Free Republic

Horrific video surfaces of Ford City Mall Riot tied to Mindless Behavior Video surfaced today of a violent riot that broke out following an appearance Saturday at Ford City mall in Chicago by urban boy band Mindless Behavior. According to the Chicago Sun Times initial report damage in the mall was limited to a destroyed planted box. Over fifty squad cars descended on the mall to defuse the situation, leading to twenty arrests. This new video shows the extent of the chaos outside of the mall. Unidentified African American teenagers can be seen flashing gang signs and discussing their dubious...

I just finished watching all 30 episodes of the series "Jericho" and thoght it was very good. I was surprised to see that it ended after only 8 episodes in season 2. Does anyone know if a third season is planned? I heard rumorss that Netflix was considering picking it up.

Listen Live: Sound Off Connecticut with Jim Vicevich 9 a.m. to noon ET (Da ily Thread)Sound Off Connecticut is a popular conservative/libertarian call in talk show hosted by Jim Vicevich weekday mornings from 9 a.m. to noon ET. Although based in Connecticut, the show welcomes callers from all over the United States! This is your chance to sound off America! Call into the show toll free (800) 966-9842! Listen to the LIVE AUDIO STREAM at http://wtic.com - it's free and NO registration is required! If you're in southern New England listen over the air to WTIC 1080 AM, the 50,000...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- House Speaker John Boehner will hold a press conference at 4 p.m. Eastern to discuss the across-the-board budget cuts known as the sequester, his office said. Without a deal, $85 billion in gradual budget cuts will begin on Friday,

We all know that a palindrome is a word or sentence that reads the same backwards as forward. But what should we call an essay that when read backwards, has the opposite meaning? This video reads the exact opposite backwards as forward. Not only does it read the opposite, the meaning is the exact opposite.

People you expect to see towards the end of a typical Oscar ceremony: Jack Nicholson. People don't expect to see: First Lady Michelle Obama. Presenting the final award of Sunday's very long Academy Awards -- Best Picture -- three-time Oscar winner Nicholson, 75, introduced the President's wife, 49, appearing via satellite from the White House. "Thank you Jack, and welcome to the White House everyone. I'm so honored to introduce the nominees for Best Picture," said the First Lady, resplendent in a Naeem Khan dress plus chandelier earrings. "And to help celebrate the movies that lift our spirits, broaden our...

Who am I? I’m a husband and a father. More importantly, and by the grace of God, I’m a follower of Jesus Christ. This is what motivates me to write you. You don’t have to read on, but I pray you will. What I write I write with the purest of aims and with your well-being in mind – physical, emotional and spiritual well-being, both now and for eternity. You will read truth here, not because I say it’s true – I’m nobody – but, rather, because the Creator of the universe, the very God Who wove you together in...

Britain's most senior Roman Catholic cleric, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, is stepping down as leader of the Scottish Catholic Church. It follows claims, which he contests, of inappropriate behaviour towards priests dating back to the 1980s. In a statement, the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh apologised to those he had offended for "failures" during his ministry. The cardinal also confirmed he would not take part in the papal election. This means Britain will be unrepresented in the election of a new pontiff. The Vatican confirmed the cardinal has stepped down from his post. The Scottish Catholic Media Office said Pope...

Gun owners rallied at the Capitol last month, part of a growing backlash against gun regulations that now include an expanding industry boycott. Credits: Dave Workman Saturday saw small but significant rallies of armed citizens in several states including Washington, as more firearms industry companies are joining a boycott of New York and other jurisdictions that adopt gun laws restricting the rights of citizens. The big names in guns, including Smith & Wesson, Glock, Sig Sauer, Sturm Ruger and other have not yet announced their intentions, but there clearly is a backlash in the works. For gun prohibitionists, it is...

Today, we're revisiting the topic of the ages of those who served in the U.S. armed forces during World War 2, because we have new information to add to it! Before we go any further, the reason we're doing this is because this information plays a key part in one of the projects we're developing behind the scenes here at Political Calculations, which we'll be presenting in bits and seemingly unrelated pieces throughout this year. So what information are we adding today? Well, it's about the end of volunteerism and the institutionalization of mandatory conscription for filling the ranks of...

