Free Republic

BELLEVILLE, Ill. (KMOX) – Belleville police chief Bill Clay is ordering his officers to get their pancakes from anywhere but Denny’s, calling the restaurant “political stupidness.” The new orders come after a New Year’s Day clash between five detectives and one Denny’s manager. The department says the detectives were out of uniform but wearing their badges, when manager David Rice asked them to either leave or put their guns in their vehicle. Rice, told the detectives that one of their weapons, specifically a female detective’s gun, was making another diner feel uncomfortable. As the officers were leaving, without their food,...

It apparently wasn't enough to raise taxes on 77 percent of Americans with the fiscal cliff deal signed into law by auto-pen late last night by President Obama. In a video put out by the White House, President Obama dishonestly explained what the fiscal cliff means and then proceeded to say some Americans still need to "pay their fair share." Obama said there is more he wants to do to reduce our debt in a "balanced way," because after all, the $41 in tax hikes per $1 in spending cuts apparently wasn't enough irresponsibility for him. He gloated over the...

Maryland and Virginia have vowed to tackle the issue of guns when their state legislatures convene this month in the wake a mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school, but the neighboring states are taking drastically different approaches. In Maryland, Democrats running the General Assembly have called for a crackdown on the kinds of powerful firearms and high-capacity magazines used last month by the Newtown, Conn., shooter to kill 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Republicans who control Virginia's General Assembly, however, not only dismissed the need for new gun restrictions but expressed interest in arming...

AP) IOWA CITY, Iowa - An Iowa Board of Regents member worked behind the scenes to create a university institute honoring her husband, Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin, and then pushed for its approval before two of the couple’s allies left the board, according to an email obtained by The Associated Press. The 2011 email from then-Iowa State University Provost Elizabeth Hoffman describes the top-secret process that Ruth Harkin and a small group of officials pursued in planning the Harkin Institute of Public Policy, which remains mired in controversy nearly two years later. It noted that an ethics scandal involving a...

Mark Halperin on "Morning Joe" makes the point that Obama as a Senator was against raising the debt ceiling (January 2, 2013).

MEXICO CITY -- Only days after U.S. Marine veteran Jon Hammar was thrown into a Mexican prison for carrying an antique shotgun into the country, gangsters in the jail warned him of his likely fate – beheading.

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Tea party darling Ted Cruz has been sworn in as U.S. senator and says his first order of business will be introducing a bill he knows will never pass.

Social media videos led to rape charges [Video]. The videos, pictures and tweets are chilling. A picture of a girl dangling limply from the arms of two young men. Other boys, laughingly saying the girl had to be dead because she didn't flinch as her body was violated. An alleged rape, made into a joke. The images and social media messages are at the heart of criminal charges against two high school football players accused of sexually assaulting an underage teenage girl during a series of end-of-summer parties in August.

Old truths decay and new ones are born at an astonishing rate.Dinosaurs were cold-blooded. Increased K-12 spending and lower pupil/teacher ratios boost public school student outcomes. Most of the DNA in the human genome is junk. Saccharin causes cancer and a high fiber diet prevents it. Stars cannot be bigger than 150 solar masses.In the past half-century, all of the foregoing facts have turned out to be wrong. In the modern world facts change all of the time, according to Samuel Arbesman, author of the new book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date (Current). Fact-making...

Vice President Joe Biden got a little frisky with the wife of Senator Angus King at today's ceremonial swearing-in at the Capitol:

Al Jazeera is coming to America — courtesy of former Vice President Al Gore and entrepreneur Joel Hyatt. The Arab network, funded by Qatar, has just bought Current TV — the low rated liberal cable station Gore and Hyatt founded — for a reported $500 million. The deal gives the anti-Israeli Arab network access to 40 million homes in the United States. Beyond bringing anti-Israeli propaganda into these new American outlets, Al Jazeera has a long record as the chosen news outlet for Al Qaeda and other terrorist cells. It was through them that Osama bin Laden would regularly post...

A lawsuit has been filed against The Journal News by a business that claims its reputation suffered after the newspaper published an interactive map of licensed gun owners in the area, following the massacre in Newtown, Conn. First Impression LLC is a gift shop and interior design firm located in Katonah. They sued both The Journal News and its corporate parent Gannett Co. in Westchester County Court. In the Summons with Notice, the gift shop accuses the newspaper of “falsely…publicly stating in the interactive website www.lohud.com that plaintiff First Impression LLC is a licensed handgun owner.” They are represented by...

About 60 percent of Americans have a high-school diploma but not a degree from a four-year college. Forty-four percent of their children are born outside of marriage. This finding is the focus of “The President’s Marriage Agenda for the Forgotten Sixty Percent,” the fruit of the annual “State of Our Unions”(PDF) report compiled by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Institute for American Values. W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the project, talks with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about what’s going on and why it matters. KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Who are the “forgotten 60...

Those who take prosperity for granted — and all of us do whether we admit it or not — would do well to make their way to the film Les Misérables, which features Russell Crowe playing the role of the relentless French cop Javert (not to mention an astonishingly effective presentation of “I Dreamed the Dream” by Anne Hathaway). This film brilliantly pictures a level of poverty that none of us has ever known. We do well to reflect on it and the reasons that we do not experience such poverty now (hint: it’s not because of Congress). And such...

House Speaker John Boehner has been afforded no rest after the passage of the fiscal cliff bill. (Snip) President Barack Obama, meanwhile, has been vacationing on the sunny beaches of Hawaii - leaving Washington just hours after the deal made it through Congress on Tuesday night. The White House released a series of year-end photos of the President on Wednesday. The first picture in the series was of shot of a jubilant Obama frolicking in the warm Hawaiian waters. Scroll down for video

President Obama and key members of his cabinet were among the top ten most corrupt politicians in Washington for 2012, according to an annual list compiled by Judicial Watch. Top 10 "Most Corrupt" List Dominated by Obama Administration The New American 03 January 2013 President Obama and key members of his Democrat cabinet like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, disgraced Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, and UN Ambassador Susan Rice were all among the top ten most corrupt politicians in Washington for 2012, according to an annual...

MSNBC's Ed Schultz named Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown coed who told a congressional panel that students were going broke buying contraception, a "middle class hero" for advocating free contraception, Twitchy reported Wednesday. "Even more hilarious," Twitchy said, "Fluke is boasting about it and preening." "Thx 4 including me in 2012 heroes & allowing me 2 share my friend's story--interview feels like lifetime ago," Fluke tweeted. According to Twitchy, conservatives on Twitter weren't impressed. "@SandraFluke hero? What a joke! Embarrassment is more like it," one person tweeted. "@SandraFluke what have you sacrificed to be labelled a hero? You're an underachieving grad...

The Federal Reserve Has No Practical Option To End QE January 3, 2013, at 6:07 pm by Jim Sinclair in the category General Editorial | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post Dear CIGAs, Such an announcement has been part of QE either from MSM or some Fed board member since it began. The implication of stopping QE is so dire to the economy that it is in a practical sense impossible. When gold was being sold by central banks during the 1970s market announcements were made constantly with the bias to depress metals....

The media's so full of it. Over the past few weeks, the wife and I have been re-watching the brilliant HBO drama, "The Wire." The show's fifth and final season focuses on the plight of "The Baltimore Sun," as the daily newspaper deals with a collapsing business model in the age of the inter-webs. One of the story's subplots involves a reporter with ambitions to someday work for the "The New York Times" or "The Washington Post." He's a bit overly ambitious, though, and ends up falsifying quotes and sources in order to make a name for himself. One of...