Free Republic

Homosexual activists are peeved at the Hallmark greeting company over a Christmas ornament it is marketing that is conspicuous for its non-“gay” appearance. Each year Hallmark comes out with a set of holiday “keepsake” ornaments, and this year is no exception. But one has garnered worldwide attention — and possibly collector status — for what it omits. Hallmark's 2013 “Holiday Sweater” keepsake ornament (shown) is colorful and bright, and includes a stanza from the popular Christmas carol "Deck the Halls" that refers to donning “gay” apparel. But, instead of using the potentially offensive word “gay,” the folks at Hallmark decided...

Pray For the Peace of Jerusalem The Book of Proverbs Chapter 3 Guidance for the Young 1. My son, do not forget my law, But let your heart keep my commands; 2. For length of days and long life And peace they will add to you. 3. Let not mercy and truth forsake you; Bind them around your neck, Write them on the tablet of your heart, 4. And so find favor and high esteem In the sight of God and man. 5. Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding; 6....

The side-by-side comparisons of President Obama's statements then and now are devastating. Especially the "period." Period here is no punctuation mark. It's a way of underscoring the word of the President of the United States.If you like your health care plan you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away. No matter what. - June 15,2009And I am sorry that they, you know, are finding themselves in this situation, based on assurances they got from me. - November 7,2013For him to have made such unqualified assurances to the American people--not once but dozens...

“If a Defender of the Bond wants to serve well, he cannot limit himself to a hasty reading of the acts or to bureaucratic and generic answers,” Francis said in his Audience with the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the highest judicial authority in the Catholic Church. In his address he spoke about the important function of the Defender of the Bond in the marriage annulment process, urging him to "harmonize the provisions of Canon law with the concrete situations of the Church and society.”The Defender of the Bond’s faithful fulfilment of his task does not mean taking over the...

A new edition of the left-leaning magazine The New Republic imagines Hillary Clinton's political "nightmare" as a crowd of people holding up Elizabeth Warren masks. The Image, an homage to the original promotional poster for the film "Being John Malkovich," will run with the tagline, "A Democratic Party that realizes its soul lies with Elizabeth Warren instead." Clinton, who is weighing a bid for president in 2016, is widely viewed among Democrats as the party's logical nominee should she run. Unlike in 2008, when then-Sen. Barack Obama was making overtures about a serious bid for the presidency, no apparent Democratic...

Please pray for a young single mom, Branna, whose little girl was called home around midnight. Her birthday is Nov 23rd and she would have been three. Branna's life revolved around her precious daughter and I ask that we pray the Lord God Almighty work in her life and the lives of her family in a powerful way.

TEPALCATEPEC, Mexico — For lime grower Hipolito Mora, it was time to organize and pick up arms when a packing company controlled by a brutal drug cartel refused to buy his fruit. For Bishop Miguel Patino Velazquez, it was seeing civilians forced to fight back with their own guns that made him speak out. For Leticia, a lime picker too afraid of retribution to give her last name, it was the day she saw a taxi driver kidnapped in front of his two young children that persuaded her to join those taking the law into their own hands. In Mexico,...

Strange Space Object Stumps Astronomers; Appears to be Asteroid but Has Six Comet-Like Tails Posted by Russell Westerholm Astronomers have spotted a curious comet-like spatial object with the Hubble Telescope that has six trails, causing it to look like a badminton shuttlecock, BBC News reported. The observers were lead to believe the object is an asteroid because it was spotted in an asteroid belt, but its tails are more characteristic of a comet. Asteroids also typically only appear as tiny dots of light. "We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it," Dave Jewitt, a professor from the University of California...

Farmers can now produce more crops in an environmentally sustainable way at a lower cost thanks to the efforts of hundreds of scientists over the past half-century. Seeds are developed in a laboratory and then field tested to enhance nutritional value or resistance to drought, disease and herbicides. Genetically modified crops are now planted on nearly a quarter of the world's farm land by some 17.3 million farmers. More than 90% of those farmers are smallholders who harvest a few acres in developing countries. Society, the economy and the environment have benefited enormously from GM crops. India has flipped from...

How are they doing it? How are the Liberals winning, forcing their social agenda on America and winning elections despite an economy that employs only 60 million of more than 300 million and has 48 million on food stamps? How do they keep winning when the nation is 17 trillion in debt and their policies are destroying the health care system? It is almost more generally accepted than global warming that the American economy is default. The most recent article on Nolan Chart asks the question "Do you want to boost our economy?" Though extremely brief in substance, the article...

