Free Republic

Back during the initial fuss about "don't ask, don't tell," I went over to the Pentagon to see the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We mostly discussed the situation in the Balkans and the pressure on President Bill Clinton to militarily intervene. Then I asked about gays in the military, and the chairman, who was opposed, asked me what I thought the reaction would be if two male soldiers took to the dance floor at some military base. No different, I answered, than if a black man danced with a white woman at the same base about 50...

A western Pennsylvania university student will serve five to 23 months in jail for grabbing a police officer's Taser gun and shooting her with it while she was trying to arrest him. Twenty-year-old Jeremy Spisak, of McDonald, was sentenced Monday after pleading no contest in January to disarming a law enforcement officer and other charges.

It’s slowly starting to make the news, now.  To be sure, the “mainstream” media is doing as little as possible to cover this heinous crime, but the new media is starting to make it know despite their efforts to promote their “objective bias.”I’m talking about Frank Lombard, Associate director of Duke University’s Center for Health Policy, and his despicable molestation of a 5-year old boy he adopted.According to RPV Network, Lombard was recently arrested by the FBI and charged with offering up his adopted 5-year-old African American son for sex to an undercover cop. Lombard admitted to molesting his own...

And, while none of the major newspapers in the United States seems to have covered it, the United States conducted a missile test too. Well, China, South Korea, and, of course, North Korea’s state run news agencies did (American newspapers aren’t state run right?) Basically, while the U.S. president wants Americans to know things are being taken care of (Hawaii), the U.S. wants North Korea to know that "Hey we got hundreds of these missiles that works and is very, very accurate -- to within 6 m? -- and can carry three nuclear weapons at once."

Buried in the decision yesterday in Ricci, was this pronouncement by Justice Scalia that this case merely postpones the evil day" on which the court must decide "whether, or to what extent," existing disparate-impact law conflicts with the 14th Amendment guarantee

Rio Rancho police arrested the head of the Santa Fe Police Department's Internal Affairs Division early Sunday morning and charged him with aggravated drunken driving, according to a police report. Lt. Stephen Ryan, 44, was pulled over about 1:40 a.m. at the intersection of Golf Course Road and Southern Boulevard in Rio Rancho after an officer saw his 2002 Toyota Tundra pickup weaving, the report says. He was charged with aggravated driving while intoxicated and failure to maintain a traffic lane after Ryan refused to take a breath test, according to the report. Ryan was placed on administrative leave Monday...

 GOP.COM/LIVERESPONSE  Starting at 1:15 PM EDT tomorrow (Wednesday, July 1, 2009), the RNC will be live-blogging from GOP.com/LiveResponse during President Obama's online discussion of his government-run health care plan. Because Obama did not directly answer many of the questions posed to him during last week's primetime town hall event on ABC News, the RNC is offering this service as a resource for members of the media, bloggers and other Americans interested in getting the facts and direct answers to the questions posed to the President. In the meantime, click here to compare Obama's myths to reality on health care reform.    A Product...

If a new General Motors emerges from bankruptcy as planned, U.S. financial aid for the company will expand to nearly $50 billion, but neither the government nor the company is forecasting how much of the public money will be repaid. It's sure to be a stretch. For the United States to fully recover its investment, the value of General Motors stock will have to reach levels it has never before attained. "I'm not going to predict it -- that's not my job today," GM chief executive Fritz Henderson said in a recent interview. "I don't know how much we're going...

One Hundred Fifty Reasons I'm CatholicAnd You Should Be Too!by Dave Armstrong1. Best One-Sentence Summary: I am convinced that the Catholic Church conforms much more closely to all of the biblical data, offers the only coherent view of the history of Christianity (i.e., Christian, apostolic Tradition), and possesses the most profound and sublime Christian morality, spirituality, social ethic, and philosophy. 2. Alternate: I am a Catholic because I sincerely believe, by virtue of much cumulative evidence, that Catholicism is true, and that the Catholic Church is the visible Church divinely-established by our Lord Jesus, against which the gates of hell...

Public Option or Government Takeover? by: Bethany Stotts, June 30, 2009 Amidst the heated debate over the future of health care, one professor told the House Subcommittee on Health that it could take 4 trillion dollars to make sure “nearly everyone” in America has health insurance. “Using the ARCOLA model, we found nearly everyone would be covered if all elements of the Kennedy bill were enacted at a ten-year cost of 4 trillion,” said Dr. Stephen Parente on June 23. “That 4 trillion estimate over 10 years assumes a public option plan with Bronze, Silver and Gold levels in...

