Free Republic

In Germany, architecture is being "de-Christianized". Entire new neighbourhoods and urban areas are being built without a church in them: churches are just not planned in the projects, as if nobody even thought of them. The German Catholic news site Kreuz reports on this phenomenon with examples from an article by architecture critic Dankwart Guratzsch in the daily Die Welt. In Stuttgart, a large new district was built for 12,000 residents without a church. In Hamburg, another new neighbourhood for 12,000 residents was created without a church. Not only that: to realize this project, 19 churches were closed down, probably...

Recently I received the invitation below from a group known as “Liberty on the Rocks”. Are you a libertarian looking to meet others in the Denver area? Want to learn more about libertarian ideals? This isn't about party politics, it's about what's right and how to fight for it. LOTR is not looking for how you vote, but what you believe. Is it in peace? Liberty? Or tyranny, violence and oppression? If you value the former ideals than LOTR happy hour is the network for you! We'll be joined for a 20-minute discussion (followed by q & a) by Joe...

Our children’s opportunities to learn based on technological advances has been more than offset by the loss of appreciation of literature and the humanities – including history, theology, philosophy and even economics. Our old friend Jon T. Barton, a classical violinist wrote an 800 page 2 volume work called “The Bible in Western Literature.” He co-authored with attorney John Whitehead a 1981 book, “Schools on Fire” – a prophetic work warning of the now deplorable and unnecessarily expensive condition of American education. I met a young man recently with a degree in “Environmental Studies” from screwball UCal/Santa Cruz, home of...

The federal income tax is a bad joke and it needs to be abolished. All over the nation, hard working American families are being absolutely crushed by oppressive levels of taxation, and our politicians are constantly coming up with new ways to extract money from all of us every single year. Meanwhile, many ultra-wealthy Americans and many of the most profitable corporations in the country pay little to nothing in taxes. In fact, as you will see below, there are dozens of very prominent corporations that make billions of dollars in profits and yet don't pay a dime in...

In just one week our nation faces yet another manufactured fiscal crisis. This time a refusal to compromise by conservative leaders in Congress would lead to massive, damaging across-the-board spending cuts on March 1, potentially dragging the economy back into recession and hurting American families by slashing critical investments in job training, public health, and public safety. The spending cuts, also known as the “sequester,” are a direct result of a long push by conservatives to take the nation’s economy hostage in order to secure massive, harmful spending cuts. In the summer of 2011, in exchange for agreeing to pay...

A third of all small business owners in a recent survey say their family life and their relationships have improved as a result of owning their own business. Small business owners also are more likely to be married than other workers are, researchers found. Sixty percent of the 1,100 small business owners in the poll say they are married, which is 10 percentage points higher than the national average. Small business owners also place a high emphasis on their personal relationships. Eighty-seven percent say they value their personal relationships at least as much as their business. And 80 percent say...

A university located in one of the most historical cities in America and founded as a Baptist institution has announced that it plans to begin covering the costs of the sex change operations of its students. Brown University in Providence, a city founded by Roger Williams as a refuge for those who were persecuted for their faith, states that its student health insurance plan will now cover “sexual reassignment surgeries” and 14 types of treatments for students desiring to switch genders. It notes that procedures normally cost up to $50,000 per person, and therefore, can be out of reach...

Today is the Day of Resistance! In over 120 cities across this great land, Americans will gather to take a stand for freedom and for the Constitution...

During 2012, Americans purchased more than 18,500,000 new and used firearms. From all appearances, more than 11,000,000 (eleven million) of those guns were new. The total number of guns sold to the police and the military is less certain, but some things can be inferred. To begin with, there are approximately 800,000 police officers. If their guns are replaced every ten years, that is a total of 80,000 guns a year. If you add other municipal employees who regularly carry, such as animal control officers and some inspectors, you have a potential market of 100,000 guns a year. Civilian market...

THE BEST DEFENSE IS A DUMB LOOK ON YOUR FACE The former mayor of Bell, California, was too stupid and uneducated to know his $100,000 salary for the part-time city job was illegal, his lawyer argued today. Oscar Hernandez is illiterate, has no high school degree and didn’t even finish elementary school Dem Mayor Claims He Was Too Stupid To Know Stealing is a Crime FORWARD TO DEFEAT During the Bush administration there were only two American commanders of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Under Obama there have so far been five. There has been a new...

