Free Republic

The National Football League sent six of its lieutenants to Minneapolis the other day to advertise what essentially is a take-it-or-leave-it offer. Either you people give us the tax breaks we want so that we might not be fettered by the reasonable expectations of doing business or you don't get a Super Bowl. Capiche? "It's an incredibly competitive environment,'' said Frank Supovitz, NFL senior vice president of events. If Supovitz wasn't wearing a tie, he would have said, "Look, we've got other cities that will do what we want, so you either play by our rules or you can stuff...

A 24-year-old geography major is the first Wikipedian-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley. His announcement can be found - where else? - but on his own Wiki page. Cal hired Gorman, according to a February announcement, to advise students and professors on the complex task of editing articles for Wikipedia, the user-generated online encyclopedia that gets 500 million monthly visitors. Until now, Wikipedians-in-residence have been assigned to cultural institutions, such as the British Museum, the Gerald Ford Presidential Library and the U.S. National Archives. In a statement, Cal calls Gorman a "hardcore Wikipedian" since his undergraduate days at Berkeley,...

Councilman John Duran and his gay colleagues on the West Hollywood City Council never expected a backlash when they voted recently to remove the rainbow flag from above City Hall. For Duran, who is gay, taking down the flag wasn't about slighting gays but sending a message about the city's diversity. "It's not just a city of gay men. It belongs to heterosexual people as well," he said. http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-weho-gay-identity-20140307,0,7458432.story#ixzz2vNq2Uy21

We previously made reference to the anti-Israel conference organized for February 28- March 1, 2014 by Lisa Duggan, a professor in NYU’s American Studies Department and incoming President of the American Studies Association. (Full conference poster at bottom of post.) When Elder of Ziyon blog and others caught wind of Duggan trying to keep the Conference from coming to the attention of those who oppose ASA’s academic boycott of Israel, the Facebook post for the event was taken down. The Conference is an NYU function, but it’s hardly academic. The panels are stacked with anti-Israel academic boycott movement supporters arguing...

Evidence is accumulating that quality control is a serious issue in academic publishing, which is the key to career advancement for scientists and other scholars. In an age when appeals to "peer reviewed" "settled science" have become standard operating procedure in efforts to impose radical increases in government control over our lives, corruption in the mechanisms for reviewing  scientific publications has very real consequences for all of us. Nature magazine tells us: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers. Richard Van Noorden writes: The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after...

Fire, brimstone, eternal suffering — hell is not a pleasant concept. But research has pointed to the societal benefits of a belief in supernatural punishment, including higher economic growth in developing countries and less crime. But there are also drawbacks, even in this life. A new study links believing in hell, and perhaps even thinking about it, with lower levels of happiness and satisfaction in life. "It seems there is this trade-off," said Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. In research published in January in PLOS ONE, Shariff and a colleague looked at international...

Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas likes to present himself as a deficit hawk—a red-state conservative who “believes that Congress must be a good steward of the taxpayers’ money,” as his official website declares, and that “fiscal responsibility is the cornerstone for good governance.” So the revelation in the National Journal that the 61-year-old Cornyn is collecting three different state-government pensions while receiving his federal salary as a senator (a total of $239,383 in taxpayer-funded largesse) is slightly off-message, and just a tad inconvenient, as he gets ready to run for a third term next year. “There’s a lot of...

Dear President Obama: I'm planning to move my family and extended family into Mexico for my health, and I would like to ask you to assist me. We're planning to simply walk across the border from the U.S. into Mexico, and we'll need your help to make a few arrangements. We plan to skip all the legal stuff like visas, passports, immigration quotas and laws. I'm sure they handle those things the same way you do here. So, would you mind telling your buddy, The President of Mexico, that I'm on my way over? Please let him know that I...

Lease terms are still being negotiated, but these are some of the things expected to be a part of it: rehabilitating Hangars One, 2 and 3, fixing up a golf course, starting a public use and educational facility, and getting rid of NASA’s operation and maintenance cost of the area, among other things. In a press release, NASA did not give a date as to when these negotiations would conclude.

The Nazi-like march of Islamic supremacists into influential positions of power in media, politics and academia sank to a new low this week (and that bar was already conspicuously low ). Tarek Fatah received a  panicked message from a student enrolled at the University of California Berkeley, who along with 100 kids in his class is being forced to tweet on“islamophobia” as a course requirement by a notorious antisemitic, terror-supporting professor, Hatem Bazian: [The student} wrote: “I’ve been told by one of my professors I will be required, as part of my grade, to start a Twitter account and tweet weekly onIslamophobia. I can’t help but feel this is unethical. This is...

