Free Republic

ARLINGTON, Texas - A two-time “Teacher of the Year” in Arlington is now fighting to keep her job after allegedly telling a Hispanic student to “Go back to Mexico.” Barnett Junior High School math teacher Shirley Bunn has 24 years of teaching experience. But her career could end with what she called a moment of frustration. Bunn admitted she lost her temper on Sept. 30 while distributing Title 1 forms to her eighth grade students. According to public documents, a student who had a history of being disruptive repeatedly asked his teacher for a form printed in Spanish by saying,...

President Obama released his FY 2013 budget [Monday] morning. By his own numbers, his budget raises net taxes over the next decade by $1.56 trillion (Table S-9, page 225). As a percentage of the economy, tax revenues would rise all the way to 20.1% of GDP in 2022, far higher than the historical tax revenue average of 18.3% of GDP (Table S-1, page 205). Here are some of the tax lowlights: All 20 of the new or higher taxes in Obamacare are assumed to take place. That means that there will be a 3.8 percentage point surtax on investment income....

RUSH: This is from Rayford, North Carolina. Carolina Journal. I'm gonna read it to you exactly as it printed out here: "A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because a state employee told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious. The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips and apple juice did not meet US Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the agent who was inspecting all lunch boxes in her More at Four classroom that day." Again, let me read this to you again: "The...

A left-wing freebie newspaper in Toronto, called NOW magazine, has published a photoshopped picture of the conservative mayor, Rob Ford, pointing a gun to his head. This from a magazine that claims to be against guns and gun violence. NOW magazine is unimportant to most people, but there is an important point buried amidst its smut: Liberals don’t mind promiscuous suggestions of gun crime, if it’s someone they hate in the crosshairs. It’s like when the movie, Death of a President, came to the Toronto International Film Festival. It wasn’t about a historical assassination. It was a Hollywood liberal fantasy...

Racism is about many things but it isn't about race. To understand the uses of race in American liberalism requires understanding its place in the political culture. When American liberals speak of race they aren't speaking in the genetic sense, what they are doing is clumsily piggybacking class onto race and adding one dubious construct to another. The placement of racial politics at the center of liberal advocacy coincided with a growing national prosperity that seemed to be on the way to making class warfare of the old kind irrelevant. Previous liberal civil rights activity had been a subset of...

The Philadelphia Inquirer's big story Feb. 4 was about how a budget crunch at the Philadelphia School District had caused the district to lay off 91 school police officers. Over the years, there's been no discussion of what has happened to our youth that makes a school police force necessary in the first place. The Inquirer's series "Assault on Learning" (March 2011) reported that in the 2010 school year, "690 teachers were assaulted; in the last five years, 4,000 were." The newspaper reported that in Philadelphia's 268 schools, "on an average day 25 students, teachers, or other staff members were...

Although Barack Obama is the first black President of the United States, he is by no means unique, except for his complexion. He follows in the footsteps of other presidents with a similar vision, the vision at the heart of the Progressive movement that flourished a hundred years ago. Many of the trends, problems and disasters of our time are a legacy of that era. We can only imagine how many future generations will be paying the price — and not just in money — for the bright ideas and clever rhetoric of our current administration. The two giants...

And we're the ones, the old-fashioned conservatives, we want to deny people a good time, we want to deny people fun, we want to deny people all these things in life. So we have yet another example of life in America under the thumb of an ever-expanding state with central planning, otherwise known as "well-intentioned liberalism." From violating religious rights where there is no power permitted to do so, to mandating the purchase of products, to now mandating insurance companies sell certain products at a price that's also mandated, from czars, to denying the right to travel, it's all here....

With all that's going on with the Catholic Church and the President right now, this has become a huge hot button topic. But why is this so important to progressives? Rush keeps saying that "abortion is the sacrament of liberalism." What makes this so? Let's ask Margaret Sanger. In her book "Woman and the new race", Sanger explains the purpose of birth control:(Page 229) Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those...

