Free Republic

President Barack Obama tried to console frustrated supporters by placing blame for the slow pace of change on the nation’s “founding fathers.” “You and I know what needs to be done to bring social justice to every American,” the President observed. “But our enemies in Congress and the states are exploiting loopholes left in the Constitution by our nation’s early leaders. The requirement that laws must be approved by both houses of Congress enables obstructionists to block the mandate I received from voters in 2008. The autonomy granted the states under the Tenth Amendment insulates them from total compliance with...

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is warning employers that requiring new hires to have a high school diploma violates federal law. “The deplorable performance and almost total lack of standards exhibited by the nation’s public schools cast a pall of considerable doubt over the equity and utility of using high school graduation as a criteria for employing a person,” declared Daniel Blunt, spokesman for the EEOC. “Supposing a person has a diploma, what does this signify?” Blunt asked. “Standardized tests reveal that a remarkably large percentage of high school graduates are distressingly stupid. Even if graduates are less stupid...

"A woman who wanted to work at a nightclub started searching for someone who could perform plastic surgery at a cheap price to give her a curvier body. Police say what she found was a woman posing as a doctor who filled her buttocks with cement, mineral oil and flat-tire sealant."

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Rick Perry. Let's do this. Let's go back October 20th on this show, and I said this. Number three, audio sound bite number three. Go back in order. RUSH ARCHIVE: Rick Perry -- and I mean this in a complimentary way. People are gonna find this not strange or not hard to believe, but you might be confused by this. Rick Perry makes me laugh. But not at him. I laugh with the guy. RUSH: I gotta tell you: Rick Perry, to me, is funny. During the debate when he decided to go after Mitt Romney for...

PRINCETON, N.J., Oct. 24 (UPI) -- Most Americans say they would amend the Constitution to swap the Electoral College with a popular-vote system to elect the president, a poll indicates. Sixty-two percent of Americans prefer replacing the Electoral College and 35 percent would keep the current method for electing presidents, results from a Gallup poll released Monday indicated. For the first time since the disputed 2000 presidential election, the majority of Republicans said they favor amending the Constitution, the Princeton, N.J., polling agency said. That year, Democrat Al Gore won the national popular vote but Republican George W. Bush wound...

Texas Gov. Rick Perry doesn’t have a reputation as the most scientifically inclined of candidates..... But there’s one kind of science that Perry is willing, even eager, to run on: political science. And that should have his opponents worried. In...“The VictoryLab,” Sasha Issenberg digs deep into Perry’s campaign organization, which he calls “the brainiest political operation in America.” After seven straight wins at the ballot box, Perry’s organization is also among the most fearsome in America. And there’s nothing unscientific about it. In fact, compared with Perry’s organization, every other campaign in America appears in denial of the evidence. The...

We live in an age of babies. It's official. And I HATE it. Today, as I was fundraising for the YAF 9/11 Never Forget Project, I was pulled into the office of my head of school. I was told to take down the posters we had up, that read "Never Forget" with pictures of various attacks on Americans, such as 9/11, the bombing of the Marine barracks, and a picture of Daniel Pearl with a gun to his head. Now, my head of school said that the picture with the gun was inappropriate. Granted, I do go to a school...

Durbin: Maybe Illegal Alien Will Become President Someday Wednesday, June 29, 2011 By Terence P. Jeffrey (CNSNews.com) - Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.) said in a congressional hearing Tuesday that a young person who is an illegal alien in the United States today may someday become president. “When I look around this room, I see America's future, our doctors, our teachers, our nurses, our engineers, our scientists, our soldiers, our congressmen, our senators, and maybe our president,” Durbin said immediately after having asked all young persons in the room to stand if they were currently undocumented aliens who would...

Robert Allison Chairman of History Department of Suffolk University when interviewed by NPR specifically supported Sarah Palin on Paul Revere.

California's attempts to switch to green energy have inadvertently put the survival of the state’s golden eagles at risk. Scores of the protected birds have been dying each year after colliding with the blades of about 5,000 wind turbines. Now the drive for renewable power sources, such as wind and the sun, being promoted by President Obama and state Governor Jerry Brown has raised fears that the number of newborn golden eagles may not be able to keep pace with the number of turbine fatalities. The death count along the ridgelines of the Bay Area’s Altamount Pass Wind Resource Area...

