Free Republic

Talk about a puff piece, this Associated Press short is a story with absolutely no substance. Not only that but after seeing the headline and then reading the story, one is hard pressed to believe they belong together. This Amy Forliti puffery is incongruously headlined "Protesters expected to transform the streets outside GOP convention into marketplace of ideas," yet there isn't any discussion at all of any such "marketplace" or about any real "ideas" in the story. In fact, the only "ideas" are ages old, stale and losing their grip among more Americans everyday. Oh, Forliti talks about protests filled...

The day James Anthony Williams allegedly stabbed to death a stranger on Capitol Hill, the homeless, mentally ill ex-convict showed up at his probation officer's office agitated, defensive and, the officer wrote, "barely able to hold himself together." Despite intense concerns about Williams' paranoid schizophrenia and violent behavior, the probation officer gave Williams a pair of Metro bus tickets and told him to come back in three days.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congress, prodded by the deadliest shooting rampage in modern American history, passed legislation on Wednesday designed to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill. Without objection, the Senate and House of Representatives approved the measure, which would bolster background checks for gun buyers, and sent it to President George W. Bush to sign.

Television talk-show host Montel Williams threatened to find and "blow up" the homes of three Savannah Morning News reporters Friday while he was in town promoting free prescriptions for poor people. ...snip... "As we were preparing to film, Montel walked up with his bodyguard and got in Courtney Scott's face pointing his finger telling her, 'Don't look at me like that. Do you know who I am? I'm a big star, and I can look you up, find where you live and blow you up,' " Cosey said. "At this time he was pointing randomly at all of us." "He...

The mentally ill, anti-American Communist disrupted a 9/11 celebration at SF State. SF has been infected by the illness and we should start thinking of ways to take away the power these leftist have. See video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZMgIKZUvFQ

BUILDING boss Howard Shelley carried out the ultimate DIY conversion — by CASTRATING himself so he could become a woman. The 42-year-old dad of two decided on the drastic move after being told he would have to wait at least two years for a sex change on the NHS. He found a website which gave a step-by-step guide to the eye-watering home surgery, then waited till wife Janet went out before setting to work with a kitchen knife in the loo. With the job done, he wrapped his severed appendages in a cloth and dropped them in the bin. Then...

MURMANSK, Russia - Heavy sedatives keep Larisa Arap languishing in a woozy haze at a mental asylum, the victim not of a troubled mind, her family says, but of a Soviet-era practice that continues to muzzle and punish dissent in today's Russia. Earlier this summer, Arap, an activist with former chess champion Garry Kasparov's opposition movement, co-wrote an article that alleged abusive practices at local psychiatric clinics. When Arap appeared at a Murmansk clinic to pick up a routine medical certificate July 5, a doctor called police and had her taken to a local asylum. The doctors handling Arap's case...

In the 16th century, London’s mentally ill were often kept at Bethlem Royal Hospital. The conditions inside the hospital were notoriously poor. Patients were often chained to the floor and the noise was so great that Bethlem was more likely to drive a man crazy than to cure him. The conditions were so infamous that the nickname locals gave the hospital—Bedlam—has come to mean any scene of great confusion. Unfortunately five hundred years later, we’re still treating the mentally ill more like prisoners than patients. Fifty years ago, more than 550 thousand people were institutionalized in public mental hospitals. Today,...

I was in graduate school, studying clinical psychology when they began shutting down the asylums. The place was California, the time was the early 1970s, and "they" were an unprecedented confederation of progressives, libertarians and fiscal conservatives. ... The best predictor of future violent behavior is past violent behavior, yet we regularly grant parole to murderers, serial rapists, chronically assaultive individuals and habitual pedophiles. Even when we do attempt to segregate low-impulse multiple offenders with effective tools such as with three-strikes laws, liberationist clamor never ceases. Talk to anyone who's tried to commit a dangerously violent child or parent for...

WASHINGTON -- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Thursday that laws should be strengthened to prevent the mentally ill from buying guns. Cho Seung-Hui, the gunman who shot 32 people at Virginia Tech Monday before killing himself, had a history of mental health problems but still was able to buy two guns that he used in the rampage. "If we know that he got mental health services, then there should be some way of preventing somebody like that from buying any kind of weapon," Obama said in an interview on "The Steve Harvey Morning Show," syndicated on radio stations nationwide....

