Free Republic

The Senate on Monday advanced legislation banning workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity — marking a victory for gay rights supporters despite the bill’s dim House prospects. The measure, known as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, cleared a key test vote on Monday evening, 61 to 30. The bill appeared to clinch 60 Senate votes — the threshold needed to avoid a filibuster — after Dean Heller (R-Nev.) said he would endorse the bill earlier Monday.

October was Iraq’s deadliest month since April, 2008. In those five and a half years, not only has there been no improvement in Iraq’s security situation, but things have gotten much worse. More than 1,000 people were killed in Iraq last month, the vast majority of them civilians. Another 1,600 were wounded, as car bombs, shootings, and other attacks continue to maim and murder. As post-“liberation” Iraq spirals steadily downward, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was in Washington last week to plead for more assistance from the United States to help restore order to a society demolished by the 2003 US...

Four years ago today, Major Nidal Malik Hasan slaughtered fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas while yelling “Allah u Akbar!” There is absolutely no doubt that Major Hasan’s attack was an act of Jihad and that Hasan was acting as an enemy combatant who had infiltrated the US Army, yet the victims who were killed and wounded at Fort Hood have been denied Purple Heart awards by the Obama administration, who have arrogantly termed the attack to be “workplace violence,” as if Hasan had just gotten mad at his fellow workers and “snapped.” It didn’t have to happen. Hasan...

A southern New Jersey couple has sued Gov. Chris Christie over his signing of a bill banning so-called gay conversion therapy, claiming it violates their constitutional rights. The couple, who isn't identified in the court papers filed Friday, claims the law violates their rights to free speech and free exercise of religion because it prevents them from seeking treatment for their 15-year-old son. According to the lawsuit, the teen suffers from "unwanted gender identity disorder and unwanted same-sex attractions" and has contemplated suicide. Christie signed the bill in August. It bans licensed therapists from trying to turn gay teenagers straight....

A floating island of debris the size of Texas has been crossing the vast Pacific Ocean to the western shores of the Americas since a devastating tsunami inundated Japan in 2011, says a new study. Five million tons of wreckage - the remains of homes, boats, and other remnants of shattered lives in eastern Japan - were swallowed by the ocean that day in March, and more than one million tons of flotsam continues to head towards the west coast of the US..... While the first documented debris from the tragedy has already been found in California, scientists fear these...

Friday’s slaying of a Transportation Security Administration officer at Los Angeles International Airport is fueling calls from union leaders to give some of the agency’s employees guns, handcuffs and the power to make arrests.

Obamacare is a disaster—not because of the clunky, costly, inoperative website, but because President Obama and his HHS minions have grabbed control over our personal health care decisions and they won’t let go. First, the top-down control means that the President and his know-it-all bureaucrats mandated that every adult purchase health insurance, even if they don’t want it. (The Supreme Court’s ruling that the mandate is only a “tax” provided helpful cover for the Administration.) Second, the Obama Administration asserted control over religious organizations and private companies, dictating the contents of their insurance plans. The move, requiring coverage for birth...

I found this book about Watergate and Nixon. It is eye opener right form the beginning. The Watergate scandal rocked the American public, while there was a huge outrage regarding the scandal itself, few have delved into the events surrounding the 25th Amendment, or how unnoticed the 25th Amendment (inspired by Nelson Rockefeller) and was enacted into law. It’s a good read and revealing relationships of Nixon, Agnew, Kissinger, Rockefeller and the events that orchestrated in to the Watergate scandals.

It sounded so simple. Too simple, it turns out. President Barack Obama's early efforts to boil down an intricate health care law so Americans could understand it are coming back to haunt him, leaving a trail of caveats and provisos in place of the pithy claims he once used to sell the law. Jonathan Gruber, who played a central role in crafting Obama's health law, said the moral of that story was that most Americans are happy with their health care and are resistant to change. "The view was, 'Look, we've got to get this across the finish line.' To...

he Supreme Court will hear arguments this week about prayers in public life, this latest deliberation revolving around a case from Greece, N.Y., and the recitation of prayers during town board meetings. The board used to begin each of its meetings with a moment of silence. When that moment of silence was replaced by spoken prayers, they turned out to be overwhelmingly Christian, and a suit was filed. Last year a federal appeals court ruled, according to The Washington Post, "...that such a 'steady drumbeat' of Christian invocations violates the Constitution's prohibition against government endorsement of religion." The Court, not...

