Free Republic

Decker: There are many near-death stories out there in which people recount being in a tunnel of light, hearing music, sometimes sensing a figure at the end of the tunnel, and then they come back to life. What do you know about what comes next? Blatty: There are three things that assure me that what comes next is more life: 1. My Catholic faith; 2. my capacity to reason, as follows: Never in history -- never! – has there been a universal yearning by all of mankind for something that does not exist. But we have all and everywhere desired...

Hard-core Communists in Hollywood, and by that I mean those with party cards and whose allegiance was to Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, not the United States, made a major effort to take over the movie industry and nearly succeeded. The much-maligned House Un-American Activities Committee, as even liberal Hollywood historians Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund acknowledge, uncovered over 200 party members in Hollywood. My dad, Morrie Ryskind, one of the few outspoken anti-Communist screenwriters in Hollywood, said the number was closer to 300. They were part of a broad conspiracy of subversives who had penetrated America’s most critical...

An investigator has found that the global warming “crisis” is based on years of systematically falsified temperature data. Given the amount of government money saturating climatology these days, this should come as no surprise. The climate science motto these days is, “fake it til you make it.”

A major Democratic donor was arrested this week by the Sex Crimes Unit in Portland, Ore., for raping a minor. Terrence Bean, a liberal activist who bundled more than $500,000 for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, is charged with having sex with a 15-year-old boy. Bean has made contributions to influential Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin and Rep. Barney Frank, who has had his own smarmy brushes with the law. Bean’s Instagram account shows him on Air Force One with President Obama and getting chummy with Vice President Joe...

Conservatives need to get their act together and not blow another opportunity to push back liberalism. In both of the last two elections in 2012 and 2010, a Senate majority was in reach but Republican candidates ran self-defeating campaigns, and the red-state base didn’t show up on Election Day. The no-show mistake cannot be repeated again because the future of the country is on the line, and the dangerous Obama agenda must be repudiated. For those who need reminded why they should go vote, consider: Debt: U.S. National Debt is at $17.9 trillion. Put another way, that is more than...

Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung claimed Sunday that local democracy protests raging for over a month are, “not entirely a domestic movement, as external forces are involved.” American businessman Mark Simon has been thrown into the eye of this storm as one of the alleged external forces. “Former American Military Intelligence Officer Turned Next Media Executive,” charged a typical headline about him in the pro-Beijing press. Next Media is a leading pro-democracy publishing company in Asia. Raised in Falls Church, Va., Mr. Simon played football at East Carolina University and attended Georgetown University before a 25-year career in the...

The crown jewels of any intelligence organization are its sources and methods – the means by which information is obtained. I have no doubts that, thanks to Edward Snowden, Russia and China now have an extraordinary volume of data on NSAs sources and methods for collecting information from communications. That means they now know the weaknesses in their and other of our adversaries’ communications procedures and our strengths in exploiting them. And not just voice communications, but also radar, telemetry, missile and rocket command and response, military GPS locationing and weapons systems countermeasures. On far too many subjects, Russia and...

The increasingly heated standoff in the central business district of this Asian financial hub cannot last indefinitely. Eventually, something will have to give because there is no middle ground between the opposing sides: The people want the vote, and Beijing says they can’t have it. Practically speaking, Beijing cannot make an exception for Hong Kong without stirring up democratic sentiment across the rest of the world’s largest country. Reports from the ground that the People’s Liberation Army has reinforced its Hong Kong garrison indicate the government has no plan to yield. The Hong Kong tinderbox is relevant to America because...

“Beijing is bulking up the military presence in Hong Kong,” a source on the ground told Radix News. “Under the cover of night, PLA troops are being sent over the border from the mainland. Why would they need an army in this peaceful place?” The short answer is that Chinese Communist Party officials view debate and protest as challenges to their authority, and the kneejerk authoritarian response to a challenge is to put it down. The threat of a harsher crackdown has been in the air since last month when security forces used tear gas and nightsticks to try to...

It is not an accident that the point man for the damaging disclosure of so much Top Secret information enjoys asylum in Russia and that the intelligence is ending up in the hands of Islamic extremists. “It is reasonable to assume that Vladimir Putin is giving information obtained via Snowden to ISIS or al Qaeda so they can damage U.S. infrastructure as his proxy,” former NSA executive Charlie Speight explained to us. “Without getting his hands dirty or spending a single ruble, Putin can bring us down and elevate Russia.” The Putin-Snowden collaboration makes sense in the context of the...

GETTYSBURG, PA – One of the hottest-selling t-shirts at souvenir shops outside Gettysburg proclaims, “If at first you don’t secede, try, try again.” While the pun is popular among Civil War re-enactors at the historic battlefield, the message also has growing appeal in contemporary politics, especially among fractious Republicans. On both the Right and the Left, activists are convinced that the Republican Party is not pure enough on their issues, and perhaps it is time to break away and create a new political organization to shake up the system. “It's hopeless; Republicans are as much at fault as Democrats for...

As the U.S. debates ways to replace or improve Obamacare, Canada may offer a blueprint for reform. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper has moved to transfer control from the federal government to the provinces and is opening up the socialized system to private clinics and doctors. “What we clearly need is experimentation with market reforms and private delivery options within the public system. ... that experimentation should occur at the provincial level,” Harper said a decade before winning a government majority in 2011. Now he's acting on his vision. This is relevant to the debate over health policy in America...

Republican National Committee officials announced recently that the party's nominating convention for the next presidential election will be held in Cleveland or Dallas. “These world-class cities have the ability to provide our next presidential nominee a launching pad that will put a Republican in the White House in 2016,” said site-selection chairman Enid Mickelsen. Given the ultimate goal, the GOP's big bash should be in Ohio. A lot more than one election is riding on the next campaign for the Oval Office. After losing the popular vote in five of the last six presidential contests, many of the Republican faithful...

President Obama told West Point's graduating cadets Wednesday that “some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences.” Apparently the nation's commander-in-chief is unaware of -- or perhaps unconcerned by -- the more pressing reality that bad things happen when America's real and potential adversaries don't fear U.S. strength. On Tuesday, a Chinese vessel rammed and sank a Vietnamese fishing boat. China recently deployed three nuclear submarines to Asia's troubled waters and over the weekend scrambled combat aircraft to harass Japanese defense forces. At...

At least seven people wrote Decker and told him to “go to hell.” For instance, MariaTM supportively promised, “I will pray for your burning soul.” And Amanda kept things real simple: “Go to hell lowlife.” One simple text just said: “hater.” Someone calling himself or herself SSPVArchangel asked, “When did the other 2 ‘popes’ die and who made Decker Supreme Pontiff??” On FreeRepublic.com there was KarlFromOhio who cleverly wrote, “Since John Paul II eliminated the Devil’s Advocate position in the canonization procedure, I guess USA Today has decided to take the position on a pro bono basis.”

Link only included due to copyright restrictions: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/04/21/pope-saint-johnpaulii-easter-sex-abuse-column/7980347/

Hillary Clinton essentially has been coronated the next Democratic nominee and first woman president of the United States 33 months before the 2016 election. This media-driven certainty ignores her many negatives, including the Benghazi debacle on her watch, the circus sideshow of her husband Bill, her tendency to give off an unlikable vibe, and the possibility that another green amateur could swoop in out of nowhere to defeat her in the primaries like Barack Obama did in 2008. There is also the issue of Israel

Only including link due to copyright limitations: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/02/19/taliban-prisoners-us-soldier-afghanistan-column/5619727/