Free Republic

Yelling “fire” in a crowded theater can get you into trouble. So can saying “yoga” in a group of Catholics.I just do it for the stretches, I don’t do anything religious.It’s evil…the work of the devil.Oh please! The next thing you’ll be telling me is the number 13 brings bad luck. Practicing yoga breaks the First Commandment; it’s pagan worship.And so it goes. And goes. And goes.Three years ago, I did an article titled “To Yoga or Not to Yoga.” Initially, I wrote it then put it aside for around a year. I was not sure I was up...

Conspicuously absent from yesterday’s post-Hobby Lobby hullabaloo was the acknowledgment on the left that the decision was the product of a court. Distilling into a single line what was a popular and widely disseminated critique, the New York Times’s Nick Kristof tweeted a picture of Justices Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, sardonically labeling the quintet as “The experts on women’s health on the Supreme Court who ruled today against contraception coverage.” A few hours later, Senator Harry Reid’s office pushed out an assessment that was cut from the same unlovely cloth. “It’s time that five men on the Supreme...

Here's the question of the day: Is there a climate bubble? In a New York Times op-ed, former treasury secretary Hank Paulson says there is. He calls it The Coming Climate Crash. For too many years, we failed to rein in the excesses building up in the nation’s financial markets. When the credit bubble burst in 2008, the damage was devastating. Millions suffered. Many still do. We’re making the same mistake today with climate change. We’re staring down a climate bubble that poses enormous risks to both our environment and economy. The warning signs are clear and growing more urgent...

Here is a truth so fundamental that it should be self-evident: When legitimately constituted state authority stands down in the face of armed threats, the very foundation of the republic is in danger. And yet that is exactly what happened at Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch this spring: An alleged criminal defeated the cops, because the forces of lawlessness came at them with guns — then Bureau of Land Management officials further surrendered by removing the government markings from their vehicles to prevent violence against them. What should be judged a watershed in American history instead became a story about one...

Asked about the prospects for female candidates in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton made a dramatic claim on Sunday. “Who is the viable woman of either party who could win a primary nomination in 2016, if who not you?” CBS Sunday host Jane Pauley asked Clinton in yet another interview the former First Lady has given during the week of the release of her latest memoir, “Hard Choices.” “Politics is so unpredictable,” Clinton responded. “Whoever runs has to recognize that the American political system is probably the most difficult, even brutal, in the world.”

Obama Calls For Climate Change Action In California Commencement Speech Speaking at University of California, Irvine, president compares science denial to saying 'moon is made of cheese' Barack Obama yelled 'Zot, Zot, Zot', as he makes the symbols of the Anteater, the school's mascot. Barack Obama on Saturday repeated his recent appeals for action to prevent climate change, while speaking at the University of California, Irvine graduation ceremony. “The question is not whether we need to act,” the president said, at Angel Stadium in Anaheim. “The overwhelming judgement of science, accumulated and reviewed over decades, has put the that to...

Maybe it’s me, but the predictable right-wing cries of outrage over the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rules on carbon seem oddly muted and unfocused. I mean, these are the people who managed to create national outrage over nonexistent death panels. Now the Obama administration is doing something that really will impose at least some pain on some people. Where are the eye-catching fake horror stories? For what it’s worth, however, the attacks on the new rules mainly involve the three C’s: conspiracy, cost and China. That is, right-wingers claim that there isn’t any global warming, that it’s all a hoax...

The problems that arise from having a mouth is that sometimes they open. It’s even worse when the owner doesn’t know how to keep it shut. But, when it comes to liberal Democrats, it has become an epidemic…and they just cannot contain themselves. Especially when it comes to the financially driven fear-fest known as climate change…because, you know…we’re all going to die. Ladies, and Gents, I present to you… 10 Things Liberals Insanely Link To Global Warming: 1) Global Warming Causes Rape Hide yo kids, hide yo wife, cuz global warming be raping everyone up in here! Back in February,...

An evil man by the name of Elliot Rodger murdered six, injured thirteen near the University of California at Santa Barbara. Rodger apparently coveted the company of women and was depressed by his family being just outside of the Hollywood elite. He had Asperger’s and has been in therapy since he was 8. In other words, we’re talking about an evil man who could probably function in society. At least until he started killing people. The feminist left has run wild with this story, complaining about misogyny while conveniently leaving out the fact that half the people Rodger murdered were...

