Free Republic

How did marriage lose most of its meaning? How has it gone from being regarded as an institution that formed the conjugal bond, established nuclear families, knit vital social ties across extended familial units, and forged the necessary social cohesion for the sheltering and rearing of children, to a more-or-less optional affirmation of love? True, the same-sex marriage debate has rekindled some interest in the institution and its purposes. But that imbroglio seems more like the last flaring of a star before it goes cold rather than a true rekindling. The weakening of the institution has been ongoing for so...

SAN DIEGO (AP) - A car belonging to the suspect in the disappearance of a teenage girl in California has been found in Idaho, authorities said on Friday. San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore also said that horseback riders reported seeing two people matching the description of the suspect and girl in the Cascade area 70 miles northeast of Boise on Wednesday.

Texas state senator Wendy Davis spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Monday afternoon about her 13-hour filibuster of a bill limiting late-term abortion, her life story, and her future in politics. Davis has become a champion for pro-choice activists, but during her recent whirlwind national media tour, she never commented on late-term abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, who was convicted of murder in May for killing infants moments after they were born. Following her Press Club speech on Monday, THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked Davis to explain the difference between the late-term abortions that the Texas state senator wants...

<p>SANFORD -- After five weeks of trial and 56 witnesses, few legal observers believed prosecutors came close to proving Sanford neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman committed second-degree murder when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin in February 2012.</p> <p>So for many legal analysts, it was no surprise that jurors rejected even a lesser “compromise” verdict of manslaughter, acquitting Zimmerman outright of all criminal charges and deciding he acted in a reasonable way to protect his own life.</p>

Is the Zimmerman case really open and shut? Many conservatives seem to think so. But are they letting leftists dictate their conclusion? Are they not guilty of the same rush to judgment that made liberals convict Zimmerman before the facts, and merely reacting to that injustice rather than to the actual elements of the case? Is it not possible that they are themselves victims of a toxic environment that polarizes all things racial? It is a fact that many, if not most conservatives have already concluded that George Zimmerman is innocent of any crime in connection with Trayvon Martin’s death...

Lender Processing Services today released its latest LPS Home Price Index (HPI) report, based on April 2013 residential real estate transactions. Home prices rose 1.5% from March to April and 8.1% Year over Year (YoY). Where did home prices rise the fastest? 9 of the 10 faster rising metro areas are in California (and Bend OR is really California El Norte). San Francisco is the most expensive metro area on the list. Do we really need to have conforming loan limits set high for San Francisco (or California)? Compare this list with Bloomberg’s “Bubble List” where rising home prices are...

The S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values in 20 cities rose 9.3 percent in February from the same month in 2012, more than forecast, after rising 8.1 percent in the year ended in January. Compared with the prior month, prices rose the most since October 2005. From January to February, Las Vegas was the big winner NSA. Minneapolis was the biggest loser (followed by Chicago and Cleveland). The supply of homes in the US is back to 2005 levels. Low supply, low mortgage rates, rising house prices? In related news, the Chicago Purchasing Manager Index fell below 50 and the Milwaukee...

AFP - Taiwan on Wednesday reported the first case of the H7N9 bird flu outside of mainland China. The 53-year-old man, who had been working in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou, showed symptoms three days after returning to Taiwan via Shanghai, the Centers for Disease Control said, adding that he had been hospitalised since April 16 and was in a critical condition. A passenger (right) has her temperature checked by a Centers for Disease Control staff member at the entrance of Sungshan Airport in Taipei on April 4, 2013. Taiwan on Wednesday reported the first case of the H7N9...

A new virus from the same family as SARS that sparked a global alert last September has been found in a further patient in Britain, health officials said on Monday. This latest case of infection with the new virus known as a coronavirus brings the total number of confirmed cases globally to 10, of which five have died. The British patient, who had recently travelled to the Middle East and Pakistan, is receiving intensive care treatment in hospital in Manchester, northern England.

All is not as it appears in the case of Richard Windsor, the alias used by outgoing EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, apparently to shield email messages from discovery and disclosure. Under court order to cough up the email messages to Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and having turned over a first installment of 2,100 such email messages earlier this week, the Obama administration is making this a case that might challenge the ingenuity of Sherlock Holmes. With Horner’s assistance, my daughter Eliana tries to pierce the fog of administrative war in her NRO column “Lisa Jackson’s gadfly.”

