Free Republic

Over the years, it has been my pleasure to worship with many brothers and sisters in many different locations in the United States.  If I asked someone to visit these congregations and describe them to me in two words or less, there would no doubt be a great variety of descriptive terms.  Some of these terms would likely be:  Liberal, charismatic, institutional, non-institutional, fundamental, one-cupper, mainstream, non-cooperative, Holy Roller, legalistic, anti, instrumental, non-instrumental, conservative, contemporary, traditional, unorthodox, orthodox, normal, post-modern, and I am certain a number of other monikers I have not included.  Certainly not all of these congregations are...

Liberals are "pro" and bestow rights on people. Conservatives are "anti" and negative. That's the impressions that viewers would get from watching ABC. On Tuesday, Good Morning America's Bianna Golodryga mentioned the possible presidential candidacy of George Pataki, noting the former New York governor is "pro-choice, pro-union and pro-gay rights." Yet, on June 30, 2011, World News reporter Sharyn Afonsi highlighted Michele Bachmann's "anti-abortion view." On June 07, 2011, GMA co-host George Stephanopoulos suggested to Ann Coulter, "You seem to express some kind of understanding for anti-abortion protesters who use violence.” Using slightly different wording, reporter Aaron Katersky provided a...

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - Coming to a store near you: nine more reasons not to smoke. The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday is set to release nine new graphic health warning labels for U.S. cigarette packs, representing the most significant change to cigarette packs in more than 25 years. The new labels will take up half of a pack of cigarettes and also will appear on advertisements. Cigarette makers have until the fall of 2012 to comply. Mandates for new warning labels were part of a 2009 law giving the FDA authority to regulate tobacco. The announcement follows reviews...

When does war become genocide? When the protagonists are black people. That is the only conclusion one can draw from the unhinged claims that the Ivory Coast is on “the brink of genocide” following the disputed presidential elections and the stand-off between the incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo and president-elect Alassane Ouattara. Unlike we in the West, Africans, it seems, never “fight wars”; they don’t “launch invasions”; they don’t have “political tensions”. They just commit genocides – barmy, inexplicable genocides, often with machetes, for no other reason than the fact that they like to kill people. Lots of people. Entire races...

The rule will apply to raw and single-ingredient major cuts of meat and poultry, including boneless chicken breast, tenderloin steak and ground meat such as hamburger or turkey. It will go into effect in 2012. Coming soon to a grocery store near you: nutrition labels, like the ones seen on soda pop and potato chips, slapped on packages of raw ground meat and chicken breasts. The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Wednesday that a new federal rule will require 40 of the most commonly purchased cuts of poultry, pork, beef and lamb to carry labels that disclose a variety of...

New group hopes to emphasize non-partisan solutionsBy Kevin Bohn and Jessica Yellin, CNN December 13, 2010 10:25 a.m. EST Washington (CNN) -- New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an Independent, joins several leading Democrats, Republicans and other Independent political leaders in the launch of a new group that hopes to find non-partisan solutions to some of the nation's problems and to impact the next Congressional session. The organization, known as No Labels, kicked off Monday in New York with a series of panels discussing some key political problems in America, such as hyper-partisanship and electoral reform. During the day the group's...

For two centuries, the melting pot was America's defining symbol and crowning achievement. It allowed millions of integrating immigrants to formulate and maintain this nation's social contract. But new concepts of separateness, new feelings about diversity, and new definitions of ethnicity have all but destroyed the melting pot and the social contract. To be politically correct today, how should one categorize the following naturalized or native-born Americans, all of whom I know or have known? A Kenyan-born white woman whose parents were born in South Africa and whose grandparents were born in the Netherlands. A black man who was born...

On a July afternoon in 2006, Patrick Hale microwaved a bag of popcorn for his two young children and sat down with them to watch television. When he got up to change the channel, he heard a strange noise behind him, and turned to see his 23-month-old daughter, Allison, turning purple and unable to breathe.

Consumers know less about the water they pay dearly for in bottles than what they can drink almost for free from the tap because the two are regulated differently, congressional investigators and nonprofit researchers say in new reports. Both the Government Accountability Office and the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, recommend in reports released Wednesday that bottled water be labeled with the same level of information municipal water providers must disclose.

OLYMPIA, Wash. -- A man who fled Vietnam more than 30 years ago has won a defamation lawsuit in Olympia against five fellow Vietnamese who called him a communist sympathizer in local publications. The jury awarded the 65-year-old man, Duc Tan, $225,000 on Thursday after a three-week trial. The Olympian reports that the lawyer for the defendants, Nigel Malden of Tacoma, argued the case is a blow against free speech. The jury also awarded $85,000 to Tan's organization, the Vietnamese Community of Thurston County. One expert witness testified that labeling people communist discredits them among Vietnamese who were imprisoned or...

