Free Republic

So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? Do women get less desirable as they get more successful?"Columnist Maureen Dowd posed those questions in Sunday's New York Times Magazine in an essay adapted from her forthcoming book: "Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide." Entertaining as usual, Dowd explored her premise that many women end up unmarried and childless because they're successful by reviewing women's evolution since her college days, which happen to have coincided with my own. We both came of age as women's lib was being midwifed into the culture by a generation of women who felt...

Was the U.S. Supreme Court fooled by a make-believe sodomy case in Lawrence v. Texas – one manufactured by homosexual activists to entrap police and ensnare the judicial system in a conspiracy to change the law of the land?That is the compelling verdict of a new book, "Sex Appealed: Was the U.S. Supreme Court Fooled?" by Judge Janice Law.It was in the Houston courthouse where Law presided as judge that she first heard rumors that the key figures in what became the landmark Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court case actually invited arrest in a pre-arranged setup designed from the start...

Can anyone help with finding the statistics for how much money the city of New Orleans spends on Mardi Gras as opposed to disaster preparedness. I have been a freeper for some years now and this is my first vanity post. Please be kind!

Born to immigrant parents in New York, Ronald Walken was the youngest of three boys. While his father ran the little bakery he owned, the boys' mother was a member of the Stage Mothers' Society and was always bringing the little ones to television auditions and photo shoots. Young Ronnie's first role was posing with cats for a calendar when he was three years old, and by the time he was ten, he and his brothers were enrolled in tap dancing classes and regularly performed on television variety shows. In their free time, the boys would help their father with...

As Judith Miller of The New York Times approaches the end of her second week in a Virginia jail, reports from behind bars reveal she is enduring stomach problems from jail food. She is also sharing a cell unit that had originally been designed to house just one person. Because of that, Miller had been forced to sleep on a mattress on the floor for a few days but now has her own bed. "It has definitely dawned on her that this is really in jail -- it is certainly no summer camp," Times Executive Editor Bill Keller told E&P...

Back in the days of the Hapsburg Empire, there was a town in Bohemia called Budweis. The people in that town were called Budweisers and the town had a brewery which produced beer with the same name -- but different from the American Budweiser. Like many communities in Bohemia during that era, Budweis had people of both Czech and German ancestries, speaking different languages, though many were also bilingual. They got along pretty well and most people there thought of themselves as Budweisers, rather than as Czechs or Germans. But that would later change -- for the worse -- not...

I am convinced God uses trials like the Terri Schiavo case to test men. Pinellas County Circuit Court Judge George Greer was tested – and found wanting. He had seven years to consider this case and got it wrong every time. I don't know Greer personally, but I know many people like him. They go to church on Sunday and then between Monday and Friday lead lives with no seeming connection to what they hear preached in the pulpit, what they read in the Bible, what they claim to believe of the Christian faith. This may be the biggest single...

With the recent toppling of CBS's Dan Rather and now CNN's top news executive, Eason Jordan, I think we can declare without fear of contradiction that rigor mortis is settling over the carcass of the Fourth Estate. At least as we once knew it. I make this pronouncement without pleasure, and in fact, suggest that we're really witnessing a double funeral. One is for traditional journalism as the omnipotent gatekeeper of information. As bloggers - authors of Web logs - have gleefully pointed out the past several days, everyone with access to the Internet is now a journalist. Given the...

What an odd couple. Who would ever link Jerry Orbach with Susan Sontag? What could the popular hoofer-singer-actor and the always-on intellectual have had in common? Like life, death will bring the strangest people together in the headlines. Both died on the same day last week in Manhattan - he of prostate cancer at 69, she of complications of leukemia at 71. In a way, both were in show business, but only Jerry Orbach knew it. For him, it was the family business. He was born in the Bronx in 1935, the son of a vaudevillian father and radio songstress....

During upcoming confirmation hearings for Attorney General-nominee Alberto Gonzales, senior Democrats want to screen infamous videotapes showing Iraqis being abused at Abu Ghraib prison, top sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT. The curtain is raised Thursday for the Senate Judiciary Committee's showdown with Gonzales. The Bush White House counsel will be grilled about his role in formulating the administration's legal policies on coercive techniques in interrogations -- techniques some Democrats believe led to outright torture! Yet it's the grainy prison videos, shot by a soldier's cellphone and never before viewed by the public, that threaten to turn the New Year ugly:...

