Free Republic

OKLAHOMA CITY - An Oklahoma County Sheriff's Deputy is recovering after she was attacked Monday morning by a pit bull outside a NW Oklahoma City car repair shop. Sheriff John Whetsel said 21-year-Oklahoma County Sheriff's Department veteran Susan Perkins was at Portillo's Auto Shop to serve a no-contact order to an employee. Whetsel said a blue nose pit bull by the name of 'Big Head' attacked the deputy after she knocked on the front door of the business. Whetsel said Perkins suffered deep bite wounds to both of her legs, before she pulled a handgun and shot and killed the...

" Even bad people love their children".  But do they? Its not so much, "are they capable of love", as, "do they know what love is"? It's parallel to "what is freedom"? The ability to do whatever you want? Or the ability to do what is right? Love is preferring the good of the other for the other's sake. It can be explained to a five-year-old, as simply as Rapunzel and Flynn Rider's mutual, self-sacrificial love.  (Rapunzel is willing to remain the false-mother's slave, to save Flynn Rider's life. Flynn is willing to die so that Rapunzel can become free. Self-sacrificial love that perfects their...

Laurie Bertram Roberts, Mississippi State Pres. of the National Organization of Women, comments on Margaret Sanger’s racism: “First of all, Margaret Sanger did not work on abortion. She worked on birth control. Context is everything. I will never deny that Margaret Sanger was connected to the eugenics movement, what they (abortion opponents) never bothered to say is that eugenicists also wanted to limit the birth rate of poor white people and disabled people. It wasn’t just Black people; it was a whole lot of people they deem to be unfit.” Quoted in “Thank God for Stupid Enemies” Speaker for the...

The family of a man shot in the head and killed by a Philadelphia police officer sought answers in the hours after the deadly incident during a traffic stop in the city’s Mayfair section. The deadly gunshot rang out around 2:45 a.m. along the 6600 block of Frankford Avenue after police said the suspect reached for a loaded handgun — stolen last year — in his rental car. "I would like to know why the police, law enforcement, has the right to kill instead of disabling," the victim's mother Tanya Dickerson said. "It has to stop, this is enough already."...

There’s no good reason for her not to run. When Elizabeth Warren rallied beleaguered House liberals to push back against a bank-coddling omnibus bill and the spineless White House that enabled it, she showed us some of her dynamic appeal. Her only leverage? An implicit threat to shut down the government. Hypocrisy? Sure. Consider the agitated criticism Warren and her allies threw at Republicans not very long ago. And yes, St. Warren’s righteousness was aimed at some inconsequential riders. Still, passing trillion-dollar pieces of legislation should never be easy, and disrupting the current cozy, bipartisan environment surely can’t be a...

A funny thing happened on the way to Vladimir Putin running strategic laps around the West. Russia's economy imploded. The latest news is that Russia's central bank raised interest rates from 10.5 to 17 percent at an emergency 1 a.m. meeting in an attempt to stop the ruble, which is down 50 percent on the year against the dollar, from falling any further. It's a desperate move to save Russia's currency that comes at the cost of sacrificing Russia's economy. So even if it "works," things are about to get a lot worse. It's a classic kind of emerging markets...

Murthy, 37, a physician at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital and instructor at Harvard Medical School, won confirmation on a 51-43 vote. He's a co-founder of Doctors for America, a group that has pushed for affordable health care and supports Obama's health care law. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said most of Murthy's career has been spent as an activist focused on gun control and other political issues, rather than on treating patients. "Americans don't want a surgeon general who might use this position of trust to promote his own personal campaign against the Second Amendment of the Constitution," Barrasso said.

Karl Eikenberry couldn't understand why the staff sergeant insisted that he take a loaded pistol to patrol the barracks. The West Point cadet was in Hawaii for the summer, serving as a staff duty officer with the 25th Infantry Division, which had recently returned from Vietnam. It was his job on weekend nights to ensure good order. "Why would I take a sidearm?" Eikenberry asked. "In case you need it, that's why," replied the sergeant. As soon as he entered a darkened barracks building, Eikenberry says, he understood why his staff sergeant was so nervous. Soldiers were gathered in small...

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident...collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in - your nation, your people - is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of...

The most dishonest advertising in The Washington Post isn’t selling soap or shoes or automobiles. It doesn’t come phonier than this: “Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective.” Rubin spent 2012 insisting that every conservative presidential contender was unelectable except Mitt Romney, who was neither conservative nor electable, as it turned out. Rubin’s still at it, as in her latest screed from Sunday, headlined “Senate passes spending, GOP still despises Ted Cruz: The cromnibus passes despite Ted Cruz's ego trip.” Which part of the GOP? The wing of the party...

