Free Republic

Recently, 130 environmentalist groups gathered in an UN-backed event in Venezuela to gather more civilian support to combat climate change, reports the Daily Caller. A number of them signed the Margarita Declaration which calls for an end to the “hegemonic capitalist system” as the only solution to human-caused climate change. The environmentalists argued that measures such as carbon capture and trade and conservation efforts are not sufficient to prevent the environmental disasters they are predicting; instead, they demanded a radical system change. Although they did not spell out what their ideal social system would be, we can assume they want...

A new campaign advertisement from U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, criticizing his Republican opponent's pro-life stance, features a mother holding her young daughter and saying the child is the reason abortion should remain legal. As a female narrator criticizes Republican Congressman Cory Gardner’s "history [of] supporting harsh anti-abortion laws,” the camera cuts to a dark-haired woman holding a girl, who appears to be less than 10 years old, on her lap. “I want my daughter to have the same choices I do,” she says. The narrator also references “Gardner's eight year crusade that would ban birth control.” “Seriously?” a woman says....

Each new climate-change study seems more pessimistic than the last. This May and June, for example, were the hottest ones on record for the planet. Effective countermeasures now could actually ward off many of these threats at relatively modest cost. Yet despite a robust scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are at the root of the problem, legislation to curb them has gone nowhere in Congress. In response, President Obama has proposed stricter regulations on electric utilities, which some scientists warn may be too little, too late. Why aren’t we demanding more forceful action? One reason may be the frequent...

Michael Vickers’s ranch 113 kilometres north of the US–Mexico border in Brooks County, Texas, is near a Border Patrol checkpoint. Undocumented migrants trek through the harsh brushland onto his property to avoid capture. An electric fence encloses the nearly 1,000 acres: at 220 volts, says Vickers, a local veterinarian and avid hunter, “it won’t kill them but it will make them wet their pants”. In 2006, Vickers and his wife Linda founded the Texas Border Volunteers, which now has some 300 recruits, who dress in fatigues and patrol private ranches in South Texas, using night-vision goggles and thermal imaging to...

In the Hobby Lobby decision handed down last month, the Supreme Court was asked to strike a balance between women’s rights and religious freedom. But the major conflict that has erupted in the wake of that decision has been between religious freedom and gay rights. The resulting controversy has split gay-rights and faith groups on the left, with wide-ranging political fallout that some now fear could hurt both causes. One chapter of the controversy is set to close on Monday, when President Obama plans to sign a long-awaited executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against gays and lesbians, according...

Everyone is exactly who he or she says on the internet – at least according to one Washington Post writer. That conclusion is her rationale to say Christians are awful people. Sally Quinn, Washington Post columnist and OnFaith founder, claimed that, “When it Comes to Hateful Internet Speech, Christians Are the Worst.” In her July 17 article, Quinn examined a white-supremacist site and comments on her articles to conclude that Christian “haters” “need a place to unleash their dark sides.” For her introduction, Quinn pointed at white-supremacist Stormfront to note how the site targeted others: 39 percent Jews, 33 percent...

One may have believed that the revocation of an esteemed award from human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali by Brandeis University was the lowest level the school could stoop in kowtowing to fascist, racist influences among Brandeis faculty. Yet one would be wrong. In an all-new bombshell uncovered by Brandeis student Daniel Mael, an entire listserv used by Brandeis professors and teachers has been leaked to the public. This email list, entitled “Concerned” contains several exchanges between professors bashing conservatives, Jews, Christians, and anyone who views America as a force for good in this world.Donald Hindley, professor of comparative politics...

The celebrating began before the coroner could collect the bodies of Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo, the Las Vegas patrol officers ambushed and executed while eating at a pizzeria last month. “The good news is, there are two less police in the world,” read an entry on the Facebook page for CopBlock.org. The post was visible for less than a day, but it attracted at least 6,300 likes and comments by the time the page’s administrators removed it. Jerad Miller — who along with his wife, Amanda, gunned down the Vegas police officers before dying during a shootout with police...

“The Bundy ranch standoff wasn’t a spontaneous response to Cliven Bundy’s predicament but rather a well-organized, military-type action that reflects the potential for violence from a much larger and more dangerous movement,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow in the SPLC’s Intelligence Project. “This incident may have faded from public view, but if our government doesn’t pay attention, we will be caught off guard as much as the Bureau of Land Management was that day.”

Attorney General Eric Holder has a "lot of sleepless nights," reported ABC News this morning. Chief among his concerns? The threat of "homegrown violent extremists."

The standoff between rancher Cliven Bundy and federal agents, which escalated into a national news story earlier this year as armed supporters of Bundy gathered at his Nevada ranch, “invigorated an extremist movement” in the country, according to a report issued Thursday by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The U.S. Constitution protects gay people’s right to marry the person they love. It does not, however, protect them from getting fired for doing so. Throughout the first decade of marriage equality, most states that legalized gay marriage also proscribed anti-gay employment discrimination, rendering this legal dissonance moot. But as more and more states find marriage equality foisted upon them by a judicial mandate, this discordance in rights presents something of a ticking time bomb for the LGBT movement. ...

Why are liberal 'gay' activists freaking out over a contraception case -- Hobby Lobby -- and should they be worried? Court's defense of religious liberty for profit-making companies could help Christian small businessmen oppressed by "gay rights" laws By Peter LaBarbera It's easy to understand why hard-core feminists with their frenzied, overblown "War on Women" rhetoric would be outraged by the Supreme Court's upholding of Hobby Lobby's right as a Christian-run corporation not to be forced to provide abortifacients to its employees through an Obamacare mandate. (See Hillary's misinformation on the decision HERE.) But why are liberal "gay" activists freaking...

To Hold Senate, Democrats Rely on Single Women By JACKIE CALMES JULY 2, 2014 Senator Kay Hagan, center, a North Carolina Democrat struggling to secure a second term, recently has shown gains in polls. RALEIGH, N.C. — The decline of marriage over the last generation has helped create an emerging voting bloc of unmarried women that is profoundly reshaping the American electorate to the advantage, recent elections suggest, of the Democratic Party. What is far from clear is whether Democrats will benefit in the midterm contests this fall. With their Senate majority at stake in November, Democrats and allied groups...

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...