Free Republic

Republicans have given up the pretense that their party is the party of small government. “One of the most misunderstood parts of Hoosier culture is that Hoosiers are reluctant of change of any kind,” State Rep. Luke Messer told Brian Howey, publisher of Indianapolis Eye News, in an article that identifies an undercurrent in Indiana to have a constitutional convention. “If we have a strong leader, Hoosiers are willing to step up and make big changes. Bob Knight and Larry Bird were pretty big figures in Hoosier culture and they have been willing to make big changes. What we want...

After being elected twice as a Republican to the position of county attorney in Anderson County, Kan., Fred Campbell decided following the Nov. 2 elections to drop his Republican Party affiliation in favor of the Libertarian Party, saying the GOP has abandoned the idea of minimal government. Campbell was re-elected in November with no opposition. He has been a Republican for years, primarily because he's "always been in favor of less government rather than more," he said. "I've always thought that the Republican Party was the major party that went along with that philosophy," Campbell explained. "But in the last...

A 12-year-old New Hampshire boy who wanted to jolly up his junior high dance by dressing in a Santa suit instead got a lesson in political correctness when his Scroogelike principal turned the student away, fearing he might offend his classmates.

Ashcroft v. Raich, the Supreme Court's medical marijuana case, isn't really about medical marijuana. It's about power -- the power of Congress to exert control, and the power of the Constitution to rein Congress in. The named plaintiff in this case is Angel McClary Raich, a California mother of two afflicted with an awful array of diseases, including tumors in her brain and uterus, asthma, severe weight loss, and endometriosis. To ease her symptoms, doctors put her on dozens of standard medications. When none of them helped, they prescribed marijuana. That did help -- so much so that Raich, who...

NEW YORK (Nov. 14) -- For some New Yorkers, a shoe sale is an incidental thing, a chance to pick up a pair of loafers, or rummage through racks of heels. For Lorraine Koppell, shoes are a matter worth suing over. Ms. Koppell, a lawyer and the wife of G. Oliver Koppell, a city councilman and a lawyer himself, is part of a class-action lawsuit filed in Manhattan Civil Court this month. Her adversary is Bloomingdale's. The suit, filed by a neighbor who went to the same Bloomingdale's sale, claims that the store misled shoppers in a sale flier last...

I just joined www.smartstocks.com and have created a group for freepers.Its a stock market simulation game that lets you pick real stocks from the stock market and track how well you do with them.They give you 1 million dollars to start out with and they track the rise or fall of the stocks in each group.The group I created is called freepers rule and the password to join the group is freeple.Once you sign up go to the left hand side of the page and click groups then scroll down the list of groups. freepers rule is about 1/4 of...

Inalienable Rights - what they are, and are not! Libertarianism is a political philosophy that holds that consent is the basis of morality and therefore that any activity - prostitution, "assisted" suicide, you-name-it between consenting adults ought to be legal. Libertarians also believe that man "owns" himself, and therefore may do anything to himself he pleases - use drugs, commit suicide, again, you-name-it. It is logically impossible for Libertarianism to be America's founding philosophy. At least 30 years ago, most Americans could quote the beginning of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be...

Update at 4:30 pm nov 3 results for all presidental candidates ALL CANDIDATES CANDIDATE VOTE TOTAL VOTE % John Kerry, Democrat 55,104,702 48% George W. Bush, Republican (incumbent) 58,640,799 51% Ralph Nader, independent 392,219 0% Michael Badnarik, Libertarian 374,741 0% Michael Peroutka, constitution party 129,162 0% David Cobb, green party 104,591 0% Leonard Peltier, peace and freedom party 21,616 0% Gene Amondson, Prohibition Party 1,895 0% Andy Andress, Unaffiliated (no websites for candidate or party )716 0% Walter Brown, Socialist Party USA 10,258 0% Roger Calero, socialist workers party 5,263 0% Earl F. Dodge, Prohibition party 122 0% Thomas Harens,...

There's been a lot of vitriol hurled at both Democrats and Republicans this election, but I'd like to focus on one party that has, until this point, largely escaped some richly deserved criticism. The voters. That's right, the precious American voters: Sacred stewards of democracy. You don't have to spin around in an election cycle for long to discover that a shocking number of voters are in fact gullible, greedy, oblivious to facts, or simply fundamentally retarded. However, three types of voters deserve special mention for taking their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote, and essentially wiping their with it. Let's...