LARGO, Fla. — Steve Stanton professed his love for the city and asked the people of Largo to support his decision to undergo a sex change and allow him to keep his $140,000-a-year job as city manager. To his sorrow, the answer came back no. Almost 500 people packed City Hall on Tuesday night for a special meeting to decide if they would accept someone named Susan instead of Steve as their top official. And while many spoke eloquently in his defense, more called for his ouster. "If Jesus was here tonight, I can guarantee you he'd want him terminated,"...

WASHINGTON -- GLOBAL WARMING is “unequivocal,” according to the just-released report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The most likely culprits are people — all of us. Yet, apart from insightful comments by former Vice President Al Gore, there has never been much public discussion about the role of human population growth in global warming. Prof. Tim Dyson, of the London School of Economics indicates that a 40 percent cut by 2050 in per-capita carbon emissions in the developed world could be completely cancelled by population growth. It’s time to open a “second front” in the battle against global...

Saint Petersburg -- A judge threatened to jail the head of the state Department of Children & Families if the agency can't explain why it consistently has failed to get mentally ill jail inmates into psychiatric treatment. Under Florida law, jail inmates found incompetent to stand trial must be turned over to the agency and placed into treatment within 15 days. An assistant public defender in Miami, Carlos Martinez, said the average wait time had spiked to more than two months, and his office and public defenders in Broward and Hillsborough counties have filed court motions to force DCF to...

A loose coalition of liars, profiteers, political panderers, conspiracy theorists, anti-Semitics, terrorist sympathizers, cyber thrill seekers, anti-Americans, and the mentally ill is growing and congealing in America. They allege terrorists did not attack the United States on 9/11; President Bush and the “neocons” did it or the Jews did it or both did it. Their fallback theory is the Bush administration extensively knew about the 9/11 plot by terrorists and just let 9/11 happen so they could aggressively pursue a war on terror. For the conspiracy coalition's main claim, they have virtually conjured from the thin blue 9/11 air a...

Schnitt just announced the breaking news. The DNA for JM Karr is NOT a match for Jon Benet evidence.

Here is something I like to do and I wonder if anybody else is on the same page. I'll go into one of those convenience stores, especially a mom-and-pop convenience store, and I'll buy multiple quantities of some stupid dust-covered knick-knack type thing that this store might sell two or three of in a given year. After two or three visits, I'll have this item completely cleaned out of the store. Then the store will inevitably buy a whole bunch of this stuff, thinking that this item is suddenly in demand. But once this happens, I'll never buy another one...

Synchronised swimming not for gays The governing body for aquatic sports and their World Masters Championships insist that synchronised swimming is for females 09-August-2006 Tony Grew A gay synchronised swimming team has been banned from performing at an international meet, as the International Olympic Committee continues to insist that the sport is for females only. The ten men and four women squad from the San Francisco Tsunami Swim Club had been invited to perform a routine at the FINA Masters in Stamford, California this week. Local organisers knew that the male team would not be able to compete organised a...

The American Left as "crisis cult" Clinical psychologist Robert Godwin proposes an interesting framework for understanding the increasingly bizarre behavior of the American Left at his very interesting website One Cosmos. Drawing on the work of psychoanalytic anthropologist Weston LaBarre, he posits that the left has become a “crisis cult” such as are found in societies whose bedrock assumptions break down in the face of the superior strength of foreign cultures impinging on their territory. Probably the most famous of the crisis cults are the cargo cults which developed in Melanesia. The Cargo Cults believe that manufactured western goods (‘cargo’)...

MCMINNVILLE, Tenn. - A former teacher who has already served jail time for having sex with a 13-year-old student was sent to prison for more than six years Friday for violating her probation by sending the boy nude photos of herself. When Pamela Rogers, 29, was released after serving 198 days in jail, she was under orders not to contact the student or his family or use the Internet. But authorities say that even after appearing in court on a charge of violating her probation in April, she continued talking with the boy and sending him text messages and sexually...

Ansaman has been keeping a lil' strip on Kim Jong Il's latest fun shennanigans.... http://www.ansaman.com/kim/kimcomix.html

Today: June 28, 2006 at 3:16:29 PDT Transgender Community Finds Acceptance By LISA LEFF ASSOCIATED PRESS SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A clash between police and patrons of an all-night diner here 40 years ago was once a forgotten footnote in history. For members of the transgender community, though, it was the start of their slow march toward widespread acceptance. Sparked by the riot, San Francisco activists started their own civil rights movement - three years before the more famous clashes at New York City's Stonewall Inn. A dedication this month of a granite anniversary marker at the site of the...

