Free Republic

I wanted to write this today because of all the rhetoric I see on tv and hear about the Racism in America these days... Racism has always been around and probably always will. I want to share my experiences with racism. And I want to say I am not going to pull any punches. My first experience with racism was when I was in kindegarten in Spokane Washington, it was a african american gentlemen and his wife who happened to be white.Also he was a minister. I came to school to see the man and his wife in panic with...

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (CNS/Reuters) Wondering how pro-abortion Catholic politicians like Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius justify their public dissent from Church teachings on this most fundamental issue concerning the sanctity of human life? This blog will answer that question with SebeliusÂ’s own words, in an interview published yesterday by The Washington Post. Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City in Kansas requested in May 2008 that Sebelius not present herself for reception of Communion because of the public scandal caused by her support for legal abortion as governor of Kansas. HereÂ’s what Sebelius said about the matter,...

Washington, D.C (AHN) - Americans were $2 trillion richer at the end of June than they were three months earlier, the Federal Reserve reported Thursday.Household wealth increased to $53.1 trillion in the second quarter of the year, a 17 percent annual rate, the agency said in its Flow of Funds report. It was the first increase since the second quarter of 2007, although net worth is down $12.2 trillion from that point.The majority of the increase is pegged to improvements on Wall Street, where corporate equity rose $1.04 trillion. Real estate wealth rose by $139 billon. Household debt fell to...

An NTSB audio recording indicates that minutes before a collision between a helicopter and airplane that killed all nine occupants over the Hudson River last month, the pilot of the airplane appears to have misheard the radio frequency for the air traffic control tower he was instructed to communicate with. An air traffic controller instructed the pilot to tune in to the Newark Liberty International Airport frequency, 127.85, but the pilot read back 127.87, and the controller, who was alone in the tower and was having a personal phone call, missed the incorrect read-back.

The lack of respect for President Obama is bigotry and intolerance in its purest form. The debates about health care and education are defining the role of the far right-wing media in U.S. society. How did Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and other so-called journalist and broadcasters in mainstream media get it so wrong? What the conservative media and many elected officials on the “right”are doing is easy to understand. The right continues to disseminate their false arguments as facts over the airwaves. They, along with many conservative Republicans and some members of the Democratic Party, are...

Former Republican Gov. George Pataki has leapt ahead of Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand in an hypothetical U.S. Senate match-up, according to a new poll out this morning. The statewide Marist College survey found voters would narrowly favor the three-term governor - 48 percent to 44 percent - over the freshman senator if the 2010 election were held today. That's an eight-point swing from a similar poll in July, when Pataki trailed Gillibrand 42 percent to 46 percent.

New York, NY, September 17, 2009 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has joined with the nation's leading religious, civil rights, labor, health and education groups in calling on Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. to withdraw a "constitutionally questionable" policy that could exempt certain religious organizations from federal anti-discrimination provisions. The League helped to coordinate a letter, signed by 58 national organizations and released today, urging the attorney general to direct the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to "review and withdraw" a June 2007 memo that held the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 could be broadly construed for groups...

September 17, 2009 City Unemployment Rate Exceeds 10% By Patrick McGeehan New York City’s unemployment rate jumped to 10.3 percent in August as the number of city residents unable to find work rose to a record high of 415,800, state officials said on Thursday. The city’s unemployment rate, up from 9.5 percent in July, is higher than the national rate of 9.7 percent and much higher than the 8 percent reported for the rest of the state, the State Labor Department’s figures show. Gov. David A. Paterson and other state officials said that the new data emphasized how the financial...

Leaders of some of the most oppressive regimes in the world will be coming to New York next week for the annual opening of the UN General Assembly. Tyrants such as Cuba's Castro, Iran's Ahmadinejad, Venezuela's Chavez and China's Hu were all granted visas to enter the country and address the international community. Only one international leader was considered so horrible to be denied a visa, Roberto Micheletti, the interim president of Honduras. The old president, Jose Manuel Zelaya Rosales was removed from office because he tried to overthrow the nation's constitution. This upset the socialist regimes in Latin America...

VATICAN CITY — Relations with the Russian Orthodox church have vastly improved, possibly paving the way for a papal visit to Moscow or a historic meeting between the pope and the Orthodox patriarch outside of Russia or the Vatican, a senior Vatican cardinal said Thursday.