Ignorance, hatred, and meanness of spirit. DUmmie Family Values? No, this is what DUmmie Cyrano says America is like under our fascist overlords with their ready supply of mindless drones. It is only the superior advanced state of enlightened progressives that keeps our country from being a complete hellhole. But it is hanging by a thread. As we see in *this* THREAD, "Ignorance, hatred, and meanness of spirit." So let us see what Cyrano du Brainiac and the rest of the highly evolved DUmmies have to say, in Bolshevik Red, while the commentary of your humble guest correspondent, Charles...

According to a report posted by Yahoo, it appears that most teens do not know who Osama bin Laden is. Two thirds of people who searched “who is Osama bin Laden” on Sunday turned out to be teenagers: Teens ages 13-17 were seeking more information as they made up 66% of searches for “who is osama bin laden?” More from the Yahoo report: According to Yahoo!, The Top Searched Questions on Osama bin Laden are (based on Sunday, 5/1): Is Osama bin Laden dead? How did Osama bin Laden die? Who killed Osama bin Laden? How old is Osama bin...

The south is still realizing the full extent of the damage caused by this week’s storms. Nearly 300 people are dead. The country is rallying in support of the devatated areas, and President Obama (who must have learned something from ignoring Nashville’s flood last year) is set break character to visit the very red state today. Anyone with a soul feels pain for those affected. Thousands have lost everything. Lives were destroyed. Think Progress (via Da Tech Guy) has instead chosen to adopt the Pat Robertson model and claim Divine Justice for those redneck Republican climate change deniers in the...

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Three people were struck by a car and police are searching for the individual they say was responsible after a melee broke out at the McDonald's 'National Hiring Day' event at St. Clair Ave. and East 105th St. Det. Theodore Perez with the Cleveland Police Department tells Fox 8 News' Melissa Reid, a fight broke between two females outside the event. Sgt. Joseph O'Neal with the Cleveland Police Department says one of the women was asked to leave by the owner and operator of the McDonald's and the store's manager. Sgt. O'Neal says the woman who was...

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL), who admits to owning an iPad, blames the Apple Inc. product for "eliminating thousands of American jobs." "A few short weeks ago I came to the House floor after having purchased an iPad and said that I happened to believe, Mr. Speaker, that at some point in time this new device, which is now probably responsible for eliminating thousands of American jobs. Now Borders is closing stores because, why do you need to go to Borders anymore? Why do you need to go to Barnes & Noble? Buy an iPad and download your newspaper, download...

The Electoral College, the means by which Americans chose their President throughout the nations history, is facing its most serious challenge yet. Polling shows that 75% of Americans no longer see the value of the institution, and want to switch over to direct democratic elections where the winner of the national popular vote also wins the Presidency. There are two ways of achieving this end. The first, a Constitutional Amendment, is a long and difficult process that requires the approval of 3/4 of the states. However, there exists an alternative method that goes around the Electoral College by abolishing it...

With a government shutdown looming, Capitol Hill was a pretty serious place on Wednesday afternoon. But for Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.), what better way to ease the tension than with a congressional ladies personal shopping trip in Arlington, Va.? According to an email from Brown’s scheduler titled, “Outing with Congresswoman Corrine Brown,” staff member Cathy Gass invited Brown’s fellow female Congressional Black Caucus members to join the lawmaker at a boutique in Crystal City, Va. on Wednesday afternoon. According to the email, which was addressed to “CBC Schedulers,” Brown “would like to invite the woman [sic] CBC Members to go...

Conservative women who hate Sarah Palin confound me. What has especially alarmed me has been the amount of women who hate her as a woman. I know that is the reason, because – and this is the important part – when you ask them WHAT “scares” them about her (a favorite “Halloweeny” term used in place of the word “hate”), the answer is the same from conservative and liberal women alike. “She’s so dumb.” How? Uh, crickets chirping.

With Christopher Hitchens teetering on the brink of eternity, revisit this query from 2007: Do we have any prayer volunteers for Christopher Hitchens? He’s the self -proclaimed “atheist/anti-theist,” and stunningly clever wordsmith. He leapfrogged puzzled agnosticism to a pledged rebellion against God. He’ll be a tough turn-around, so thick is his iron-clad ignorance of the divine. In a recent Newsweek he cynically dissects Mother Teresa’s dark theological struggles, a postscript to his derisive 1995 book, “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.” A week ago he was a featured speaker for an Atheist Alliance conference in Washington DC....

A Department of Education study indicating that 82% of the nation’s public schools could be labeled “failing” under standards set by the No Child Left Behind Act has sparked a discussion of the need for “change.” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan characterized the Act’s approach as “fundamentally flawed.” “What other government service demands such strict standards of accountability?” Duncan asked. “Do we penalize public transit because it can’t deliver cost-effective transportation? No, we invest more resources to keep it going. We ought to do the same thing for our public schools.” Duncan also maintained that the goal of having all...

