Free Republic

Gambling might join the list of Baltimore City's problems after Horseshoe Casino opens Aug. 26. As the city touts 1,700 new jobs, millions in education funding and an expected economic boost, new billboards advertise hotlines for gambling addiction, a dark side to Horseshoe’s shiny exterior. A moral gamble? With a median household income of $35,000, Park Heights is among Baltimore City’s poorest ZIP codes. In 2012, however, it led state lottery ticket sales, with a total of $34 million, according to a Capital News Service analysis. Father Zaborowski compares gambling spending to alcohol and drug addiction, which plague the neighborhood,...

Attention gay rights lobby: I read of your latest conquest with great interest. A Catholic couple in New York has been charged and fined for violating the “rights” of a gay couple by choosing not to host a gay wedding on their farm. This story has garnered little interest and virtually no media attention, which is understandable considering that everything in the world had to take a backseat while the entire nation sat enthralled for two weeks by a local police matter in a place called Ferguson. Of course, the media only considers homicide to be a “local crime story”...

Not long ago, Turkey was hailed as a model democracy in a tough neighborhood spanning the Balkans, Central Asia and the Middle East. Its startling reforms in anticipation of European Union membership, observers cheered, were transforming the country into a prototype for a modern, democratic Islam — living proof that Islam and liberalism could mesh. Turkey was also emerging as a constructive regional power that bridged West and East, both physically and diplomatically. As a NATO member, Ankara spoke to other Muslim-majority states as a friendly sister nation and could even truck with Israel. That now seems like a past...

The development is about 15 years old One of the major reasons for those who push for a disarmed population to desire the registration of all firearms is that it makes the ownership of the means to self defense contingent on government approval.  This is the philosophy that "everything that is not permitted is forbidden", rather than the standard English/American philosophy that "everything that is not forbidden is allowed".  It is an enormous difference in perspective.  In Revere, Massachusetts, a homeowner evicted from a party after getting in a fight.   He returned with his 50 year old step father.  ...

Douglas McAuthur McCain, 33, of San Diego California was killed over the weekend in fighting between the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and a Syrian opposition group, according to the Free Syrian Army. After the battle, McCain, along with his American passport and the bodies of three other foreign jihadis were found. McCain, who referred to himself as “Duale ThaslaveofAllah” on Facebook made his allegiance to Islam apparent on his social media pages. His Twitter bio read: “It’s Islam over everything.”

While members of Congress spent the last decade lobbing cow pies at each other, their counterparts in Canada were accomplishing what Washington should have been doing: streamlining the nation’s tax structure to attract more companies. It worked. Burger King (BKW), based in Miami, hopes to acquire the Tim Horton’s (THI) chain, based in Oakville, Ontario, and relocate the headquarters of the combined company to Canada. The so-called tax inversion that would be part of this deal would give the new firm a sizable tax break, on account of the lower rates in Canada. With many nations lowering their corporate tax...

(August 26, 2014) – Happy National Dog Day! This holiday (also known as National Dog Appreciation Day) has been celebrated every year on August 26th since 2004. The purpose of the holiday is to show appreciation for the millions of the dogs in the US that keep us safe and bring us comfort and companionship.

What's thought to be an audio recording of the shooting death of Michael Brown has reportedly surfaced. According to CNN, an unidentified man, who has since been interviewed by the FBI, is said to have managed to record the incident in which Michael Brown was shot by Officer Darren Wilson earlier this month, setting off a national firestorm. The most notable tidbit from the short recording (and what will become subject to the most immediately scrutiny and parsing) is the existence of two distinct volleys of gunfire from Officer Darren Wilson's weapon. From CNN: class="cnn_storypgraphtxt cnn_storypgraph3">In the recording, a quick...

Generation X homeowners are far more likely to be underwater on their mortgage than millennial and Baby Boomer homeowners, a generational block that could limit the market for years, according to the second quarter Zillow® Negative Equity Reporti. The overall national negative equity rate fell to 17 percent in the second quarter, with more than 8.7 million homeowners with a mortgage owing more than their home was worth. Approximately 42.6 percent of Generation X homeowners (those aged from 35 to 49) are underwater on their mortgage, compared to 15.3 percent of millennial homeowners (20-34 years old) and 31.1 percent of...

