Free Republic

Marquette University has moved to suspend and then fire Professor John McAdams for backing a student who tried to defend man-woman marriage when a leftist teaching assistant shut the student down.

Always game to push the boundaries of the portrayal of awkward sex on television, merely a few short minutes into Girls’ fourth season, Lena Dunham managed to up the squirm factor by tossing in some unexpected butt play between Marnie (Allison Williams) and Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). We caught up with the cast (and Brian Williams) at the season four premiere and asked them — as delicately as we could — their thoughts on the soon-to-be-infamous sex scene.

Once again we have to ask, what the hell is the NRA up to?

Doubts are growing about the authenticity of an edict attributed to the Sunni Islamist group Isis controlling the Iraqi city of Mosul about female genital mutilation (FGM). A top UN official quoted from a statement saying that Isis wanted all females aged between 11 and 46 in the northern city to undergo the procedure. Jacqueline Badcock said the decree was of grave concern.

Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal narrowly avoided getting hit by a train Friday during a press conference about why it’s important to keep yourself safe around trains. The politician was standing on the platform of a Metro-North station in Milford, Conn., while the town’s mayor, Ben Blake, spoke about commuter safety.

Last week a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel affirmed the U.S. District Court’s granting of summary judgment in favor of Morgan Hill Unified School District, a civil rights suit brought by high school students who were asked to remove clothing bearing images of the American flag after school officials learned of threats of race-related violence during a school-sanctioned celebration of Cinco de Mayo.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact.com is holding its annual “lie of the year” contest in which the site’s editors and reporters will choose between 10 finalists for the biggest political whopper of 2013.

The U.S. Postal Service tabled its first lady Michelle Obama-inspired physical activity stamp series due to safety concerns, a Postal Service spokesman confirmed to The Daily Caller Thursday. “The stamps are on hold with the printer and we have not made a decision at this point, right now, with respect to how we are going to move forward,” the USPS spokesman told TheDC. Some of the illustrations on some of the stamps in the series, the spokesman explained, feature activities that some might not consider safe — like doing a cannonball into a swimming pool.

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) -- Former President Jimmy Carter said Monday that the income gap in the United States has increased to the point where members of the middle class resemble the Americans who lived in poverty when he occupied the White House. Carter offered his assessment of the nation's economic challenges Monday at a Habitat for Humanity construction site in Oakland - the first of five cities he and wife Rosalynn plan to visit this week to commemorate their three-decade alliance with the international nonprofit that promotes and builds affordable housing. The recent economic downturn revealed that families living in...

President Bill Clinton has been telling everyone he is a vegan since 2009, but it turns out Clinton’s a liar. The former president, who has been enlisted to sell the nation on Obamacare, told reporters that he was joining his daughter, Chelsea, in an all vegan diet after he had had heart trouble. He was even named PETA’s person of the year in 2010.

A New Jersey mother was arrested and told to turn over her guns after reading the Constitution and peacefully protesting at a tax dispute forum, she says. Eileen Hart was with her husband Keith and her 7-year-old daughter on Saturday at the Gloucester Community Center to dispute a mandatory home re-evaluation that would roughly double her property value (and therefore dramatically increase her rates), objecting on multiple grounds. As an Orthodox Jew, she refused to have the inspectors in her home when her husband was away at work. As an American citizen, she objected to the seemingly arbitrary reappraisal, noting...

BOSTON (CBS) – Gov. Deval Patrick declared a state of emergency in Massachusetts Friday afternoon for the blizzard that could bring up to 3 feet of snow. He also announced he has signed an executive order to ban all travel on all roads in the state starting at 4 p.m. Friday. There are some exceptions to the ban, including emergency workers, those who work in hospitals and media, and others required to be at their jobs. The governor said rapid snowfall of 2-3 inches per hour will make for, “extremely dangerous conditions,” and will “make safe travel nearly impossible.” This...

Brad DeLong points me to this National Review attack on Nate Silver, which I think of as illustrating an important aspect of what’s really happening in America. For those new to this, Nate is a sports statistician turned political statistician, who has been maintaining a model that takes lots and lots of polling data — most of it at the state level, which is where the presidency gets decided — and converts it into election odds. Like others doing similar exercises — Drew Linzer, Sam Wang, and Pollster — Nate’s model continued to show an Obama edge even after Denver,...

FAIRFIELD COUNTY, Conn. — Whose vision for foreign policy do you trust more — Barack Obama's or Mitt Romney's? Which candidate do you trust to protect U.S. interests abroad and Americans at home? Vote in our poll or comment below. Reader Results Who won the final presidential debate? Barack Obama-45% Mitt Romney-49% Too close to call-5%

United Nations-affiliated election monitors from Europe and central Asia will be at polling places around the U.S. looking for voter suppression activities by conservative groups, a concern raised by civil rights groups during a meeting this week. The intervention has drawn criticism from a prominent conservative-leaning group combating election fraud.

Azusa Pacific University has blocked students from forming a Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter, which is a project of Young America’s Foundation. Administrators said they are banning the group because they disagree with principles stated on YAF’s national website. Ashley Blackwell, the would-be chair of the chapter, is currently the chair of a generic conservative club at APU and wants to formally affiliate with YAF. Ashley and other key members of her club have attended a number of Foundation conferences both in Washington, D.C., and at the Reagan Ranch, which Young America's Foundation has owned and preserved since 1998.

There’s only one way to say something like this, and it’s loud and proud and without apology: I wholeheartedly support Mike Bloomberg’s war on sugar. It’s unassailable as policy. Refined sugar is without question the worst foodstuff in the world for human health, and high-fructose corn syrup is little better. We are a fat country getting fatter and fatter, and these mountains of refined sugar that people ingest are a big part of the reason. The costs to the health-care system are enormous, so the public interest here is ridiculously obvious. Obesity is a killer. Are we to do nothing,...

Advocating the adoption of the new Constitution drafted in Philadelphia, the authors of “The Federalist Papers” mocked the “imbecility” of the weak central government created by the Articles of Confederation. Nearly 225 years later, critics across the spectrum call the American political system dysfunctional, even pathological. What they don’t mention, though, is the role of the Constitution itself in generating the pathology.

After being injured on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan, Lt. Augustine Kim spent the night in a D.C. jail for possessing unregistered guns. After being pulled over, handcuffed, arrested, thrown in jail overnight, his guns were confiscated by the city. In the end, the platoon leader felt forced to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge, which was later dismissed, but the District still refuses to return to him $10,000 worth of firearms and parts. The national guardsman will deploy to Kosovo this summer. The city should return his property before he leaves to serve our nation overseas for...

Chanting "here piggy" and "this is a peaceful donut" occupiers harass police in Zuccotti park .