Alongside today’s respect for human life there is the increasingly popular idea that there is too much human life around, and that it is killing the planet. Since the beginning of time, one of the clearest markers of an enlightened society has been the moral status it attaches to human life. And outwardly, at least, twenty-first-century Western societies express an unprecedented degree of respect for human life. For example, cultural and political institutions continually talk about the need to uphold human rights. The human rights narrative now shapes policymaking, both domestically and internationally. Many even argue that protecting human rights...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Think about how far we've come, folks, in just three years. Just three years. We've gone from, "Birth control and abortion is a matter of conscience that we cannot impose on anyone," to, "Birth control and abortion is a human right that everybody must get for free if they want it." Now, what other benefits are we entitled to for free, even if we have the means to pay for them? Let me tell you... (interruption) Cell phones? That's true. But this just shows what the sacrament to the religion of the Democrat Party is. It's abortion....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u24nH03NccI&feature=player_embedded

The age-old hobby of tossing a football or Frisbee on the beach on a beautiful summer day in Los Angeles will cost you a cool $1,000 thanks to a new ordinance passed by the Board of Supervisors Tuesday. Claiming that such activity could be dangerous to other beachgoers, the Supes outlawed "any person to cast, toss, throw, kick or roll any ball, tube, or any light object other than a beach ball or beach volleyball” on or over a beach.

STOCKTON - The city has a tentative plan to combat climate change, more than three years after reaching a legal settlement with the Sierra Club and then-Attorney General Jerry Brown. It wouldn't be cheap. If adopted by the Stockton City Council later this year, the plan could cost the city $28.5 million and could cost the private sector $240 million, the document says. The plan itself acknowledges it would require "substantial effort on the part of the entire Stockton community" at a time when people are struggling to pay their bills and keep businesses open.

  Testing Our Country to Destruction David C. Stolinsky Feb. 9, 2012 Years ago, car magazines tested tires. I mean they tested them. In addition to the usual on-the-car tests of handling and braking, they also tested high-speed endurance. They mounted the tire on a laboratory wheel; adjusted the pressure, temperature, and load; and then slowly increased the speed as the tire spun on a roller. Eventually the tread would separate or spin off chunks of rubber, or the sidewall would burst. The endpoint was the destruction of the tire. Thus if a tire flew apart at 120 miles...

The American public's dependence on the federal government shot up 23% in just two years under President Obama, with 67 million now relying on some federal program, according to a newly released study by the Heritage Foundation. The conservative think tank's annual Index of Dependence on Government tracks money spent on housing, health, welfare, education subsidies and other federal programs that were "traditionally provided to needy people by local organizations and families." The increase under Obama is the biggest two-year jump since Jimmy Carter was president, the data show. The rise was driven mainly by increases in housing subsidies, an...

US Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg tells Egyptians: Don’t look to the “OLD US Constitution” for guidance in drafting a new constitution. Justice Ginsburg holds in high esteem the constitution of South Africa and Canada.

The book reads like a playbook for liberals to turn America into a solidly socialist state. By page 5, it summarizes liberal takeover of every inch of our lives as we have all seen the mid fifties. A must read, get it and tell everyone you know to read it before the election

The “Occupy DC” protest group is planning to disrupt the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference using a range of potentially illegal tactics that could even include violence against participants, Scribe has learned. The planned disruptions at CPAC come only days after U.S. Park Police raided Occupiers’ tent cities at McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., confiscating a number of tents, and prohibiting Occupiers from camping out there any longer. During a Thursday meeting at McPherson Square, until Saturday the epicenter of the protests, Occupiers brainstormed tactics for shutting down or disrupting the conference, according to a source who...

I have been writing for a long time about the real news in the Battleground Poll results over the last decade.  These bipartisan polls predict election results with remarkable accuracy and which also reveal the answers to all the questions respondents provided -- including, critically, how people describe themselves ideologically. In the last twenty consecutive Battleground Poll reports over the last ten years, the overwhelming majority of Americans have described themselves as "very conservative" or "somewhat conservative," although the poll provides six other possible responses:  "moderate," "somewhat liberal," "very liberal," or "don't know/unsure."  On average, about 60% of Americans in...

