Free Republic

FORE! Score? And seven trillion rounds ago, our forecaddies brought forth on this continent a new playground, conceived by Robert Trent Jones, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal when it comes to spending as much time on the links as possible — even when it seems totally inappropriate, like moments after making a solemn statement condemning the grisly murder of a 40-year-old American journalist beheaded by ISIL. I know reporters didn’t get a chance to ask questions, but I had to bounce. I had a 1 p.m. tee time at Vineyard Golf Club with Alonzo...

President Obama is under siege. Not enough having to put out fires in far flung places he was suddenly faced with a domestic flair in Ferguson, Missouri. The brutal shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year old unarmed African American kid, by a white policeman, brought Ferguson, a quiet rundown St. Louis suburb, to the brink of civil unrest. The rest of the country was put on edge. That was until the even gorier spectacle of the beheading of an American journalist, James Foley, by an Islamic State executioner in Syria, hit the news waves. The beleaguered President first took time...

Stabat Mater (At the Cross Her Station Keeping) This 13th-century hymn is variously attributed to Gregory I, Bernard of Clairvaux, Pope Innocent III, St. Bonaventura, Jacopone da Todi, Pope John XXII, and Pope Gregory XI, and others. It was the liturgical sequence for the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin (Sept. 15 and the Friday before Palm Sunday). It is no longer used on the Friday before Palm Sunday and is optional on September 15, but it continues to be sung at the Stations of the Cross during Lenten services. It was not admitted as a liturgical sequence until 1727, and...

The White House said over the weekend it was ready to "take action" against any threat to America as it indicated serious consideration of U.S. military strikes against the Islamic State (IS, formerly called ISIS) in Syria, AFP reports. The Pentagon has warned of the dangers of IS and said operations against it in Syria may be needed, after weeks of air strikes have slowed the advance of the Sunni group in Iraq. The White House also said late Friday that air strikes in Syria may be necessary, as deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes agreed that "any strategy to...

Kids reacting to technology of the past, this time around, it's rotary phones. Amazing how technology changes so quickly.

August 24, 2014 Fareed Zakaria Busted for Plagiarism Once More By Jack Cashill First, I will acknowledge up front that this is a revised version of an earlier American Thinker article, which in itself was a revised version of an earlier American Thinker article, which in itself was an update of the information contained in my book, Deconstructing Obama. But when a Harvard worthy gets busted for literary fraud anew, I feel compelled to update the scorecard. The man on the hot seat once again is Fareed Zakaria. Born to a Muslim family in Mumbai, the fifty year-old Harvard Ph.D....

AUGUST 23, 2014 Obama’s Endless Vacation In the 1990s, America had a holiday from history. Today, it has a president on holiday. By Matthew Continetti The headline was brutal. “Bam’s Golf War: Prez tees off as Foley’s parents grieve,” read the cover of Thursday’s New York Daily News. Obama’s gaffe was this: He had denounced the beheading of James Foley from a vacation spot in Martha’s Vineyard, then went to the golf course. Seems like he had a great time. Such a great time that he returned to the Farm Neck Golf Club — sorry, membership is full — the...

Pre-operational tests have been successfully completed at unit 1 of the Lungmen nuclear power plant in Taiwan. Start-up of the reactor has been delayed until a national referendum, not expected for up to another three years. Construction work began on the two 1350 MWe Advanced Boiling Water Reactors at Lungmen, in 1999, with the first scheduled to enter commercial operation in 2006 and the second in 2007. NT$300 billion ($10 billion) has already been spent building the plants both of which, will now mothball.

Texas Police Chief Killed In Traffic Stop By Leslie Holland, CNN updated 12:27 AM EDT, Sun August 24, 2014 Police Chief Michael Pimentel had made a traffic stop He was shot multiple times, Bexar County officials says Pimentel dies at hospital Elmendorf, with 1,500 residents, is just south of San Antonio (CNN) -- A police chief in a small Texas town was shot multiple times during a traffic stop Saturday afternoon and later died, authorities said. Michael Pimentel served in Elmendorf, a suburb southeast of San Antonio with about 1,500 residents. According to Rosanne Hughes, spokeswoman of the Bexar County...

The West Borough Baptist Church nearly made a journey to Iraq to protest against IS, after taking up an offer from comedian Adam Hills to fly the anti-gay hate group to the war torn country.The Australian comic made his pledge on his show The Last Leg, on Channel 4 last Friday after the church vowed to picket the funeral of Robin Williams, who they labelled a ‘fag pimp’.He told members of the controversial church to ‘put your money where your mouth is’ and offered to fly them to Iraq so they could protest against the killing of Christians by Islamic State...

“Jesus and the Church: Inseparable” (Matthew 16:13-20) “I love your Christ, but I dislike your Christianity.” That is a quote that has been attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, the leading figure from India of the 20th century. Sometimes it’s quoted as “I like your Jesus. I don’t like your Christians.” Or something like that. Whether Gandhi actually said this or not, the point is the same: Some people want to have Jesus--or at least the Jesus of their imagination--they want to have Jesus, but without the church. They try to pit the two against each other, Jesus and the church. Now...

