Free Republic

...Geller is a person who, in the wake of 9/11, found her life changed, changed utterly, and who has followed the cause of resistance to terrorism without fear or favor since that time. ...Many say that Garland was just some sort of bizarre attention-getting device for Geller, but that is not true. It is a device for calling attention to the fact that many do not believe their own ardent proclamations of 1st Amendment when the hammer comes down. Just now on Fox News, playing in the background, a panel was discussing Geller some pundit declared: Quote "I am a...

The IRS cannot be sure that Americans who lacked health insurance last year have complied with Obamacare’s “individual mandate” penalty this tax season, according to an inspector general report Friday that pointed to a decision to delay proof-of-coverage forms from insurers and employers until 2016. Agency mangers told the Treasury’s Inspector General for Tax Administration that a “business decision was made to not develop processes and procedures” to ensure compliance after it decided in 2013 to delay the pair of forms. The documents are sent to both filers and the IRS, allowing the federal government to cross-check what filers say...

More secular confusion about the moon’s former magnetic field by D. Russell Humphreys A recent paper by Clèment Suavet et al.1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that uniformitarian scientists, who assume the world is billions of years old, are still very puzzled about the moon’s magnetic field. They don’t understand why it was formerly strong but now doesn’t exist, and how it could exist in the first place.2 The moon’s magnetic data fit creation science theories very well. Suavet and his colleagues have carefully analyzed the magnetism of two basalt samples brought from the moon...

While we are all justifiably proud of the Garland traffic officer who brought a Glock 21 to a fight against terrorists wearing body armor and carrying carbines and decisively won, let’s not kid ourselves. The assault in Garland was only a failure because the terrorists were dim-witted amateurs who didn’t realize that the school-owned target they drove more than a thousand miles to attack was well-protected with multi-layer defenses. If the same two amateur jihadis had attacked an average school, mall, concert, or church with the same firearms and “fools rush in” game plan, they might have succeeded in creating...

America can breathe a sigh of relief. The economy is improving with the spring weather. The U.S. added 223,000 jobs in April, a healthy pick up after a disappointing March and about in line with what economists surveyed by CNN Money projected. April's strong job gains reflect a trend the country saw last year: job growth cooling in the winter months, then gaining momentum into the spring. "They are good numbers," says Kate Warne, investment strategist at Edward Jones. "It's reassuring that we saw job growth rebound to above 200,000." The good news doesn't stop there. The unemployment rate dropped to 5.4%,...

A federal judge on Thursday threw out a lawsuit challenging parts of Washington state’s new law expanding background checks on gun transfers, saying gun-rights activists couldn’t challenge it because they aren’t being prosecuted for violating it. U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle in Tacoma ruled that opponents of the law didn’t have standing to challenge the parts of Initiative 594 that required background checks for noncommercial gun transfers. To challenge the law, the plaintiffs must show they’ve been actually prosecuted or at immediate risk of being prosecuted, he said.

Conservative presidential candidate Ben Carson says the $7.25 federal minimum wage should be raised.“I think, probably, it should be higher than now,” Carson told CNBC’s John Harwood in an interview Friday.Carson added that government assistance often provides more than the minimum wage in several states, allowing people to ignore the long-term benefits of a job."I don't necessarily blame people for saying, 'Look, I can stay home and make this money, or I can go and work this little chicken job that doesn't have many benefits,’ ” he said."However, recognize that if you go and take that chicken job, you gain...

Of course this group is based in San Francisco – where else? If this were 1915 rather than 2015, the positions taken by the Pacific Educational Group (PEG) would be properly attributed to the Klu Klux Klan. Even today if any “unapproved of” group said these things the media would ride in with their keyboards blazing to destroy anyone who even whispered what this liberal think tank is saying out loud. PEG uses what it calls Courageous Conversations to say the things it does; but it’s still idiotic. PEG tells teachers that Blacks are, “…less likely to respond to fundamental...

Ukip supporters have woken up this morning to find that the party retains only 1 MP, but they will surely feel cheated by an election system that has handed the SNP over 56 MPs for a much smaller number of votes. Despite bringing in almost 4 million votes, making Ukip the third biggest party by vote share, this election has seen the fall of their leader Nigel Farage and second MP Mark Reckless. The spectacular success of the SNP in Scotland throws into sharp relief the unfairness of the first-past-the-post system on smaller parties. By the time Farage lost his...

Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz. • What's the worst thing Helaman Barlow did as a marshal of the polygamous towns here on the Utah-Arizona border? He knew men who took 16-year-old girls as plural wives. The marriages were sanctioned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, so Barlow didn't report them. He looked up license plates for church security so they could track dissenters and their families. He obstructed the FBI when it came to town. When a church leader said he wanted another marshal demoted, Barlow watched for and reported a minor transgression made by...

Last week I delivered a guest lecture at a Christian liberal arts college entitled “Each Day Dies With Sleep: Literary and Theological Reflections upon Mortality.” As I thought through the topic over the previous weeks, two superficially disparate questions puzzled me. Why is it that the people most vocally committed to causes connected to death (abortion, assisted suicide, euthanasia) are often the same who are committed to progressive sexual causes? And why do abortion advocates frequently see it not as a necessary evil but as a positive good? As to the first question, that the same people often, though not...

Over the last decade, states have made massive cuts to higher education, with average state support falling from $9,729 per student in 2001 to $6,815 in 2011. While a large share of the blame for these cuts can be pinned on the financial crisis and subsequent recession, some of the decline is due to a deliberate effort to eviscerate public higher education. For instance, Bobby Jindal plans to savage higher education spending in Louisiana to the tune of $141.3 million, or about 12 percent of the state’s higher education budget, to pay for tax cuts. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker is...

At 9:21 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday in America, former top Obama aide David Axelrod conceded the UK election. “Congratulations to my friend @Messina2012 on his role in the resounding Conservative victory in Britain,” Axelrod wrote on Twitter. The surprisingly decisive victory for Prime Minister David Cameron and his Tories also delivered a big win to Jim Messina, President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, who advised the Conservative Party and triumphed over his fellow Obama aide, Axelrod, who advised the Labour Party.

WASHINGTON — After each of Hillary Clinton’s campaign events, a large group of reporters gathers on one side of the room and shouts questions at her. She rarely responds, opting instead to ignore them, not even glancing in their direction. Clinton has largely closed herself off from media questions in the first month of her campaign. Her refusal to take questions stands in stark contrast to virtually all other candidates in both parties, who routinely wade into a pack of reporters after events, often fielding more questions in one event than Clinton has so far in her entire campaign. They...

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Featured Term selected at random:OBSCURANTISM Concerted opposition, on principle and from religious motives, to justified intellectual development. A familiar charge against Christians by rationalist critics who charge the faithful with fear of enlightenment lest they weaken their beliefs. (Etym. Latin obscurus, dark; unintelligible.) All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

Two illegal aliens in Walker County, Texas, have pleaded guilty to murdering and dismembering a 16-year-old high school student with a baseball bat and a machete in a national park nearly two years ago. According to investigators, the crime was a revenge killing ordered by the infamously violent Latin American gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. Cristian Zamora, 22, and Ricardo Leonel Campos Lara, 19, both from El Salvador, pleaded guilty on April 17 to aiding and abetting each other and others with the murder of 16-year-old Josael Guevara on Sept. 23, 2013, the Houston Chronicle reported.

Washington (CNN)—Security conditions at U.S. military bases were raised Thursday night, because of growing concern of a jihadist threat in the U.S. It comes hours after FBI Director James Comey raised the prospect there are thousands of ISIS followers online in the U.S. "We have a general concern, obviously, that ISIL is focusing on the uniformed military and law enforcement," Comey told reporters Thursday. The order was signed by Admiral William Gortney, head of the command. "We have the same concern about the potential threat posed by violent homegrown extremists," said Captain Jeff Davis, spokesman for the U.S. Northern Command...

President Obama’s lawyers admitted to a federal judge late Thursday that they had broken the court’s injunction halting the administration’s new deportation amnesty, issuing thousands of work permits even after Judge Andrew S. Hanen had ordered the program stopped. The stunning admission, filed just before midnight in Texas, where the case is being heard, is the latest misstep for the administration’s lawyers, who are facing possible sanctions by Judge Hanen for their continued problems in arguing the case. The Justice Department lawyers said Homeland Security, which is the defendant in the case, told them Wednesday that an immigration agency had...