Obama recently quoted Jesus to justify taxes. He says he interprets the words of Jesus “To whom much is given, much is required.” to mean that those who work and are of faith shouldn’t take issue with giving to those who don’t work. Given? I don’t remember any hard working American ever being given anything. Obama’s remarks are the result of a long tradition by liberal pseudo-intellectuals who believe that it is the duty of some to give to others. They justify this philosophy to themselves by seeing the world only in terms of “have” and “have not’s” and seeing...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: The Susan G. Komen bunch, the Race for the Cure, whatever? They have caved big time to the feminazis at Planned Parenthood. It is stunning! Yesterday everybody was holding firm, and today Nancy Brinker who runs the Susan Komen group (I think it was her sister) made a big time cave. Biiiig time. Abortion is the sacrament to the religion of liberalism. Nobody is gonna mess with that money's flow. Nobody is gonna mess with that pile of money. Nobody's gonna mess with that at all. BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I want to talk about this Susan G....

On Tuesday, director Joe Carnahan announced on Twitter that he had embarked on a remake of the Charles Bronson vigilante classic Death Wish. The main question, for any director approaching such a topic, especially with source material as infamous as Death Wish, is “Have you read any reviews lately?�Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, dubbed the original Death Wish “a despicable movie, one that raises complex questions in order to offer bigoted, frivolous, oversimplified answers.� Dirty Harry, whose 40th anniversary passed in December, attracted similar distaste. Pauline Kael savaged the film’s “fascist medievalism,� and described it as a...

New Playgrounds Are Safe—and That's Why Nobody Uses Them The problem with safety guidelines is that they make most playgrounds so uninteresting as to contribute to reduced physical activity. Playgrounds don't look like they used to. Steep metal slides and wooden towers have given way to slow, plastic slides and carefully penned-in climbing contraptions. And forget about seesaws -- they're a thing of the past. When kids are bored by unimaginative (read: safe) playground equipment, they're less active as a result, and with childhood obesity at epidemic proportions, that's a danger, too. An interesting new investigation looks into this phenomenon....

Liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Tells Egyptians: Look To The Constitutions of South Africa or Canada, Not To The U.S. Constitution

Actual title is : It’s baaack! The plan to kill talk radio. Group advising White House wants to restore controversial policy An organization that helped to craft President Obama’s environmental policies has recommended the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, purportedly as a method of silencing critics of the theory of global warming. The Presidential Climate Action Project, or PCAP, last year released an extensive list of recommendations for the White House in a 75-page paper entitled, “Building the Obama Administration’s Climate Legacy.” Primary among the PCAP’s recommendations is that the Department of Energy should join the U.S. Department of Housing...

What do the political battles in Wisconsin and the Spanish Civil War have in common? A disturbing characteristic. The Spanish Civil War is one of those events that are on the way to becoming forgotten history. The term "civil war" is a bit misleading, since the conflict internationalized itself in short order, with Hitler and Mussolini lining up with the rebels, or "Nationalists", and Stalin backing the "Republicans" (actually a motley gaggle of various left-wing elements). The dictatorships utilized Spain as a proving ground for new tactics and weapons, including the Me-109, fighter-bomber, the Ju-87 Stuka dive bomber, along with...

A few days ago, an article titled "Is it morally wrong to take a life? Not really, say bioethicists" appeared in a journal for bio ethics. More than anything, note the context. This is being discussed by those who are "the experts" of ethics, by researchers from Duke University and the National Institute of Health. So we're supposed to take this seriously, that this is an enlightened and reasoned discourse on the matter. All of that gets shattered if you look at the verbage they use at the bottom: This radical conclusion may shock some readers, but the authors are...

Occupy Oakland is aptly named. When forces occupy a city, they know that occupied turf is not their home. They can maraud, loot, vandalize, abuse the locals, and then leave. They can treat other people's property as their own. The occupiers don't have to clean up after themselves. They don't have to worry about paying for the workers who clean up after them, either. Occupiers don't have to exert self-control. They can freely act upon their rage, while defenders of occupied territory must concentrate on protecting what others want to harm. Occupiers do not have to fear that they will...

