The Stop Badware site responded with this:
Review Search
Your search for http://www.freerepublic.com matched 4 URLs URLs currently blacklisted by
StopBadware's data providers:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3156744/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/
This explains WHY Google reported freerepublic.com was a malicious site. . .