Free Republic

Wittenberg, Holy Roman Empire, 1517. A young monk marches up to the castle church and nails a piece of parchment to the massive wooden door. He is Martin Luther, and the parchment is his famous 95 theses, written in Latin. With this document, an open challenge to the power and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, the brash cleric sets off one of the greatest upheavals in human history: the Protestant Reformation. Wittenberg, Germany, 2009. I walk down the long, cobblestone Collegienstrasse to All Saints' Church, the castle church that stands at one end of the street, eager to see...

September 15, 2009 A New Declaration of Independence Judges don’t belong in the national-security business, so let’s get them out of it. By Andrew C. McCarthy It’s time for a new Declaration of Independence — a declaration of national-security independence from the U.S. court system. Without a new declaration of our determination to make democratically the life-and-death decisions that a self-governing body politic must make — a declaration of our refusal to be dictated to by unaccountable judges — catastrophe beckons. On Saturday, the weekly Obama bad-news dump featured anonymous defense officials telling the New York Times that the administration...

James Pouillon, aka "the sign guy," was the abortion rights opponent gunned down in suburban Owosso, Michigan, early Friday morning. Shortly after his murder, a Facebook Friend of mine with a conservative political outlook posted the question: "Where is the outrage?" Her point being that when famous abortion doctor George Tiller was murdered a few months ago, expressions of condolence from all sides of the abortion debate rocketed through the Internet within a short time... Well, we now know what the authorities are telling us. According to the Detroit News: "We believe Mr. Drake was not happy with the way...

The National Legal and Policy Center has asked JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to end financial support for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), and its affiliates. According to the 2007 tax return for the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, the most recent available, ACORN Housing, Inc. was the recipient of a million dollar grant in 2007. Another grant of $25,000 was made to the ACORN Institute. In a letter to Dimon, I warned: Continued identification with ACORN harms the company’s brand name and reputation, and carries special risks for this company, a recipient of taxpayer TARP funds. The New...

WASHINGTON -- Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has been trying for months to write a health care bill that could win Republican support. If he succeeds he may find it's fellow Democrats he has to worry about. Baucus said Monday that "we're getting very close" to finalizing sweeping health care legislation to enact President Barack Obama's priorities of extending coverage to most of the 50 million uninsured and holding down spiraling health care costs. Following weeks of closed door negotiations with two other Democratic senators and three Republicans, Baucus plans to unveil his bill on Wednesday, and he hopes...

Mccain's abstain "makes sense" to me, given that he's the de facto amnesty republican. But what's Vitter's excuse? He also had an amendment to defund ACORN, did he not? I say defeat them all in the primaries for their support of this criminal enterprise.

It’s widely recognized that our government is in dire shape. Our annual deficits are in the trillions of dollars. Unfunded entitlement programs run many times that. Lobbyists and earmarking rule Washington. Special interests, including public-sector unions, environmental groups, the AARP, and countless others, vie against one another for exorbitant privileges — all meted out at taxpayers’ expense. Our most responsible mainstream news venues, like Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, often carry stories exposing the sobering facts. The analyses are penetrating, succinct, and eloquent. But the recommendations? Timid and trite. The best they can offer is to advise moderation: slow...

Here is unbelievable audio that ABC News Anchor Charlie Gibson saying he has not even heard about the ACORN undercover video scandal! He was asked about it this morning on radio station WLS-AM Chicago. Gibson laughed when asked and said "I don't know about it." He then said condescendingly, "Maybe that's just one you leave to the cables." . . . (AUDIO)

This is a notion that hasn't really gotten any traction anywhere yet, but could Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C. be a viable 2012 presidential election candidate? The hosts of Fox Business Network's "Happy Hour," Eric Bolling, Rebecca Diamond and Cody Willard, contemplated that possibility on their Sept. 14 show, which comes on the eve of a vote on a "resolution of disapproval" Wilson for calling out "You lie!" as President Barack Obama spoke to a joint-session of Congress Sept. 9. "First off, House Dems appear set to censure South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson for shouting ‘you lie' at President Obama during...

HIDALGO, MEXICO - Thirty-one police officers have been arrested in the state of Hidalgo, on suspicion of collaborating with a gang of drug cartel hit men. The officers were arrested as part of an almost year-long investigation into alleged ties between police and the Zetas cartel. The investigation began last October, when federal authorities arrested seven suspected Zeta accountants and found evidence of monthly payments from the gang to officers. Back in June, 92 officers were arrested on similar charges.

Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.) will make one more attempt this week to get Republicans to join the Democrats health care reform plans. Some breathed a sigh of relief that his health care bill does not include a government-run insurance program. Those who listened to President Obama's health care address to Congress last week noted that much. But the proposed regulations will destroy private insurance, guaranteeing another debate in a couple of years to fix the disastrous shape that these regulations will leave health care in. The most striking part of the plan is that it is partially paid for it...

Continuing this weekend's unintentional theme of "toddlers and food service," today we bring you the sad tale of a Quincy, Mass. 23-month-old whose parents are suing Dunkin' Donuts after he was burned by a hash brown. A hash brown that fell out of his mouth and onto his neck. "It took only seconds for the extremely high temperature of the interior portion of the food item to severely burn and blister (Cullen's) skin," attorney Joseph K. Curran Jr. wrote in a complaint filed in Norfolk Superior Court. Before handing the hash brown to her son to eat, the boy's mother,...

Economists seem to be using new math to guage the start and end of this recession. When I learned economics in high school, I was taught that a recession was any period in which there were two quarters of negative growth in gross domestic product. That's why I had trouble understanding why economists everywhere began, at the end of 2008, to say that this current recession began at the end of 2007. At the end of 2007, the economy was still growing. Now, the roots of the recession certainly started there but the technical definition is nothing like what these...

A woman martial arts expert knocked out a Coldstream Guardsman and attacked another squaddie's wife at an Army Christmas ball in a row over soldiers pretending to be gay.

Raleigh, N.C. – Public Policy Polling’s newest survey of the New Jersey Governor’s race finds Chris Christie continuing to lead Jon Corzine, by a 44-35 margin this month.

Vatican City, Sep 15, 2009 / 10:48 am (CNA).- The Russian Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Churches have improved relations under Pope Benedict XVI, and in a sign of a growing closeness, the Vatican announced today that Archbishop Hilarion, the Russian Orthodox head of External Church Affairs, is paying his first visit to Rome.  Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk is visiting Rome at the invitation of Cardinal Walter Kasper, the president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. His trip began today and will last until September 20. Archbishop Hilarion's post was previously filled by then-Archbishop Kirill, who was elected...

Days after the shooting death of anti-abortion activist James Pouillon, some abortion opponents are asking why abortion rights supporters haven’t condemned the slaying. Harlan Drake has been charged in the deaths of Pouillon, a 63-year-old retired autoworker who was known locally for wielding signs depicting aborted fetuses, and another man Friday in Owosso, Mich. Police say Drake, 33, intended also to kill a third man. According to the Associated Press, prosecutors say Drake had been irritated by Pouillon’s protests, but police have said little about what might have led Drake to kill, other than that he had a grudge against...

ACORN indignantly denies having intentionally revealed its "no child-sex-slave left behind" motto for helping sex-traders get federal aid for business loans and mortgages. [snip] "We already have a backup plan. It will require us to fundamentally change our name, or, rather, to change the words for which our acronym stands. In other words, to regain our eligibility, we'll change the meaning of 'ACORN' to 'All Child Orgies Revoked Now' and we would hereafter make a solemn commitment that any criminality we facilitate in the future will be limited to situations in which all participants are over age eighteen."

September 15, 2009 Government Workers: From Public Servants to Masters Ed Lasky Liberals love to denounce income disparities, but seem very comfortable with the rising gap between the wages of government workers and the rest of us. In 2000, the average compensation (wages and benefits) of federal workers was 66% higher than the average compensation in the U.S. private sector. The new data show that average federal compensation is now more than double the average in the private sector. . . . It's time to put a stop to this. Federal wages should be frozen for a period of years,...

On the same hidden-camera video in which loan counselors at ACORNs Brooklyn office helped a hooker skirt the law, a list of the supposedly nonpartisan groups primary-election endorsements can be seen in the background. As a tax-exempt 501c3 nonprofit, ACORN is not permitted to endorse candidates or host political events. But on a prominently displayed dry-erase board visible in the video, ACORN backs Bill de Blasio for public advocate and Richard Aborn for Manhattan district attorney. These are the same candidates backed by the Working Families Party, which shares office space with ACORN. Under each candidates name is a list...