Free Republic

For the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice, and without an image, and without an ephod, and without teraphim: Afterward shall the children of Israel return, and seek the Lord their God, and David their king; and shall fear the Lord and his goodness in the latter days.(Hosea 3:4-5)Hosea was one of the Hebrew Prophets who saw the short and long term future of the nation.What Hosea saw, was that Israel, the wife of Jahweh had become a harlot,faithless to her God, but seeking after foreign alliances and...

Watch out! ACORN is back -- in all but its name. Backed by hundreds of thousands of dollars in union donations, New York Communities for Change -- a rebranded version of the controversial organization that closed up shop amid several scandals -- is acting again as labor's attack dog on controversial issues. NYCC took over ACORN's office on Nevins Street in Brooklyn, shares some of the same board members and uses its membership lists and other resources. (Snip) But when NYCC has to choose between low-income consumers and unions, it dances to Big Labor's tune.

The woolly mammoth, extinct for thousands of years, could be brought back to life in as little as four years thanks to a breakthrough in cloning technology. Previous efforts in the 1990s to recover nuclei in cells from the skin and muscle tissue from mammoths found in the Siberian permafrost failed because they had been too badly damaged by the extreme cold. But a technique pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse from the cells of another mouse that had been frozen for 16 years.

The once great GOP of Reagan's era sits in mourning tonight. The party that only yesterday it seems stood for hard work, self reliance, independence from government intervention, God, family and the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness found it's hopes tied to a moderate Democrat dressed in conservative clothing. Don't blame McCain. He rightfully accepted the opportunity granted him by a media bent on the elimination of Romney, Thompson and Huckabee for a candidate they felt they could control. Too old. Too liberal. Too much like Bush. Too hard to pass up. A Republican whose best friend in Washington...

Preacher Dan Smith turned a rap song about babes with booty into a spoof Internet hit, and used it to help create a new church for people who hate church. Dan Smith thinks Christians take themselves too seriously. Pastor Dan Smith's 'Baby Got Book' video, a big hit online, helped him start his Momentum Church. "We can be dorks," he says after Sunday service in suburban Cleveland. "We can be Ned Flanders and basically speak jargon that nobody understands." The 33-year-old pastor has made it his mission to turn the notion of earnest, boring, humorless Christianity on its head —...

SACRAMENTO -- A stalled, highly controversial bill boosting local and state public safety employee pension caps to 100 percent of workers' final salaries has been quietly resurrected and is advancing at the 11th hour of this year's legislative session. The proposal, backed by at least one prominent Bay Area legislator but opposed by many cash-strapped cities, originally applied only to local police and firefighters. It has now been broadened to also allow California Highway Patrol officers and state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection personnel to receive the same pension enhancement -- a move that follows their salary concessions in...