Free Republic

The North Korean state newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, in today's issue quoted a speech on Wednesday by senior North Korean Workers Party officials accusing America of being a gangster state. Wanna call us gangsters? GAME ON!!!! Rodong Sinmun, Aug. 11, 2017: "The U.S., the most shameless gangster-like state, framed up the 'sanctions resolution' with dastards acting as voting machine without any principle. This is no more than desperate efforts of those frightened at the might of the DPRK which rose to the high strategic position as a nuclear power of Juche and world-level military power… We will further increase the might...

When hard-right conservatives like Patrick J. Buchanan and hard-left liberals writing for magazines like the New Republic both agree that it's time to reinvigorate long-forgotten concepts like federalism and states rights, and let liberal and conservative states both pursue the policies their voters think work best for their own people, something important has changed in our political discourse. Either something's gone seriously wrong and our nation is falling apart, or something is finally working right as both sides of the political divide figure out just **WHY** our Constitution was written as a compromise between the interests of thirteen very different...

GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Greg McNeilly occupies the chasm dividing gay rights activists and conservative Republicans. The GOP strategist unabashedly claims membership in the two groups that have been on opposite sides of the battle over legalizing gay marriage. McNeilly's marriage to Lansing attorney Doug Meeks is one of 300 that will now be recognized by the state following a federal court injunction, and Gov. Rick Snyder's decision not to appeal the decision. Savoring the legal victory is difficult for McNeilly when thousands of same sex couples can not be married or have their marriages recognized in this state. The...

When Ariel Sharon died in January this year, eight years after a stroke, he'd survived for longer than would probably be expected had he lived elsewhere in the world. Since 2005 it's been illegal in Israel to turn off ventilators when a person is dying or has no hope of recovery. The result is that large numbers of patients spend years on life support, many of them unconscious... In most countries a ward like this would not exist, and doctors and families in discussion together, might have made the decision to turn off Schmail's ventilator to allow him to die....

GRANDVILLE, MI -- Republican National Committeeman Dave Agema supports the “Duck Dynasty” family whose hit television show may be over now that one of the stars has been suspended for comments the A&E cable network deemed offensive to gays. In a Friday, Dec. 20, Facebook post visible to his social media friends, which include an MLive Media Group employee, Agema lauded this statement released by Phil Robertson’s family. “Good for them,” Agema wrote. “The LGBT Gestapo speech police will not succeed when families like them are Biblically solid. You are in our prayers. May A&E fall into the pit they...

Big-ticket weapons like aircraft carriers and the F-35 fighter jet have to be part of any conversation about cutting Pentagon spending to satisfy the mandatory budget reductions known as the sequester. But compensation for military personnel has to be on the table, too — even though no other defense issue is more politically volatile or emotionally fraught. After a decade of war, the very idea of cutting benefits to soldiers, sailors and Marines who put their lives on the line seems ungrateful. But America’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is over or winding down, and the Pentagon is obliged to...

The suspension of a Rolla High School student who wore a shirt that displayed biblical verses and words opposing homosexuality raised debate on social media websites over the weekend after a St. Louis television station reported on the incident Friday. However, Rolla public schools’s superintendent has responded to the TV station’s report, clarifying that students are disciplined for wearing clothes that are disruptive, not because they have religious quotes written on them. Dr. Aaron Zalis, superintendent of the Rolla Public Schools system, spoke with the Rolla Daily News by phone Monday morning about the school’s dress code policy and to...

WASHINGTON (JTA) – On a Saturday night following Shabbat, Nick Muzin arrayed on his dining room table what would turn out to be the winning strategy to elect the first black Republican to Congress from South Carolina in more than a century. The next night at the same table in his Charleston, S.C., home, Muzin hosted his weekly Talmud class. Associates say the duality typifies Muzin, the 37-year-old Orthodox Jewish dynamo now leading the effort by House Republicans to expand the party’s appeal following Mitt Romney’s loss to President Obama last November. The ascension of Tim Scott from the South...

Can chaplains committed to historic biblical Christianity serve in the United States military? That question, though inconceivable to our nation’s founders, is now front and center. And the answer to that question will answer another, even more important question: Can religious liberty survive under America’s new moral order? The repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, coupled with the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional, set the stage for this crisis. The full normalization of same-sex relationships within the U.S. military is part of the unprecedented moral revolution that is now reshaping American...

The town where J. Gresham Machen, the founder of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, last preached before his death has shown up again in the news, this time in a horrible way. While Machen's direct denominational influence was fairly narrow, as the key leader of the secession from the Northern Presbyterians and founder of Westminster Theological Seminary, Machen has a lasting role in American Calvinism that is far larger than the Orthodox Presbyterian Church which he founded. In his own lifetime, however, Machen's role was even more important and went well beyond Reformed circles. As a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary,...

