Free Republic

I am a proud American who believes that America has held – and still holds – a very sensitive and special place in the affairs of mankind on Planet Earth. I believe that America has been divinely blessed and protected in our two centuries plus of existence. I believe that America has been a counter balance that has cancelled out a lot of tyranny, evil and conquest, and admittedly, we have made a lot of mistakes. But on balance we have exerted a certain Pax Americana in the international affairs of mankind. It took a lot of old fashioned guts...

As Jon Stewart wraps up his final week as host of the Daily Show, he used his Monday night show to attack a recent Koch brothers event that featured numerous Republican presidential candidates in attendance. Stewart opened up his broadcast by making a crude sexual joke at the expense of the GOPers in attendance who “worked the talking points and cradled the special interests in the hopes of one of them after a period of 45 minutes to an hour would induce the money shot. And really, they didn't care which Koch went off.” Later in the segment, the Daily...

The further I travel down this rabbit hole, the more I feel divorced from the good conservative people that I choose to call my own. I hold some stories back from our readers. My thought is that people have a hard enough time embracing the basic fact that our government is ( corrupt on both sides of the aisle.) If you knew how corrupt I thought these people really were, I feel like you'd rush to the phone and soon bad men would show up to haul me off in a straitjacket.Do they still do that? Regardless, today I want...

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius controls a $54 million slush fund to hire thousands of “navigators,” “in-person assisters” and counselors who will propagandize and enroll Obamacare recipients in government-run health insurance exchanges. This nanny-state navigator corps is the Mother of all Community Organizing Boondoggles. It’s also yet another Obama threat to Americans’ privacy. A reminder about Secretary Sebelius’ sordid snooping history is in order here. In August 2009, HHS and the White House Office of Health Reform called on their ground troops to report on fellow citizens who dared to criticize their federal health care takeover. Team...

This past Tuesday, a key Obama campaign operative launched Battleground Texas, a group that seeks to transform the Battleground Texas traditionally Republican Lone Star State into a Democratic stronghold, and thereby make it impossible for Republicans to ever again win a presidential election. Launched on February 26, 2013, Battleground Texas (BT) seeks to transform the traditionally Republican Lone Star State into a Democratic stronghold.[1] At its inception, BT pledged that over the next several years it would “focus on expanding the electorate by registering more voters—and, as importantly, mobilizing those Texans who are already registered but who have not been...

DOBBS: The Defense Department has issued a warning about new security threats to this country. The Defense Department report shows Mexico and Pakistan could face a rapid and sudden collapse. Joining me now is Fred Burton, vice president for counter terrorism and corporate security at Statfor, also a former state department counterterrorist official. This is stark. ... this is truly troubling, that a -- one of our two closest neighbors could be facing this level of trouble. BURTON: Yes, it's no surprise to us at Stratford, we've been following this for quite sometime. The collapse in Mexico is quite systemic....

2008-01-30) — Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards today quit the race for the Democrat presidential nomination, and immediately endorsed Republican frontrunner Sen. John McCain.

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) - Irish police were hunting for a beer bandit who stole 450 full kegs from the Guinness brewery - the largest heist ever at Ireland's largest brewer. National police said a lone man drove into the brewery - a Dublin landmark and top tourist attraction - on Wednesday and hitched his truck to a fully loaded trailer awaiting delivery to city pubs. Diageo PLC (DEO), the beverage company that owns Guinness, said the brewery had never suffered such a large-scale theft before in its 248-year history. Police said the raider took 180 kegs of Guinness stout, 180...

Conveniently, the American media is largely ignoring a significant statement from a UK High Court judge who said Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” promotes “partisan political views” and the schools should treat it as such. As a result the British government was forced to rewrite their website and their “guidance” and will need to issue a warning before showing the film.As NewsBusters reported, truck driver, part-time school official and father of two Stewart Dimmock brought a High Court action to ban the film from UK schools, claiming it is “unfit for schools” because it contains scientific inaccuracies, “sentimental mush” and is politically biased....