PROVIDENCE, RI, January 30, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street movement threw condoms on Catholic schoolgirls, refused to allow a Catholic priest to give a closing prayer, and shouted down a pro-life speaker at a Rhode Island right to life rally on Thursday, according to its organizer. The event marked the third time protesters associated with the movement have disrupted a pro-life meeting in a week. About two-dozen members of Occupy Providence hiked from Burnside Park to the 39th Annual Pro-Life State House Rally organized by the Rhode Island State Right to Life Committee on Thursday. The...

A friend of mine commented the other day that she was growing tired of the Mitt-Newt volleys and super pacs.  After cruising the GOP buffet going back to the days when even Gary Johnson was still all-in, she was leaning toward Rick Santorum. “The problem is.” she lamented “is that he lacks…Santorumism.” Santorumism?Suddenly aware that I might be present at the birth of new word in the language of elections, I pressed her for what she meant by that. “I support everything he says in his campaign speeches, but he’s missing Santorumism” she replied. I was still intrigued and had...

  All Our Problems Are Caused by Them The Devil Theory of History David C. Stolinsky Jan. 26, 2012 The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.− Mel Gibson, 2006, during drunk-driving arrest Mel Gibson is one of my favorite Hollywood personalities. I believe “Braveheart” is one of the 10 best films ever made. And I have a more personal reason. One day my wife and I were walking our Airedale through an alley. A man looked out of a back window and said, “Cute dog.” My wife looked up, saw who it was, and said...

We need to get beyond the dysfunctional and outdated ideas of 20th-century liberalism. Writing about the onset of the Great Depression, John Kenneth Galbraith famously said that the end had come but was not yet in sight. The past was crumbling under their feet, but people could not imagine how the future would play out. Their social imagination had hit a wall. The same thing is happening today: The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one...

Hat Tip to Michigan Capitol Confidential: Teachers' Union Manual Shows How to Organize Illegal Strikes, Use Children During Bargaining This is evil, evil stuff. You want to know just how deep down the rathole that the school systems have gone? Take a look inside this crisis manual. On page 17 of the manual(searchable alternative link here) it says "Pick a target - personalize - and polarize the opposition" which is right out of Saul Alinsky. It was Horace Mann who said it best: We, then, who are engaged in the sacred cause of education, are entitled to look upon all...

People earning over $1 million per year should pay an effective tax rate of no less than 30 percent, President Obama said in his State of the Union address Tuesday night. The president laid down one of his most political markers of the annual policy speech by crafting what he called the "Buffett Rule," named after the famous billionaire investor. "Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes," Obama said.

Starbucks was targeted by a well known anti gun rights group recently because they took “No position” on firearms in their stores. They couldn’t coerce Starbucks into banning guns in Starbucks for everyone except criminals who don't care about "No guns" policies. Again, Starbucks is the target of a boycott beginning on Valentine’s Day by The National Gun Victims Action Council. Starbucks has the right to run their business as they see fit. They call themselves “A force for sane gun laws.” They cite England’s gun laws as a model to follow. But, English criminals are stealing guns, converting starter...

Vicious cycles of debt and irresponsible lending helped to cause the Great Recession, and now another vicious cycle of housing weakness and unemployment is keeping many cities from recovering. … Of the 10 metropolitan areas with the toughest job situations, seven are in California. Cities in the Golden State, as well as in Arizona, Nevada, and Florida, have suffered greatly from falling housing prices and high unemployment. These places saw skyrocketing home prices during the housing bubble. After it became clear that many buyers had purchased homes well out of their price range and the market collapsed, many of those...

After years of puzzlement and curiosity observing modern day Democrats, I think I have finally figured them out. I'm constantly amazed that modern Democrats have evolved beyond living in caves. I mean what other animal on this planet can disregard all common sense and logic and survive? Scientists have recently discovered that even giant sea slugs that do not possess a brain as such can learn from past experiences. That puts them a leg up over the current crop of liberals in this country. I used to subscribe to the adage that liberalism was a mental disorder, but even Rainman...

