Free Republic

Grace Powell was 12 or 13 when she discovered she could be a boy. Growing up in a relatively conservative community in Grand Rapids, Mich., Powell, like many teenagers, didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She was unpopular and frequently bullied. Puberty made everything worse. She suffered from depression and was in and out of therapy. “I felt so detached from my body, and the way it was developing felt hostile to me,” Powell told me. It was classic gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort with your sex. Reading about transgender people online, Powell believed that the reason she...

At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Journal found that 'more than 200 senior officials… or nearly one in three, reported that they or their family members held investments in companies that were lobbying the agency. Some Americans still believe the federal government is working in the public’s best interest. If anything can disabuse these naive holdouts of this notion, it will be the bombshell Wall Street Journal investigation that just dropped—revealing runaway corruption among the federal bureaucracy. The Journal reviewed more than 31,000 financial disclosure forms and analyzed more than 850,000 financial assets and 315,000 trades to shed light...

Hours ahead of President Donald Trump’s prime-time announcement of his selection for the U.S. Supreme Court, and Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey has made up his mind.

The first community organizer to become president has managed to anger community groups so much with his planned personal monument, aka a "presidential center," that part of the plan was just scrapped. Lolly Bowean of the Chicago Tribune reports: Bowing to community pressure, the Obama Foundation has scrapped its plan for an above-ground parking garage and will instead build an underground facility below the presidential center in Jackson Park, officials said late Monday. The original plan would have grabbed a treasured part of Chicago's park system, the Midway (site of Chicago's World's Fair), for a two-story garage. The group Save...

Republican Donald Trump is calling on his remaining rivals to drop their presidential bids, saying neither Ted Cruz nor John Kasich has a path to the nomination. "They should both drop out of the race so that the Republican Party can unify!" Trump tweeted Thursday evening....

As things heat up on "The Bachelorette," Kaitlyn Bristowe is being put in the hot seat! On Tuesday night's episode, viewers were shocked when an extended promo for this season revealed that the newly crowned Bachelorette slept with one of her suitors weeks before the "fantasy suite" stage of the dating competition. In light of this scandalous revelation, Bristowe sat with ET's Nancy O'Dell on Wednesday to reveal why she's "not ashamed" of what was caught on the "Bachelorette" cameras. "I don’t think that's a crazy thing to sleep with somebody when you're trying to be in a relationship with...

Republicans never expected to get a fair shake in the Big Three networks' coverage of the 16-day government shutdown, but the final tally of stories blaming the GOP is stunning: 41 stories blamed Republicans and zero blamed Democrats. Nightly, 20 million Americans heard “a version of the shutdown story that could easily have emanated from Barack Obama's own White House,” said the new report from the Media Research Center.

October 01, 2013 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Martin in Cadillac, Michigan, as we start on the phones. I promised we'd go to the phones and we're gonna do it. Hi, Martin. Glad to have you here. CALLER: Thank you for taking my phone call, Rush. RUSH: You bet. CALLER: As I mentioned to the screener, as of October 1st, as part of the Medicaid expansion in the state of Michigan, the Health and Human Services mandate is that any doctor who is not a Medicaid enrolled provider -- if he writes in the labs, x-rays, or prescriptions, Medicaid will not reimburse...

Anderson Cooper, who has been reluctant to talk about his personal life in public, revealed that he is gay in an essay posted online on Monday. The CNN journalist said he had kept his sexual orientation private for personal and professional reasons, but came to think that remaining silent had given some people a mistaken impression that he was ashamed. "The fact is, I'm gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn't be any more happy, comfortable with myself and proud," he wrote in a letter to Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Beast. Cooper, the son of Gloria...

Row faster, Mainstream Media! Faster! There are all kinds of polls out there, but except for a single outlier, even in polls that show Obama ahead of Romney, the President is still stuck in the mid-forties -- the last place any incumbent wants to be. Today, Gallup's daily tracking poll gives the White House and Obama's Media Palace Guards another reason to gulp: Romney 48% Obama 43% More bad news for Obama is that his challenger is already romantically close to that magic 50% number. The bad news for us is that if these polls continue to show Obama in...

[Image above] Pass me my smelling salts. Conservative Ann Coulter’s latest New York Times bestseller, Demonic, was written for a gay libertarian and venture capitalist of German descent*. It reads: “For Peter Thiel” – not “For the Westboro Baptists” (much to the dismay of leftwing Democrats). So good on Ann. As Protestants know, you can love the libertarian – but not his libertarianism. Returning to ancient Israel now, Jesus was seen with a broad anointing him with an expensive perfume. She even wiped his feet with her hair! *Not that there’s anything wrong with being German.