The S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values in 20 cities increased 4.3 percent from October 2011, the biggest 12-month advance since May 2010. The median forecast projected a 4 percent gain. On a month-over-month basis, house prices rose 0.48% in October. I should not that these are seasonally adjusted numbers. On a non seasonally adjusted basis, house prices actually fell slightly in October by -0.1%. oct12-case-shiller The Case-Shiller 20 (green), FNC 30 (yellow) and FHFA Purchase Only (purple) indices are all showing house price recovery from the the disastrous housing bubble. Of course, The Federal Reserve and the fiscal fiasco in...

A copy of a letter received in the past hour by Gun Rights Examiner addressed to Eric Holder from Senator Chuck Grassley questions the attorney general about a leak on a gun trafficking case tied to the Fast and Furious gunwalking operation that resulted in the indictment of the husband of the then-head of the New Mexico U.S. Attorney’s Office Criminal Division. The letter, sent on Wednesday, provides further details to a story related last Monday in this column, concerning Danny Burnett, married to federal prosecutor Paula Burnett, charged with leaking wiretap information to a suspect in an ATF gun...

Owning or Renting: High Risk or Tragedy of the Commons? The tragedy of the commons is the depletion of a shared resource by individuals, acting independently and rationally according to each one’s self-interest, despite their understanding that depleting the common resource is contrary to their long-term best interests. Examples abound such as common grazing on public land, depletion of fish in the ocean and why public restrooms are usually filthy. Homeownership is an example of the “tragedy of the commons.” Public housing projects, such as the infamous Cabrini Green in Chicago, are an example. Public housing is often poorly maintained...

This coming Wednesday features a myriad of important economic, housing and mortgage reports: GDP, Pending Home Sales, Mortgage Purchase Applications, Pending Homes Sales and Corporate Profits. But on Tuesday, the Case-Shiller home prices indices will be released (and that means a busy day on TV for Yale Professor Robert Shiller). What are we expecting for Tuesday’ Case-Shiller 20 metro home price index? In a nutshell, it will show that house prices are recovering. FNC (blue) and FHFA (gold) have already released their home price indices last week and both show an uptick in their recent release for June 2012. What...

President Obama’s first chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, wrote a paper with her husband, David Romer, showing that higher taxes reduce economic growth. ...After looking at data from 1947 to 2006, and studying the legislative record, the Romers concluded that legislated tax changes have far more effect than automatic tax increases. They wrote, “Our estimates suggest that a tax increase of 1% of GDP reduces output over the next three years by nearly 3%.” Their major reason is that higher taxes have a markedly negative effect on investment. In another finding that argues against raising rates,...

The NYPD is questioning a New Jersey man in connection with the Etan Patz case, the 6-year-old boy who vanished more than 30 years ago as he walked to the school bus from his SoHo home, NBCNewYork.com reported Thursday

SEMINOLE COUNTY, Fla. (WOFL FOX 35) - Just hours after George Zimmerman walked out of the Seminole County jail $150,000 bail, the court unsealed several documents. (see below for documents) Circuit Judge Kenneth Lester issued an order to unseal several documents. According to one of the documents released Monday, Zimmerman's arraignment was pushed forward from May 29 to May 8. Zimmerman's location is being kept a secret for his safety and could be outside the state of Florida.

I strongly disagree with David French’s analysis. I’m inclined, instead, to agree with commentators ranging from former Reagan Justice Department official Mark Levin to Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz that the affidavit is stunningly weak — “unethical,” as Prof. Dershowitz puts it. In fact, I go further (which, after nearly 20 years of writing and supervising the writing of complaint affidavits, I think I’m qualified to do). This affidavit is not law, it is agitprop: invoking, for example, the explosive term “profiled” but carefully avoiding any discussion of what it means and failing to note that (a) there is no evidence of...

The Department of Justice has given up its bid to prosecute a pro-life counselor and agreed to pay her $120,000 in a case a judge said never should have been brought. Mary Susan Pine, who stands outside abortion clinics and advises women not to have the procedure, was accused of blocking a car from entering a Florida abortion clinic in 2009. In December, a judge threw out the case, in which the government sought $10,000 in fines and a permanent injunction barring Pine from counseling women outside the Presidential Women's Center in West Palm Beach, Fla. The government had been...