MIDDLEBURG, Fla. -- A 42-year-old woman was fatally mauled by her two pit bulls, which also attacked the victim's son and a sheriff's deputy before both dogs were shot and killed on Tuesday morning, according to the Clay County Sheriff's Office. Tina Marie Canterbury was dead by 8:15 a.m. when Clay deputies arrived at the scene in the 2400 block of Cosmos Avenue, off county Road 218 West. "She was a wonderful, wonderful person to be around -- always smiling and always happy. It brightened up the room when she walked in," said Billie Cantebury, the victim's cousin. "We have...

PORTLAND, Ore. - Two provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow search warrants to be issued without a showing of probable cause, a federal judge ruled today. U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended by the Patriot Act, "now permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment." Portland attorney Brandon Mayfield sought the ruling in a lawsuit against the federal government after he was mistakenly linked by the FBI to the Madrid train...

In an extraordinary move that reflects the depth of his resentment toward his former network, Dan Rather sued CBS yesterday, charging that he was made a "scapegoat" for a discredited 2004 story about President Bush's National Guard record because CBS wanted to "pacify the White House." CBS management "coerced" the veteran news anchor "into publicly apologizing and taking personal blame for alleged journalistic errors in the broadcast," says the $70 million suit, which also names Sumner Redstone, chief executive of the network's then-parent company, Viacom; CBS Chairman Les Moonves; and former CBS News president Andrew Heyward.... Gold, Rather's lawyer, maintained...

On August 28, radio talk show host Ed Schultz, who has proclaimed that he became "converted" from conservative to liberal while eating a baloney sandwich with his future wife in a Salvation Army cafeteria, loudly issued a challenge to all conservative radio hosts to debate him. Since his show that day was simulcast by C-SPAN, the Big Eddy Challenge can be both seen and heard at almost 20 minutes into the third hour of his show: ...We'll stand up to any conservative talker anywhere in America who wants to have the guts to go head to head with me on...

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Hillary Clinton's links to illegal fundraising by Asian-Americans in 1996 should have made her wary of accepting $850,000 from a fugitive Asian-American this year, a rival presidential campaign said Tuesday. The criticism came from an adviser to former Republican Sen. Fred Thompson, who chaired a Senate investigation into illegal contributions by Asian-Americans to Bill Clinton's re-election campaign and the couple's legal defense fund in the 1996 election cycle. Thompson adviser Rich Galen said Clinton's 2008 campaign has become "the sequel" to her husband's scandal-plagued 1996 campaign.

<p>NEW YORK — For the second time in a year, a man who lives in downtown Manhattan's trendy SoHo district has discovered a roommate dead in the same bedroom.</p> <p>Detectives were questioning a suspect on Thursday in the latest case — the stabbing of a woman whose decaying body was found by the man on Wednesday.</p>

In a heated discussion stemming from the Sen. Larry Craig arrest, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay blasted “Today” show host Matt Lauer for the media’s “amazing” double standard regarding GOP and Democratic scandals. Lauer prefaced DeLay’s Thursday morning appearance on the NBC program by reciting a litany of recent Republican problems, mentioning Rep. Mark Foley and Jack Abramoff among others. DeLay responded: “I hate to say this Matt, but you just showed the problem, the double standard, and you just participated in it. You listed a whole lot of scandals that involve the Republicans, but you didn't mention one...

Richard Jewell has passed away.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A baby born in a toilet at a McDonald's did not suffer any injuries from the water or the mother's reported attempts to flush the toilet, police said Tuesday.

VIENNA, Austria — Did someone kill Beethoven? A Viennese pathologist claims the composer's physician did — inadvertently overdosing him with lead in a case of a cure that went wrong. Other researchers are not convinced, but there is no controversy about one fact: The master had been a very sick man years before his death in 1827. Previous research determined that Beethoven had suffered from lead poisoning, first detecting toxic levels of the metal in his hair and then, two years ago, in bone fragments. Those findings strengthened the belief that lead poisoning may have contributed — and ultimately led...

The Americans were getting close. It was early in the winter of 2004-05, and Osama bin Laden and his entourage were holed up in a mountain hideaway along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Suddenly, a sentry, posted several kilometers away, spotted a patrol of U.S. soldiers who seemed to be heading straight for bin Laden's redoubt. The sentry radioed an alert, and word quickly passed among the Qaeda leader's 40-odd bodyguards to prepare to remove "the Sheik," as bin Laden is known to his followers, to a fallback position. As Sheik Said, a senior Egyptian Qaeda operative, later told the story, the...