Free Republic

As each day passes, the lengths to which school districts will go to prevent gun violence has been taken to new levels of maladministration. For example, last Friday an Anne Arundel County, Maryland, student was suspended for “chewing his breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun and saying, “bang, bang”— an offense that the school described as a threat to other students, according to his family,” according to the Washington Post. “The boy’s two-day suspension Friday comes at a time of heightened sensitivity about security issues and guns— even pretend guns — in the aftermath of the mass shooting...

We live in an age of falsity, in which words have lost their meanings and concepts are reinvented as the situation demands. The United States is in a jobless recovery — even if that phrase largely disappeared from the American lexicon about 2004. Good news somehow must follow from a rising unemployment rate, which itself underrepresents the actual percentage of Americans long out of work. At the same time, we are supposed to be relieved that we are in a contracting expansion, where fewer goods and services are proof of a resilient economy. In our debt-ridden revival, borrowing $1 trillion...

Parents of a deaf child named Hunter were told by his Nebraska public preschool that they must change his name because he was in violation of the school district’s weapons policy. To sign his name, the three-year-old crosses his index and middle fingers then wags his hands. This sign apparently appeared to school officials to represent a gun. Grand Island Public Schools’ policy section 8470 — Weapons in Schools states: “Students are forbidden to knowingly and voluntarily possess, handle, transmit or use any instrument in school, on school grounds or at school functions that is a firearm, weapon, or looks...

My husband I just ended our debate about having children. To breed or not to breed, this was the question — and it had been ticking like an egg timer in the back of my head for 15 years. We talked about it for five months. In the car on the way to work. During dinner. For five minutes, for 30 minutes. After seeing nephews and nieces. I wanted it to be a decision we made, not one made for us by chance or time. I turned to friends with kids for advice. “Feel free to convince me to your...

Looking at the polls, this presidential election season is poised to give birth to the most racially polarized electorate in U.S. history. Whites are backing Mitt Romney in historic numbers, while Obama is garnering historic levels of support among blacks, Latinos and Asians. While the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll has the president in a dead heat with his GOP opponent, recent surveys show wide swings in support based on race. In other words, it looks like white voters versus everyone else. Looking at a composite of polls, Obama’s white support averages 37.9 percent, ranging from 35 percent to 41...

Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not. Those views could cost President Barack Obama votes as he tries for re-election, the survey found, though the effects are mitigated by some Americans' more favorable views of blacks. Racial prejudice has increased slightly since 2008 whether those feelings were measured using questions that explicitly asked respondents about racist attitudes, or through an experimental test that measured implicit views...

In the 1967 film "A Guide for the Married Man," a husband, played by a peerless Walter Matthau, is given lessons in ways to cheat on his wife safely. The most essential rule: "Deny! Deny! Deny!"—no matter what. In an instructive scene, he's shown a wife undone by shock, and screaming, with reason: She has just walked in on her husband making love to a glamorous stranger. "What are you doing," she wails, "who is that woman?" "What woman, where?" the husband serenely counters, as he and the tart in question get out of bed and calmly dress. So the...

PARIS (AP) — A correspondent for France 24 TV was "savagely attacked" near Cairo's Tahrir Square after being seized by a crowd, the network said Saturday. It was the latest case of violence against women at the epicenter of Egypt's restive protests. The news channel said in a statement that Sonia Dridi was attacked around 10:30 p.m. Friday after a live broadcast on a protest at the square and was later rescued by a colleague and other witnesses. France 24 did not give further details about the attack, but it said its employees were safe and sound, though "extremely shocked,"...

Is there a limit to self-delusion? And if there is, what happens when the limit is exceeded? New York Times columnist Gail Collins began her column last week as follows, "When Democrats run into each other on elevators, they exchange glances and sigh. Or make little whimpering sounds." She went on to observe that "Democrats are going bipolar. Democrats spend all their waking hours thinking about the swing states. If Wisconsin starts looking wobbly, their day is ruined." It makes you wonder what their days are going to be like if Obama loses the actual election. Liberals are angry and...

Liberalism isn’t doing so well lately. In fact I’d go so far as to say that liberalism is becoming downright pathological. The disease is progressive (in more ways than one). Precursors were visible as far back as 1964, and again in the 1980s. Yet this latest uspsurege has been building since 2000, and has never yet spread so widely or threateningly across the body politic. The chief symptom of liberal distress is an intense form of denial. Liberals now actually deny that conservatives exist. There are, of course, strange, cartoon-like images that liberals call conservative, yet these bear little resemblence...