When all the fanatical Christians disappear, will traffic finally improve? Wait, did I miss it? Did it happen three days ago, on 6-6-06, a.k.a. Tea Time with the Beast, a.k.a. the Great Day of Reckoning, a.k.a. the National Day of Slayer, all the world crashing down in a heap of hissing steam and belching smoke and balmy gusty breezes sometime around noon just after lunch but not before rush hour and hitting right around siesta? I might have been napping. Did the Apocalypse finally hit? Did the deep wish of roughly a half-billion zealous believers come to pass and were...

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree? Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV...

Think sex and drugs destroy America? Try naive chastity. Oh, and "Purity Balls" There are these things. These unholy events called "Purity Balls" and you should probably fall to your knees right this minute and thank a merciful and lubricious and happily polyamorous God that you do not know what they are and that you have access right this minute to vast quantities of wine to deflect their nasty karmic arrows because, you know, oh my God. But hey, free country. Purity Balls. No, not some sort of newfangled spherical chastity device to be inserted using vacuum tubes and pulleys,...

It's a shockingly eco-friendly plan from the world's most toxic retailer. Did hell just freeze over? Sometimes you just have to let the possibility breathe. Sometimes you just have to allow that something grand and good and healthy might actually be born from the bowels of the dank and ravenous megacorporate world, like flowers from a dung heap, like vodka from old potatoes, even if it comes right alongside the nastiest, most abusive federal environmental policy you will see in your lifetime. Take Wal-Mart, the most famously offensive, town-destroying, junk-purveying, labor-abusing, sweatshop-supporting, American-job-killing, soul-numbing, seizure-inducing, hope-curdling retailer in the known...

LESBIANS and single women are receiving IVF and other fertility treatments on the NHS in Scotland despite a nationwide shortage of sperm donors. A Scotland on Sunday investigation has revealed that three health boards are paying up to £3,000 per treatment for lesbians and single women who want babies to have artificial insemination. Four other boards have treated or referred women who paid for the fertility procedures themselves. The revelation has been welcomed by gay rights campaigners but has angered infertility support groups, who fear healthy gay couples are harming the chances of parenthood for heterosexual couples with fertility problems....

(Former Vice President Al Gore, who previously supported the Defense of Marriage Act and civil unions, was the keynote speaker at the Human Rights Campaign Gala on March 25, 2006, at the Century Plaza Hotel. This is an excerpt of his speech.) Abraham Lincoln once said, "I do good and I feel good. I do bad and I feel bad, and that is my religion." As a Christian, I was taught at an early age that the single most important departure in Christianity from the Judeo-Christian tradition as a whole was embodied in the simple teaching -- God is Love....

WASHINGTON, March 30, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A proposed law to curb prostitution in the U.S. capital has some homosexual activists worried that the profiling would unfairly target transgendered people. A coalition of 22 homosexual rights groups has signed a letter of protest against the proposed Omnibus Public Safety Act of 2005, which would allow police to establish “Prostitution Free Zones” in public areas. The group warns it “will increase harassment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens.” Program coordinator Darby Hickey, from the homosexual rights group Different Avenues, complained that the program would unfairly target transgendered people. “There’s widespread profiling...

Gay, lesbian, and bisexual people are at particular risk in our society.They are surrounded by images and references that imply the unacceptability of their own feelings and identity. Heterosexuality is simply taken for granted as “the way to be.” Many sexuality education curricula assume all students are heterosexual. When sexual orientations are considered, homosexuality is often the only one examined. All young people benefit from learning about sexual orientation—their own and others.This education helps young people understand not only sexual development and orientation, but also the effect of stereotyping, homophobia, and prejudice on people’s lives. The activities in this section...

The Conservative Christian organizations that are increasingly targeting teenagers and young people with "ex-gay" conferences and therapy are deceiving parents, teens and the public about the effectiveness of their efforts, according to a report released Thursday by a gay rights organization. The report, "Youth in the Crosshairs: The Third Wave of Ex-Gay Activism," claims that organizations working to help people overcome same-sex attraction could be sued because they cause harm instead of accomplishing what they promise. "There's no evidence that conversion therapy actually works, but there's a growing body of evidence that it can be extremely harmful and unethical," said...

Most paleontologists look into the mouth of an allosaurus and see a prehistoric eating machine with a jaw full of flesh-tearing teeth. Peter DeRosa peers into that mouth and sees the hand of God. Working from a business park about 80 miles north of Tampa, Fla., DeRosa and his family are hammering away at two bedrock principles of modern science: evolution and the notion that Earth is about 4 billion years old. The DeRosas are part of a small but growing band of creationists using dinosaurs - the icons of an ancient Earth - to argue that the world is...