The vice presidential candidates' debate tonight between Republican Vice President Dick Cheney and Democrat Sen. John Edwards, touted by the mass media as a possible pivot point in the presidential election, is missing a vital component -- four other candidates for the same office. Because several candidates were excluded from the "official" debate, there will actually be two debates between vice presidential candidates tonight in Cleveland, Ohio. Libertarian Richard Campagna, Pat LaMarche of the Green Party, Ralph Nader's independent running mate Peter Camejo, and Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party all plan to take part in a debate for "third...

The false spider mite has been revealed as the first known animal to make do with only one set of chromosomes, challenging traditional theories of evolution... Using standard sequencing techniques, Weeks's team found the mites' chromosomes to be very different. As far as the researchers could tell, none of the mites carried two identical copies of any particular gene. They conclude that the species is exclusively haploid. Weeks thinks being exclusively haploid might give the animals an evolutionary advantage... This genetic state may be rare simply because diploidy was "frozen" early in evolution and other animals haven't had the...

I have created a public register of "bump lists" here on Free Republic. I define a bump list as a name listed in the "To" field used to index articles. Free Republic Bump List Register

<p>The world of massively multiplayer online games is often a dangerous place, what with constant threats from bloodthirsty monsters and murderous non-player characters. But now players have even more peril to contend with: addictive drugs that can incapacitate or kill their characters.</p>

Yes, I inhale. I am one of more than 100,000 California medical cannabis patients. I use cannabis, marijuana, pot or whatever you want to call it, to alleviate symptoms from post-traumatic stress and bipolar disorders. Cannabis allows me to forget about my neuroses and live a productive life as a student, volunteer, and activist. The U.S. government likes to paint cannabis as an evil monster, but that is not true. Most taxpayers are tired of billions of dollars being spent to wage a drug war that's done nothing but widen the profit margin of drug dealers and placed millions of...

A team of military intelligence and police drug enforcement units rounded up some 50 Muslim residents of the Al-Salam Mosque Compound in Barangay Culiat, Quezon City as part of intensified operations against illegal drugs and firearms in the metropolis. Senior Superintendent Procopio Lipana, chief of the Central Police District-Criminal Investigation Unit (CPD-CIU), said 12 suspects remained under their custody while the rest were released. Lipana identified the 12 as Dawabe Ben Albi Maulana, businessman from Basilan; Musa Sabaddin Abdurahman, 27; Awop Wadja Ignus, 26; Radjail Karawan Tirih, 34; Raquel Francisco Mabajo, 26; Pamaran Alain Awali, 48; Abubakar Cuevas Zunco, 34;...

KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge, dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc: Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that "speech, or... the press" also means the Internet, see Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), and that "persons, houses, papers, and effects" also means public telephone booths, see Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967). When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases -- or even the...

A healthy society needs censorship to survive, 1950s musical icon Pat Boone said yesterday. He added that he would welcome strong content restrictions governing movies and other artistic works. "I don't think censorship is a bad word, but it has become a bad word because everybody associates it with some kind of restriction on liberty," said Mr. Boone, who is in Washington making the rounds as the national spokesman for the 60-Plus Association, a conservative senior citizen lobby.

Amaani Lyle was fired four months into her job for Warner Brothers as a writers' assistant on "Friends" because she couldn't type fast enough to record the writers' dictation accurately. She sued for sexual harassment because the comedy writers would regularly make jokes about women and sex in the process of writing a sitcom about the sexual adventures of six thirty-somethings. A California appeals court has decided that a jury should resolve whether the jokes made by the comedy writers were appropriate for writing a sitcom or whether they created an actionable "hostile working environment for women." Summary judgment was...

LONDON – When is a spanking more than a spanking? When does parental discipline cross the line from an occasional spank to keep an unruly child in order to a beating? The great parenting debate is now a great federal government debate here. As a new children's bill makes its way through Parliament, ministers and officials are debating whether all forms of corporal punishment - even by parents - should be banned. The government has taken state interference in personal behavior to a new level; it now seems to distrust parents so much that it thinks they can't distinguish between...

"I won’t go to jail." Bob Schulz announces this in late January to a rapt crowd of 200 gathered in an auditorium in Crystal City, Virginia. It’s the first national conference of the We The People Foundation for Constitutional Education, a nonprofit advocacy group Schulz founded and runs. He delivers his declaration not with reckless bravado but with a dignified, quiet, middle-management-lifer assurance, in keeping with his general mien. Schulz is a serious white male in a nice conservative dark suit, a former environmental engineer for both General Electric and the Environmental Protection Agency. He’s been married for 38 years...