public safety. McCarthy went on to express his belief that judges and legislators should rely on public opinion polls when interpreting our Constitution. After totally dismissing the citizen's right to redress grievances, McCarthy trained...

I previously wrote about how BuzzFeed Politics has combined “the culture” and savvy crafting into a highly effective tool for undermining Republicans with subtle and not-so-subtle mockery. “Look at the goofy cat, look at the goofy celeb, look at the goofy Republican” is more dangerous to us than a 5000-word article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. To follow up on that theme, I happened upon a website called Upworthy, which had one its posts run at HuffPo, Elizabeth Warren Asks The Most Obvious Question Ever, Stumps A Bunch Of Bank Regulators. The post was so wrong on substance,...

North America has become the fastest growing oil and gas region in the world. Production of shale oil and gas and oil sands resources are increasing year after year as new infrastructures are developed, new extraction technologies are used and more resources are found. The surging supply growth could change North America into the new Middle East by 2020 according to a GPS report produced by Citigroup (NYSE: C). If accurate, the energy industry would generate benefits from exploitation of oil and ensure endless economic wealth for the country. As a matter of fact, crude oil is off its all-time...

VIDEO: Dr. Ben Carson appeared on a special edition of the Sean "Hannity" show for one full hour on Feb. 15, 2013.

Professor George Lakoff describes himself as a cognitive scientist. In his book, Moral Politics How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Professor Lakoff illustrates the problem of accurately describing the dichotomy between contemporary liberalism and contemporary conservatism in America. From the section, The Worldview Problem for Cognitive Science in chapter two:~The job of the cognitive scientist in this instance is to characterize the largely unconscious liberal and conservative worldviews accurately enough so that an analyst can see just why the puzzles for liberals are not puzzles for conservatives, and conversely. Any cognitive scientist who seeks to describe the conservative and liberal worldviews...

The left has never adapted to the transition from nationalistic wars to ideological wars. It took the left a while to grasp that the Nazis were a fundamentally different foe than the Kaiser and that pretending that World War 2 was another war for the benefit of colonialists and arms dealers was the behavior of deluded lunatics. And yet much of the left insisted on approaching the war in just that fashion, and had Hitler not attacked Stalin, it might have remained stuck there. The Cold War was even worse. The moderate left never came to terms with Communism. From...