My colleague Brent Baker has painstakingly documented how the big three broadcast networks have gone out of their way to avoid labeling scandal-scarred New York Governor Eliot Spitzer as a “Democrat.” An examination of the fifteen ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news shows through Wednesday night finds Spitzer was called a Democrat just 20% of the time — twice on CBS, once on ABC, and never on NBC. So how do the networks treat Republicans involved in sex scandals? Always, always as Republicans, and as problems for their party. Last July, Louisiana Senator David Vitter’s name surfaced in...

The consultancy conducted an online survey amongst 1,000 consumers aged 16 years and over. Eighty-four percent of respondents said they now look at recycling details. For 84 per cent this is just as important as fat content. For 80 per cent it is more important than salt info, for 79 per cent more important than sugar info, and for 70 per cent more important than calorie content. The findings are pertinent at the present time as the nutrient content of food is a hot topic across Europe, since the European Commission published its proposal for new labelling legislation at the...

AP Business Writer Tyson Foods Inc. plans to revise labels that say its fresh chicken is "raised without antibiotics" after the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it made a mistake in approving labels that use that term. The world's largest meat processor said it has been in discussions with the USDA since at least September about the label it introduced this summer in a major marketing campaign for its fresh chicken. According to a Nov. 6 letter from the USDA, the agency told Tyson it had mistakenly overlooked a feed additive, called ionophores, used for Tyson's chicken when it approved...

SANTA ROSA, Calif. - Vintners have been using byproducts from milk, eggs, wheat and even fish guts in the winemaking processes for centuries. But a new federal proposal could require American wineries to disclose such unsavory items _ used as "fining" agents to remove grit _ as ingredients. The proposal, which could be passed by the end of the year, would require companies to redesign the labels on every bottle to protect people who are allergic to certain foods. Executives at Sonoma and Napa county wineries and their trade groups say few, if any, wine drinkers suffer allergic reactions from...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Meat and milk from cloned animals may not appear in supermarkets for years despite being deemed by the government as safe to eat. But don't be surprised if "clone-free" labels appear sooner. Ben & Jerry's, for one, wants consumers to know that its ice cream comes from regular cows and not clones. The Ben & Jerry's label already says its farmers don't use bovine growth hormone. "We want to make sure people are confident with what's in our pints," company spokesman Rob Michalak said. "We haven't yet landed on exactly how we want to express that publicly."...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Yankees owner George Steinbrenner said he was "deeply disappointed" at his team's elimination in the first round of the AL playoffs, calling it a "sad failure." New York was heavily favored in its series against the Detroit Tigers and won Tuesday's opener 8-4. The Tigers then won 4-3 at Yankee Stadium on Thursday, and swept two games in Detroit, 6-0 Friday and 8-3 Saturday. "I am deeply disappointed at our being eliminated so early in the playoffs," Steinbrenner said in a statement issued Sunday by spokesman Howard Rubenstein. "This result is absolutely not acceptable to me...

WASHINGTON - Oh, the irony. A nation full of overweight people is also full of label readers. Nearly 80 percent of Americans insist they check the labels on food at the grocery store. They scan the little charts like careful dieters, looking for no-nos such as fat and calories and sugars. Yet even when the label practically screams, "Don't do it!" people drop the package into the cart anyway. At least that is what 44 percent of people admitted in a recent AP-Ipsos poll. So attentive, yet so overweight. Two-thirds of people in the United States weigh too much. Why,...

Given the sad state of affairs in today's affairs of state — record federal budget deficits, record trade deficits, illegal domestic eavesdropping, the sale of key U.S. ports — one would think the U.S. House of Representatives has more important problems to address than a proposal to virtually wipe out state food labeling laws. Well, no actually; the biggest fish fried by the House March 8 was just that: the National Uniformity for Food Act of 2005. The uniformity act is a fat, old carp multinational food firms have been selling Congress for years. The goal is to override nearly...

Beyond Bar Codes: Tuning up plastic radio labels Peter Weiss Electronic labels made from plastic semiconductors can now pick up and respond to radio signals at a frequency suitable for use on products. At an electronics conference in San Francisco this week, two European industrial-research teams described plastic radiofrequency-identification (RFID) prototypes with those advanced capabilities. Although silicon-based RFID tags are already in wide use—for instance, in so-called smart cards used to pay mass-transit fares—the new developments bring closer the prospect of RFID tags becoming as common as bar codes, or perhaps even more so, the researchers say. Besides labeling consumer...

DETROIT - A warning that consumers shouldn't use a heat gun that produces temperatures of 1,000 degrees as a hairdryer has won an anti-lawsuit group's award for the wackiest label of the year. The Wacky Warning Label Contest, in its ninth year, is conducted by Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch as part of an effort to show the effects of lawsuits on warning labels. "When judges see it as their job to dismiss cases that are rooted in frivolous theories, we'll see fewer wacky labels and more fairness in the courts," said Robert B. Dorigo Jones, the group's president. The $500...