Charles Darwin observed “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” That was certainly true in 1995 when a man named McArthur Wheeler boldly robbed two banks in Pittsburgh without using a disguise. Security camera footage of him was broadcast on the evening news the same day as the robberies, and he was arrested an hour later. Mr. Wheeler was surprised when the police explained how they had used the surveillance tapes to catch him. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled incredulously. He seemed to believe that rubbing his face with lemon juice would blur his image and make...

StandWithUs, an international organization that seeks Middle East peace by challenging the widespread ignorance about the issues, has released the following video - highlighting the utter ignorance about Israel, Hamas and related matters in one of America's top universities. Israel IQ at UCLA

Does God exist? Are there multiple gods? Is man his own god? These questions have drawn lines across the world. These questions affect not only relationships between people, but those between people and their governments. Under some governments, certain religions are forbidden and persecuted, while others are promoted or enforced. In the United States, a government founded on Christian principles and a trust in God, the government is increasingly allowing persecution of all forms of Christianity while enabling the progression of Islam. This is quite ironic considering adherents of Islam have been actively engaging in terrorist actions against the United...

Question: What do you call the Director of National Int Director of National Intelligence when he seems to be short of intelligence? Answer: James Clapper. On Monday, Diane Sawyer asked the White House's top anti-terrorism brains about the fallout from the sweeping arrests of 12 men in the UK early that morning. Clapper's response: Silence. Crickets. The sound of one career, well, imploding. Pressed by Sawyer, he admitted he simply hadn't heard of the matter. It was a mortifying lapse given Clapper's position: As DNI, he oversees all 16 US intelligence agencies and serves as chief intel adviser to the...

Invincible IgnoranceBy PAUL KRUGMAN December 15, 2010, 9:24 am So Republican members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission are going to issue their own report, placing primary blame on the government — because it’s always the government’s fault. And according to reporting at the Huffington Post, all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases “Wall Street” and “shadow banking” and the words “interconnection” and “deregulation” from the panel’s final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by Brooksley E. Born, one of the six commissioners who voted against the proposal. Yep. It was all...

An audio clip from about two months ago has been uncovered by The Blaze which clearly demonstrates that, even with all of his opining and public speaking skills, there is a reason that Howard Dean’s most notable quote will always remain a timelessly incoherent scream.  Despite being a one-word definition of ignorance, Dean doesn’t mind discussing how to control the media in an effort to educate what he considers to be the ignorant masses – Americans. What would he do about the media? “I would bring back the Fairness Doctrine so you couldn’t have a spectacle of a Fox Flooze, which...

ZABUL PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN -- Sitting on the dusty flightline at Forward Op erating Base Lagman in the Afghan hinterlands, what could make better leisure reading than the November issue of Inspire -- the English-language magazine of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula? The lavishly illustrated, 23-page PDF, is a "special issue" devoted to the attempted toner-cartridge bombings via UPS deliveries from Yemen. Besides a page taunting Yemen's president, the issue focuses on how the explosives were prepared, how difficult they are to detect and how economically the plot was accomplished. Of course, none of the bombs mailed to out-of-date addresses...

BALTIMORE - Johns Hopkins University is America's premier research institution. Yet a student could complete a bachelor's degree here without ever taking a course in science. Or math. Or history. Or English. Students at Johns Hopkins - and many other prestigious colleges - choose classes the way a diner patron assembles a meal, selecting items from a vast menu. Broad distribution requirements ensure that students explore the academic universe outside their majors. But no one is required to study any particular field, let alone take a specific course. Shakespeare, Plato, Euclid - all are on the menu; none is required....

I wrote this nearly 10 years ago, but after hearing Chris Cotter on Fox New’s Redeye so confidently declare following words, I thought it was time to edit and resend: Referring to Helen Thomas’ statement that the Jews should ‘get the hell out of Palestine’ Cotter said, “[Thomas] remembers [before 1948] when Palestine was a nation.” Somehow, a reporter on the Fox Business Channel assumed that Israel came into being by taking over an Arab country called Palestine. Hopefully he knows his stocks better than his history. Sadly no one on the show, including Greg Gutman, the Jewish host, corrected...

Even Barack Obama’s midterm electoral humiliation won’t redeem US foreign policy. The problem didn’t begin with the history-deficient mind-set of American students who’ll earn their bachelor’s degrees in 2014. But the intellectual rootlessness of the class of 2014 exacerbates the flaws. Today’s students/ tomorrow’s leaders fertilize the soil into which bad seeds are sown by the current Washington elite. On the simplistic level it was a hoot to read that to the class of 2014 Beethoven is a movie pooch, Michelangelo was a computer virus and Czechoslovakia never existed. For the past 13 years Beloit College’s Mind-Set List by Tom...

