Free Republic

This is the only country on Earth that thinks it's not sporting to consider our own interests in choosing immigrants. Try showing up in any other country on the planet, illiterate and penniless, and announcing: "I've seen pictures of your country and it looks great. I think I'd like to live here! Oh, and by the way, would you mind changing all your government and business phone messages, street signs and ballots into my native language? Thanks!" They would laugh you out of the country. What seems not to have occurred to the "NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL" crowd is...

The rise of the Libertarian Movement Party as a national force is the real story in the upcoming presidential election in Costa Rica. The party’s leader, Otto Guevara, has been able to do what no libertarian has achieved anywhere in the western hemisphere, including the United States. Mr. Guevara is currently running third, with 15 percent in the polls; far behind the expected winner Oscar Arias, but a close second to Otton Solis, a classic Latin American populist. The Libertarian Movement party is also well ahead of the Social-Christian Democrats and is set to obtain some 12 seats out 57...

The political action arm of the left-leaning National Council of Churches (NCC) was not very hopeful that President Bush will embrace its own themes in State of the Union address last night. So before any details leaked out about his message, it issued its own "faithful" version of what a State of the Union address should be. Call it pre-emptive leftism. Naturally, the NCC warned against the supposed theocratic ambitions of religious conservatives. Instead, it is promoting its own theocracy of the Left, in which worship is aimed at the welfare state, the Planet Earth, and multicultural understanding. The NCC’s...

The good news: a federal grand jury in Eugene, Oregon, has indicted 11 people on charges that they committed acts of domestic terrorism on behalf of the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front. Moreover, now one of the FBI's "highest domestic terrorism priorities," according to director Robert S. Mueller III, is to prosecute people who commit crimes "in the name of animal rights or the environment." Nevertheless, it remains worrisome that we still dismiss such terrorists as deranged individuals who pervert the ideology of environmentalism. Even more worrisome is that few of us intellectually grasp, and then rise...

Jan. 16, 2006 issue - The surest, quickest way to add quality to primary and secondary education would be addition by subtraction: Close all the schools of education. Consider The Chronicle of Higher Education's recent report concerning the schools that certify America's teachers. Many education schools discourage, even disqualify, prospective teachers who lack the correct "disposition," meaning those who do not embrace today's "progressive" political catechism. Karen Siegfried had a 3.75 grade-point average at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, but after voicing conservative views, she was told by her education professors that she lacked the "professional disposition" teachers need. She...

Every day, news organizations choose which stories to highlight in their news coverage and which to omit. In their coverage of hard news, the media inevitably trumpets meaningless, skewed, or false stories, while overlooking news items of vital importance – and this year was no exception. TOP TEN OVERREPORTED STORIES OF 2005 10. The Passion of Mary Mapes Mary Mapes, you’ll recall, is the former CBS employee who produced the now-infamous “60 Minutes II” story about President Bush’s National Guard service based on forged documents just days before the 2004 election. She accepted the phony “Vietnam-era memos” from a longtime...

When an unhinged antiwar editor is called “perceptive,” “non-partisan” and “truth-telling,” something stinks. The awful stench can be traced to blind partisanship, being totally disingenuous, or simply clueless. So which will it be for the the American Academy of Diplomacy? Clueless, let's hope, for this respected Washington-based group recently anointed a notorious bomb-tossing Midwest editorial editor for its 2005 media award. Mainstream journalists are known to toss accolades only to swingers from the left side. Self-aggrandizement? After all, the near and far left side is where roughly 87% of journalists reside ideologically. Diplomats, too? Is this the cause of sieve-like...

WASHINGTON – In 1986, Gale Norton was 32 and working for the secretary of the interior on matters pertaining to the proposal to open a small portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – area 1002 – to drilling for oil and natural gas, a proposal that then had already been a bone of contention for several years. Today Norton is the secretary of the interior and is working on opening ANWR. But this interminable argument actually could end soon with Congress authorizing drilling. That would be good for energy policy and excellent for the nation's governance. Area 1002 is...

William Burden’s just an unlucky guy. It was bad luck that he was caught by an armed citizen when he was trying to rob a home in Upper Deerfield, New Jersey. It was bad luck that police have been able to tie him to a string of other crimes in southern New Jersey in 2002 and 2003. And it’s just his bad luck that’s led to a sentence of 20 to 30 years for those crimes. Clearly, the crimes William Burden committed are not his fault. At least, that’s what William Burden believes. He recently told a court that the...

President George W. Bush, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and several others are promoting new laws that would grant amnesty or guest-worker status to millions of illegal immigrants living in the United States and to an indefinite number of foreign workers. All these bills should be rejected on moral grounds. Inviting foreigners to come to America as guest workers is like saying: You people are only fit to work the menial jobs that Americans think they are too good to work. We will let you come into the United States for a few years to work low-paid...