ATLANTA - Gov. Sonny Perdue announced today that the state of Georgia is severing all ties with the liberal-leaning ACORN organization once its current contract expires in 13 days. "In July," Perdue said in a statement released today by his office, "I directed my office to review all consulting contracts the state has with outside vendors to look for budget savings; that review did not identify the ACORN contract, because it does not involve state funds. "The state of Georgia will not renew the contract, which expires in 13 days. Further, I have issued an executive order that prevents executive...

New York, NY (AHN) - Four young men accused of gang-raping a Hofstra University freshman in a dorm toilet have been released from jail after their alleged victim recanted her charges against them. Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice told reporters at a news conference Thursday that the 16-year-old student withdrew her story after a lengthy interview with prosecutors late Wednesday. A lawyer of one of the accused also said the accuser's description of the alleged gang rape does not match with the scene shown on a short cell phone video of the incident taken by a fifth man she...

Had the United States not turned back Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, it's likely he would have marched into Saudi Arabia. The Saudis essentially sat back and watched the American-led forces protect and defend their enormous wealth, basking in the protection before and since of the American nuclear umbrella. The billions they've spent on the latest weapons we have made them no less dependent on our protection; they were unable to stand up to Saddam in 1990, and today, after historic arms buying sprees, they are unable to defend themselves against their cross-Gulf rivals in Iran. A senior Saudi prince once...

Canvasser from the Citizens Action Coalition stopped by with a petition against Cap and Trade. I thought the CAC was more of a liberal, envirowingnut group. Is this one of those "even a broken clock is right twice a day" moments?

As of this writing, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is still refusing to meet Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. And given recent media reports about the Obama administration's planned peace initiative, one can understand why: If they are true, he has no reason to bother negotiating with Netanyahu. All he has to do is sit and wait, and in two years, the international community will give him everything he wants on a silver platter. The plan in question was first broached publicly by the European Union's foreign policy czar, Javier Solana, at a speech in London in July. The international community...

Posters portraying President Obama as a witch doctor may be racist, organizers of Tea Party protests say, but they reflect anger about where he is leading the country. The posters, showing Obama wearing a feather headdress and a bone through his nose, have recently popped up in e-mails, on Web sites and at Tea Party protests. The image has stoked debate and cast attention on the rallies, which have drawn people Tea Party organizers describe as on the fringe and not representative of the overall movement. Their general viewpoint, leaders say, is that there's been too much federal government intervention,...

HAMPTON A man used a robber’s gun to shoot him after the robber broke into his residence early Wednesday. The robber was arrested at a local hospital receiving treatment, police said. The home invasion was reported about 12:20 a.m. in the 1100 block of E. Pembroke Avenue. Two men with guns went into the residence and attacked a man inside, while a third robber waited in a car, police said. “During the assault, one of the suspects dropped his handgun which the victim was able to retrieve,” a police statement said. “The victim fired the handgun striking one of the...

The House Republicans' top campaign chief strongly denounced Speaker Nancy Pelosi's comments that appeared to question whether today's angry conservative protests were similar to anti-gay rallies in the late 1970s that preceded the assassination of two San Francisco political leaders. Rep. Pete Sessions (Texas), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said Pelosi crossed the line when she related the rhetoric of anti-gay protesters in San Francisco in 1978 -- the year Harvey Milk, the first openly gay member of the city's board of supervisors, and his political ally, Mayor George Moscone, were killed by former supervisor Dan White --...

ACORN has received over $53 million of federal funds since 1994 and stands to get $8.4 billion more tax dollars in the near future and this past week we have been enlightened to certain ways that our taxpayer dollars are at work. The “ACORN Exposed” videos came from James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles who went undercover to expose the dirty deeds of ACORN this past summer. When the first two videos hit the airwaves last week, Blogcritics was on top of the story, “In both cases, O’Keefe and Giles “presented himself as a pimp and his associate Hannah Giles as...

WASHINGTON – In a ceremony described as “moving” by Russian diplomats, President Obama officially canceled a Bush-era deal that would have placed a missile-defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland. Both countries played host to decades of bloody Soviet occupation as a reward for their efforts against Nazi Germany during World War II. The decision was presented to Russian ambassadors and other diplomats as a gift congratulating the country on the anniversary of its famously successful invasion of Poland’s eastern front in 1939, just over two weeks after Nazi Germany overran the country’s western border. During the ceremony, which...