Free Republic

San Francisco — The homeless are a challenge for almost every American city, but nothing like they are for San Francisco. The city’s mild, year-round climate, famously liberal “live and let live” attitude, and a dense network of social services have made the problem worse than ever there. The city has some 3,200 people living on its streets, and the number is growing. Two recent news items brought the issue into sharp focus. First, a light pole collapsed downtown, crushing a car and barely missing the driver. The cause? It had been corroded by urine aimed at it by street...

Rachel Dolezal, an NAACP activist and the daughter of a white couple who claims to “identify as black,” told NBC News Tuesday night that “there’s been no biological proof” that her mother and father are actually her parents. Dolezal, who resigned Monday as president of the African-American advocacy group’s chapter in Spokane, Washington, after her parents said she’d been misrepresenting her racial heritage, told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, “I haven’t had a DNA test. There’s been no biological proof that Larry and Ruthanne are my biological parents.”

This week, Rachel Dolezal, the former local head of the Spokane NAACP, a lecturer in Africana studies at Eastern Washington University, and a proud black woman, was revealed to be a non-proud white woman. She lied about her personal history: She said her parents whipped her when they lived in South Africa, that she underwent rape and physical abuse, that the KKK targeted her with swastikas and nooses. No evidence exists to support any of this. Her parents point out that Dolezal has no black ancestry, and grew up in a Montana home as the child of two white parents....

A cashier at an Ottawa Loblaws grocery store has filed a discrimination grievance with his union, alleging he was told he could not wear pigtails to work. Adam Stone, 22, told CBC News he expresses himself through his hair — and has worn various styles and wigs to work over the past year. "I'm also openly gay and queer-identified. So I also feel it's a representation of my sexuality and my gender presentation," said Stone, who has worked for Loblaws for about four years. On Tuesday, he said his store manager told him that his pigtails were a health and...

Nine years as chaplain of an 800 bed state mental hospital taught me that one can be mentally ill and highly intelligent. Talking with the patients often was more interesting than talking with their psychiatrists. Mad men are not mindless. They just do not distinguish between delusion and fact. Chesterton summed this up by aphorism: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” This explains why it is often hard to distinguish university faculties from mental wards, save for the latter being kept under...

Ladies and gentlemen, MSNBC host Joy Reid has a statement to make: Joy Reid JoyAnnReid "To the anti-government wingers in my thread: so far, the only "spread of Ebola" in the U.S. was caused by a private hospital in a red state." 1:33 PM - 12 Oct 2014

For Michael Powell, a 53-year-old ex-convict, his tent off the highway in Camden, N.J., is what he has called home for nearly a decade. But on Tuesday, he and dozens of others living in homeless encampments known as “tent cities” throughout Camden were forced out—leaving many of them homeless all over again. The eviction was conducted by the state of New Jersey, as well as Camden county and city, for health and safety reasons. […] Amid the commotion on Tuesday, Gino Lewis, director of housing at the Camden County Improvement Authority, assured people that the county would work to find...

A pregnant woman has had her baby forcibly removed by caesarean section by social workers. Essex social services obtained a High Court order against the woman that allowed her to be forcibly sedated and her child to be taken from her womb. The council said it was acting in the best interests of the woman, an Italian who was in Britain on a work trip, because she had suffered a mental breakdown. The baby girl, now 15 months old, is still in the care of social services, who are refusing to give her back to the mother, even though she...

OAKLAND, Calif. — The weekly meetings of Mouthing Off!, a group for students at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, always start the same way. Members take turns going around the room saying their names and the personal pronouns they want others to use when referring to them — she, he or something else. It’s an exercise that might seem superfluous given that Mills, a small and leafy liberal arts school historically referred to as the Vassar of the West, only admits women as undergraduates. Yet increasingly, the “shes” and “hers” that dominate...

Hemlock Society Founder Pushes for Euthanasia of Mentally Ill People by Wesley J. Smith | LifeNews.com | 11/5/13 10:37 AM It really is astounding how the media continue to assume that assisted suicide/euthanasia is only for the terminally ill.HereÂ’s the latest example: Hemlock Society founder Derek Humphry was in Arizona advocating for assisted suicide for the mentally ill, and Arizona Star columnist Tim Steller is shocked!From the article: If you think the idea of assisted suicide is controversial, welcome to the farthest frontier in the debate. Announcing his visit to Tucson for two Nov. 23 presentations, Derek Humphry, a pioneer...

