Free Republic

Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates. Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction. In his book, “The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement,”...

Supermarkets, hotels, councils and universities could be given a "cap" on the amount of carbon dioxide they are allowed to emit within five years under Government plans announced yesterday to set legally binding carbon reduction targets. Any business or public body wanting to use more power than its allocation would have to buy low-carbon technology or purchase carbon credits on the open market under the powers contained in a draft Climate Change Bill. The new legislation, binding the UK to an ambitious 60 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050, was published as ministers stepped up their attack on...

The strokes of cartoonists' pens have proven mighty enough to open deep fault lines in European society. The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten was trying to demonstrate an important truth about tolerance and freedom of speech when it commissioned a dozen cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad that it published Sept. 30. The truth: People in Europe have become frightened of saying things that Muslims might find offensive, for fear of violence and the threat of violence. The newspaper's demonstration has been more powerful than it could have imagined. Protests in Copenhagen spread to other countries, as newspapers in those nations reprinted the...

Not often do Rush Limbaugh and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman agree on anything but recently both of them pointed out the same pattern in the prices of housing -- and both were correct. The pattern is this: Despite hysteria over high home prices, in most parts of the United States housing is quite affordable. But in some places housing prices are astronomical -- three times the national average in much of California, for example. Despite the old rule of thumb that housing should cost no more than one fourth of your income, there are parts of California where...

The man who sparked the flat tax revolution is former Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar. He governed his country from 1992 to 1995 and from 1999 to 2002. When the historian became Prime Minister in 1992 at the age of 32 he knew nothing about economy. Laar’s area of expertise were Europe’s 19th-century national movements. “It is very fortunate that I was not an economist,” he says. “I had read only one book on economics – Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose.” I was so ignorant at the time that I thought that what Friedman wrote about the benefits of privatisation,...

When faced with a new battle, the enemies of gun manufactures, tobacco companies, fast food chains, and free enterprise in general usually adhere to the following well-tested pattern for whipping-up some public sympathy: Step 1: Identify people who knowingly and willfully caused harm to themselves or others. For example, a good selection would be someone who smoked for 30 years despite the large warning with the word "cancer" prominently featured on the side of every single pack of cigarettes they ever touched. Another good selection would be someone who loaded a Beretta 92, walked into a 7-Eleven, and shot the...

The "animal rights" movement has pulled off a deadly deception: promote a vicious, anti-human policy, while feigning benevolent, compassionate motives. The deception takes the form of opposing life-saving medical research--in the name of opposing cruelty to animals. [...] The founder of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, has declared unequivocally that animal research is "immoral even if it's essential" and that "Even painless research is fascism, supremacism." When questioned what her movement's stance would be if animal tests produced a cure for AIDS, Newkirk responded: "We'd be against it." Chris DeRose, founder of the group Last Chance for Animals, writes: "If the death...

A recent e-mail from a dedicated teacher illustrates a problem that has received far too little attention. In her kindergarten class was a little black girl who did well except for getting a very obvious question wrong. It turned out that the little girl had no problem with the concepts or the facts but had misinterpreted a word because it sounded like another word that she had heard used at home, where a "black English" dialect was spoken. Since the teacher was white, she knew that she was running a risk by getting into this issue. Opening this can of...

VIENNA, Austria -- Oil prices fell by more than $1 a barrel yesterday, bringing the decline in crude futures to more than $4 a barrel in the past three days. Brokers attributed the drop to profit-taking at the end of the second quarter, rising U.S. supplies of oil and related products and solid refinery output. After falling as low as $55.90, light sweet crude for August delivery settled 76 cents lower at $56.50 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The Nymex contract has been sliding since Monday's record close of $60.54 a barrel. "What started the decline from...

Weare, New Hampshire (PRWEB) Could a hotel be built on the land owned by Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter? A new ruling by the Supreme Court which was supported by Justice Souter himself itself might allow it. A private developer is seeking to use this very law to build a hotel on Souter's land. Justice Souter's vote in the "Kelo vs. City of New London" decision allows city governments to take land from one private owner and give it to another if the government will generate greater tax revenue or other economic benefits when the land is developed by...

We are told that United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan gasped when informed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that President Bush intends to send John Bolton to New York to represent this nation's interests before the world body. Annan had been hoping, no doubt, for someone more malleable who would politely look the other way or at least keep his mouth shut as the various scandals rocking the United Nations play out, someone more like departing Ambassador John Danforth. Danforth may have represented the Bush administration, but he was a team player who did little to upset things and he...

