Free Republic

It’s going to fail. Here’s why it’s going to fail…

Today's Gospel : John 1:1-18 In the beginning was the Word: and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things came to be, not one thing had its being but through him...read more...

God’s Son did not disdain to become a baby. Although with the passing of the years he moved from infancy to maturity, and although with the triumph of his passion and resurrection all the actions of humility which he undertook for us were finished, still today’s festival renews for us the holy childhood of Jesus born of the Virgin Mary. In adoring the birth of our Saviour, we find we are celebrating the commencement of our own life, for the birth of Christ is the source of life for Christian folk, and the birthday of the Head is the birthday...

Simeon's prayer is a hallmark of the Catholic Church's night prayers (compline). In it is the assurance that we have seen our salvation and if we were to pass in the night it would be well. read more...

VATICAN CITY – A woman jumped the barriers in St. Peter's Basilica and knocked down Pope Benedict XVI as he walked down the main aisle to begin Christmas Eve Mass on Thursday. The 82-year-old pope quickly got up and was unhurt, said a Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Ciro Benedettini. Footage aired on Italy's RAI state TV showed a woman dressed in a red, hooded sweat shirt vaulting over the wooden barriers and rushing toward the pope before being swarmed by bodyguards. Read more.

"The loving providence of God determined that in the last days he would aid the world, set on its course to destruction. He decreed that all nations should be saved in Christ..." read more...

-excerpt- Mir Hossein Mousavi today released a new statement denouncing the regime’s brutal tactics against the Green Movement ... -excerpt- While the statement is quite similar to other statements he has released in the past, several points on closer inspection stand out. -excerpt- ... Mousavi for the first time actually discounts his own influence and that of Mehdi Karroubi. He admits that even though people asked him to call for protests or at least lend his support, he did not do so in the case of Ashura. He also acknowledges the fact that people came out without him calling them...

As some Houston leaders called on Sunday for measures to help guard against future terrorist attacks, others questioned why the Nigerian man charged with trying to destroy a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit spent time last year in Houston. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is believed to have traveled to Houston in 2008, but no details of the trip were available Sunday. U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston declined to discuss any connection Abdulmutallab might have to the city, saying details of the investigation remain classified. U.S. government officials did confirm that they are looking into his travel itinerary, but the FBI...

I know…technically the decade doesn’t end until next year. Whatever. The first 10 years of the 20th Century, as it was, was a great era for great movies. In my mind, we saw a true resurgence of innovation and imagination…with some routine Hollywood nonsense thrown in. Now, I took some editorial leeway on some of these, as you will see. For what it is worth, here is my top 10 list:

Hacked emails discussed manipulating data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures Calls for an independent inquiry into what is being dubbed "Climategate" are growing as the foundation for man-made global warming implodes following the release of emails which prove researchers colluded to manipulate data in order to "hide the decline" in global temperatures.

Holder wants gun registration? So says the Law Enforcement Alliance of America: Holder wants a national, permanent gun registration system administered by law enforcement. A registration of honest citizens that have cleared the federal background check for gun purchases with those records permanently retained by and shared among law enforcement. Holder wants new federal authority to prohibit any person on the federal watch list (reported to be 400,000 names) from buying guns and supports confiscating guns from those on the list who possess them. So, he doesn’t want due process protections for people who want to own guns. Even though...

This is the comment left at our blog:As John F. Kennedy once said, "Where there's smoke, look for a smoke-making machine." The whole "story" of ACORN is a fabrication of the Republican National Committee and those folks in Republican politics who come out with the daily "talking points" for people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. ACORN has had the audacity to register poor people to vote, and those poor people are usually Democrats. This infuriates the Republicans and the right wing commentators. So the right wingnuts find any transgression they can and pump it up and repeat it again...

Whatever Happened to Sanctions? Malcolm A. Kline, November 13, 2009 It’s interesting that the same worthies on campus who clamor to disinvest from Israel have yet to endorse sanctions on Iran. It should be noted that, as Claire Lopez points out in a report for the Center for Security Policy, the Iranian government employs a Washington lobby whose primary purpose is to get sanctions lifted on the renegade regime....

Limits To Diversity & Tolerance Malcolm A. Kline, November 9, 2009 When school district representatives told a Southern California teacher to remove the banners he had on display in his classroom, “diversity” and “tenure” were used to justify the order, according to an attorney from the Liberty Counsel. “Mr. Johnson, if a Muslim student came in here, he wouldn’t be comfortable,” bureaucrats told the educator, the barrister from LC said at a Capitol Hill seminar on October 28, 2009.....

Photos of today's crowd outside the Capitol: Health Care Protesters Overwhelm Capitol Bethany Stotts, November 6, 2009 Today’s November 5 rally may have drawn as many as 20,000 protesters against the health care bill which will soon come up for a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, according to an Americans for Prosperity representative. As I’m no crowd size estimator, I won’t even hazard a guess, but the panoramas below should give you an idea of how many people were there.....

A law school professor has withdrawn a lawsuit accusing the legal blog Above the Law of publishing a "viciously racist series of rants" after reporting the professor's arrest for suspicion of soliciting prostitution. University of Miami School of Law professor Donald Marvin Jones dropped his lawsuit on Wednesday, nine days after he filed it pro se in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. He did not respond to a request for comment.*** Above the Law Managing Editor David Lat declined comment on Thursday, but in a blog post on Wednesday wrote that there had been no...

The following is by Dr. David N. Menton, Ph.D. It is copyrighted 1994 by Missouri Association for Creation -- The human brain consists of approximately 12 billion cells, forming 120 trillion interconnections. The light sensitive retina of the eye (which is really part of the brain) contains over 10 million photoreceptor cells. These cells capture the light pattern formed by the lens and convert it into complex electrical signals, which are then sent to a special area of the brain where they are transformed into the sensation we call vision. In an article in "Byte" magazine (April 1985), John Stevens...

While organizing our filing system, I ran across my adoption papers. My mother gave them to me a couple of years ago for my own records. The cost of my adoption was a 300.00 donation to Catholic Charities in Chicago, I was six days old. I am blessed to be in the family, in which I was placed. My mother tells me there were lots of rules to comply with. The agency wanted to make sure I had a stable and secure home. In reality, no one can predict how a family will one day turn out. Ours certainly had...

An official announcement by the Obama administration disclosing the reality of extraterrestrial life is imminent. For several months, senior administration officials have been quietly deliberating behind closed doors how much to disclose to the world about extraterrestrial life. Dissatisfaction among powerful institutions such as the U.S. Navy over the decades-long secrecy policy has given a boost to efforts to disclose the reality of extraterrestrial life and technology. The impending disclosure announcement follows upon the secret implementation of a year long openness policy on UFOs and extraterrestrial life. Over the period February 12-14, 2008, the United Nations held closed doors discussions...

Tina Fey, who only recently confessed before David Letterman's national television audience that she didn't have sex until she was 24, is outing herself again: she admires and respects the woman she imitates, Sarah Palin. And is teetering toward voting for Palin should the former Alaska governor run for president in 2012.