A Democratic state House hopeful who was accidentally outed as a bisexual by a party colleague earlier this year has withdrawn from his race. Nate Murphy of Pocatello had sought election in District 29. In March, he was accidentally outed after Idaho's only openly gay lawmaker, Sen. Nicole LeFavour of Boise, told The New York Times that Murphy would be taking up her legacy. Murphy's former campaign manager, Ryan Hand, said personal issues prompted the 23-year-old candidate's departure from the race, not the outing. Murphy also had faced questions about a marijuana conviction five years ago. Hand declined to provide...

For several tense weeks, our nation has been broiling unpleasantly in the cultural equivalent of polyunsaturated fat. And despite any profits or political points made during this Chick-fil-A debacle, I think we’ve all gotten a bit burned. As everyone now knows, this entire ordeal—from the Mike Huckabee-orchestrated “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day,” to the “Same-Sex Kiss Day” that came after, the talking heads, the relentless stream of articles and opinion pieces on the controversy, the thousands upon thousands of online comments, the vitriolic tweets, impulsive Facebook statuses, and equally tart replies, the strained friendships, heated arguments with family members, all of it—began...

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota, July 30, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Target is promoting their wedding registry with a focus on homosexual “marriage”. A new ad released last month depicts two men holding hands with the slogan, “Be yourself, together.” The retail giant has angered both pro-family and pro-homosexual activists as they have apparently flip-flopped in their approach to same-sex “marriage”. In 2010 Target faced some backlash from homosexual political groups after they gave $150,000 to MN Forward, a political group that supported Tom Emmer, the pro-life, pro-marriage Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota. More recently they have been criticized for their decision...

A lesbian student has been kicked out of college and arrested after it emerged she was behind a string of anti-gay messages slipped under her dorm room door, police said. After the notes were found in Alexandra Pennell's room at Central Connecticut State University in March, hundreds came out in support of the student at a campus rally against hate crimes. But when police hid a camera along the hallway outside her room, they allegedly caught her leaving the notes herself - and she admitted she had written them to get the attention of her roommate. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2168204/Alexandra-Pennell-Lesbian-college-student-faked-anti-gay-messages-left-room-sparked-rally.html#ixzz1zdYNi7o0

Lesbian Couple FAKED Hate Crime By Painting Their OWN Home With 'Kill the Gays' To Frame Neighbors After Spat Over Dogs 18 May 2012 [Pic in URL] Caught: Aimee Whitchurch, 37, left, and Christel Conklin, 29, right, are accused of forgery, false reporting and criminal mischief A lesbian couple that claimed their neighbors spray painted 'Kill the Gay' on their condo are being accused by the police for doing the deed themselves. The Douglas County Sheriff's Office in Colorado has issued a warrant for Aimee Whitchurch, 37, and Christel Conklin, 29, for forgery, false reporting and criminal mischief. In October...

Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist slammed for radicalizing Washington Washington is more dysfunctional than it has been in 40 years, and while Democrats have deserved their share of the blame over the years, today "the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party," write Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein in the Washington Post. What makes their column particularly interesting is that Ornstein is not liberal, but a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Together, they call the GOP an "insurgent outlier in American politics" because of the...

...This Presidential campaign cycle is very different for our family than the one in 2008. This time around, we have a four-year-old daughter we adopted from Ethiopia two years ago... Because we’ve had the audacity to appear in public with our family, we’ve been getting hate mail from liberals who are deeply offended that a white family would raise a black child (the Huffington Post posted a video of Naomi and me at CPAC and it generated more than 1,000 comments, many of them utterly vile). Usually, I laugh at baseless criticism and it inspires me to work even harder...

We need to start taking student loan debt seriously, both as a troubling moral issue and as a ticking economic time bomb. By some reports, student loan debt will exceed 1 trillion dollars this year, more than the credit card debt of all Americans. A whole generation of young Americans is at risk in this excessive borrowing. They fall further and further behind in “servicing their debt” because they have no way to keep up with the payments as many of them are unemployed or underemployed. They will delay starting marriage and families; they dare not take the risk of...

Obama jumps the shark with student loan jam President Obama's 'celebrity status' reached perplexing new levels last night on comedian Jimmy Fallon's comedy show last night. After watching this sketch, I think it's fair to say that he has 'jumped the shark.' Last night on the Jimmy Fallon show, Obama "slow jammed" with Jimmy Fallon and his band about his plan to freeze interest rates for student loans, criticizing filibustering Republicans for blocking his plan. Warning that the interest rates for student loans will 'double,' Obama warned that "some hard working students would be paying about $1000 extra just to...

Thomas Beatie, who gained fame as the world's first known legal man to give birth, has split from his wife of nine years. Beatie revealed the breakup with Nancy during a taping of the syndicated TV show The Doctors in which he also said he had undergone a final female-to-male gender reassignment surgery. Beatie began life as a woman and legally switched to a male identity, while preserving his female reproductive organs. He made headlines in 2007 after pictures of his bearded face and pregnant belly became public.