Free Republic

National Republicans met with two potential challengers to U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson on Wednesday as the GOP establishment continued to search for a candidate who can topple the outspoken freshman Democrat... State Rep. Eric Eisnaugle, R-Orlando, and businessman Bruce O'Donoghue sat down with GOP lawmakers and strategists from the National Republican Congressional Committee in meetings that participants described as productive -- although no verdict was reached. "It's great to see that these folks are very serious about the direction that this country is going," said O'Donoghue, who wouldn't commit to run. "This race is going to draw national attention, and...

Rosie O'Donnell has confirmed that she and longtime girlfriend Kelli Carpenter are on the rocks. In a new interview with USA Today, she says, "We're a family. We will remain a family forever. And we are working on our issues." The 47-year-old O'Donnell -- who has been suggesting a split on her blog -- wouldn't confirm a National Enquirer report that Carpenter, 42, has moved out of their Nyack, NY, home and into Manhattan. (USA Today notes that Carpenter was not at the house during the interview.) Meet Rosie O'Donnell and other stars' surprise BFFs "We're a family, we remain...

BAHTIYAR MAHNUT, a detainee at the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay, learned a few weeks ago that the Pacific island nation of Palau had invited him to settle there. It should have been cause for celebration, especially for a man who desperately wants to be free. But, to the surprise of his lawyers, Bahtiyar has turned down the offer. He wishes to remain a prisoner, they say, so he can look after his older brother, a fellow detainee. The brothers’ saga, as related by their attorneys and military records, could transpire only in the context of Guantánamo Bay and...

President Barack Obama may be regarded as a Communist trying to nationalise health care by his fiercest detractors at home, but other world leaders see him as a conservative, he declared on Sunday. Asked about the antipathy aroused by his stimulus bill, health reform plans, and takeover of ailing banks, the president revealed that the stinging domestic criticism has bemused other politicians whose politics are ostensibly to the Right of his. "I can't tell you how many foreign leaders, who are heads of centre-right governments, say to me 'I don't understand why people would call you socialist, in my country...

In 1992, after he stopped wearing clothes to his UC Berkeley classes, Andrew Martinez was something of a walking only-in-Berserkeley joke as the campus' own Naked Guy. But his life was no laughing matter. Around 1997, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In 2003, he was arrested for assaulting a staff member at a halfway house where he was a resident. He spent the next 21/2 years in Santa Clara County jail, its acute psychiatric unit, Napa and Atascadero state hospitals - until at age 33, he killed himself by suffocating himself with a plastic bag in a jail cell on...

Santa Clara County agrees to pay $1 million in lawsuit over Naked Guy's suicide To many, Luis Andrew Martinez was simply the Naked Guy — a Berkeley fixture who gained national notoriety in the 1990s for refusing to wear clothes. About 10 years later, on May 18, 2006, isolated and alone in a Santa Clara County Jail cell, Martinez — a diagnosed schizophrenic — tied a plastic bag around his head and killed himself. Today — on the third anniversary of his death — lawyers for his family plan to announce a $1 million settlement reached with Santa Clara County,...

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All of the people in the four pictures below are men - on Transgender Lobby Day last Tuesday, April 7! If this bill passes, it will be a crime to make any critical comments on this. In fact, this very report could be considered criminal "hate speech" punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine.

She never revealed mental illness to officials; it’s difficult to screen in hiring SOUTH BEND — It may still puzzle the public as to why a substitute teacher sat and watched as an eighth-grade classroom play-fought at Dickinson Intermediate Center two weeks ago. A student caught the scene on video for seven minutes and posted it to the Internet site YouTube.com. On the video, you hear students giggling as they jostle each other around. The video has since been removed. The Tribune has since learned the substitute lives in a local home for people with chronic mental illness. The residents...

On several forums and blogs such a freerepublic, there have been debates about civil commitment and expanding laws and state hospitals and hospital psyche wards. What is disturbing is that many, even Conservatives and libertarians are more than willing to sacrifice civil liberties and safeguards against government tyranny to clear the streets of the homeless mentally ill and other similar individuals. But the truth is that there is on the books in nearly every state, provisions that allow the involuntary commitment of those who are unable to care for themselves due to so called mental illnesses that they suffer from...

Video of the Goreacle speaking in Germany this past week.

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...