The media seem to have come up with a formula that would make any war in history unwinnable and unbearable: They simply emphasize the enemy's victories and our losses. Losses suffered by the enemy are not news, no matter how large, how persistent, or how clearly they indicate the enemy's declining strength. What are the enemy's victories in Iraq? The killing of Americans and the killing of Iraqi civilians. Both are big news in the mainstream media, day in and day out, around the clock. Has anyone ever believed that any war could be fought without deaths on both sides?...

As I make my way, once again, to Iraq to cover the progress U.S. troops have made in rebuilding that country, I have mixed emotions. Of course, I'm pleased and honored to be able to spend time with some of the finest young Americans our country has produced. Relating the stories of brave soldiers and Marines as they protect innocent Iraqis who will go to the polls for their third election in a year is a job a I look forward to performing. These young men and women have worked tirelessly to remove a brutal dictator from power -- a...

(CNSNews.com) - Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-Wis.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said he will introduce legislation on Tuesday addressing "some of the problems" with the U.S. immigration system. "Quite clearly, this system is broken and must be fixed," Sensenbrenner said in a press release. Sensenbrenner said his proposal will focus on prevention, including stronger border security and a "serious interior immigration enforcement effort." "This legislation will demand that people follow the law and be held accountable for their actions -- whether it's an employer hiring illegal workers, a smuggler trafficking in human beings in a 21st...

Mike Wallace says President Bush is afraid to be interviewed by him. The 87-year old reporter for “60 Minutes” made the comment on MSNBC’s “Hardball” earlier this week, in an exchange with host Chris Matthews. MATTHEWS: So why is the man in the oval office afraid of the man on “60 Minutes”? Mike, why is George W. the man in the White House afraid to interview you. WALLACE: Because he pays attention strictly to Karl Rove and that’s why from the very beginning that Karl Rove will not permit him to sit down with me. After seeing this, I can’t...

Wisconsin is, by all accounts, a fairly modern state. They have interstate highways, running water, electricity, and the internet. But Wisconsin doesn’t have something that forty-six other states do: concealed carry. Legislators in the Badger State are working to correct that. For the past few years, bills authorizing residents to carry concealed firearms for personal protection have come up in the Assembly. In fact, last session, the bill passed out of the legislature and ended up on the governor’s desk. But Governor Jim Doyle vetoed the bill, and the override attempt in the legislature ended up one vote short. The...

Animal rights terrorists have won a battle in New York, and all it took was a few gallons of paint and a little trespassing. On the evening of November 15th, according to a press release from the Animal Liberation Front, these thugs went to the home of Lloyd Harbor mayor Leland Hairr. They painted anti-hunting slogans across the home, gained access to the garage (the Animal Liberation Front says the garage door was open), and painted more anti-hunting slogans on both cars. Then they put a statement on the internet containing the mayor’s address and home phone number, adding, “His...

Some people seem to see nothing between zero and infinity. Things are either categorically all right or they are categorically off-limits. This kind of reasoning -- if it can be called reasoning -- is reflected in the stampede to ban torture by Congressional legislation. As far as a general policy is concerned, there is no torture to ban. Isolated individuals here and there may abuse their authority and violate existing laws and policies by their treatment of prisoners but the point is that these are in fact violations. When some individuals violate laws against murder, no one thinks that requires...

The 39th president has been testing our endangered patience by delivering homilettes on any mainstream media outlet that will have him (which is all of them), hawking his newest book, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis – this week’s number one New York Times bestseller. In the Left’s latest, lamest appeal to the “values voters” who tipped the 2004 election, Jimmy Carter tells them an unpleasant truth: they are all bloodthirsty, hard-hearted, racist, sexist, bastards who are destroying the world and making Baby Jesus cry. In his tome, Carter blames all the world’s ills on the rise of “fundamentalism.” Appearing...

On September 28, 2005, New York Governor George Pataki announced that he was removing the controversial proposed International Freedom Center (IFC) from the World Trade Center (WTC) Memorial. His announcement officially ended an important battle in America's 40-year-old culture war and signaled a stunning defeat for the far-Left. The IFC's founders had touted their “Freedom Center” as a “world-class place of education and engagement, helping people to understand, appreciate and advance freedom's narrative of hope.” As the gateway to the greater WTC Memorial it would seek to “educate, inspire and engage people around the world to consider freedom's promise, to...

On May 2, 2005 Ward Churchill was welcomed by a crowd of around five hundred at California State University, Monterey Bay with applause and a standing ovation, concluding to even more thunderous clapping and another, grander ovation. His rant, “Perpetual War: U.S. State-Sponsored Terrorism and the Limits of Academic Dissent,” was part of MEChA’s (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán [Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán]) event, Semana de la Raza [Week of the Race]. This year’s Semana de la Raza, a weeklong series of events, was titled, “Revolutionizing the Globe: Cultra [sic], education y paz [and peace].” The lecture was cosponsored...