Free Republic

<p>BATON ROUGE -- The race to become Louisiana's next governor is threatening to become an international incident.</p> <p>Republican Bobby Jindal's campaign to become the first Indian-American governor in American history has touched a nerve with some Pakistani-Americans, who are lining up to support Democrat Kathleen Blanco in the Nov. 15 runoff.</p>

Bethlehem has come a long way since Phillips Brooks assisted in a midnight church service on Christmas Eve, 1865. His inspiration born that night resulted in the words to the now-famous Christmas carol about the quiet village in whose "dark streets shineth the everlasting Light." That light is gone from Bethlehem. In its place are terrorists, and those who hunt them. I spent last week in Israel and I met with many senior Israeli military officials, a smattering of politicians, and some of the Palestinians' principal representatives. It doesn't take much to learn why Arafat's "intifada" is now in its...

FLASH: SHARPTON TO HOST 'SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE' DEC 6... Lorne Michaels: 'He's been really funny and I think he's been refreshing in the debates. He is, to say the least, theatrical'...

AN influential Lebanese politician and leader of its Druze community triggered US outrage today when he expressed regret US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was unhurt in a Baghdad rocket attack. "We hope the firing will be more precise and efficient (next time), so we get rid of this microbe and people like him in Washington who are spreading disorder in Arab lands, Iraq and Palestine," Walid Jumblatt said in a statement. Jumblatt, who is also the leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, called Wolfowitz a "friend of Ariel Sharon", the hardline Israeli prime minister, "and one of the main...

A presidential primary is a way for a political party to make up its mind. Through the process of nominating a candidate, a party figures out its stances on the new issues and what adjustments, if any, it will make in its positions on the old. So with that, through their collective rhetoric and actions, the ten Democratic candidates have arrived at the outlines of a rough philosophy — the credo of the Democrats of '04. This credo is often nonsensical and hypocritical, but it is clearly discernible. The Democrats of '04 believe: That wars should be authorized, but never...

Al Qaeda's new threats to conduct a series of homicide hijackings should have encouraged the Department of Homeland Security to establish procedures that would provide the highest degree of security possible to the flying public in a cost-effective manner. Instead, during NBC's Meet the Press, on August 3, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge remarked merely that airline passengers are much more secure today than they were before September 11, 2001. However, he conceded, "it will be several years until we get the kind of robust system that we need" to protect air travelers. Almost two years and approximately $2.5 billion...

<p>'I'll be honest with you,' Lance Armstrong said to me once, 'I don't wake up every morning thinking, 'I want to be an inspiration to somebody today.' '</p> <p>The next time I see Lance, he'll probably be sitting on the porch of his favorite home, a one-room cabin overlooking his Austin ranch, wearing a t-shirt, jeans and flip-flops, and a two-day growth on his chin. He'll be drinking a Shiner Bock beer while he watches his kids roll down a hill of rich grass that he planted for that purpose, and I'll stare at him, and try to reconcile the regular guy I know with the heroic, iron-faced figure who's now won the Tour de France five times.</p>

Keith Olbermann, often described as the thinking man's idiot (or is that the idiot's thinking man?) said on MSNBC a few nights ago: "Jonah Goldberg of National Review said on CNN that you would bring 'slack-jawed yokels, hicks, weirdoes, pervs, and whatnots.' And apart from considering the source there, at what point did we stop letting yokels, hicks, weirdoes, pervs, and whatnots vote? We let Jonah Goldberg vote." Jerry Springer responded, "Well, you make a good point. But that's the elitism. That's the elitism that is part of the problem. Our government right now is very good at protecting the...