Yes, I know you were drunk. Must've been. Either drunk or on serious meds and/or you just didn't give much of a damn about anything anyway because you're just one of those people, one of those types who comes lurching around the city like a chunk of numbed pain in your big-ass mid-'80s burgundy car with the white top and chrome bumpers -- an old Cadillac? Monte Carlo? -- early last Sunday morning to wreak casual havoc. Is that about right? Do you remember any of it? Here is what I'm guessing: probably not. Let me tell you what happened,...

Arkansas mom gives birth to a whole freakin' baseball team. How deeply should you cringe? Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost? And furthermore, who are you to suggest that her equally troubling husband -- whose name is, of course, Jim Bob...

Apparently, it wasn't just "invade Iraq and Afghanistan in my name." A special report: Scene: White House private residence, night, not long ago. President Bush present in his most favoritest guns 'n' bunnies PJs. Laura asleep, knocked out by a combination of too much Good Housekeeping and excessive hair-spray fumes. Suddenly, a burst of black smoke. A deep, resonant voice speaks: "Psst! George! God here, taking a break from supervising the well-being of eight billion troubled souls along with infinite galaxies of unimaginable vastness to speak with you directly one more time because, well, you're special, aren't you, George? Yes...

Leather, techno, sex & war: more only-in-SF juice to make you proud. Take that, uptight neocons. It was the moment when we walked by a jam-packed S.F. City Hall and realized it was open to host a VIP techno dance party, while immediately outside its gilded doors upward of 50,000 revelers wandered and shimmied and flaunted their costumes and drank nasty Red Bull cocktails in the huge Civic Center plaza for the third annual Love Parade, everyone baring flesh and shaking their groove thangs to any one of 200 world-class (well, some of them) DJs spinning their wares on over...

At last, one scientist BushCo will definitely -- albeit resentfully -- listen to. Sometimes. So now we know. This is what it takes. This is how far the nation has to crumble and this is how many people have to die and this is how many tens of billions it has to cost and this is how far his dirt-low poll numbers have to fall before Bush will finally come out and say he agrees with one of those godforsaken gul-dang book-learned scientist types. You know the ones. Those informed and well-educated data-crunchers he normally despises like a kid hates...

SEOUL -- North Korea said today that it would not dismantle its nuclear-weapons program until the United States first provides an atomic energy reactor, casting doubt on its commitment to a breakthrough agreement reached at international arms talks. The North's Foreign Ministry made the surprise demand a day after it had agreed at six-nation talks in Beijing to give up its arms efforts. The North insisted during arms talks that began last week in Beijing that it be given a light-water reactor, a type less easily diverted for weapons use, in exchange for abandoning nuclear weapons. The agreement reached at...

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea demanded Tuesday that the United States give it a light water nuclear reactor before it rejoins the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and ends its weapons program. The North's Foreign Ministry made the demand a day after it agreed at six-nation talks in Beijing to give up its arms efforts, rejoin the treaty, and accept inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. "We will return to the NPT and sign the safeguards agreement with the IAEA and comply with it immediately upon the U.S. provision of LWRs, a basis of confidence-building to us," the ministry...

Can you hear that? That low scraping moan, that painful scream, that compressed hissing wail like the sound of an angry alligator caught in a vise? Why, it's the GOP, and they're screaming, "No, no it can't be, oh my God, please no, this damnable Katrina thing is just an unstoppable PR disaster for us!" After all (they wail), who woulda thought dissing all those poor black people and letting so many of them die in filth and misery in the Superdome while our pampered CEO president enjoyed yet another vacation would cause such an ugly backlash, such harsh criticism...

<p>'We are waging a nuclear war in Iraq right now. That country is contaminated. It will be contaminated for practically eternity now'...</p>

SEMINOLE, Fla. - A man was arrested after trying to steal a weapon from a gun shop so he could "take some action and rescue Terri Schiavo," authorities said.Michael W. Mitchell, of Rockford, Ill., entered Randall's Firearms Inc. in Seminole just before 6 p.m. Thursday with a box cutter and tried to steal a gun, said Marianne Pasha, a spokeswoman for the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office. Mitchell, 50, told deputies he wanted to "take some action and rescue Terri Schiavo" after he visited the Pinellas Park hospice where she lives, Pasha said. The feeding tube that has kept Schiavo alive...

