Free Republic

Last week The Ryersonian reported on an incident that involved two first-year journalism students who were turned away from an event organized by Racialized Students' Collective because they are white. Since then there has been a lot of commentary on the piece and a lot of debate -- a lot of the criticism is valid. There are two sides to the story: 1) the media has a right to attend public events and report on matters that are in the public interest. The student media needs to cover initiatives that are happening on campus so that we draw attention to...

Everyone says President Obama is a feckless commander, weak in statecraft, especially compared to the great leaders of the Western world, such as Reagan and Churchill. I believe this does Obama a great injustice. It's so easy to react the way a great leader would. Sure, Obama could have left a small contingent of American troops in Iraq, preserved America's victory, and prevented the entire region from collapsing into chaos and terror. He could have refrained from issuing empty "red line" threats to Syria. He could call ISIS "Islamic." But anybody could do that -- even ISIS calls itself "Islamic."...

Wolf Blitzer invited Marie Harf on CNN’s Situation Room this afternoon. Blitzer sought her out to expand on her remarks on the administration’s approach to dealing with the Islamic State terrorists. Harf thinks that we must attack old-fashioned “root causes” of the material kind. Harf is promoting Great Society liberalism as the answer to “violent extremism.” Great Society liberalism couldn’t even cut it in the United States with more limited (if still ambitious) goals. Touting the rollout of Great Society liberalism worldwide as the answer to religious fanaticism betrays a mind-boggling stupidity. Jobs programs don’t quite cut it when you’re...

Beyoncé has been labeled "insensitive" by some current and former NASA astronauts and their families for sampling audio from the space shuttle Challenger disaster for a love song off her newly released album. Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center Jan. 28, 1986. All seven crewmembers aboard were killed. "Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction," now-retired NASA public affairs officer Steve Nesbitt said as the nation watched wreckage fall toward the ocean on live television. Twenty-seven years later, Nesbitt's voice is heard at the beginning of the video for...

The State Department on Monday said it has no evidence that “core al Qaeda” was behind last year's terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. “We have no indications that core al Qaeda, which I think is what most people are referring to when they talk about quote ‘al Qaeda,’ directed or planned what happened in Benghazi,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said at a briefing. The statement appears to leave open the possibility that associates or followers of the terrorist network were involved in the assault. The comments come on the heels of a New York Times investigation published over the...

By extrapolating quotes and just plain old lying, the elite media are using a GQ interview with "Duck Dynasty" patriarch Phil Robertson as an excuse to go on an anti-Christian rampage that they hope will further their longstanding goal of toxifying Biblical beliefs as bigoted and anti-gay. If you read the full GQ interview, though, it is glaringly obvious that Robertson is anti-sin, not anti-gay, and that he believes we should all love one another. To begin with, the Duck Commander did not single out homosexual behavior; he listed over a half-dozen sins, including adultery, greed, bestiality, drunkenness, idolatry, etc....

As Obama et al. shove us into a senseless conflict that could easily escalate into WWIII, let’s give a listen to righteous voices from Tinseltown: “But I am equally against the death penalty or war — anywhere people are sacrificed for some end justifying a means.” — Martin Sheen “I also think that there is a strong streak of racism, and whenever we engage in foreign adventures. Our whole history in regime change has been of people of different color.” — Ed Asner “I think we’re past that point in human evolution where there’s such a thing as winning wars.”...

For some California Tea Party conservatives, it has become a favorite statistic: Nearly half of Americans - 46 percent - don't pay taxes. The number is used to back up their claim that if that many people don't pay taxes, why should the wealthiest individuals pay more? It is accurate in a sense - 46 percent of U.S. households aren't expected to pay federal income taxes this year. "But most of those people do pay federal taxes" of some sort, such as payroll taxes, said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a center-left Washington think tank,...

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday again condemned the Iranian government's violent attacks on demonstrators, but said it's too soon to say whether those actions will hinder U.S.-Iran talks aimed at halting Iran's development of nuclear weaponry. "We are still waiting to see how the situation in Iran plays out," Obama said in response to questions at a joint White House press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Firearms We recognize that the right to bear arms is an important part of the American tradition, and we will preserve Americans’ continued Second Amendment right to own and use firearms. We believe that the right to own firearms is subject to reasonable regulation, but we know that what works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne. We can work together to enact and enforce common-sense laws and improvements, like closing the gun show loophole, improving our background check system and reinstating the assault weapons ban, so that guns do not fall into the hands of terrorists or criminals. Acting...

Obama is nuanced. It must be true. Everyone is saying it. http://www.google.com/search?q=obama+%2B+nuancedhttp://news.google.com/news?q=obama+%2B+nuanced&ie=UTF-8&scoring=nhttp://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=obama+%2B+nuanced&ie=UTF-8&scoring=d

BRUSSELS -- Radical Muslims in France's housing estates are waging an undeclared "intifada," or uprising, against the police, with violent clashes injuring about 14 officers each day. As the Interior Ministry announced that nearly 2,500 officers had been wounded this year, a police union declared that its members were "in a state of civil war" with Muslims in the most depressed "banlieue" estates. Banlieue, which means outskirts, is the commonly used euphemism for the low-income housing projects heavily populated by unemployed youths of North African origin. The police union said it had asked the government to provide police with armored...

Washington, D.C. (CNSNews.com) - U.S. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts on Tuesday told an audience at the liberal Take Back America conference that he was sorry for voting to authorize the war in Iraq, calling the entire mission "a mistake." "We were misled, we were given evidence that was not true," Kerry said. "It was wrong, and I was wrong to vote [for it]." Kerry, who led an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2004, said it was necessary to admit mistakes because "you cannot change the future if you''re not honest about the past." He criticized supporters of the...

For all the horror stories we’ve heard about euthanasia in recent years, there are still many people who think of it as “mercy killing.” Those people need to take a long, hard look at what’s happening in the Netherlands right now. It’s very difficult to find anything merciful about what Dutch doctors are doing to children and infants. According to Wesley J. Smith in the Daily Standard, Groningen University Hospital in the Netherlands now officially allows doctors to euthanize children under twelve, “if doctors believe their suffering is intolerable or if they have an incurable illness.” That includes non-fatal illnesses...

The Weekly Standard had this great segment on where the Kerry/French Nuanced Diplomacy has lead us to date: For decades rogue states used terrorism as a form of low-level, low cost warfare. Gaddaffi's Libya and the Baathist dictatorships in Syria and Iraq knew that they could not win conventional battles against either the Americans or the Israelis. Instead, they sent terrorists to murder their opponents and extract concessions from them. For these regimes, terrorism was a standard tool of statecraft, a bloodier version of the old diplomatic note. For years the hands off links between al-Qaeda and its state friends...

Two recent stories illustrate why even seemingly intelligent politicians speak in short, dumbed-down sound bytes. One story has to do with the peak of political power; the other concerns lowly me. Let's start at the peak. Last week, N. Gregory Mankiw, the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisors, made the following sensible statement on globalized trade in testimony to Congress as part of introducing this year's Economic Report of the President: Outsourcing of professional services is a prominent example of a new type of trade ... When a good or service is produced at lower cost in another...