An ex-con who died of his injuries today after being shot over the weekend by a retired Union City police officer was carrying a loaded .38-caliber revolver, sources with direct knowledge of the incident told CLIFFVIEW PILOT. Authorities also are expected to announce that they've secured a surveillance video of the incident. The retired officer was working as a UPS security guard when 26-year-old Devin Grimes and another man who were in a pickup truck -- and wearing masks -- ordered him out of his Infiniti at gunpoint around 4:30 a.m. Saturday, law enforcement sources told CLIFFVIEW PILOT tonight. That's...

Tom Davis, who is an ordained minister with the United Church of Christ and a chaplain and professor at Skidmore College: “I contend that Planned Parenthood is engaged in a form of sacred work, the work, that is, of securing reproductive justice for women… Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) is thoroughly secular. But when it comes to the issue of sacred work, that doesn’t matter. The scripture is clear about one thing: sacred work, the work of justice, is sacred no matter who does it.… In the biblical view, sacred work is love, and in practical social realities, sacred...

CORAL SPRINGS, Fla. - An employee who works at a popular brewery in Coral Springs was seriously injured Sunday after he tried breaking up a fight between patrons and a waiter, police said. Coral Springs police were called to Big Bear Brewing Company, 1800 N. University Drive, after receiving multiple 911 calls from employees who feared for their lives. Police arrested Claude Galland, 29, and Michael Laguerre, 29, on complaints of aggravated battery and disorderly conduct after witnesses alleged the men assaulted a restaurant employee.

I hate Republicans. I can’t stand the thought of having to spend the next two years watching Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Ted Cruz, Darrell Issa or any of the legions of other blowhards denying climate change, thwarting immigration reform or championing fetal “personhood.” This loathing is a relatively recent phenomenon. Back
 in the 1970s, I worked for a Republican, Fred Lippitt, the senate minority leader in Rhode Island, and I loved him. He was a brand of Republican now extinct—a “moderate” who was fiscally conservative but progressive about women’s rights, racial justice and environmental preservation. Had he been closer to...

The Obama administration’s original government website promoting Obamacare has been deleted. […] (A)fter Healthcare.gov went live, HealthReform.gov went dark. Thankfully, the Internet’s “WayBack Machine” gives us a shot of HealthReform.gov’s final big screaming homepage: “Keeping the Health Plan You Have…The rule announced today preserves the ability of the American people to keep their current plan if they like it.” …

Obama Braces For Immigration Battle With GOP By David Nakamura December 15 President Obama is bracing for a political and legal battle with Republicans next year over his executive actions on immigration, but as he seeks to rally support against the anticipated assault, a lingering frustration among some Latinos could mean renewed pressure on him to do even more to protect illegal immigrants. After six years in which his administration took a tough line on deportations, Obama’s decision to shield up to 4 million more undocumented immigrants from being removed from the country was in part aimed at repairing damage...

One day after saying Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz had no idea “what they were trying to accomplish,” syndicated columnist George Will said Monday on “Special Report” the pair have two “exceedingly strange careers underway.” Will told Fox News’ Doug McKelway that Cruz is “indifferent” to politics being a “team sport,” adding further that there hasn’t been “a more peculiar career” in the Senate than the one Cruz is currently enjoying. The conservative columnist also said while Democrats are “bemused” by his antics, he is “loathed” within the GOP caucus, while also telling McKelway if Cruz doesn’t get the GOP...

Terror of Hindu Girls Forced Into Marriage Anjali, 12, was kidnapped from her home in Sindh on October 29 by a gang of men who intended to forcibly convert her to Islam via marriage to a Muslim Robin Pagnamenta Anjali, 12, was kidnapped from her home in Sindh on October 29 by a gang of men who intended to forcibly convert her to Islam via marriage to a Muslim December 16 2014 The kidnap gang armed themselves with AK-47s and pistols for their mission, but this wasn’t a jihadist hostage-taking, or even the latest brutal convulsion of gang warfare. It...

Top Republican leaders in the House and Senate are gearing up to push legislation in the next Congress that would increase the number of foreign guest-workers even in industries that do not need them. They are hoping such legislation would "open the door" to a broader comprehensive immigration bill.

Right-wing televangelist thinks the Tea Party senator from Texas needs to tone it down. It’s come to this: even uber-conservative televangelist Pat Robertson is fed up with Ted Cruz’s rabble-rousing. Over the weekend, the Tea Party hero teamed up with fellow Sen. Mike Lee of Utah to hold up a spending bill funding most of the government through the fiscal year, protesting that the measure did not defund President Obama’s executive action on immigration. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the outgoing majority leader, took advantage of Cruz and Lee’s delaying tactics to push through confirmation votes on several Obama administration...