NH is called for Kerry...but I have done the math and to me it is still a toss-up!

NEW YORK — One person's trash is literally another person's treasure, if that person happens to be a freegan (search). They’re not vegans who refuse to eat meat or animal products; these people eat out of the garbage. Freegans generally are activists. They believe we live in a capitalistic society gone mad where food, like so many other items, is needlessly tossed out.

Yesterday I saw some geek wearing a T-shirt that said "Somewhere a town in Texas is missing its Idiot" (or some such) on the back! It got me thinking about the definition of idiocy. I don't have to get the dictionary to know it as well as most people, but it is time the distinctions were discussed. Regarding the constant ape-like chants and missives about how stupid George Bush is, I think it is high time for factual comparisons of idiotic behavioural patterns.Fact: Pres. Bush piloted an F-102 successfull for approx. 4 years and did not crash once! If he...

An NHL hockey team's idea to get more fans in the stands by offering free beer is leading to a brawl of words off the ice.The Tampa Bay Lightning will give patrons all the beer they can drink during the playoffs if they agree to purchase season tickets. Those who deposit $100 for 2004-05 season passes are eligible for unlimited free brew during the games, according to a scoreboard announcement on Saturday.But police and safe-driving advocates in Southwest Florida think the idea belongs in the penalty box. "Why attach alcohol to a season-ticket plan? It's almost encouraging people to drink...

Israel's security fence, plus its recent assassinations of Hamas leaders, are responsible for a major decrease in Palestinian terrorism and an absence of suicide bombings in Israel proper since February, Raanan Gissin, chief spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, tells WorldNetDaily."While terror alerts are at an all-time high, the Palestinian ability to carry out suicide bombings is at an all-time low because of the fence and our relentless efforts to keep terrorists, especially Hamas, constantly on the run," explained Gissin. However, he also voiced concern over the possibility that terrorists would now resort to firing rockets over the fence.Since...

U.S. authorities have identified more than a billion dollars in Iraqi assets in banks in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan and are pursuing hundreds of leads in the United States concerning possible illicit financial transactions with the former Iraqi government.Treasury, Internal Revenue Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have spent nine months poring over financial records recovered from the vault of the Central Bank of Iraq, including records they say show how Saddam Hussein's government diverted at least $1.8 billion from the United Nations' humanitarian oil-for-food program and moved some of that money to foreign banks or used it...

Arab television channel Al Jazeera on Friday aired a new videotape of a man it said was one of the September 11 hijackers, reading his will and saying it was a Muslim duty to fight the "American enemy"."America is the enemy that every Muslim should fight. There is no way the Arab nation can be saved except through jihad (holy war)," said the speaker, identified as Saeed Alghamdi, wearing military fatigues and an Arab headscarf.The tape also showed Alghamdi during military exercises in a remote area which Al Jazeera said was in Afghanistan. He was shown jumping out of a...

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi met the European Commission (news - web sites) on Friday in a frescoed villa in Rome, hoping to patch up Italy's scarred European Union (news - web sites) presidency after his Nazi jibe upset much of the continent.Berlusconi appeased German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on Thursday, telling him by phone that he regretted having compared a German politician to a Nazi concentration camp guard.But European Parliament President Pat Cox said this was not enough."The incident happened on the floor of the European Parliament, not in Berlin. There is a need for clarification by Berlusconi with the European...

MOSCOW, Oct. 28 -- Muscovites who switched on Channel 3 Friday for the 6 o'clock news about the mesmerizing hostage crisis were suddenly presented with a blank screen. Moskovia TV was not allowed back on the air until 15 hours later, after the standoff had ended, as punishment for what the press minister considered improper coverage. The station's blackout is just one example of how the Kremlin has muscled the mass media throughout the hostage crisis, prohibiting doctors who treated freed hostages from speaking publicly and reprimanding an official newspaper for insensitivity in publishing the photo of a dead victim....

First the spelling bee champion was tagged with sending a spelling error-ridden dispatch to the nation's leaders. Later the student of history was fooled by a fake Shakespeare internet hoax, but not before delivering a performance before thousands. The stormy week in Malibu ends with a look at the financials... Dissing Diva Barbra Streisand may be warning the nation about Vice President Dick Cheney and the evils of Republican big business interests, but a DRUDGE REPORT investigation can reveal: Streisand bought and traded 800 shares of HALLIBURTON -- while Dick Cheney was its chief executive! IRS tax returns show Streisand...