Liberalism used to be a respectable position for intelligent, well-meaning, and informed people. That was a long time ago. No longer. Today the "liberal" faith requires an extraordinary act of ignorance, purposeful forgetting, and constant spinning. To be a faithful "liberal" today you have to forget the whole 20th century, and its 100 million victims of the radical left -- that is, victims of Obama's brand of leftism. You have to shut out of your mind the fact that Obama hails from today's Chicago Machine, the most storied and undemocratic political machine since Boss Tweed. You have to ignore the...

President Barack Obama, today, release a statement celebrating the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision that allowed for 54 million abortions. The decision, handed down on January 22, 1973, overturned pro-life laws offering protection for unborn children in most states across the country, and made abortions legal and virtually unlimited. The statement Obama release says: As we mark the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we must remember that this Supreme Court decision not only protects a woman’s health and reproductive freedom, but also affirms a broader principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters. I remain committed...

I'd like to discuss something that happened to me while working in a department called "Women's Support Services." I was the only conservative (at least the only one who would stand up for conservative values) and the only Christian. The women in this department were militant feminists. This group was very diverse. Athiests, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims. We had a group of doulas who helped women through labor and birth. I taught childbirth classes and also setup /maintained the class database. I was continuously bulled and made fun of, but it was ok because Christians were not a protected class. I...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- A class reading assignment infuriates the parents of a 14-year-old Valley Traditional High School student. They said their daughter's questions about the book left them speechless. The book is called "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian." "She was masturbating and (describing) how to masturbate and how she did it and also giving a boy a (expletive) and going into great detail of how to perform it," said Vincent. Vincent took the book to her daughter's step-father, who became speechless. "Her being the age that she's in right now, you just freeze up. You don't know...

The publisher of Mark Levin's new #1 book Ameritopia has made the Epilogue publicly available. It is one of the most compelling 8 pages I've ever read in a book. Here it is.

How Liberalism May Be Hurting Comic Book Sales by Darin Wagner If you are a conservative like me, you’ve been reading fewer and fewer comic books over the last 12 years. For those of you who know what I’m talking about, the weekly visit to the comic book shop has become either an exercise in irritation or a monotonous drill. You pick up a superhero comic book featuring a childhood favorite of yours, hoping to reignite some of that magic you felt way back when and you see that the opening sequence in the comic deals with an oil rig...

Many conservatives are absolutely perplexed by the question of what motivates liberals to take the patently wrong political positions they do. It’s difficult to explain it without believing such obviously wrong ideas like “liberals are just stupid”, or “they want to destroy our country”, but sometimes we resort to those explanations out of pure frustration. But what is the explanation? Why do seemingly good, intelligent people take positions that cause so much harm in the face of all the facts? I’ve finally stumbled upon the answer, and it’s so stunningly simple, yet profound in its implications, that it’s absolutely mind-boggling....

America, liberalism has gotten it's first sound warning of the 2012 election season. Liberalism in all it's forms has caused the decline of the greatest nation on earth. As we decline, traitors to the American spirit pressure us to accept it, through silencing of debate, through appeals to our emotion, and the bully tactics of the mob against the individual. May those who would crush the spirit of the American individual taste the first step toward decline. Let socialized medicine, high taxation, culture depletion, amnesty, appeasement, and the replacement of God by science and the heavy hand of government be...

NBC's Andrea Mitchell on New Year's Day made it clear to Nightly News viewers that her Obama-loving network will continue using the race card to assist the current White House resident's reelection. In a brief segment about the upcoming Iowa caucuses, Mitchell said "the rap" on the Hawkeye state is that "it doesn't represent the rest of the country - too white, too evangelical, too rural" Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/01/02/andrea-mitchell-iowa-too-white-too-evangelical-too-rural#ixzz1iMDxZzyc

Another audience member questioned the candidate about Santorum awarding former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky with the Angels in Adoption Award. Santorum explained that he lacked knowledge of the situation at the time and noted that the award has since been withdrawn. In response to his explanation, the audience member asked, "So we shouldn't trust Obama with our kids, but we can trust you?"

A satirical short film taking a look at the national debt and how it applies to just one family. Make sure you watch it to the end.