Yesterday, I wrote about the silliness of requiring a file clerk to have a college degree. This morning, a friend sent me the following note about the narrowing of opportunity in modern America: Random thought inspired by the NYT article re: requiring BAs for everything and your post, especially the note about your IT team and their varied backgrounds, which is far less likely to be true today. It seems to me that a similar version of that narrowing-entry option is occurring in many fields You've written in the past about how the top banks have steadily narrowed the pool...

Federal appellate courts across the country increasingly are reversing settlement agreements and fee applications approved by the lower court judges in class action cases. Yesterday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit "threw out a class-action settlement" in an antitrust action involving baby products "that would have paid the lawyers who negotiated it more than four times as much as their clients" -- $14 million to the lawyers and only $3 million to the class -- as reported by Daniel Fisher for Forbes: "it acknowledged the 'potential for conflict' between lawyers primarily interested in a fee and their...

Here’s some good news: Demetrius Murphy, one of the original members of a gang of Black teenagers who roam the streets of St. Louis attacking people as they “play” the Knockout Game, is dead. He was shot and killed recently while preparing to break into the wrong home and met someone who was armed and not afraid to defend himself. It happened that the home owner is White and Murphy was Black. In ordinary times this shouldn’t mean anything, but in this case it does. Murphy instigated this confrontation because he preferred White victims – well actually any victims but...

Okay, Folks, here's what would be the next logical evolution in disaster preparedness: a Preppers' Dating Site! DoomsdayDating.com offers a link to preppers to meet and greet and do all those things that dating sites all over the web already do; just focused on the prepper community. There are also links of interest along the sidebars, and a few prepper-oriented ads.

A stunning press release by Obama eligibility challenger, Attorney Orly Taitz is revealing “…clerks of the Supreme Court NEVER forwarded to five out of the nine justices one single page of pleadings nor the Supplemental Brief” so they could review details prior to last Friday’s (Feb. 15, 2013) conference! Her case, Noonan v. Bowen, (CA Secretary of State) seeks relief in the form of a stay of election results of the Presidential election of Barack Hussein Obama because of his lack of citizenship, problematic Birth Certificate posted on the internet, plus non verifiable Social Security and Selective Service records and...

Lawmakers in Washington State have accidentally written a bill permitting police to invade private homes for the purpose of confiscating “illegal” guns and accessories, such as magazines which hold over 10 rounds. (1) According to Senate Bill 5737, introduced on February 13th by Democrat State Senators Murray, Kohl-Welles and Kline, no one may possess an “assault weapon” or the combination of a semi-automatic pistol or rifle capable of using a detachable magazine AND any magazine that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammo. Happily, however, you ARE allowed to possess an UNLOADED assault weapon “…for the purpose of permanently...

State Farm, the nationally knowninsurance chain headquartered in Bloomington Illinois, has apparently had its fill of “The Land of Lincoln’s” confiscatory taxes. The 800 million dollar company is reported to have purchased “substantial workspace” in the Dallas, Texas area. The giant insurance firm’s workers are being kept in the dark reportedly to avoid “alarming them” but is it their workers or the State of Illinois they would like to keep in the dark about this move? If this doesn’t signal State Farm’s coming dash out of Illinois’s clutches what could it mean? A knowledgeable Dallas real estate insider has called...

Democide: Socialism, Tyranny, Guns and Freedom Democide is the elimination of a despised group by a government. It includes genocide, politicide, and other forms of state-sponsored mass murder. The hated minority headed for extermination may be defined by religious, racial, political, class, cultural or other attributes. Between 200 and 260 million people were the victims of democide in the 20th century, several times more than were killed in international wars during that period. The first widely studied modern democide occurred in Turkey between 1915 and 1923, when the Turkish government decided to eliminate the country’s Christian minority, primarily ethnic Armenians...

Krugman, Death Panels, And The Disabled February 16, 2013 By Anthony 'AC' Castellitto “We’re going to need more revenue…it will require some sort of middle class taxes as well…And we’re also going to…have to make decisions about health care, not pay for health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits…death panels and sales taxes is how we do this.” -Paul Krugman

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the Forbes-listed billionaire who heads the Sinaloa cartel, may have died in a shootout with rival narcos in Guatemala's northern Peten province as reported by Sonia Perez for The Associated Press. However, it's still too early to pop the champagne, dance in the streets and celebrate with joy on the hopeful news because "officials stressed late Thursday that they had not yet found any bodies or even confirmed a shootout happened." Guatemala is among the major transit points for cocaine smuggled from Colombia through Central America and Mexico before reaching crazed druggies in the United States....