Mayor Mike needs lessons on when to shut his yap -- like when he's galli vanting around the globe and is suddenly moved to bash a key part of the US government, using crude hyperbole. "You look at who we're electing to Congress, to the Senate," the mayor said in Hong Kong last week, days after the midterm elections. "They can't read." He went on: "I'll bet you a bunch of these people don't have passports. We're about to start a trade war with China if we're not careful here, only because nobody knows where China is." Some folks, understandably,...

The headline of the article in my local newspaper says it all: “Tea Party a stammering, stuttering ruse“... ...In Mr. Johnson’s view, Tea Partiers are racist, dumb as a post, and being manipulated by shadowy politicians and lobbyists for nefarious purposes. To begin with, Mr. Johnson, if you’re relying on the mainstream media to prove any of your points, you might want to reconsider. ...In short, we're Americans. It's a safe bet that you know quite a few of us, but due to your disdain of and antipathy toward us, we probably don't feel comfortable sharing our views with you....

I confess--I had never heard the phrase "the Queen of the Sciences" until a few months ago. Even when I read it, it made no sense. They seemed to be talking about geography. What was all this??? Apparently, the wise and scholarly had much more respect for geography a thousand years ago than we do now. Once you start thinking about this decline--from Queen to corpse--you gain new insight into how radical (in the worst sense) our Education Establishment is. These people never saw a fact they didn't want to drop overboard in a deep part of the ocean. So...

In the 16th century, astrono mer Taqi al-Din built one of the world's great observato ries in Istanbul. It rivaled that of pioneering Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe -- while it lasted. "Taqi al-Din's observatory was razed to the ground by a squad of Janissaries, by order of the sultan, on the recommendation of the Chief Mufti," Bernard Lewis writes in his book "What Went Wrong?" "This observatory had many predecessors in the lands of Islam; it had no successors until the age of modernization." NASA Administrator Charles Bolden caused a furor when he revealed that President Obama had directed him...

There are dangerous trade-offs associated with new media. The influence of television -- popularized in the 1950s and in full swing in the 1960s -- reshaped the political and cultural landscape. The computer revolution hummed along quietly until the internet and desktop and laptop machines blended in the early 1990s to set off the phenomenon predicted at the advent of television by Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan. The medium, said McLuhan, would soon be the message, a famous statement that Woody Allen immortalized in the film Annie Hall. Medium Cool, a cult hit film of the 1960s, ensured McLuhan's permanent fame....

Dozens of Italian women who have had relationships with Roman Catholic priests or lay monks have endorsed an open letter to the pope that calls for the abolition of the celibacy rule. The letter, thought by one signatory to be unprecedented, argues that a priest "needs to live with his fellow human beings, experience feelings, love and be loved". It also pleads for understanding of those who "live out in secrecy those few moments the priest manages to grant [us] and experience on a daily basis the doubts, fears and insecurities of our men". The issue was put back on...

Attorney in alleged victim's lawsuit seeks to document charges against former local priest New London - A woman who says the late Catholic priest Rev. Thomas Shea sexually abused her when she was a girl is trying to force the Diocese of Norwich to release 661 pages of documents - including a 2005 letter about Shea that current Bishop Michael Cote sent to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI. Diocesan attorneys are fighting an attempt by New London attorney Robert Reardon to force the release of the documents. Reardon has filed a lawsuit on behalf of the...

There is no limit to the depravity of the cultists who worship at the altar of multiculturalism. 100 to 140 million girls and women around the world have been subjected to genital mutilation. And now, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is embracing this barbaric expression of misogyny in the name of cultural sensitivity and immigrant outreach. Equality Now is stunned by a new policy statement issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which essentially promotes female genital mutilation (FGM) and advocates for “federal and state laws [to] enable pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a ‘ritual...

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) wants to allow the government to interrogate U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism without warning them of their right to remain silent—a proposal that would dramatically rewrite the rules regarding suspects captured inside the United States. “Miranda warnings are counterproductive in my view,” Graham said at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing Wednesday. “The homeland is part of the battlefield. So this idea that you get to America, the rules dramatically change, to the benefit of the suspect – the terrorist – makes no sense,” he said. Graham told POLITICO he is working on...

