Free Republic

They just affirm what many of us have already believed. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Citizen Journalist, Ryan Sorba recently went undercover in Palm Springs, California, posing as a same-sex marriage activist. He asked the following question: “Do you believe being gay is strictly genetic?” The video enclosed in this email is a montage of clips from interviews in which gays admit that they believe they are gay due external circumstances, such as being sexually abused at an early age or going through other traumatic experiences. When asked how many interviews Sorba obtained during this venture, he answered, “There are many more...

Since Dr Michael Mann announced his intention to sue over my Corner post, I've had a few queries on this and that aspect of the case: 1) Several readers have asked if there's a legal defense fund to which they can contribute. No, but, if you want to help out, you could always send a few bucks National Review's way. Since Dr Mann's lawyer, John "I don't bluff" Williams, has assured us he doesn't bluff, it seems prudent to budget for a full-length trial.You can donate to NR here. Or better yet, subscribe to the magazine, and enjoy a fortnightly...

Midway through a Julie Burchill column in the Guardian bemoaning the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, I was startled to learn the following: Although fewer than 10 percent of British children attend private schools, their alumni make up over 60 percent of the acts on the U.K. pop charts. Twenty years ago, it was 1 percent. There's always been a bit of this, of course: Mick Jagger went to the London School of Economics and made more money singing the songs of hardscrabble Mississippi bluesmen than the gnarled old-timers who'd lived those lyrics could ever dream of. But he was "middle class"...

Today, April 15, 2012 is the 120th anniversary of the birth of Corrie ten Boom. It is also the 29th anniversary of her death. She wrote the book The Hiding Place, about her family's story. In WWII, they lived in Haarlem Holland. They hid Jews in a small room in their home. The Nazis came and arrested the ten Boom family and sent them to concentration camps. Corrie was the only one who survived. But the Jews that were hiding there survived and escaped. You can read more about Corrie at the link. Happy birthday Dear Lady!Better yet, buy a...

Some of you may have a Berkey water purifier. It is touted as the best there is. From their wabsite: "Berkey® Systems are the World’s Most Powerful and Cost Effective Personal Water purification Systems Providing Reliable and User-friendly Water Purification in Both Normal and Hostile Filtration Environments." "Moreover, Berkey® systems are capable of purifying both treated water and untreated raw water from such sources as remote lakes, streams, stagnant ponds and water supplies in foreign countries, where regulations may be substandard at best. So powerful, this system is able to remove red food coloring from water without removing the beneficial...

You've heard of the Berkey water purifier, right? It is supposed to be the best of the best. And they charge according to that reputation. For years, that reputation was well deserved. However in 2010, they had a batch of bad filters. The ceramic filter was not properly glued to the plastic base, and this allowed unfiltered water to rush around the filter, rather than through it. They thought they fixed that problem, and released more filters in early to mid 2011, that were also bad. This time, they used an adhesive that sticks to the ceramic element, but doesn't...

As I think about it, the inability of the boobs who run the Iowa caucuses to declare reliably a winner until over two weeks after voting is not a small thing. Obviously, a couple of dozen votes one way or another is statistically insignificant, but then so, in Iowa, are the total votes: 121,000-and-something Iowans participated in the Republican caucuses and they have more say over the presidential nominating process than all 37 million Californians. So they could at least get it right, and in a timely manner. The horse-race headlines matter. Just nine days ago, the bigfoot media line...

In the 2010 election the New Hampshire Republican Party took 298 out of 400 House seats, 19 out of 24 state Senate seats, and all five seats on the Executive Council. A little over a year later, in the state's presidential primary, the same (more or less) electorate gave over 56 percent of its votes to a couple of moneyed "moderates," one of whom served in the Obama administration and the other of whom left no trace in office other than the pilot program for Obamacare. Another 23 percent voted for Ron Paul. Supporters of the three other "major" candidates...

Front Sight was founded and continues to grow geometrically with the purpose to positively change the image of gun ownership in our lifetimes. Through the thousands of responsible citizens who attend our courses every month and then go back to their communities all across the country as walking, talking representatives of Front Sight’s expert training, we really are making a significant, positive change. In the past, when events such as Columbine, 9/11 and Virginia Tech captured national attention, Front Sight immediately lead the way to position the importance of responsible gun ownership at the forefront of discussions to train teachers...