A favorite tactic of this Administration is to engage in outrageous behavior, and then – with the support of its allies – put its opponents on the defensive by accusing them of engaging in the conduct of which it is in fact guilty. So, for example, the Obama Administration takes far-out positions on social issues— then labels as “extreme” anyone who stands up for mainstream values. The White House promotes monetary policies that destroy jobs– and then attacks the business community for driving “income inequality.” The latest example of this “jujitsu” maneuver involves the Health and Human Services contraceptive mandate...

The National Institutes of Health has spent millions of dollars studying male sex workers in Peru, including more than $400,000 to determine why gay men get syphilis in the South American country. “Syphilis remains an uncontrolled infectious disease globally, with high prevalence and incidence in certain high risk populations, affecting more than 20 percent of men who have sex with men (MSM) in Peru,” according to the grant, awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “The incidence of syphilis in MSM in Peru is about 9 cases per 100 person-years,” it said. “We are proposing a study to improve...

University of Tennessee (UT), a public school, has announced the schedule for its second annual Sex Week, complete with a lectures on orgasms as a political act and masturbation. One event, “Get Wet: Exploring the Connections Between Sexual Pleasure, Health, & Advocacy” will ask students “When is an orgasm a political act? When is lube a tool of the revolution?” The event description promises that host Megan Andelloux will "demonstrate how three components of sexuality - pleasure, health, and advocacy - flow into one another as we explore a variety of topics centered on reproductive justice and sexual freedom." The...

(CNSNews.com) – Larry Brinkin, who worked at the Human Rights Commission for the City of San Francisco for 22 years and was a prominent homosexual rights activist for more than 40 years, pleaded guilty to felony child pornography possession last week. Brinkin is expected to serve six months in jail, five years of probation, and register as a sex offender for the rest of his life when he is sentenced on Mar. 5. But he likely will get to keep his city pension because possessing and viewing child porn apparently is not considered a crime of “moral turpitude” under San...

David Remnick of The New Yorker showed up on PBS’s Charlie Rose Monday night to discuss his long, mostly sympathetic profile of Barack Obama from the January 27 issue of the magazine. Near the end of the interview, Rose focused in on the president’s reported desire to be “big.” The host wondered, “[W]hat's his definition of 'big,' and does he believe in his deep recesses of his own mind that the chance of that has slipped away?” Remnick replied that no, Obama does not think his chance of being “big” has slipped away. The editor then rattled off a laundry...

COLLEGE PARK, Md. (CBSDC) – Accelerated aging and a greater likelihood of suffering from an age-related illness at a younger age are two consequences being linked to African-American men who have experienced high-levels of racism throughout their lives. A study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine finds that African-American men who reported high levels of racial discrimination, or who have internalized anti-black attitudes, have an increased risk of premature death and chronic disease than white people. Previous research has documented African-Americans’ shorter life expectancy and greater risk of chronic diseases, but this new study is the first to...

Any health insurer providing coverage in Connecticut will now have to include sex-change surgery and hormone therapy in their plans, as ordered by the state insurance department. The Hartford Courant reported that the state agency sent out a notice to insurance companies, ordering that “individuals with gender dysphoria … are not denied access to medically necessary care because of the individuals’ gender identity or gender expression.” Now state officials are advancing on that notice with active campaigns. Deputy insurance commissioner Anne Melissa Dowling told the Courant that the state wanted to “go out and affirmatively make [the policy] very clear.”...

The end of 2013 brought a measure of closure to a long-running Milwaukee police scandal, though some say the officer — and his cohorts — who repeatedly and illegally shoved his fingers up black male suspects’ anal cavities got off with a light sentence considering the flagrant nature of his abuses. The ringleader was identified as officer Michael Vagnini, a white man who routinely targeted black males as young as fifteen for sadistic — and blatantly illegal — anal searches. One victim said that another officer put a gun to his head while Vagnini administered a choke hold, touched his...

A group representing 5,000 U.S. professors has endorsed an academic boycott of Israeli colleges and universities. The American Studies Association says it voted for the boycott "as an ethical stance." "It represents a principle of solidarity with scholars and students deprived of their academic freedom and an aspiration to enlarge that freedom for all, including Palestinians," a Dec. 4 statement said. According to The New York Times, which reported the boycott Monday, the action — the first time the group has called for an academic boycott of any nation's universities — makes the group the largest of its kind to...

CNSNews.com) - The fiscal conservatives at Americans for Tax Reform have crunched the Obamacare numbers released by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and here's the bottom line. American taxpayers have paid $14,196 for each Obamacare enrollee so far. In her testimony to Congress Wednesday, Sebelius said taxpayers have spent $677 million on the flawed healthcare.gov website through the end of October.* On top of that, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has spent $4.5 billion to promote Obamacare at the state level. Sebelius told Congress that 364,682 people had "selected a plan" as of Nov. 30...