Free Republic

California has met the future, and it really doesn’t work. As the mounting panic surrounding the drought suggests, the Golden State, once renowned for meeting human and geographic challenges, is losing its ability to cope with crises. As a result, the great American land of opportunity is devolving into something that resembles feudalism, a society dominated by rich and poor, with little opportunity for upward mobility for the state’s middle- and working classes. The water situation reflects this breakdown in the starkest way. Everyone who follows California knew it was inevitable we would suffer a long-term drought. Most of the...

The End Of Civilization https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzShgcocaqg

A federal appeals court signaled Friday that it is unlikely to allow President Barack Obama’s request to go ahead with a new round of relief for illegal immigrants, making it likely that the White House will have to take its legal case to the Supreme Court within days. The oral arguments before the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans were being closely watched by both sides in the heated immigration debate as a sign of whether the administration will be able to move forward with its plan to grant quasi-legal status and work permits to about 4...

Even in this Easter season, there are those who would nervously employ the secular convention of saying that they want Christ but not his Church, and that they can confess their sins to God without confessing to a priest. This ignores what Jesus did when he rose from the dead: he constructed the Church through his teaching during the forty days before the Ascension, and the first thing he did when he appeared to the apostles was to give them authority to forgive sins in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Saint John wrote that not all the books in the world...

Hillary Clinton may be reticent to speak on the subject of foreign policy just yet - she's peppered her rare interactions with actual media with bland policy positions mostly having to do with middle class Americans and favorite burrito proteins - but that might be because the Clinton Foundation is still trying to work out how they're going to accept all that foreign cash while one of their founders is campaigning to be leader of the free world. Turns out, they're still going to accept the foreign cash, at least as far as six key countries, with whom the US...

They’ve stood by and waited while establishment Republicans staged a noisy First in the Nation Leadership Summit in New Hampshire which drew 19 presidential hopefuls and a crush of media this weekend. Now they are ready to rumble: a feisty group of Granite State conservatives will move in. Literally. On Sunday, the 603 Alliance - activists loyal to founding principles and the Constitution - will stage a daylong summit in the very same hotel. They intend to winnow out the authentic conservative candidates - with much ado. “On April 19, in the city of Nashua, New Hampshire, the live-free-or-die state,...

Yesterday the Tennessee Senate approved a resolution applying for a convention of states under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, making it the seventh legislative house to pass this resolution in 2015. The resolution, which was adopted with 26 Senators voting in favor and just five voting against, calls for a convention “for the purpose of proposing amendments to the Constitution of the United States that will impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government and limit the terms of office for officials of the federal government.” Under Article V of the...

Aspirants to the White House, both Democratic and Republican, have, as we all know, begun “announcing,” thus initiating, from a rationalist’s point of view, a media carnival featuring, on both sides, an array of supposedly God-fearing clowns and faith-mongering nitwits groveling before Evangelicals and nattering on about their belief in the Almighty and their certainty that if we just looked, we could find answers to many of our ills in the Good Book. The candidates will cloak their true agendas – serving the Lords of Wall Street far more zealously than Our Father who art (or really, art not) in...

"...Walker expanded the stump speech he had given in Iowa back in January, a coming out party of sorts, that propelled him to co-frontrunner status in national and early-state polling. The new content made clear that Walker is a hawk and that in a Walker presidency the United States would not only reengage with the world but would project its power without reservation. He called the war on radical Islam and “generational” war and scorched Barack Obama for his ambivalence on the threat. “We’re going to bring the fight to them and fight on their soil and not ours." Walker’s...

As the leading article in The Spectator this week pointed out, thousands of people are fleeing war and anarchy in Africa and setting sail across the Mediterranean bound for Europe. The latest tragedy comes today, after a boat carrying between 500 and 700 migrants from Libya capsized. So far, only 28 people have been rescued. Coaxed by traffickers who demand huge sums, refugees have been piling into rickety boats which often disintegrate en route. Aid groups, human rights activists, the pope and the EU itself all say the EU-funded rescue operation Triton is inadequate. Well, they’re right in a way,...

Higher education professionals are dismayed at the growing number of students who expect their universities to protect their tender emotions from over-stimulation. If you graduated from college in the previous millennium, you may be unaware that many students now believe that college professors and administrators should protect them from, rather than expose them to, ideas they disagree with, especially ideas that disturb them. Much of the recent debate over the current state of college campuses was spurred by Judith Shulevitz's March 21 op-ed in The New York Times, "In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas." The Brown University campus, Shulevitz...