There is no doubt that the United States is in financial disarray and the future seems quite bleak. In the next decade or so, the U.S. will face extreme difficulties paying for healthcare, making Social Security payments and pretty much keeping entitlement programs afloat. What is the solution? In a speech made earlier this year in D.C., world-renowned Keynesian economist Paul Krugman concurred that the federal government does have a financial problem. When you add an aging population and rising healthcare costs, the government lacks the necessary revenue to pay for pretty much anything. According to the Nobel Laureate, the...

The white hipsters of Austin want us to know that race had nothing to do with the 200 black people who fought, destroyed property and threw rocks at police a few days before Halloween. White people do it all the time, said Katie Friel, who writes for Culture Map in Austin. But the only time anyone calls it a riot is if it involves a large number of black people, she says. She pointed to a 2011 punk rock concert where mostly white fans tried to tear down the chain link fence. Police sprayed pepper gas. No one said that...

Gannett company - link and title only.

Sen. Mitch McConnell is done playing nice. McConnell smacked down the tea party in an interview with Wall Street Journal opinion writer Peggy Noonan published Thursday evening. The Tea Party is made up of people who are “angry and upset at government,” the Senate minority leader said, but they’ve been mislead by their leaders. “They’ve been told the reason we can’t get to better outcomes than we’ve gotten is not because the Democrats control the Senate and the White House but because Republicans have been insufficiently feisty. Well, that’s just not true, and I think that the folks that I...

Ship christenings at Newport News Shipbuilding are typically a who's who of political figures, and Saturday's event honoring the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford is no exception. Past aircraft carrier christenings have drawn presidents to the shipyard, but not this time. A shipyard spokeswoman said Ford administration figures — Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and chief of staff (and eventual veep) Dick Cheney — will be there. Democratic heavyweight Carl Levin, a senator from Ford's home state of Michigan, will also be on hand. President Barack Obama, who gave a major policy speech on sequestration at the shipyard in February,...

Just happened, goes to rubber stamping in Senate where it was already passed and on to supportive governor. Hawaii is 16th state +DC to legalize this sin(also Oregon and New Mexico have functional same sex marriage because they recognize out of state marriages).

Washington Post writers know how to spot racial hatred: It’s all about the “pattern,” said Mary Curtis in a recent Post column. That is how she can “determine the motive” of white members of Congress who oppose President Obama. And whether they are racist. But this pattern-seeking reporting has not yet made its way to the Post crime desk. And the latest example of that came Halloween night, when a “large group of assailants” beat and robbed a 50-year teacher at the Metropolitan Branch Trail, a hiking and biking path from Union Station downtown to the suburbs in Maryland. It’s...

It’s an odd feeling to get the upsell on instruction manuals related to domestic terrorism. The nice lady from the Illinois hamlet of Smithton would never describe her wares that way, but that’s what they are. The booklets were stacked in neat rows that wrapped around her four tables in the exhibitor’s hall at October’s Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot, a biannual event just south of Louisville that looks and sounds a lot like a reenactment of the first days of the Siege of Stalingrad. Since 1979, the Shoot has drawn growing numbers of full-auto aficionados to the wooded hills...

The transformation of American liberalism over the past half-century is nowhere more apparent than in the disputes now roiling a relatively obscure section of upstate New York. In 1965, as part of his "war on poverty," President Lyndon Johnson created the Appalachian Regional Commission. Among the areas to be served by the commission were the Southern Tier counties of New York state, including Broome, Tioga and Chemung. The commission's central aim was to "Increase job opportunities and per capita income in Appalachia to reach parity with the nation." Like so many Great Society antipoverty programs, the effort largely failed. The...

Over the past few years, British businesses operating in America have learned the hard way exactly how brutal the US can be when things go wrong. British banks have had to pay billions of dollars in fines to settle investigations by US regulators, ranging from allegations that Barclays rigged LIBOR to claims that Standard Chartered breached US sanctions against Iran. … The US Department of Justice has hardly given JP Morgan an easy ride of late. Last week, America’s biggest bank was fined $5.1 billion, most of which related to wrongdoing at Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, companies JP Morgan...