This 4 On Your Side investigation looks into the actions of police officers and doctors in Southern New Mexico. A review of medical records, police reports and a federal lawsuit show deputies with the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office, police officers with the City of Deming and medical professionals at the Gila Regional Medical Center made some questionable decisions. The incident began January 2, 2013 after David Eckert finished shopping at the Wal-Mart in Deming. According to a federal lawsuit, Eckert didn’t make a complete stop at a stop sign coming out of the parking lot and was immediately stopped by...

AFP - Jailed Pussy Riot band member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova is on her way to a new penal colony in Siberia, her husband said Tuesday, following fears after two weeks without information about her whereabouts. Tolokonnikova, 23, who alleged major prison abuses in her previous colony in central Russia, is on her way to a new prison colony deep in the Krasnoyarsk region, her husband Pyotr Verzilov wrote on Twitter, saying the information comes from a reliable source. The penal colony number 50 in the town of Nizhny Ingash lies about 300 kilometres (185 miles) from the regional centre Krasnoyarsk, four...

Police arrested a 21-year-old New York woman who allegedly drove into a herd of cows in Orange County, seriously injuring three of them. Authorities say Daisy Cowit, of Wawayanda, was using her cell phone when she plowed her Jeep Liberty into the cows on Mountain Road last Monday. Six of the cows were struck, and two farm workers were nearly hit, police said. Three of the cows had to undergo emergency surgery for their injuries; they survived. Cowit was charged with reckless endangerment, criminal mischief and reckless driving. She also faces charges of driving while using a cell phone and...

About 17 percent of people who don’t have health insurance actually tried to buy some on the new marketplaces in October, a new survey published Monday indicates. And just 20 percent of those who did try managed to buy a policy, the Commonwealth Fund survey finds. And health officials have made clear the frustrations will not be completely over for anyone, even by the end of the month. The troubled website crashed again Monday, its third complete outage in just over a week. But this time, technicians were able to get it up and running again after 90 minutes. "We...

President Barack Obama told his enthusiastic supporters Monday night that he never promised what video recordings show him promising at least 29 times. The videos show Obama promising 300 million Americans that “if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan, period.” (snip)

Congressional incumbents have two basic routes to re-election. One is to tack sharply toward the base, leaving only the narrowest of lanes for a primary challenger to outflank you. Most of the 11 Republican Senators up for re-election in 2014 have chosen this strategy. A few others, including Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and Lamar Alexander, take the second path, calculating that the best way to stay in Washington is to emphasize their clout inside the Capitol. Then there is a little-traveled third path: the one blazed by South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham. The garrulous two-term Republican Senator is a rare...

On the fifth anniversary of his election, President Obama told a rally of grass-roots supporters on Monday evening that “I’ve got one more campaign in me” — to make sure his signature health care law works. Mr. Obama has been widely criticized for having promised as a presidential candidate that Americans could keep their current coverage under his insurance program, and on Monday he modified his language in the face of reports, long anticipated, that some companies had canceled individual policies because they did not meet minimum coverage standards set by the Affordable Care Act. “If you have or had...

Dan Pfeiffer, the top White House communications strategist, tweeted out a liberal organization's hit piece on Edie Sundby's insurance company Pfeiffer has one of the few 'official' White House Twitter accounts The story ran on the Think Progress blog, a project of the Center for American Progress – run by a former Clinton White House chief of staff It alleged Sundby's now-famous health insurance limbo is United Healthcare's fault, not Obamacare's Sundby, who has battled gallbladder cancer for nearly seven years, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed about how Obamacare will affect her health Her insurance plan will be canceled...

First Amendment: A federal court has ruled that the ObamaCare contraception mandate violates the guarantee of free exercise of religion and forces some to choose between their religious conscience and bankruptcy. The Supreme Court's decision in June 2012 that ObamaCare was constitutional because its fines for not complying with its mandates made the law a tax within Congress' authority to impose did not end the constitutional or court challenges to this attempt at redistribution of health and wealth. On Friday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Gilardi v. HHS that ObamaCare's contraception mandate violates the constitutional rights of...

Fairfax,Woodson highschool: at 7am I was voter #109, that's LOW! For the last 18 year I have voted at same time to get a feel for turnout. I'm in a Heavy Dem area.... So there is hope!