Hawaiian newspaper misquotes Churchill CU prof did not back away from Indian heritage claim By Charlie Brennan, Rocky Mountain News February 24, 2005 A dispute that erupted Wednesday over a published report that CU professor Ward Churchill was backing off his claims to Indian heritage ended when a Honolulu newspaper admitted it had misquoted him. Ed Lynch, the city editor at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, said, "Unfortunately, our reporter made a mistake." He said the newspaper would run a retraction today. Advertisement Click Here! The paper published a report Wednesday that said Churchill addressed the issue of his ethnicity in a...

Starbulletin.com Wednesday, February 23, 2005 "I never wanted to be a poster boy for academic freedom. You can't give an inch. If you let this one down, you've lost it all." Ward Churchill Visiting University of Colorado professor LUCY PEMONI / STAR-BULLETIN Protesters made their opinions known last night outside the entrance of the auditorium where University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill delivered his speech on the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus. Churchill attacks essay’s critics University of Colorado president calls for calm By Craig Gima cgima@starbulletin.com Ward Churchill, the outspoken Colorado professor who created a national uproar by...

LARGO - Fed up up with watching the Pinellas County Jail become cluttered with the mentally ill, many who spend weeks or months sitting in a cell, Public Defender Bob Dillinger won a $1-million federal grant last year to tackle the problem. Since then, some mentally ill inmates have been pulled from the jail within days after their mug shot is snapped. The program, which Dillinger thinks is a first-of-its-kind in the nation, places these folks in treatment facilities that do a better of job of meeting their needs than a jail ever could. As the program celebrates its one-year...

Kerry will be in the White House as long as we keep up the pace we have been at the last few weeks. We need to keep the emails going, keep the protests going...as long as we do this more and more leaders will fall in line as they see the movement grow. I can't say this enough: 1) Protest, Protest, Protest If you have time to attend any protest in your area, DO IT. Get out there. Especially in Ohio and Florida. We did one in CO and it made the news. IT puts a face to this that...

Teresa Heinz Kerry Touts Secret Health Cures Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Presidential hopeful John Kerry, revealed several alternative health remedies today while speaking in Reno. According to Teresa, better health awaits those who follow her alternative advice. In all her remedies, Teresa advocates a strong liberal use of the sauce (not the secret 57 kind) and white raisins. Teresa’s healthful anti-aging tips include: Arthritis: “You get some gin and get some white raisins — and only white raisins — and soak them in the gin for two weeks, then eat nine of the raisins a day.” Bunions: “You get...

At Ohio psychiatric centers, workers molested children, denied them food or gave them alcohol and drugs. Some kids suffered broken bones. Others lived in homes so dirty they urinated on the floor by their beds. Taxpayers shell out $160 to $1,000 a day for each mentally ill child who lives in these private treatment centers. But a Cincinnati Enquirer investigation reveals that kids don't always get the help they're promised. Some struggle just to survive. "You have kids secluded, restrained and injured over and over again," says Carolyn Knight, director of the Ohio Legal Rights Service, a state-funded agency that...

Vichy mentally ill patients 'were not murdered' By Philip Delves Broughton (Filed: 17/10/2003) A two-year investigation into the deaths of 50,000 mentally ill patients under France's Vichy regime has found they mostly starved to death, rather than being intentionally killed following the Nazi example. French historians have argued recently that the Vichy government deliberately created appalling conditions in its asylums as a form of "gentle genocide". They supported their arguments with horrific reports written by the doctors working in the asylums during the war, describing patients eating their own hands and books, causing stomach ruptures and death. The latest research...

AUGUSTA — Just weeks before his 7-year-old daughter was allegedly assaulted by a man with prior assault convictions, Scott Durant told his little girl what to do if someone ever attacked her. After hearing of an adult who tried to get some children to ride in a car, Durant sat his daughter down and said, "If somebody ever tries this on you don't be afraid. Be mad." On Monday, when a man approached the girl and her two younger sisters while they played in their back yard, she fought back. "She's tall and strong for a 7-year-old," Durant said. "I...

Berlin - Some 200 000 handicapped, mentally ill and other institutional patients whose lives the Nazis deemed worthless were killed under the Third Reich during World War II, German officials said on Tuesday as they presented new research into the killings. Data compiled by the German Federal Archive in a three-year project list hundreds of hospitals and clinics in Germany as well as present-day Austria, Poland and Czech Republic where patients or people the Nazis viewed as social misfits were gassed, drugged or starved to death - the most comprehensive look yet at the scope of the Nazis' programme to...