Free Republic

"One of Aaron Hernandez’s first official acts as a freshman football player for the Florida Gators was to sucker punch an employee at a Gainesville bar so hard that he ruptured the poor guy’s ear drum. Tim Tebow, who then was a sophomore quarterback, intervened in the dispute and tried to make everything better. Tebow, you see, was the public face of Urban Meyer’s national championship-winning program at UF. Aaron Hernandez was its secret and seedy underbelly. Hard to believe the Gators had one of the greatest role models in sports history and one of the most heinous criminals in...

I just filled out an application for a job on the left coast. I was required to select the gender "I identify with." It was at that point I had an epiphany: "If I can pretend my gender, despite biology, why can't I pretend my race, and take advantage of government programs?" If you want to see the Left impale themselves on logic, through that one around!

As a practicing corporate attorney, one of my hobbies is teaching impressionable young minds the basic of business law at a small, Christian college. The following is an abstract of my first lecture on the foundations of American law. I'll withhold citations and research notes and simply present this portion in the hope that someone here will find it useful in keeping certain recent events in perspective. Over 200 years ago the founders had a chance to do something unique in all of human history: They took a blank piece of paper to draw up a new country in a...

The New York Times has devoted enormous resources to covering this controversy - more than 40 articles, including a 5,200-word piece by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Walt Bogdanich -- probing the legal processes that have cleared Winston. But the newspaper’s coverage has been characterized by the same selective and agenda-driven presentation of the facts it faults Florida authorities for exhibiting. The accuser, anonymous until last month, has now publicly identified herself and told her story in “The Hunting Ground.” Her name is Erica Kinsman. In her version of events, she was not only raped by Winston but also mistreated by...

"This is the worst attack on an athlete that we have ever seen in the history of amateur sports," his attorney, David Cornwell, said Monday on NBC Sports Radio.... Part of that is because his own doing (see: Burger King, Publix, FSU Student Union). There's a big difference, however, between being a serial knucklehead and a rapist. It didn't help Winston that the incident occurred as "rape culture" awareness was skyrocketing on campuses. The Washington Post recently ran a column titled, "We Should Automatically Believe Rape Victims." As FSU was struggling in a game against Boston College, a San Francisco...

In this series, we’re going to look at how the Times and other media entities have used loaded language, irrelevant details, and inference to portray the FSU football program as monstrously out of control and Florida State University, Tallahassee, and local law enforcement as willing to conspire and bend the rules to benefit their local football heroes.

He just a talk at our company before heading to Washington to vote FOR the bill. He says the amendment fixes the border enforcement problem, for the first time since the Reagan bill, and that opposition to the bill is based on misperception. He came by my table and conversed in Spanish with the Hispanic lady next to me. When he shook my hand I looked him in the eye and asked him if he read the bill he's about to vote for. He says he did, and the amendment too.It's incredible to me that he can't see the Democrats...

What gives life to that document is the consensus of the people who uphold it. It has no special magic. It is fragile. If our society choses to change or disregard it entirely, it means nothing, affords no protection. The shift away from its governing principles has been slow and continuous but determined. The Kelo v. New London case went a long way towards erasing individual property rights, which are the foundation of our personal freedom. With the decision to uphold the individual mandate of Obamacare, the government has just consumed another large portion of our indiviudal liberty. Where will...

My very conservative and funny 20 year old daughter and a friend just got back from the Occupy Tampa rally. She and her friend held up a sign that read "Tofu is Murder." To show you the mental capacity of the shiftless malcontents who populate these events, they took her seriously, and thought she was "down with the cause", whatever that is. I told her the good thing about these rallies is, no one is missing a day of work. :)

Gainesville Police arrested and Tased Florida Gators cornerback Janoris Jenkins following his involvement in a street fight over the weekend, according to Alachua County jail records. **** Jenkins is the Gators' 24th arrest in the last four years, a trend the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's Dave Hyde recently pointed out. Jenkins is the third Gator to be arrested in 2009, following offensive lineman Carl Johnson and walk-on Marquis Hannah. Defensive tackle Torrey Davis was arrested shortly after leaving the team in March.

I know there are "seasoned" ex-military types on this board. I'd like your and anyone else's opinion on this topic. Every year of WWII saw improvements in aircraft development and performance-- so much so that what was state of the art at the beginning of the war, such as the Me 109 and Supermarine Spitfire, would have been death traps by the end, 6 years later.For years I'd heard the P-51 Mustang was the ultimate WWII fighter. Then I read a quote from a former FockWulfe 190 pilot who said Mustangs were frail-- one bullet in the aluminum cowling and...

Will it draw the same fatal conclusions it did after the past 14 years of defeats and near-defeats: "The American people must be moving left. We need to move more to the left too." "The Dem candidate is so reprehensible that we can prop up a party hack with anti-conservative values, and the base will still turn out to vote for him."Or, will the GOP moderate movers and shakers finally get it this time: Real conservative values sell, and real, dynamic conservative cnadidate is more than a match for the Dems. Check back in '12.

We know that if either Obama or Clinton is elected, he/she will work with a Democrat Congress to pass a Fairness Doctrine law to effectively kill the critical conservative voice.Wouldn't John McCain do they same thing if he is elected? We know from McCain-Feingold that he will abridge First Amendment rights for his own political advantage. Conservative talk radio host have been among his harshest critics, and he has made clear what he thinks of them. Does anyone seriosuly doubt that he would stand aside and let Congress pass this legislation?Regardless who is elected, I think there is a very...

I am a long-time poster here, but I have to admit that I never gave Ron Paul serious consideration because (1)many of his most vocal supporters are nuts and (2) he can't hold his own in a debate. But looking at the substance of the man, I finally realized his conservatism is almost exactly the same as mine: He is a small government, pro-life, pro-marriage, constitutionalist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul#Stem-cell_research_regulation If not for his unpopular stance on the futility trying to police the globe, I think he would have had much more support among the GOP's conservative base.There is just no way, now...

Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong and the lead investigators in the Duke lacrosse case have different recollections of the first time they huddled at the Burlington laboratory that provided DNA testing for the prosecution. Durham police Sgt. Mark Gottlieb and Investigator Benjamin Himan each listed in their case notes that they were at DNA Security on April 10, a week before any indictments in the case...

Forgive my venting, but I've got to tell somebody. This is the second time in my 15+ year legal career that I've been in this unfortunate position. I'm a general corporate counsel, and took a job in a publicly traded company 8 months ago. I get along well with the general counsel I report to. We never talk politics,but there was always something odd about his behavior. Yesterday in a conference call I found out what it was, and I quote:"Mr. X., I'm honored to meet you. I'm a big Democrat, and I admire your relationship with Bill Clinton".Well, that...