With his new book, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street (Howard Books, 2010), Wallis drops all pretense to holding the center as he piles on with the horde of religious left activists and others now demonizing Wall Street. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This class of the very poor – those who are just on the borders of pauperism or fairly over the borders – is rapidly growing. Wealth is increasing very fast; poverty, even pauperism, is increasing still more rapidly. – Washington Gladden, Applied Christianity (1886) For three decades, we have experienced a social engineered inequality that is really...

The National Council of La Raza (NCLR) recently issued a statement urging Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform. No surprise there. The nation’s largest Latino advocacy organization has long been a vocal proponent of such reform. It is especially fond of a major component — a pathway to earned legal status for illegal immigrants if they make amends for the infraction of entering the country illegally by meeting certain conditions. What was unusual was the marketing behind the plea. The statement came on March 31, and the organization urged that Congress pass comprehensive immigration reform “in recognition of the birthday...

Sometimes it's good to go back to the beginning and review the basics. This is an old classic. Try showing this to a college kid. Their head will explode.

New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz (D-Brooklyn) has introduced a bill that would prohibit restaurants from adding salt to any food served to customers. The legislation calls for fines of up to $1,000 for each individual addition of salt by restaurant staff. “Ideally, we ought to be eliminating salt from our diets,” Ortiz asserted. “It’s a dangerous, unhealthy, and unnecessary additive. Customers shouldn’t have it forced down their throats by restaurant owners trying to boost profits by trying to make their meals more palatable.” Ortiz rejected the idea that the option that he himself uses whenever he eats out should suffice...

Many voters had concerns over McCain winning due to their fears that, as old as he is, were he to become for any reason unable to fulfill his duties as president, that would have left his VP, Sarah Palin, in the Oval Office. Their concern was her supposed dangerous “inexperience.” Whatever your views on Palin’s experience, one thing is certain; her years as Mayor, then Oil Commissioner, then as Governor, provided her with tests of her executive abilities and delegatory skills which she quite obviously passed. Of all the myriad barbs slung her way by her often rabid detractors, none...

A woman with a petition went among the crowds attending a state fair, asking people to sign her petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears. She collected hundreds of signatures to ban dihydroxymonoxide -- a fancy chemical name for water. A couple of comedians were behind this ploy. But there is nothing funny about its implications. It is one of the grim and dangerous signs of our times. This little episode revealed how conditioned we have become, responding like Pavlov's dog...

So I have a question about terminology. Some of our Catholic FRiends get upset when we Prods use the term Roman Catholic, insisting that the term is derogatory, insulting, etc. What I would like to discuss is why do Catholics complain about the term Roman Catholic, when the term is in such wide use inside of the Catholic church? Thoughts?

In a recent conversation, I confessed to ignorance of popular culture. With a little introspection, I realized that I was proud of this ignorance. I suspect that most of us are proud of ignorance of some form or another. It seems that many liberals are proud of their ignorance of firearms, for example. A person only has so much time to learn and experience, so choices need to be made. I chose to learn woodcraft and primitive survival skills instead of pop music. I am curious what other Freepers are proud to be ignorant of.

Loyal to Liberty Wednesday, January 20, 2010Alan Keyes  I can't help but look at Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts in the context of the larger strategy clearly being implemented by the RINO (Republican-In-Name-Only) clique that currently controls the GOP. Sean Hannity is the clique's bellwether media tool. It was no coincidence that he featured Mitt Romney on his program last night to revel in the Scott Brown victory. Scott Brown in Massachusetts is the advance guard for Mitt Romney in the White House (or vice-versa). He becomes the poster child for the RINO clique's archetypal GOP candidate who: Has no...

Celebrity “Scientists” Prescribe Bad Medicine The British Sense About Science charity trust just released its annual report Celebrities and Science 2009 debunking the absurd health claims of celebrities who think their pop culture status gives them the right to play doctor. Sense About Science reviews celebs’ bogus advice, from special diets to miracle cures, and asks real scientists what the “stars” should have said. Among this year’s gems, actor Roger Moore told the Daily Mail that “eating foie gras can lead to Alzheimer’s, diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.” A real shocker -- except that it’s false. Dietician Lucy Jones corrects the...

President Obama's push to revamp the terror watch list, improve airport screening and hold the intelligence community more accountable for tracking suspects does not go far enough, some lawmakers say, arguing that more specific steps need to be taken to avoid a repeat of the attempted Christmas Day bombing. After National Security Adviser James Jones warned that President Obama's preliminary review of the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing would "shock" Americans, the most startling aspect of it may have been that the administration was pledging to do what seemed obvious to many -- at least in hindsight. The president's push...