“In every respect, this agreement is a win for everyone,” said United Federation of Teachers (UFT) president Randi Weingarten in an unexpected Monday announcement about the deal the teachers’ union had just reached with the Bloomberg administration on pension contributions for new teachers. Mayor Michael Bloomberg echoed the win/win rhetoric and welcomed the anticipated reduction in pension costs for the city’s treasury after this year. Amid all this celebration, however, nobody pointed out that the pension deal will probably wind up harming Gotham’s students, starting with their very first day at school.

The following post and its title are courtesy of Matthew Vadum, Senior Editor, Capitol Research Center (CRC). Matthew Vadum and the staff of CRC are looking out for taxpayers and exposing ACORN’s Web of Corruption.

Thousands of Maine high school students will receive new laptops this fall through an expansion of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI). The Maine Department of Education announced it has placed an order for more than 64,000 MacBooks for students and faculty in grades 7 through 12, and will place an additional order for up to 7,000 more laptops in the coming weeks. MLTI has provided Apple notebook computers to all Maine middle school students since 2002 – making Maine the first and only state with a statewide implementation of laptops for every student. The high school expansion will mark...

One of the threats facing our judiciary is the view that judges can use the laws of foreign nations to interpret the American Constitution. This is not an abstract argument but a view shared by legal minds across the country and put into practice by our own Supreme Court. It must be refuted and rejected - it is dangerous, and it is wrong. It is dangerous to our rights and liberties and to the Constitution that protects them. It is wrong because it violates the entire concept of republican government, in which the moral authority of our laws derives from...

The story out of Honduras is that the people of that stalwart little country have now taken it into their own hands to preserve their democracy in the most courageous action since they established their constitutional republic nearly three decades ago. Just as former Honduran President Jose Manuel Zelaya Rosales prepared to seize full power in direct violation of the nation’s Constitution, the military leadership – with the backing of the people – removed him from power. Unfortunately, Barack Obama, after encouraging the Zelaya coup with his complicit silence, has now condemned the people’s move to uphold their Constitution and...

Although New Haven's firefighters deservedly won in the Supreme Court, it is deeply depressing that they won narrowly -- 5 to 4. The egregious behavior by that city's government, in a context of racial rabble-rousing, did not seem legally suspect to even one of the court's four liberals, whose harmony seemed to reflect result-oriented rather than law-driven reasoning.

One Race, One Vote? by: Mytheos Holt, June 30, 2009 In her recent book Voting Right—And Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections, noted race relations scholar Abigail Thernstrom makes the argument that, in the aftermath of the election of Barack Obama, the Voting Rights Act has actually begun hampering and damaging the very racial group it was originally intended to protect. “Today the Voting Rights Act arguably serves as a brake on black political aspirations and a barrier to greater integration…the law has created a black political class too isolated from mainstream political discourse,” Thernstrom writes in...

The accomplishments of President Obama and his allies in Congress over his first six months in office are — depending on whom is asked — either tackling the recession and heralding a new era of progressive reform or bankrupting the nation with unprecedented speed. Either way, the new administration and congressional Democrats have spent the first half of the year pushing through key elements of Mr. Obama's economic agenda, though the fate of his two biggest priorities, energy and health care reform, still hang very much in the balance. The $787 billion stimulus bill was on the president's desk within...

Planned Parenthood Abortion Center: We Bend the Rules on Sexual Abuse Birmingham, AL -- A new undercover video shows what others have when it comes to Planned Parenthood and how it handles potential cases of sexual abuse. New footage shows a staffer at a Birmingham, Alabama abortion center telling a woman who appears to be a victim of statutory rape that "we bend the rules." Full story and video at: http://www.LifeNews.com/state4265.html

I wonder sometimes whether the Nixon tapes really will just continue to be the gift that never stops giving. I was in college when Richard Milhous Nixon was first elected president, and I can still remember the profound sense of loathing and disgust that I experienced at the mere sight, let alone the sound, of him and of his most especially repellent sidekick Henry Kissinger. Wiser and older people tell you that the passions of your youth will dry up and that a more sere and autumnal condition will overtake you as maturity advances, but the thought of the Nixon...