A police chief in a small Texas town was shot multiple times during a traffic stop Saturday afternoon and later died, authorities said. Michael Pimentel served in Elmendorf, a suburb southeast of San Antonio with about 1,500 residents. According to Rosanne Hughes, spokeswoman of the Bexar County Sheriff's Office, Pimentel pulled over a vehicle in a residential area. There was a struggle and Pimentel was shot, Hughes said. The Bexar County Sheriff's Office took 24-year-old Joshua Manuel Lopez into custody and he will face charges of capital murder of a police officer, said Hughes.

AUGUST 23, 2014 Eric Holder, Racial Profiler The Investigation of Darren Wilson Is Solely Based On His Race. By Andrew C. McCarthy Why has a federal civil-rights murder investigation arisen out of the tumult in a St. Louis exurb? There is only one plausible reason: Eric Holder is guilty of racial profiling. To be clear, we are not talking here about whether there was justification for the shooting of a young black man, 18-year-old Michael Brown, by a young white police officer, 28-year-old Darren Wilson. Was the shooting a legitimate exercise in self-defense by an officer under attack? Was it...

There are two disciplines in which Silicon Valley entrepreneurs excel above almost everyone else. The first is making exorbitant amounts of money. The second is pretending they don’t care about that money. If you have never been to Burning Man, your perception is likely this: a white-hot desert filled with 50,000 stoned, half-naked hippies doing sun salutations while techno music thumps through the air. A few years ago, this assumption would have been mostly correct. But now things are a little different. Over the last two years, Burning Man, which this year runs from Aug. 25 to Sept. 1, has...

Siege of Mecca, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Syria: US and Gulf Destabilization PoliciesMurad Makhmudov and Lee Jay WalkerModern Tokyo Times In the 1980s the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and some other nations began to fund Sunni Islamic terrorism in Afghanistan. This meddling came hot on the heels of the Siege of Mecca in Saudi Arabia in 1979. Therefore, funding radical Sunni Islamism in Afghanistan came at a very opportunistic time for the rulers based in Saudi Arabia. Pakistan became the central base in training international jihadists and spreading Islamism in Afghanistan. Irrespective of the motives in...

Is the beheading of an American journalist – along with the genocide of Christians and other religious minorities – enough to label the Islamist terror group ISIS as the consummation of evil? According to CNN.com, the answer is really quite complicated. In fact, James Dawes, director of the program in Human Rights at Macalester College, argued in a piece for CNN’s online arm that “there are few things more dangerous now than allowing ourselves to think” that ISIS does “evil things for evil ends,”as NRO’s Jonah Goldberg phrased it in a tweet earlier this week. Dawes’s assertion is that Americans...

Option No. 1: It’s one of those government programs that “don’t work” and is merely “corporate welfare.” Option No. 2: It’s an “independent” bank that “pays for itself” and creates jobs. President Barack Obama has flip-flopped between No. 1 and No. 2 when it comes to the U.S. Export-Import Bank. “Its sole mission is to create American jobs,” Obama said in his weekly address Saturday. “That’s it. It helps many American entrepreneurs take that next step and take their small business global.” While urging Congress to reauthorize Ex-Im, Obama said, “the bank works. It’s independent. It pays for itself. But...

British jihadis involved in the brutal beheading of American reporter James Foley callously boasted of making personal fortunes from ransoms paid for other released hostages, openly talked of making so much money they could retire to Kuwait or Qatar, The four Islamic State jihadis – nicknamed The Beatles by their Western captives – were reported to be ‘interested in money’ from the start. American hostages – especially Foley, whose brother was discovered to be serving in the US Air Force – were picked out for the most brutal beatings.

The Price of Oil Crushed Russia Once. Is It About to Happen Again? By Aimee Duffy | More Articles | Save For Later August 23, 2014 | Comments (0) Russian oil pump. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons/AcoderIn case you hadn't heard, Russia has an oil problem. The country is heavily dependent on oil tax revenue to fill its coffers, and trouble is brewing given today's low price for Russian crude. Consider these recent headlines from Reuters and The Moscow Times:"Russian oil prices fall below $100/barrel, straining budget""Struggling with Sanctions, Russia Faces Oil Price Crash"And if you go all the way back...

Our barbaric jihadist enemies – the ones President Obama repeatedly assured us he had “decimated” and put on “the path to defeat” – are now stronger than ever. Not stronger than they have been in years, or decades – stronger than ever. They have seized a country-size swath of territory (and growing). They have just beheaded an American journalist – which is the sort of thing they do as a matter of routine but has obviously, and finally, gotten our attention. Not to worry, though: The Obama Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation. I’m sure ISIS is quaking. The...