Free Republic

Last night I saw something I had never encountered before: the launch of what I'm told were probably six large drones. They really made my mouth open with astonishment. They went up very fast then changed heading and rose into the clouds. Two minutes later they were joined on the same course by some fast movers which I could hear overhead but could not see due to high cloud. Bearing in mind that "Loose lips sink ships" (which WWII-era warning not coincidentally we began to use again after 9/11/2001), I'm not sure how much to say here. But it's natural...

An immense explosion has been heard throughout the northern Iranian city of Qazvin, semi-official Fars news agency reported, and many casualties are expected from the blast.

Back in the early 1980s I was a first-adopter and bought an AT&T 6300 PC. Believe it or not, it still fires up and runs (though the monitor fizzes now and won't display anything). It runs MS-DOS and had Wordstar on it. I backed up the work I had on that machine with both hard copies and floppy disks, (you young whipper-snappers might have heard of those), but they were all destroyed in a fire. Always intended to ask someone if there was a way to get the information off the old hard drive, but I kept thinking, "mañana," and...

For nearly 35 years I've lived in Montgomery County, MD, about 25 miles outside of DC. It's a beautiful place and in some ways I will always love it, but as most Freepers know, Maryland has been dominated by Democrats and has become almost uninhabitably liberal and expensive. Taxes, regulation, overzealous penetration into one's private life, crime, crowding, and traffic have made life here very difficult for a conservative. For many years I have told myself that as soon as my children were grown and I was free to do so, I'd sell my suburban house and move to rural...

We have never had cable TV, and it was the greatest relief to me when analog television broadcasting stopped so that my kids couldn't watch TV at our house. Nobody was going to study at all, much less do Algebra II and graduate from high school, if the temptation of stupid entertainment was available, so I always refused to pay for cable. There were times I did miss television, though. When other Freepers would talk about news or sports events, when there was an election or an historic occasion, it would have been good to see for myself what they...

Yesterday morning my son received his Eagle, Globe, and Anchor as a US Marine. The young man who has given me an abundance of laughter, grief, delight, worry, aggravation, frustration, excitement, and exhaustion for nineteen years now fills me with pride and joy. I could not be more proud or more happy that he has overcome all the setbacks and disappointments that held him back. Just talking to him on the phone today, for the first time since he went to boot camp 13 weeks ago, it was easy to hear that he was now a man, a very different...

The Virtual Inaugural AddressBill Whittle says what Obama should have said. This guy is good. Listen to him.

Blogger, pilot, screenwriter, and conservative speaker Bill Whittle introduces himself to the stars of conservative activism by delivering a fiery 15-minute speech to the Restoration Weekend gathering last week.

I still feel optimistic about a Romney victory. But if Obama wins next week, whether by cheating or by the stupidity of the electorate, things are going to get much worse in this country. It's quite possible that election rules will be changed and freedom of speech suppressed so much that the forces of conservatism could not win an election again, as Bill Whittle reminds us. So what are your plans in that case? Are you going Galt? How will you change your behavior and your life in the event of an Obama win?

Undaunted by a forecast of heavy thunderstorms, 200 Christians gathered on the afternoon of March 25 to pray at the front steps of the US Supreme Court. The two-hour vigil, called "Encircle the Court in Prayer," took place the day before the high court began hearing arguments concerning the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordability Act, widely referred to as “Obamacare.” The provisions of the president’s healthcare legislation of greatest concern to these believers are the “HHS mandates,” which compel religious entities to provide employees with insurance coverage for contraceptives, sterilization services, and abortifacient drugs. Roman Catholics, conservative Christians,...

Today tens of thousands of Americans gathered in 140 cities to peacefully protest the "HHS Mandate". This recent mandate of the US Department of Health and Human Services requires religious institutions and faithful employers to provide insurance coverage of contraceptive drugs and devices, sterilization services, and abortion-producing drugs, even if this coverage is anathema to them. The mandate levies crushing fines on any institution that attempts to opt out of paying for such coverage. Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Jews, and Muslims are all strongly opposed to providing coverage of such services, and since HHS and the Obama Administration have been absolutely...