Politicians and businessmen are fond of talking about America's scientist shortage -- the dearth of engineering and lab talent that will inevitably leave us sputtering in the global economy. But perhaps it's time they start talking about our scientist surplus instead. I am by no means the first person to make this point. But I was compelled to try and illustrate it after reading a report from Inside Higher Ed on this weekend's gloomy gathering of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In short, job prospects for young science Ph.D.'s haven't been looking so hot these last few...

A US engineer whose online claims didn't turn out to be true have left a Gothenburg woman out of pocket and brokenhearted, and one of dozens of Swedish women who have fallen victim to an increasingly common online dating scam.

The Arrival Of Japan’s SunsetGregory MacdonaldFebruary 25, 2013For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. ~ Richard Feynman Waiting for Japan’s economy to make a strong recovery has been an ongoing game since 1990. Shall we play that game one more time? There have been many false dawns in Japan over the past 20 years. Struggling with a combination of crushing debt and deadly demographics, Japan’s economy has stubbornly refused to make progress, despite numerous government efforts that range from currency devaluation to endless public works projects. None of this was enough,...

It looks like the radical environmental left may have to find a new favorite dirty four letter word.  Scientists at Ohio State University have announced the discovery of a new process that takes the energy from coal without burning it – "and removes virtually all of the pollution."  The technology, known as Coal-Direct Chemical Looping (CCDL), captures more than 99 percent of coal's carbon dioxide emissions based on laboratory research.  The team of scientists led by Liang-Shih Fan, professor of chemical engineering and director of the Clean Coal Research Laboratory at Ohio State University, has been working on this and...

[Someone]brought my attention to the [recent] tug of war ... over the legacy of Dorothy Day ... between pro and anti-capitalists. The Catholic Worker has criticized both the NY Times and Fr. Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute on Day-related matters. Liberals can’t claim her ... because she was anti-abortion and loyal to Church teaching, obviously never having gone the way of radical disobedient feminism. But conservatives and libertarians can’t claim her either because she rejected capitalism.... Or did she? As best I can tell, she neither practiced it or preached it as a way of life.... If you don’t...

With less than a week until the automatic slowdown of Federal spending kicks in, it seems like every group in the USA is screaming for mercy from the ravenous spending slowdown. ABC News lists 57 terrible consequences of the sequester, including “U.S. Less Prepared for a ‘WMD Incident’” and “An Even More Porous Border” (you mean, even MORE porous than now??). Wow, all that pain and suffering from a trivial slowdown in government spending. On top of the media hysteria over sequester cuts, I read that IKEA is selling horsemeat in their Swedish Meatballs over in Europe. I doubt if...

The liberal organization Progressive USA Voters, which is housed in the same progressive Denver office building as a chapter of the infamous left-wing astroturf group ProgressNow, is offering an hourly wage of between $9 and $11 to join its gun-control campaign in Chicago, according to a flyer that was photographed and posted to Reddit Friday.

Some Republican governors — all of them elected with strong tea-party support — have moved left since the November election by agreeing to participate in Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid. The lure of “free money” from Washington has proven too much for governors Jan Brewer of Arizona, Rick Scott of Florida, and John Kasich of Ohio to resist. Obamacare promises to pay 100 percent of the cost of new Medicaid patients, lowering that to 90 percent in later years. Never mind that Uncle Sugar has a notorious reputation for reneging on promises and that history shows that expanding Medicaid only increases...

Melvyn Weiss, the once high-flying legal eagle who made a fortune by bringing securities fraud class actions against publicly traded companies, "admitted to a California federal judge Friday that he violated the terms of his supervised release by driving under the influence of alcohol in Florida" as reported by Ciaran McEvoy for Law360. Weiss was a founding partner of Milberg Weiss, and was convicted in 2008 on a racketeering charge for his role in an alleged decades-long scheme in which serial plaintiffs were paid kickbacks out of the attorneys' fees for filing their shareholder lawsuits. The disbarred lawyer was sentenced...

With the March 1st deadline for the sequester looming, the chorus of politicians and pundits decrying its passage in apocalyptic terms has reached a fevered pitch. These are the same political leaders who in the summer of 2011 agreed to implement these cuts if a broader spending deal could not be reached. The negotiations carried out by the Super Committee collapsed and the sequester agreement was passed and signed into law. For months, the Administration promised the sequester would be turned off with a deal to offset the automatic across-the-board spending cuts. The President even went so far as to...