LOS ANGELES — Sinai Temple is a Conservative Jewish congregation perched on a hill in Westwood, famous for its wealth, its sizable population of Persians, many of whom fled Iran after the fall of the shah, and a well-known and outspoken rabbi who has at times pushed his congregation on ideologically adventurous paths. So it was that three weeks before the Supreme Court cleared the way for same-sex marriage in California, the rabbi, David Wolpe, announced in a letter to the synagogue that gay marriages would be performed in this 107-year-old congregation, as soon as the court ruling he anticipated...

As the Supreme Court considers overturning California’s ban on same-sex marriage, gay people await a ruling that could change their lives. But the case has already transformed one gay man: Ken Mehlman, the once-closeted Republican operative who orchestrated President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election on a platform that included opposition to same-sex marriage. Now Mr. Mehlman, a private equity executive in Manhattan, is waging what could be his final campaign: to convince fellow Republicans that gay marriage is consistent with conservative values and good for their party. His about-face, sparked in part by the lawyer who filed the California lawsuit,...

...Churches have been perhaps the biggest supporters of scouting groups. But today a few pastors in the Birmingham area predicted that the new policy will cause some churches to drop their sponsorship of scouting programs. The Rev. Harry Reeder, senior pastor of the 4,100-member Briarwood Presbyterian Church and outspoken critic of efforts to change Boy Scout policy on homosexuality, said evangelical churches are a bedrock of support for the Boy Scout tradition in Alabama. But that's now in danger, he said. "When a church holds to a biblical social ethic of sex only between a man and a woman in...

SANA, Yemen -- IF you want to know how bad things can go in Syria, study Iraq. If you want to know how much better things could have gone, study Yemen. Say what? Yemen? Yes, Yemen. Maybe the most unique postrevolutionary political process happening in any country experiencing an Arab awakening is in poor, fractured, water-starved Yemen. In its own messy way, Yemen is doing what all the other Arab awakening countries failed to do: have a serious, broad-based national dialogue, where the different political factions, new parties, young people, women, Islamists, tribes, northerners and southerners are literally introducing themselves...

This is an Associated Press story so due to copyright it must be excerpted. Key items: ___ BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) -- Southern Indiana police arrested a man on suspicion of using an ax to smash windows and damage computers at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bloomington on Thursday. Benjamin D. Curell, 27, of Ellettsville, was arrested on preliminary burglary and criminal mischief charges, The Herald-Times reported... The man allegedly attributed his actions to his religious beliefs, saying Planned Parenthood employees murder babies... Anti-abortion group Indiana Right to Life issued a statement condemning the actions of the vandal. "Indiana Right to...

President Park Geun-hye models herself on former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as the "iron lady" of South Korea, the Wall Street Journal speculated Wednesday. "Ms. Park, like Mrs. Thatcher, is known for not being intimidated by totalitarian regimes or men in power," the paper said. "When her father, President Park Chung-hee, was assassinated in 1979, Ms. Park was quoted as saying 'Is the border secure?' -- sparking admiration by worrying primarily about the possible threat of a North Korean invasion." "In her first televised address from [Cheong Wa Dae] she sharply chastised opposition politicians -- almost all men --for...

Romans 9:15-24 15 For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. 16 So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy. 17 For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth. 18 Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom...

The national Republican Party released a scathing self-analysis Monday that party leaders hope will be the first step toward returning the GOP to a winning track after its election losses of November. The report, issued by a Republican National Committee task force, minces no words. "Public perception of the party is at record lows," the report says. "Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country. When someone rolls their eyes at us, they are not likely to open their...

In the approaching twilight of the US war in Afghanistan, China is stepping up its involvement, attracted by the country’s trillion dollar worth of minerals. China, who has long been a bystander to the conflict in Afghanistan, could prove to be the ultimate winner in Afghanistan and that without a single shed of blood. They have already hit the jackpot by winning the billion dollar investment project in Logar’s copper mine. Afghanistan’s lithium, the key raw material for batteries to nuclear components, is the next potential target. But, do they seem to be going forward? Security remains a challenge to...

WASHINGTON — When Mark Takano ran unsuccessfully for Congress twice in the early 1990s, his opponents tried to smear him as a “homosexual liberal” and a “nutzoid.” One of them even had pink fliers printed that asked, “A Congressman for Riverside ... Or San Francisco?” When he ran again last year, he won by almost 20 points. “Flash forward 18 years,” Mr. Takano said recently, “and the very macho building tradesmen are behind me. I’m getting pictures with them in their hard hats.” For decades, the words “gay” and “Congress” were usually seen together only in stories of scandal and...