GAITHERSBURG, MD, March 1, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In the wake of international press coverage of a priest’s decision to deny a lesbian communion, and the woman’s subsequent demands that he be removed from the parish, a source close to the incident contacted LifeSiteNews with new information that he says will set the record straight. Among other things, the new information indicates that the woman did actually receive Communion at the Mass – but from an Extraordinary minister rather than the priest. Fr. Marcel Guarnizo of St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland, was reprimanded by the Archdiocese of Washington...

I wonder if any other Freepers heard this on the Mark Levin show on Friday? Just at the top of the hour, moments before the 7 p.m. station break, Mark took a call from a listener who said that he was a business owner in Virginia. The caller stated that as far back as August 2010 he had received an RFP (Request for Proposal) to bid on a DOD contract. The contract was to supply some service--I couldn't quite understand what--for support of US troops in a situation consistent with central Africa. His point was that the plans to utilize...

I just received a flyer about this in the weekly bulletin at our parish church and thought people on the Catholic ping list might like to know about it. It’s the speakers’ list for the International Week of Prayer and Fasting to be held at the National Shrine in Washington DC. Speakers on October 1 include Kevin Malarkey, the father of the six-year-old-boy who was shown heaven while he was in a two-month coma; Alex Jones, the former evangelical minister, now a Catholic deacon; Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life (wonder if he’s going to be allowed to come,...

My neighborhood of 65 houses, located in a prosperous section of the most liberal county in liberal Maryland, is close to Washington, DC. We are close enough so that ten years ago today, we could see the smoke rising from the Pentagon. Today there is only one American flag displayed in this neighborhood. Mine.

Several days ago I put up a thread asking for prayers for a young Marine who had suffered severe injuries in an IED blast. I did not use his name at that time, for the sake of the family's privacy. However, his name has been made public, so it's okay to write more about his situation and family. His name is Mark Andrew Bradley, and he is a USMC Sniper Scout. The prayers of many have so far borne him up, and he has survived his injuries though he was not initially thought able to survive even the first surgeries....

A young man in my circle of acquaintance was very badly wounded in Afghanistan on Sunday. Apparently there was considerable internal damage in addition to the loss of his legs, and it is unclear whether he can survive the necessary surgery. Will you please agree with me in prayer and lift this Marine and his family up? Thank you.

My brother sent me a carton full of beautifully wrapped and beribboned Christmas packages, most of them containing clothes but a few containing plastic model airplanes for my son. When I opened the carton I found that a number of the packages had been slit up one of the short sides and the side flaps of the box pushed in so that anyone could see what was inside. I could only imagine that this was done for security purposes. Is this standard, now--to slice open Christmas presents and check to see what's inside them? I was a bit shocked, especially...

Bored? Sick of throwing money away on golf? Here's a great new competitive sport to try: competitive waterboarding. Can you outlast a terrorist? Are you as tough as a SEAL? This harmless but scary new competition is taking off among young, old, and ex-military alike across the USA. They laugh when it's referred to by the delicate specimens of manhood in the Obama Administration as "torture." Sheikh Mohammad lasted 40 seconds on the waterboard before telling of plots in England to hit elementary schools. But he was at a disadvantage, since he'd never had a bath or shower before and...

How did this happen? Today I downloaded and installed Mozilla Firefox 3.0. Mozilla had been nagging me for some time to do this, so I finally figured that today I had time, and I went ahead with it. I have been a Firefox user for a few years and have had zero trouble with it. As I was messing around with it late this evening I found that the homepage icon on the toolbar was connected to "My Barack Obama.com". Imagine my disgust. I have NEVER visited this site in my life, and I certainly did not choose this as...