For years, Democrats and their media minions have maintained that the economic boom of the '90s was caused by the fiscal policies of President Bill Clinton, in particular his 1993 income tax hike. Appearing on ABC's "This Week" Sunday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman shockingly said what conservatives have been claiming all along (video follows with transcript and commentary): PAUL KRUGMAN: I think the model is something like Clinton who, in fact, mostly was just riding on a successful economy that was successful mostly for reasons that had nothing much to do with him. But he was able to,...

According to pollster Doug Schoen, whose new poll shows vast support for the Tea Party movement among voters, the president is still liked by about half the nation. In fact, more like him personally than like his policies. Some 48 percent think he’s a nice guy, while just 42 percent approve of his job performance. But that personal favorability doesn’t translate into re-election support when voters are asked if Obama deserves a second term. Says Schoen: “Despite voters feelings toward Obama personally, 56 percent say he does not deserve to be re-elected, while 38 percent say he does deserve to...

This new report from the liberal group Families USA contains this eye-popping paragraph: Families USA commissioned The Lewin Group to use its economic models to estimate how many individuals would benefit from the new premium tax credits in 2014 and the value of the dollars going to help pay for insurance. We found that an estimated 28.6 million Americans will be eligible for the tax credits in 2014, and that the total value of the tax credits that year will be $110.1 billion. Houston, we have a problem! The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the tax credits to purchase coverage...

I have occasionally liked a clip, or something this guy has done, but aside from a few corkers, I laughed until I was nearly sick. Sometimes comedy is really capable of pointing out when people just aren't making sense.This episode features Stewart lampooning Obamacare, The Democrat leadership, the lame denials about rationing not happening, Racial politics, Hillary's fit in Africa that will make you choke with laughter, and an interview with one of Obama's economists who he asks, "Are we broke?" and proceeds to lay out the insanity of the path our country is taking.I just didn't expect it.

A new report found widespread fraud in a government program designed to help small businesses secure federal contracts, a sign of the obstacles the government faces as it launches programs designed to help small businesses dig out of the recession. In an investigation of 36 companies in four metropolitan areas, GAO investigators found that 19 didn't meet program requirements; they were using fake addresses, subcontracting to larger firms, or the majority of their employees were located in a non-HUBZone location. The investigation followed a GAO report issued last summer, which found fraudulent program participants in the Washington, D.C., area and...

You mean there is a government there? Who knew. Bono to blame America.

Dinosaur Shocker By Helen Fields Neatly dressed in blue Capri pants and a sleeveless top, long hair flowing over her bare shoulders, Mary Schweitzer sits at a microscope in a dim lab, her face lit only by a glowing computer screen showing a network of thin, branching vessels. That’s right, blood vessels. From a dinosaur. “Ho-ho-ho, I am excite-e-e-e-d,” she chuckles. “I am, like, really excited.” After 68 million years in the ground, a Tyrannosaurus rex found in Montana was dug up, its leg bone was broken in pieces, and fragments were dissolved in acid in Schweitzer’s laboratory at North...

Yanni Arrested in Alleged Domestic Dispute 45 minutes ago The musician Yanni was arrested at his home after an alleged domestic dispute with his girlfriend, authorities said.Yanni, whose legal name is John Yanni Christopher, was arrested early Friday and faces a domestic battery charge, according to a police report.The Greek-born singer-pianist denied the allegations. Yanni asked his girlfriend, Silvia Barthes, to leave his beachfront home in Manalapan on Thursday night, the police report said. Barthes, 33, told police she attempted to pack her clothing but the 51-year-old musician threw it on the ground.She told officers he then grabbed her...

"Roxy Sass," the sex columnist at the Stanford Daily, advises "tragically repressed" Stanford University students to stash sexual aids in their "trusty toy box." The Daily Cal's popular "Sex on Tuesday" column welcomed University of California, Berkeley students back to school with frank talk about morning-after manners and the etiquette of the "half-night stand" - sneaking out before the sun and the bed owner rise. And Yvonne K. Fulbright, the 29-year-old doctoral student who writes the "Sexpert Tells All" column for New York University's Washington Square News, is so well-known that she was invited to speak at freshman orientation. From...