The Shroud of Turin will be displayed for the first time in five years on Sunday. More than a million people have signed up to view one of Christianity's most celebrated relics. Pilgrims believe the Shroud of Turin, measuring 4.3 meters (14 feet) in length, was the cloth used to bury Jesus Christ. The most-talked about piece of linen in history, the shroud imprinted with an image of a man who appears to have been crucified, will go on display from April 19 until June 24 at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in the north of Italy. Public...

Not every boy wants a pony, a truck or a puppy; but every boy wants and needs a father figure in his life. When a young boy loses his father during military service, the loss can be crushing. Had his father not volunteered to be one of the 1% of Americans who serve in uniform, he could have grown up with a male role model by his side to set an example of courage and to celebrate his achievements. Let me tell you the story of Operation 300, a non-profit organization that helps children cope with the loss of a...

Pray For the Peace of Jerusalem Character Studies From The Bible Samuel New International Version (NIV) 16 Saul and his son Jonathan and the men with them were staying in Gibeahin Benjamin, while the Philistines camped at Mikmash. 17 Raiding parties went out from the Philistine camp in three detachments. One turned toward Ophrah in the vicinity of Shual, 18 another toward Beth Horon, and the third toward the borderland overlooking the Valley of Zeboyim facing the wilderness. 19 Not a blacksmith could be found in the whole land of Israel, because the Philistines had said, “Otherwise the Hebrews will make swords or...

Iran on Saturday marked Army Day with a military parade featuring new weapons systems, as well as a truck carrying a massive banner reading “Death to Israel.” A televised broadcast of the parade was punctuated by repeated cries of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” “If Israel makes a mistake,” the announcer on Iran television said during the broadcast, as heavy trucks carrying armored personnel carriers rolled past, “those in Tel Aviv and Haifa will not sleep at night, not one person.” Broadcast on national television, military brass and political leaders, foremost President Hassan Rouhani, attended the procession south...

It’s going to be a crowded field for the Republican nomination for president. Liberals will make “clown car” jokes during the first few events where they appear together. And they might not be that far off the mark, to be honest. Every election season someone says something so stupid it makes your face look like you just had a lemon unexpectedly shoved in your mouth. Unfortunately that someone is usually a Republican. Oh, Democrats say stupid and counterproductive things too, but they aren’t broadcast on a loop to the tens of millions of Americans who can name more “Real Housewives”...

A senior commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said Sunday that inspectors would be barred from military sites under any nuclear agreement with world powers. Gen. Hossein Salami, the Guard’s deputy leader, said on state TV that allowing the foreign inspection of military sites is tantamount to “selling out.” “We will respond with hot lead (bullets) to those who speak of it,” Salami said. “Iran will not become a paradise for spies. We will not roll out the red carpet for the enemy.” Iran and six world powers — the US, the UK, France, Germany, China and Russia — have reached...

No presidential decision is as politically hazardous as the war decision. That’s because voters are quicker and more ferocious in turning on their chief executives when wars go awry than when events become troublesome in other areas of governance. Woe be to the president who finds himself in a war he can’t win and can’t get out of, or finds that the price of war far outweighs the promised benefits, or learns that the rationale for war doesn’t hold up. Herewith, then, a catalogue of the country’s five worst wartime presidents, men who took their country to war, or continued...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the following remarks at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting: "Israel views with utmost gravity the supply of S-300 missiles from Russia to Iran, especially at a time when Iran is stepping up its aggression in the region and around the borders of the State of Israel. Israel also views with utmost gravity the fact that there is no reference to this aggression in the agreement being made between the major powers and Iran. There is no stipulation that this aggression be halted, whether at the start of the agreement or as a condition...

Saturday, April 18, 2015 The Death of the Left Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The left is winning, but for the left winning is indistinguishable from dying. The West didn’t defeat Communism; it held it at bay long enough for it to defeat itself. The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China crushed Communism more decisively than Goldwater could have ever dreamed of. The embargo didn’t turn Cuba into a hellhole whose main tourism industry is inviting progressive Canadian pedophiles to rape its children. Castro did that with help from the dead guy on the...