A gang of anti-Semitic thugs roughed up a Jewish man and his wife on the Upper East Side on Monday evening before fleeing in cars flying Palestinian flags, police sources told The Post. Two cars and multiple motorcycles pulled up to the couple on East 63rd Street near Third Avenue just after 8 p.m., and the assailants began yelling “anti-Jewish statements,” the sources said. …

Taking offense certifies the modern man as one who cares. If we take offense on behalf of another, we can number ourselves among the sensitive and loving. If we take offense personally, we can brandish a stop sign declaring to all that the offense must cease. In either case, the offending words must stop and the conversation must end. For the modern lover never offends. Instead he unfailingly affirms. He affirms us with an “okay” that builds our self-esteem, engenders good feelings, and requires nothing of us beyond self-affirmation.But can people who love one another do so simply by...

International Concert Pianist, and renowned interpreter of Classic Ragtime, Phillip Dyson performs Solace. A track from his best-selling Scott Joplin CD 'The Entertainer'.

Unless you don't know what baseball is or what its stats mean, you're aware that Clayton Kershaw is having an incredible season. That shouldn't be news to baseball fans, either; should Kershaw maintain his league-leading ERA, it would be the fourth year in a row he's claimed that title, and unless something changes radically this should be the third time in four years that he brings home a Cy Young Award, the sole exception having resulted in a second-place finish. All of these accomplishments have come before the lefty has turned 27 years old. That's clearly great without the benefit...

On the surface, the cases appear nearly identical: Michael Brown and Dillon Taylor, two young, unarmed men with sketchy criminal pasts shot to death by police officers two days apart. But while the world knows of the highly publicized situation involving 18-year-old Mr. Brown, whose Aug. 9 death in Ferguson, Missouri touched off violence, protests and an angry national debate, most people outside Utah have never heard of 20-year-old Mr. Taylor. Critics say there’s a reason for the discrepancy in media coverage: race. Mr. Brown was black and the officer who shot him was white. Mr. Taylor wasn’t black —...

In its latest assault on the U.S. Constitution, the Obama administration is proposing to recognize so-called “Native” Hawaiians as an Indian tribe entitled to separate and become an independent sovereign and to “reestablish” a “government-to-government relationship between the United State and the Native Hawaiian community.”Such an unconstitutional action would amount to authorizing secession for certain residents of Hawaii.It would also implicitly authorize government-sanctioned, discriminatory conduct against any other residents who don’t meet the explicit ancestry and blood-quantum requirements to be considered a “Native.” This would balkanize Hawaii, dividing the islands into separate racial and ethnic enclaves, and undo “the...

They knew he had children, and they knew that in West Africa, families and even neighbors eat off the same plate and bathe and care for sick people. They explained to the man how important it was to stop Ebola, and that his friends and family would be treated with respect. Their pleas didn't work. Mirkovic saw this scene play out over and over again. One of her colleagues at the CDC who's worked in Liberia says preliminary data shows they could be missing 40 to 60% of the contacts of known Ebola patients. "This is one of the hardest...

After the worldwide storm over baby Gammy, a child with Down Syndrome whose parents abandoned him with the surrogate mother after he and his twin sister were born, another case of baby abandonment has cropped up.Another surrogate mother of twin babies got word from the babies’ parents that they would abandon one of the children because of a disability. The baby was born with Congential Myotonic Dystrophy and rejected by the child’s parents. The birth mother is now raising the child as her own after the callous reaction.Here’s more on what’s happened, warning for strong language: A British surrogate mother...

Back in March, I wrote a piece for CatholicVote about FDA evaluation of a process that would create multi-parent embryos: Things like this always begin for such seemingly noble scientific reasons, don’t they? But they rarely stop there. And of course in addition to creating tri-parent offspring, which creates ethical and genealogical nightmares in its own right, virtually every instance of embryonic modification involves a slew of violations of the moral law, from in-vitro fertilization to the destruction of fertilized human embryos — human life — deemed imperfect or unnecessary to achieve the desired outcome. This morning, I read...

Free the Children employee Michael Lorsch begins a striptease at a Boylesque event. A manager at the popular Canadian charity Free the Children who helped run the organization’s We Day events, spoke frequently at schools, and led youth trips overseas has resigned after LifeSiteNews reported he was moonlighting as a gay stripper. Michael Lorsch, former manager of Free the Children's leadership programs in Toronto, resigned Friday after LifeSiteNews ran two stories on August 14 and August 18 about his role as a performer in the homosexual-themed troupe Boylesque, which aims to put “male nudity and sexuality back center-stage where...

One of the notable things about the Obama administration isn’t simply that its key figures often make misleading claims, but that they do so in ways that can be so easily disproven. The latest effort is in the White House’s attempt to have us believe that the president, in his now infamous “jayvee” analogy, didn’t have ISIS in mind. Here’s an exchange between NBC’s Peter Alexander and White House press secretary Josh Earnest that took place on Monday: PETER ALEXANDER, NBC: Did the president underestimate ISIS when he referred to them in an interview only a couple months ago as...