Free Republic

A Long Island federal jury rewarded Nancy Genovese, 58, a mother of three, $1.12 million in compensatory damages after being arrested in 2009 for attempting to photograph a helicopter at a Air National Guard base in the Hamptons. Genovese intended to use the photo on a “Support the Troops” website; she was arrested for trespass and insulted as a "Teabagger." From The New York Post: Southhampton cops searched her and found a legally owned rifle that she was transporting from a nearby rifle range. She contends a deputy sheriff arrived on the scene later and said to her, “I bet...

My editor called and said, “Do a column on this Lena Dunham flap!” And I said... Actually, back up. What I did NOT say was, “Who the hell is Lena Dumbwhat?” I’m a 67-year-old guy. I live in rural New Hampshire. I don’t subscribe to US Weekly, assuming that still exists. I watch football, basketball, and hockey on TV and sometimes “The Bass Pros” on Outdoor Channel. The only Lena I know of is Lena Horne, a wonderful performer, who is not involved in any flaps, and who is also dead. But I’m a writer. That is, I was a...

A federal appeals court will reconsider a decision to order YouTube to take down an anti-Muslim film clip that sparked violence in the Middle East and death threats to the actors from those who considered it blasphemous to the Prophet Muhammad. An 11-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena will hear arguments Monday by Google, which owns YouTube, disputing the court’s decision to remove “Innocence of Muslims” from the popular video sharing service. A divided three-judge panel ruled in February that actress Cindy Lee Garcia had a copyright claim to the 2012 video because she...

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- Long depicted as the rootin'-tootin' capital of American gun culture, Texas is one of the few states with an outright ban on the open carry of handguns. That could change in 2015, with the Republican-dominated Legislature and Gov.-elect Greg Abbott expected to push for expanded gun rights. "If open carry is good enough for Massachusetts, it's good enough for the state of Texas," Abbott said...

My nephew is seeing the Army National Guard recruiter tomorrow. He has some questions and I'm going with him.

Other than the Koch brothers, there is arguably no one outgoing-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid disdains more than the Tea Party. And no one represents the Tea Party in the Senate more than Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Yet, after hours of tedious wrangling, Reid on Friday agreed to allow a vote on a measure from Cruz questioning the constitutionality of President Obama’s executive order on Deferred Action, which does, in effect, grant de facto amnesty to upwards of 5 million illegal aliens. Cruz told Breitbart News that a Senate vote on Obama’s executive action was important for two reasons: “First,...

The second Project 22350 frigate, the Admiral Kasatonov, was set afloat at the Northern Wharf in Russia's northern capital of St. Petersburg in the presence of Russia’s Navy Chief Commander Admiral Viktor Chirkov. “We set afloat a second Project 22350 warship designed for remote sea areas to ensure Russian national interests in any part of oceans in the world. This warship has embodied all thoughts and ideas of our designers and requirements of our fleet,” Chirkov said. He recalled that Admiral Gorshkov, the first warship of the project, is already at sea trials. “I hope that the Northern Fleet will...

In an article for the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, a well-known Canadian bioethicist – Udo Schuklenk – argues that aborting a child after birth is moral. Naturally, Schuklenk draws his own arbitrary lines as to when after-birth abortion is moral. He says that when a baby’s life contains “overwhelming pain and suffering,” it would be a moral choice. Schuklenk thinks that even future overwhelming pain and suffering should be considered, not just what a baby might currently be dealing with. And in a horrifying pro-choice statement, Schuklenk writes: The parents should be able to freely decide on what...

New plans unveiled Friday could allow French doctors to put terminally ill patients into a deep sleep until they die. The French parliament will debate the issue in a new draft law, according to The Telegraph. So far only Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland explicitly permit euthanasia or assisted suicide. A 2005 French law already allows “passive euthanasia,” where a person causes death by withholding or withdrawing treatment that is necessary to maintain life, but the new proposal takes the idea further. The proposals by two MPs — one from the ruling Socialists, the other from the opposition UMP —...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)The grand jury in the case of Michael Brown's shooting didn't just face an onslaught of witnesses with conflicting memories of what happened the day white police officer Darren Wilson killed Brown, an unarmed black teenager. It also heard from witnesses who couldn't be believed at all. Some admitted lying. Others changed their stories under questioning. Prosecutors were so skeptical of one woman's account that they asked whether she might have dreamed about seeing the confrontation in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9. Most of the dozens of witnesses who testified likely did their best to describe what they saw, but...

