Free Republic

 Looks like we narrowly avoided tragedy this morning. According to a White House press release, the Secret Service just discovered President Barack Obama trying to pull his own head off, but they managed to stop him before he succeeded. Wow. This could have been really bad.According to the White House, several Secret Service agents walked into the Lincoln Bedroom at approximately 6:45 a.m. and discovered President Obama standing alone in the middle of the room with his hands wrapped around his head and trying with considerable effort to remove it from his body.The agents who witnessed the scene said that...

M icrosoft unveiled Windows 10, its forthcoming operating system for the desktop, mobile, Xbox, and IoT late last year. The Windows 10 moniker was interesting, as ideally, Microsoft was expected to call the successor to Windows 8 (and 8.1) as Windows 9. The Redmond-based company explained why it didn’t go with ‘Windows 9’: it would have created conflict with older versions of Windows. Alright, so what will the next version of Windows be called? Windows 10, apparently. At Ignite conference earlier this week, Jerry Nixon, a Microsoft Developer Evangelist, said that Windows 10 “is the last version of Windows (so...

A confession: Many years ago, I was an ultra-left liberal, a Marxist, in fact. As a newly minted attorney at law in New York, I joined the ACLU and volunteered serve as one of their lawyers. About six weeks later, they asked me to represent an American Nazi accused of inciting to riot. I refused. They were mightily put off, horrified in fact. They remonstrated. “But he has a right to counsel.” I said, “Maybe so, but he doesn’t have a right to me. I’m protected by the Thirteenth Amendment.” (The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary...

The chairman of the House oversight committee confronted the Secret Service director on Tuesday over what he claimed was a "botched response" to a bomb threat outside the White House, playing videotape he said shows it took far too long to secure the scene after a woman dropped off what she claimed was the bomb. The March 4 incident is the same one in which two Secret Service agents were accused of driving through the crime scene after returning from a party. However, oversight committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said at a hearing with agency Director Joseph Clancy that the...

Position Objective: To use a variety of undercover investigative methods to conduct field investigations in PETA's focus areas, including the use of animals for food, clothing, experimentation, and entertainment

I wanted to do something for my country during the holidays, so I went to the movies. I watched the Christmas Day opening of “The Interview,” to show North Korea that I wasn’t afraid of its threats to blow up theaters that screen the parody of Kim Jong Un. The $9.50 I paid in the name of patriotic pride bought me stadium seating, a preview of the coming feature “Hot Tub Time Machine 2,” and a feature film full of jokes about rectums, sex organs, ricin and the Supreme Leader defecating in his pants. Except for the Asian stereotypes, it...

You Will Serve Somebody, The Only Question is “Whom?” As Seen and Heard in a Video By: Msgr. Charles PopeThe video below features Mavis Staples and Johnny Lang. But they are singing the classic Bob Dylan song, “Serve Somebody.” The song is a sober reminder that no matter how big you or I may think we are, we have to remember that none of us is so powerful that, in the end, we won’t have to serve somebody. It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but we WILL serve somebody. The choice is ultimately ours...

Behind the shocking revelations of incompetence and unprofessionalism that rocked the Secret Service this week is a longtime reporter who has been diligently uncovering the agency's secrets for years. Carol Leonnig, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who has worked at The Washington Post for nearly 15 years, has broken almost every single story on the agency, a series of shocking reports that on Wednesday resulted in the abrupt resignation of Secret Service Director Julia Pierson. (Pierson called the resignation “painful.”) In less than a week, Leonnig uncovered three scandals that pushed the agency’s first female leader out the door. First,...

An internal Secret Service report revealed more than “1,000 security breaches and vulnerabilities,” according to a House investigator who said that a “politically correct” culture is endangering President Obama. “There are new details that will come out that — you really have to question if security is their number one objective,” Representative Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), who sits on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that is holding a Tuesday hearing on the Secret Service, tells National Review Online. “They want to be politically correct.” Chaffetz backs that up by reference to the Secret Service’s statement on the most...

Secret Service Director Julia Pierson will face questions about how an armed intruder jumped the White House fence and made it as far as the East Room when she testifies before a House committee on Tuesday. Sources confirmed to Fox News on Monday that 42-year-old Omar Gonzalez overpowered a Secret Service officer in the Sept. 19 incident -- this led to a struggle and "wrestling" inside the executive mansion as he darted through. Gonzalez was eventually tackled by a counter-assault agent in the East Room after he reached the doorway to the Green Room, a parlor overlooking the South Lawn....

