Free Republic

Well, my good friend Grover Norquist may finally see his lifelong dream come true. It looks like the Left is finally going to leave us all alone. If everything goes according to plan, blue-state Democrats are going to let us keep our guns and our money and our kids and our faith — and all the other things that government keeps trying to wrest from us. Allow me to explain the basis for my optimism. The Canadian embassy reports that the requests from U.S. citizens for travel visas, citizenship applications, and political-asylum petitions have skyrocketed since the glorious day of...

I agree with Christopher Hitchens about many things and disagree with him about many things, but even when I disagree I still admire him, because like his hero, George Orwell, Hitchens is a man of great moral seriousness. He is also, probably not coincidentally, a man of great courtesy. I've seen this in the respect with which he treats all audience questions at his talks. And also, as I discovered when I stood in line last year to get my copy of Why Orwell Matters signed, in how he autographs copies of his books. People often buy books in these...

For 60 years, American troops in the tens of thousands have been sitting in Germany essentially where Eisenhower left them at the end of World War II. For 50 years, American troops in the tens of thousands have been sitting where Matthew Ridgway left them at the end of the Korean War. For three years, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been making plans to undo this colossal idiocy. On Monday, President Bush formally unveiled plans to withdraw 60,000 to 70,000 American troops from obsolete battle stations. Some are to come home. Others are to be redeployed to Eastern Europe, the...

Maxim. FHM. Playboy. Naked (or half-naked) Olympians are going to be all over the newsstands real soon, if they haven't already arrived in your mailbox. There's nothing new here. Ever since the ancient Greeks trained in what author Tony Perrottet calls "palaces of pederasty," and competed nude before thousands of men and (young) women, sex has been part of the Games. But there's been a revival of late. Over the past 10 years, Olympians and Olympian wannabe's have been stripping down in ever-increasing numbers. At Page 2, we like to keep abreast of these issues, as you know. So we...

One of Pakistan's most influential and religious politicians will travel to Oslo later this month to speak before local Muslims. His party has earlier hailed Osama bin Laden, and he's been denied entry to Belgium and the Netherlands. Qazi Hussain Ahmed is due to speak in Oslo later this month. Norwegian officials, however, appear set to allow him travel to Norway in connection with festivities marking Pakistan's national day on August 14. Norway has a large Pakistani community. The Islamic Cultural Center in Oslo's Grønland neighbourhood has invited Qazi Hussain Ahmed, leader of Pakistan's largest religious party, to Oslo. He's...

While on a tour of the museum at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland on Sunday, a group of around 50 Jewish university students from Israel, the U.S. and Poland were verbally attacked by a three-member gang of French male tourists. Evidently incited by the presence of an Israeli flag wrapped around the shoulders of Tamar Schuri, an Israeli student from Ben Gurion University, the first assailant ran at the group while its members were being guided through a model gas chamber and crematoria and began swearing and hurling anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli insults. "He told us to go back to...

Two predictions: 1) George W Bush will win a second term as president of the United States. 2) He will be sorry he did. The dog that did not bark at the Democratic Party's convention was opposition to the Iraq war. To the chagrin of the Europeans, who oppose the war by vast margins, the Democratic leadership all but muzzled opponents of a war. The battle will be fought on Bush's ground. Senator John Kerry set himself up for defeat by making an issue of the conduct of the Iraq war, rather than the war itself. Bush will pull a...

Because I live in L.A.'s bohemian Silver Lake neighborhood and this is an election year, I regularly get invited to Bush-bashing parties by people who assume I'm a fellow traveler. (For some reason, the notion of a female Republican who doesn't look like Phyllis Schlafly seems difficult for many liberals to comprehend.) Usually I politely decline, for obvious reasons. But there's something to be said for seeing the other side in action now and then. So when my old friend Adam Parfrey, who runs the cult L.A. publishing company Feral House, invited me to a double-header election-year salon Saturday night...

It was hardly shocking that Al Sharpton was permitted to speak at the Democratic Convention. But a scandal needn't be a surprise to still be a scandal. What is stunning, however, is how his speech has been received. Business Week has hailed him as "the toast of the Democratic Establishment" and the usual nattering-chattering shows are treating him like an elder statesmen of the party. One would call it a rehabilitation, except for the fact he was never habilitated in the first place. Sharpton's re-creation is all the more miraculous — and disgusting — because it came without an apology...

It's official: The Left doesn't believe that Islamic terrorism exists. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, terror watch lists are nothing more than the product of John Ashcroft's paranoid imagination, and should play no more role in government policy than a compendium of his favorite anthems. The ACLU's dismissal of terror information is just the latest manifestation of the Left's blindness to national-security reality. The only remaining question is why such posturers continue to influence national defense. The ACLU's diatribe against terrorist watch lists comes as it is caught out in rank hypocrisy and deceit. This self-described fighter for...