America's domestic shortage of natural gas is, as Alan Greenspan has observed, "a very serious problem." Fortunately, there is a proven technology that could enable Americans to access plentiful natural gas stores from overseas: Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG)--natural gas cooled and condensed into a portable liquid, 1/600th its original volume. Given these facts, one might expect energy-short state governments to eagerly approve corporations' proposals for new LNG facilities; instead, bowing to pressure from environmentalists, they are repeatedly rejecting them. [...] The environmentalists' proclamations of danger and doom are not honest errors based on an overzealous concern for human safety and...

"I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot," said presidential candidate John Kerry when he learned he was losing in the polls. This statement shows why Kerry got wiped out during the latest election. Most Americans do not find the president stupid. The "West Wing's" Martin Sheen, after the 2000 election, pronounced the president "a moron." Teresa Heinz Kerry called anyone who disagreed with her husband's health care plan "idiots." "The Boondocks" cartoonist Aaron McGruder called the president "functionally illiterate."

To America's Armed Forces: Millions of your countrymen back home just enjoyed Christmas and New Year celebrations in peace because you are willing to stand in harm's way in places far away. But the new year is upon us and with it will come a political assault on your efforts to combat the global threat of terrorism. Since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, you have been deployed around the world and have demonstrated that you can win both the war against global terrorism, and the peace in formerly inhospitable places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The effects of the...

Summary: Since stoning people to death is a tradition in parts of the Middle East, that might be the most appropriate way to execute Saddam Hussein. If each relative of someone murdered by Saddam were allowed to throw a stone, the line might stretch back for miles. Television pictures of that line, broadcast throughout the Arab world, could completely undermine any notion that this is just an American vendetta against Moslems.

We, the people of these United States, rightfully petition our President, House of Representatives and Senate on behalf of substantive tax reform legislation, including legislation to repeal the 16th Amendment to our Constitution and replace the current invasive income tax with a national sales tax or flat tax. We encourage presidential and congressional support for House Joint Resolution 15 "abolishing personal income, estate, and gift taxes" and other tax reform measures seeking to restrict central government spending to its constitutional parameters. Likewise, we insist that reductions in taxation be accompanied by comparable reductions in extra-constitutional and economically untenable government spending....

      Congressman Ron Paul addresses the U.S. House of Representatives July 10, 2003   "Neo-conned"   The modern-day, limited-government movement has been co-opted.  The conservatives have failed in their effort to shrink the size of government.  There has not been, nor will there soon be, a conservative revolution in Washington. Political party control of the federal government has changed, but the inexorable growth in the size and scope of government has continued unabated.  The liberal arguments for limited government in personal affairs and foreign military adventurism were never seriously considered as part of this revolution. Since the...

The allegations have inflamed dinner-table talk across France: a lurid tabloid tale of sex, murder, politics and corruption and, if the saga is to be believed, there could be a whole lot more to come. The ingredients are said to include cocaine-fuelled orgies with underage call girls, prostitutes who turned tricks with robed magistrates inside a courthouse, sado-masochistic sessions secretly filmed by a transvestite blackmailer, and a string of murders by a psychopathic strangler. Those who took part in the kinky sex, or helped to cover up the slayings, are supposed to have included local policemen, judges and public prosecutors,...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - With sanctions lifted and no taxes to pay, Iraqi traders are getting back to business despite uncertainty over U.S. plans for the country two months after the fall of Saddam Hussein. To Iraqis used to hardship and shortages, the markets now look like a paradise of goods. Everything from canned food, soft drinks and milk powder to television sets, computers, satellite dishes and refrigerators can be found. "There are no restrictions on imports and the traders are free now to import all kinds of goods, including cars," said Salim Hassan, a trader in the Karrada area of...

The United States has said Europe must do more to tackle a resurgence of anti- Semitism around the world. The plea was made by former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, representing the US at a conference in the Austrian capital, Vienna. "Words do not suffice to turn the tide of anti-Semitism that is once again growing in Europe and other parts of the world," he said. About 400 officials from the Organisation for Security and Co- operation in Europe (OSCE) have gathered for the unprecedented two-day meeting following a rash of anti- Jewish incidents in Europe in recent years. The...