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...

<p>Now the topic may be way out of place here or even cause people to get angry. That's not my intent, my intent is to explain how it seems that the UK is not a friend to most US Citizens (I will admit maybe my situation has made me bias). Let me start from the beginning, I will try not to have a thousand details.</p>

I have closely followed the gun control debate in the US from the outside and, as a European, I am trying to make sense of it because I know that at stake is not just the gun legislation but also the American Constitution, with what it represents as the most historically important declaration of human rights and liberties to be safeguarded against the power of the state; the thorny issues of broken families and of how to treat the mentally ill; and even the always controversial question of race and gang violence. I have never seen a gun in my...

Should we all quit working and jump on board the Obama gravy train? Of course I am being facetious, but when you are barely surviving does there come a point when it just becomes easier to give up and totally rely on the government? Today, the federal government runs nearly 80 different means-tested welfare programs, and many state and local governments have their own welfare programs on top of that. If you become an expert on those programs and you learn how to game the system, can you live more comfortably than someone that lives honestly and works as...

Take a break from looking for black helicopters, fellow extremists! It's Short-Story-With-A-Point Time! *** A couple of years from now, in a suburb near you...or perhaps the suburb you live in....It was a cold November morning. Jack hated the cold. The sharp cold air reminded him rather rudely that he no longer had a left leg. The doctors had warned him that his phantom limb pain would be worse in the winter. I do not have time for this. Pain is simply weakness leaving the body, Jack thought as he attached his prosthetic leg. Jack was going to be busy...

Private Buyers Scored Bargains at Lansing Gun Turn In In spite of snow and official interference, brave Michigan Second Amendment activists offered cash for good guns at the Lansing gun turn in last Saturday (February 9th, 2013). One person turned in an old, RG .38, and used the money to buy ammunition. Some guns purchased for more than the offered gift card included an M1 carbine in nice shape, some hunting rifles and shotguns, a .22 revolver, a Mosin Nagant, and an SKS with a case of ammunition. The M1 carbine was reported as the most expensive purchase at $200...

Earlier this month NGO Monitor released its report on foreign government funding of radical political Israeli NGOs which work to undermine Israel's international standing and subvert Israeli society. Along with the usual European suspects who give millions of shekels (or Euros or pounds) to Israeli groups like this, it works out that the US government is also funding extremely radical organizations, courtesy of American taxpayers. Notably, the three groups that reported receiving funding from the US are all in the business of waging political warfare campaigns directed at the Israeli public. According to the report, in accordance with the NGO...

Andy Levy Responds to A Chris Brown Tweet, saying "You Spelled Punching Wrong"... the rest is classic, funny and revealing about the women who support domestic abuse...

Young Americans are faced with joblessness, skyrocketing school loans, and burdensome entitlement programs. Now, health care prices will be rising considerably, threatening “rate shock” on America’s consumers. Aetna is “cautioning that premiums for plans sold to individuals could rise as much as 50 percent on average and could more than double for particular groups such as the young and healthy,” according to the Washington Post’s N.C. Aizenman. For Aizenman, the question is not whether these hikes are justified, but whether young consumers will skip health insurance entirely–and take the penalty instead. “Most of the new rules that could push up...

Arizona, as with many states, has numerous definitions of what is legally considered a firearm. The definition of “firearm” is found in several different places in the Arizona legal code. This makes it difficult for citizens and lawyers to determine what is legal and what is not. People have faced prosecution for possessing items that most would not consider to be firearms, such as BB guns, airsoft replicas, squirt guns, or antique guns that are not legally firearms under federal law. One man was prosecuted for possession of a firearm for a collection of parts that experts testified could not...

I'M NOT FULL OF MYSELF, I'M A SOCIALIST In 1986, at the closing session of the Communist Party shindig in the Karl Marx Theater in Havana, Castro had declared, “Let no one think that what I have here is a lengthy speech; it is the party’s program.” He then went on to speak for 7 hours and 10 minutes. Obama’s ridiculous 6600-word marathon is also not a lengthy speech; it is the party’s program. As out of touch with the rest of the country as if he were speaking at the Karl Marx Theater in Havana, Obama claimed that...