Day 4 of shutdown: Vets are going to need wire cutters to visit WWII memorial.The fences/barricades were not wired shut when I was here on Tuesday.

A transgender teenager running for prom king at a central Pennsylvania school is upset because he's listed instead for prom queen. The York Dispatch and the York Daily Record report Red Lion Senior High School students who bought tickets for Saturday's prom were listed on the ballot for prom court. The newspapers say 18-year-old Issak Wolfe was campaigning for prom king when friends discovered he was listed by his birth name, Sierra Stambaugh, among the candidates for prom queen.

The city streets are teeming with thousands of mentally ill homeless people capable of psychotic acts of random violence if left untreated, experts warned yesterday. As many as 11,000 of the city’s 33,000 homeless adults have some form of mental illness, said D.J. Jaffe, executive director of the Mental Illness Policy Organization. Of that number, about 3,300 are potentially violent, Jaffe said. “When untreated, they’re capable of horrific acts,” said Jaffe. “The danger is that they’re so sick that they don’t know they’re sick, and their brain is incapable of regulating their own behavior.” He urged New Yorkers to be...

President Obama said the federal government has to do something meaningful to prevent future shootings, like the recent massacre of 26 children and adults at a school in Newtown, Connecticut.  Here is what the federal government can do to prevent violence related to mental illness:1. Start demonstration projects of Assisted Outpatient Treatment (e.g. Kendra’s Law in New York, Laura’s Law in California) throughout the country. AOT allows courts to order individuals with mental illness to stay in treatment as a condition of living in the community. It is only applicable to the most seriously ill who have a history of violence, incarceration, or...

SAN PABLO, CA, December 10, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Gabrielle Ludwig is not like any other woman on the basketball courts, or in the locker rooms, in Santa Clara Community College’s junior team. Gabrielle is a foot taller than every other player and has significantly more upper body strength. That’s because the 50-year-old player was born Robert John Ludwig, a man. He still bears the tattoos of his service in Operation Desert Storm. This turn at college basketball is his second. His first stint in 1980 was as a man at Nassau Community College. After his sex change operation this summer...

San Franciscans may be forced to wear clothes outside of their homes and some nude activists aren't pleased. City lawmakers are scheduled to vote Tuesday on an ordinance that, if passed, would make it illegal for anyone over the age of 5 to expose their genitals in public. Exemptions will be made for parades and festivals held under a city permit, according to the ordinance. A group of activists filed a federal lawsuit against the city on Wednesday, asking that a judge issue a temporary restraining order to stop the vote on Tuesday and provide the court enough time to...

BOSTON, January 19, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – After news broke this week that the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health (DMH) was seeking to force a mentally ill woman to abort her child, the state agency has dug in its heels in the face of widespread outrage, defending its decision in a statement to the Boston Herald this week. The DMH had filed a petition to have the parents of a 32-year-old mentally ill woman appointed as the woman’s temporary guardians for the purpose of forcing her to have an abortion. The woman, who is identified in court documents under the pseudonym...

As the national media continues to promote the idea that these absurd "Occupy" protests demonstrate some groundswell of popular opinion, reports continue to emerge from localized media showing how ugly these encampments are becoming. A report out of Cleveland that  police are investigating a rape claim made by a 19-year-old woman last weekend has received little attention. Do you suppose if a rape claim was made against a tea partier that it would receive more attention?It's gotten so bad in Baltimore that organizers are discouraging alleged victims from going to the police (maybe they should go to Sheriff Biden).Meanwhile,...

A video about the occupy wall street bums. CAUTION! SCARY PHOTOS w/Nudity and violence! Viewer discretion advised!

In 2008, John McCain's campaign team discussed whether they should let Sarah Palin be sworn in as vice-president if they were to win the election, according to campaign staffer Nicolle Wallace. "There certainly were discussions -- not for long because of the arc the campaign took -- but certainly there were discussions about whether, if they were to win, it would be appropriate for her to be sworn in," Wallace tells Time's Claire Suddath. In her new novel, It's Classified, Wallace has a character -- a mentally ill female vice-president -- which she says is based on her experience working...