The family of the black teenager shot dead by a policeman in St Louis are haunted by the image of him holding his hands up at the moment he was killed, a family member claimed today. Ty Pruitt said that the mental picture of Michael Brown surrendering was stuck in his relatives’ minds as it showed he was ‘killed like an animal’. Pruitt spoke out at an emotional Sunday church service during which Brown’s mother Lesley McSpadden sobbed and wiped the tears away from her eyes with a tissue. His father Michael Brown Sr stood grim faced whilst wearing a...

It's customary to give a waiter a nice tip for good service. But one San Luis Obispo server was given the surprise of his life when a party he was serving gave him a $1,000 tip on an $800 check. He says it was a group of regulars who gave him the huge tip. He had just one table Saturday night, a party of 10. But that was more than enough.

Church officials say they will “combat evil” by hosting a positive worship service to counter a Harvard group’s Satanic mass planned for Monday evening. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston will host a Eucharistic procession from MIT to a nearby church for an hour of prayer, The Boston Globe reports. The religious procession will end up at St. Paul’s Parish in Harvard Square, just a 10-minutes walk from the Queen’s Head Pub in Memorial Hall the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club is set to hold a “black mass.” A black mass is a ritual performed as a parody of the...

Chick-fil-A has surpassed KFC as the top chicken fast food chain.  Chick-fil-A's sales in 2013 passed $5 billion, compared with KFC's $4.2 billion, reports Venessa Wong at Bloomberg Businessweek. Chick-fil-A has 1,775 U.S. stores, while KFC has 4,491. Despite a smaller footprint, Chick-fil-A's average sales are more than triple those of its larger competitor, Wong writes. And Chick-fil-A achieves these results despite being closed on Sundays for religious reasons. Wong illustrates a couple of reasons for Chick-fil-A's success. 

Yesterday... Comcast cable...my internet service provider...for the TIME BEING....had a Planned Outage,...in order to upgrade equipment that services this area. No Prior Notice was given to paying customers, During my call to :customer service" Yesterday...no mention was made of that fact that this WAS a planned outage. This Morning I experienced another Outage. Today's call to comcast customer service was Unbearably frustrating. The representative told me...that this was a planned outage...and an unplanned outage. AGAIN no announcement was made PRIOR to the outage. They do have an EMAIL SERVER dont they? Would it have taken a tremendous effort and great...

Ralph E. Moore Jr. doesn’t think twice about serving others. It is part of his daily life. “I deliberately chose a career to work with people who are poor and the working poor,” said Moore, a parishioner of St. Ann in Baltimore and the mentoring coordinator at The Adult Resource Center for the Living Classrooms Foundation in Baltimore. “As Catholics, (social ministry) is our history and for many people that’s who we are.” Moore was among the nearly 300 people who attended the 35th annual Archdiocesan Social Ministry Convocation March 8 at The Seton Keough High School in Baltimore. The...

Today the conservative talkers are jawing about the supposed "balance" between a person's right not to be discriminated against, and a business owner's rights of conscience. But the problem, you see, is that the first thing is not a right. I don't have a right to force people to like me. Or to hire me. Or to sell something to me. Someone will say that I do indeed have those rights, as created by the Courts or the Congress or Eric Holder (Fleas Be Upon Him). But the government cannot create rights. Only God can grant rights. And a government...

How would you like to have to pay a fee to be able to stream YouTube videos at full speed? What if you liked downloading music from, say, Last.fm or Soundcloud, but those sites suddenly became infinitely slower than bigger sites like Amazon or iTunes? Those are the kind of major changes to the Internet some folks are envisioning after a federal court ruling this week on what's come to be called "net neutrality." This stuff can get really confusing, with all the government jargon, Internet lingo and competing arguments mixed up in it. But it's also really important and...

Morton's The Steakhouse, a high-end restaurant chain, is responding after a firestorm of complaints on social media about how it treated a cancer patient dining at its Nashville location over the weekend. A man undergoing chemotherapy treatments says he was asked to take off his hat because it violated the restaurant's dress code. Robert Chambers says he put on a beanie to keep him warm --combating the side effects of his chemotherapy treatments. Chambers says a waitress then told him to take off the hat because it was against dress code. After explaining that Chambers had cancer, a manager came...

Last March, North Dakota gave us a heart-warming demonstration of traditional voluntary service -- in minus 20 degree weather. As the rising Red River threatened to flood Fargo, willing volunteers gathered by the thousands. Before long, they had filled and stacked over 2 million sandbags to barricade the city against the raging waters. Christians prayed for victory over the forces of nature, and by God's grace, the make-shift dikes held. About 6,000 volunteers of all ages had simply followed their conscience, worked together and met the need. Unlike President Obama's plan for government-directed "service," neither prayer nor God's comforting Truths...