For most American women beyond the age of high school gym class, “I’ve got my period” isn’t considered much of an excuse for anything. We’re meant to pop an Advil and get on with things, Red Devil be damned. But in several, mostly East Asian, countries, so-called “menstrual leave” is a legally enshrined right for female workers. However, as these countries attempt to move toward greater gender equality in the workplace, menstrual leave has come under debate. Do these policies simply further the notion that women are weak, hormonally-addled creatures controlled by their uteri? Or do they encourage more equality...

PARAMUS (WABC) -- A crowd of frightened shoppers trying to exit a department store after smoke seeped in from a nearby car fire knocked over a metal support frame, leading to mistaken reports of gunshots and the evacuation of the upscale mall, authorities said Sunday. A car fire caused tires to explode at about 8 p.m. Saturday at the Garden State Plaza in Paramus. As smoke from that fire entered the store, workers told customers to leave. The moving crowd knocked over a large metal display stanchion on the store's main level, causing noises that many confused for gunshots. Another...

Freedom for a man with a gun trumps freedom for parents of kids who feel endangered by him. Our scary new reality. Imagine you’re sitting in a restaurant and a loud group of armed men come through the door. They are ostentatiously displaying their weapons, making sure that everyone notices them. Would you feel safe or would you feel in danger? Would you feel comfortable confronting them? If you owned the restaurant could you ask them to leave? These are questions that are facing more and more Americans in their everyday lives as “open carry” enthusiasts descend on public places...

‘Two, four, six, eight. Stop the violence. Stop the rape.” So chanted a group of Ohio University students calling themselves “f***rapeculture” at a protest a couple of years ago. Rape-culture activists have become a fixture on campuses throughout the country, and now, 55 colleges — including Harvard, Princeton, and Berkeley — are under federal investigation for mishandling sexual-assault complaints. Some of my conservative/libertarian sisters have pointed out that the statistics on sexual assault are wildly inflated. Christina Hoff Sommers notes that the “one in five women are victims of rape” statistic that the Centers for Disease Control popularized (and that...

Charles and David Koch are one of the “main causes” of climate change, charged Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the Senate floor. “While the Koch brothers admit to not being experts on the matter, these billionaire oil tycoons are certainly experts at contributing to climate change. That’s what they do very well. They are one of the main causes of this. Not a cause, one of the main causes,” Reid said. Now in his fifth month of flogging the billionaire conservative benefactors on the Senate floor, Reid dubbed them “multizillionaires” on Wednesday and mockingly applauded their spokeswoman for saying...

The European Commission has approved new rules aimed at limiting the spread of a virus that has killed millions of piglets in the United States, highlighting the risk of animal feed products as a potential transmission agent. Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus (PEDv) has wiped out more than 10% of the US pig population since it appeared a year ago, and has also struck in Canada, Mexico and Japan. The European Union has not been affected by this strain. In the United States, the world’s biggest pork exporter, losses from PEDv could cut pork production as much as 7% in 2014,...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: In the meantime, I have a huge, huge See, I Told You So opportunity here combined with the latest pivot and announcement from the White House yesterday. They've dropped everything now. They've dropped Benghazi, they've dropped everything, and they're moving forward (once again) on climate change/global warming. There is a desire on the part the Democrat Party and the left for the president to once again assume dictatorial-like powers to do what must be done in the area of climate change and global warming to accomplish whatever it is they want to accomplish. It's not "saving the...

Federal law enforcement officials are investigating threats made against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the aftermath of his sharp-edged attacks against Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, sources said Monday. Reid has not minced words about Bundy’s battle with the Bureau of Land Management, referring to Bundy’s supporters as “domestic terrorists” and the rancher himself as a “hateful racist.” As he’s stepped up his criticism, Reid has been the subject of threats himself, prompting an increase in his own security detail in recent days, people familiar with the matter said Monday. Shennell Antrobus, a spokesman for the U.S. Capitol Police, declined...

THE WORLD now has a rough deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Expect a certain part of our political class to insist that man-made climate change is not consensus science, and that until it is, nothing should be done. The problem there is obvious: By the time all the skeptics are persuaded, it will be too late for an effective response. In that regard, climate change poses a...

If you're poor, the only way you're likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if you're tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every...

12 Signs That Something Big Is Happening To The Earth’s Crust Under North And South America By Michael Snyder on March 30th, 2014 Why are fault lines and volcanoes all over North and South America suddenly waking up? Are we moving into a time when major earthquakes and volcanic eruptions will become much more common? For the past several decades, we have been extremely fortunate to have experienced a period of extremely low seismic activity along the west coast of the United States. You see, the west coast lies right along the infamous Ring of Fire. Approximately 75 percent of...