Lest you doubt that we're headed for the most vicious election year in memory, consider the determined effort, within 10 minutes of his triumph in Iowa, to weirdify Rick Santorum. Discussing the surging senator on Fox News, Alan Colmes mused on some of the "crazy things" he's said and done. Santorum has certainly said and done many crazy things, as have most members of America's political class, but the "crazy thing" Colmes chose to focus on was Santorum's "taking his two-hour-old baby when it died right after childbirth home," whereupon he "played with it." My National Review colleague Rich Lowry...

By 2020, just the interest payments on the federal debt will be larger than the US military budget. That’s not paying down the debt, but merely staying current on the servicing. Like when you get your MasterCard statement and you can’t afford to pay off what you borrowed, but you can just about cover the monthly interest charge. Except in this case, the interest charge for US taxpayers will be greater than the military budgets of China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey and Israel combined. Just in interest payments...

Re that NR editorial, I would like, politely, to dissent from my colleagues’ dismissal of Perry and Bachmann. In the former case, a handful of poor debate performances should not disqualify a man from executive responsibility: Our age’s veneration for men with “nothing to do but think and talk” (in Churchill’s words, on the sort of chaps he didn’t want in his war cabinet) is one reason why the Western world is sliding off a cliff. In the latter case, Congresswoman Bachmann has fought a principled, conservative campaign with only one significant misstep — her overreach on the Gardasil business....

I see Andrea True died earlier this month. The late disco diva enjoyed a brief moment of global celebrity in 1976 with her ubiquitous glitterball favorite: "More, More, More How do you like it? How do you like it? More, More, More How do you like it? How do you like it?" In honor of Andrea's passing, I have asked my congressman to propose the adoption of this song as the U.S. national anthem. True, Miss True wrote the number as an autobiographical reflection on her days as a porn movie actress but, consciously or not, it accurately distills the...

Our ludicrously unqualified chief executive would have been regarded as a joke candidate in any serious nation. "The way I think about it," Barack Obama told a TV station in Orlando, "is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft." He has a point. This is a great, great country that got so soft that 53 percent of electors voted for a ludicrously unqualified chief executive who would be regarded as a joke candidate in any serious nation. One should not begrudge a man who seizes his opportunity. But one should certainly hold in...

"It's the end of the world as we know it," sang the popular musical artistes REM many years ago. And it is. REM has announced that they're splitting up after almost a third of a century. But these days who isn't? The Eurozone, the world's first geriatric boy band, is on the verge of busting apart. Chimerica, Professor Niall Ferguson's amusing name for the Chinese-American economic partnership that started around the same time REM did, is going the way of Wham!, with Beijing figuring it's the George Michael of the relationship and that it's tired of wossname, the other fellow,...

One of my facebook friends posted a photo of three different styles of McCain 2012 bumper stickers that he picked up at some GOP event. I don't know how to copy someone elses photo, so I'll go ask him to come here and post it.

The president has taken to the campaign trail to promote his American Jobs Act. That’s a good name for it: an act. “Pass this bill now!” he declared 24 times at a stop in in Raleigh, North Carolina, and another 18 in Columbus, Ohio, and the act is sufficiently effective that, three years into the Vapidity of Hope, the president can still find crowds of true believers willing to chant along with him: “Pass this bill now!” Not all supporters are content merely to singalong with the prompter-in-chief. In North Carolina, a still-devoted hopeychanger cried out, “I love you!” Article...

Rick Perry, governor of Texas, has only been in the presidential race for 20 minutes but he's already delivered one of the best lines in the campaign: "I'll work every day to try to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can." This will be grand news to Schylar Capo, 11 years old, of Virginia, who made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days, and for her pains, was visited by a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter (with accompanying state troopers)...

Industrial Policy: The fact that President Obama's "green jobs" campaign has been an enormously expensive failure is now so glaringly obvious even the New York Times can't ignore it any longer. In a surprisingly candid article headlined "Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises," the Times' Aaron Glantz reports that "federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show," and that Obama's goal of 5 million new green jobs in 10 years is a "pipe dream." Glantz notes, for example, that Obama's much-heralded weatherization program "never caught on." California still...

The trick in this business is not to be right too early. A week ago I released my new book – the usual doom 'n' gloom stuff – and, just as the sensible prudent moderate chaps were about to dismiss it as hysterical and alarmist, Standard & Poor's went and downgraded the United States from its AAA rating for the first time in history. Obligingly enough they downgraded it to AA+, which happens to be the initials of my book: After America. Okay, there's not a lot of "+" in that, but you can't have everything. But the news cycle...