(CNN) -- The debate over the "Redskins" name in sports isn't just at the professional level. Students at an Oklahoma City high school were refusing to go into Capitol Hill High School on Wednesday morning because their mascot no longer has the controversial name, according to CNN affiliate KOCO. Dozens of students stood on the lawn outside the building rather than heading into class. The city's public school board voted Monday to change the name in response to Native American students' feelings that the mascot name was offensive. The vote to change the mascot, which has been in place since...

December 15, 2014Monday of the Third Week of Advent    Reading 1 Nm 24:2-7, 15-17a When Balaam raised his eyes and saw Israel encamped, tribe by tribe,the spirit of God came upon him,and he gave voice to his oracle: The utterance of Balaam, son of Beor,the utterance of a man whose eye is true,The utterance of one who hears what God says,and knows what the Most High knows,Of one who sees what the Almighty sees,enraptured, and with eyes unveiled:How goodly are your tents, O Jacob;your encampments, O Israel!They are like gardens beside a stream,like the cedars planted by the...

Dan Bilzerian is a 33-year-old professional poker player who has made millions playing cards and gambling. He’s been referred to as “Instagram’s Playboy King” and here’s why:

Ah, the joys of tolerance. Sydney, Australia has begun to learn them after opening several Muslim-friendly restaurants that serve only halal food that is permissible to be eaten under Shariah law. One of those restaurants is featured in this video of a Muslim man who completely loses it when a customer, apparently unaware that he was in a halal-only KFC, asked for bacon on his sandwich. The video shows the KFC employee yelling — screaming, really — about being recorded. He also threatens the customer. Apparently he really, really doesn’t like the word “bacon.” Great customer service at those halal-only...

John Boehner and the rest of the GOP RINO establishment didn’t have enough Conservative votes to pass their $1.1 TRILLION budget. That’s because while these so-called “Republicans” criticized Obama’s amnesty in public, their budget completely funded it. More than 60 Republicans voted against the spending bill, forcing Boehner to get approximately 50 Democrats to vote for it. GOP leaders blocked any anti-amnesty amendments and allowed the bill to proceed without any mention of Obama’s amnesty. That means that newly “legalized” illegal aliens will begin receiving working papers and become eligible for Social Security and Medicare as soon as they come...

Hold on…do you mean you can't succeed at the quarterback position in the NFL by just upchucking lobs into the middle of the field like you're at the county fair trying to throw rings around milk bottles? Are you telling me that what you could do at Texas A&M, you can't do in the pros? That everyone is faster than you? More athletic? You mean if you don't study hard all the time in a league with so many intelligent men who bust their ass in the classroom, you might fail?

TUC report shows 1 in 12 in labour force now in ‘precarious employment’, huge rise since 2008 ___ New figures have revealed the dramatic spread of low-paid, insecure and casual work across the British economy since the financial crash of 2008. In that year, one in 20 men and one in 16 women worked in the casualised labour market. Now, one in 12 of both men and women are in precarious employment, which includes zero-hours contracts (ZHCs), agency work, variable hours and fixed-term contracts, according to new TUC data. According to the analysis, in 2008 there were 655,000 men in...

Nearly $40 Million In FEMA Sandy Aid Possibly 'Improper or Fraudulent' BY JOEL SEIDMAN Almost $40 million of the aid provided by FEMA to Hurricane Sandy may have been "improper or fraudulent," but that figure represents a huge improvement over the percentage of FEMA aid deemed questionable after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, according to a watchdog report released Friday.

Dozens of new oil projects in the North Sea and Europe could be shelved as falling prices force international oil companies to tear up their investment plans. Global energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie has said that 32 potential European oil field developments containing 4.9bn barrels of oil equivalent are waiting for approval on more than $87bn (£55bn) of funding. These could be at risk should oil prices fall below $60 per barrel. “Major projects and investment in the UK and across Continental and Mediterranean Europe could be at risk if prices stay below $80 per barrel, as over 70pc of the...

Germany’s plan to phase out nuclear energy and switch to renewables by 2022 is unrealistic as the country is doomed to remain dependent on fossil fuels like oil and gas for the next 70 years, energy expert Matthias Dornfeldt told RT. Renewables can’t replace fossil fuels overnight because there’s not enough infrastructure, said Dornfeldt in an interview with RT. He believes the 21st century will be the century of gas, as the 20th century was the century of oil. “We are going to be dependent on oil as well as on gas, as I see, for the next 50, 60,...