In 2000, then-Gov. George W. Bush introduced the idea of letting workers invest some of their Social Security funds into presidential politics. This year, however, he has been less vocal about the issue, largely out of deference to House Republican leaders who worry that reform is a vote loser. Now some congressmen are stepping forward to make it clear that not everyone in the House Republican conference is afraid of the issue. Rep. Paul Ryan (Wisc.) introduced a private-account bill this week. Another one was introduced by Sam Johnson (Tex.), with Reps. Jeff Flake (Ariz.) and Pat Toomey (Penn.) as...

TUZ, IRAQ — As I walked into the barracks, Sgt. Kevin Porter, a 23-year-old trooper in the Ohio National Guard serving south of Kirkuk, Iraq, called me over. He had just received a package from his family in Bellaire, Ohio, which included a then-weeks-old copy of his local newspaper. The op-ed page featured a column by Andy Rooney opining about the character and morale of servicemen in Iraq. Rooney offered five questions that he wished a reporter would ask the soldiers, a group he dubbed "victims" rather than "heroes." Although Sgt. Porter is not someone who frequently talked politics or...

A ROMANIAN surgeon underwent a fit of madness while operating on a patient's testicles and instead cut off the man's penis and sliced it into three pieces, hospital officials said. The surgeon, Naum Ciomu, was described as a senior member of the hospital staff and a professor of anatomy. He had been operating on a 34-year-old man for a testicular malformation when he committed the act, the officials said. "We are shocked by what has happened. It is the first time we have had such a case," said Sorin Oprescu, head of the Bucharest emergency hospital where the patient was...

On a sultry night in late June, when the school term was nearly over, two dozen parents gathered in a church basement in Brooklyn to talk about what a waste the year had been. Immigrants from Mexico and the Dominican Republic, raising their children in the battered neighborhood of Bushwick, they were the people bilingual education supposedly serves. Instead, one after the other, they condemned a system that consigned their children to a linguistic ghetto, cut off from the United States of integration and upward mobility. These parents were not gadflies and chronic complainers. Patient and quiet, the women clad...

BANGKOK - This city of glorious Buddhist temples and gigantic traffic jams is hosting 20,000 delegates from 160 countries - along with celebs like Ashley Judd, Richard Gere, Oprah Winfrey and Rupert Everett - at the 15th international conference to fight AIDS. But, as usual at these global extravaganzas, the real agenda is kick the United States in the butt. Never mind that U.S. taxpayers will provide more money this year to fight AIDS than the governments of the rest of the world combined. Never mind that U.S. research and development has given the world the drugs that now prevent...

No matter how you look at it, federal involvement in education has been a failure. Nonetheless, with the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the federal presence is getting bigger, not smaller. Yet the seeds of revolt have been sown: Parents, educators, and legislators are increasingly restive, and the NCLB is likely to be a critical issue in the upcoming presidential election. So it's time to decide: Should the feds stay or go? In 1965, the year the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) — of which NCLB is the most recent version — was passed, the federal government spent...

When I was in business school several years ago, my macroeconomics professor assigned one of Paul Krugman's books for us to read; it was a collection of essays about President George W. Bush's economic plan. Dutifully, my classmates and I read the book, researched Krugman's position, and spent time analyzing his arguments. I was disappointed that in his June 29 article, "Who Lost Iraq?," Krugman didn't apply the same standards of honest research and analysis to me and my father, Michael Ledeen, that I had applied to him. Criticizing what he claims are the failures of the Coalition Provisional Authority...

It has come to this: The crux of the political left's complaint about Americans is that they are insufficiently materialistic. For a century, the left has largely failed to enact its agenda for redistributing wealth. What the left has achieved is a rich literature of disappointment, explaining the mystery, as the left sees it, of why most Americans are impervious to the left's appeal. An interesting addition to this canon is "What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America." Its author, Thomas Frank, argues that his native Kansas -- like the nation, only more so --...

It made sense to kill the Crusader self-propelled howitzer program, a bulky cold war left-over developing so slowly it wouldn't be available before the Starship Enterprise. We also didn't need the Comanche stealth helicopter when our problem is losing choppers to low-tech ground fire. But the stealth F/A-22 Raptor fighter, with apologies to those who consider every new military project a boondoggle, we need this jet. And far more of it than Congress plans to buy. Even critics admit the Raptor is an incredible fighting machine. Slated to enter Air Force service next year, it blends key technologies that before...

A 75-year-old man's body parts were found strewn all over a house in the city's Fishtown section Thursday and police said that his dog had been eating him. Relatives of the dead man, Burt Burnhart, said they had not talked to him for about a month so they went to his home. They said it was not uncommon for him not to answer the door. They had been checking on him, but after four weeks they decided it was time to call police. Around 10:30 a.m., police and family members entered the house and they found Burnhart's remains scattered throughout...