Free Republic

...I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home. I can relate, for...

Obama’s Gordian Knot The candidate’s politics are entangled in racial contradiction, says Shelby Steele. 14 December 2007 "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win", by Shelby Steele (Free Press, 160 pp., $22) “I am rooted in the African-American community,” Barack Obama told 60 Minutes earlier this year. “But I’m not defined by it. I am comfortable in my racial identity . . . but that’s not the core of who I am.” “My only trick as a writer,” Shelby Steele wrote in his book White Guilt, “has been to write about America without...

CQ TODAY House Approves Probe of Contested Vote in Bid to Restore Civility By Jonathan Allen, CQ Staff The House took a step toward easing its latest partisan confrontation by agreeing Friday to create a panel that will investigate a controversial floor vote and make recommendations for changes in voting rules. The bipartisan six-member select committee will probe Thursday’s contested vote on a Republican motion to send the fiscal 2008 Agriculture spending bill back to committee. The Republican-sponsored resolution (H Res 611) creating the investigative panel was adopted minus “whereas” clauses accusing Democrats of improperly manipulating that vote. Democratic leaders...

Mr. President, we have nearly finished this little exhibition, which was staged, I assume, for the benefit of a briefly amused press corps and in deference to political activists opposed to the war who have come to expect from Congress such gestures, empty though they may be, as proof that the majority in the Senate has heard their demands for action to end the war in Iraq. The outcome of this debate, the vote we are about to take, has never been in doubt to a single member of this body. And to state the obvious, nothing we have done...

What’s so bad about Planned Parenthood? It’s a question Americans must wonder about as they see pro-lifers protesting or praying outside clinics. And it deserves an answer because it gets to the heart of some key and contentious questions we face as a society, one that is ever creeping toward a brave new world (in many respects already living in it) as biotechnological choices propagate. Consider that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton has been endorsed by Planned Parenthood in her Senate runs. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican, has given money to them in the past....

Recently, as Congress debated an immigration “reform” proposal, a memorandum on official Democratic National Committee stationary was retrieved from a trash can on South Capitol Street in Washington, D.C. This memo was faxed around the country and in time reached California. Although coffee stains covered most of the salutation, it appeared to read, “From: H. Dean. TO: HRC.” However, the rest of the memo was intact and perfectly clear… Dear Senator, Nice to see you the other night at that $25 million coast-to-coast Hollywood-to-Broadway fundraiser. You certainly know how to rake in the bucks! We should have enough to make...

It appears that Rudy Giuliani, intelligent man that he is, understands the damage he did to his efforts to connect with conservatives in his CNN interview yesterday. As Kathryn Jean Lopez posted at The Corner, Giuliani has started to climb down from his support of funding abortions with tax dollars: MAYOR GIULIANI: "What I said yesterday is what I've been saying throughout, I think in the last number of months publicly and privately for quite some time, which is I'm against abortion, I hate it, I wish there never was an abortion and I would council a woman have an...

...In 1994 the Swiss carried out an extra survey that the researchers for our masters in Europe (I write from England) were happy to record. The question was asked to determine whether a person’s religion carried through to the next generation, and if so, why, or if not, why not. The result is dynamite. There is one critical factor. It is overwhelming, and it is this: It is the religious practice of the father of the family that, above all, determines the future attendance at or absence from church of the children. If both father and mother attend regularly, 33...

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. – Mark Twain Agreement Outline Phase 1: An equivalent of 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil in exchange for the shutdown of Yongbyon nuclear facility and inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In addition, each of Japan and the U.S. will enter into separate bilateral talks with North Korea to normalize relations, and the U.S. will begin the process of dropping North Korea from the State Department list of terrorist sponsors, and the U.S. will advance the process of terminating U.S. sanctions against North Korea. Five working groups will be established...

In June 2002 I wrote a column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune regarding Yasser Arafat's responsibility for the 1973 assassination of two United States State Department officers -- Ambassador Cleo Noel and charge d'affaires Curtis Moore -- in Khartoum, Sudan. The column was based on accounts of the events in David Korn's Assassination in Khartoum, Neil Livingstone and David Halevy's Inside the PLO, and the testimony of former National Security Agency analyst Jim Welsh. Welsh has doggedly purused the story for over thirty years as a result of his personal involvement in disseminating a warning relating to the communications intercepted...

A maverick dairyman named Hein Hettinga started bottling his own milk and selling it for as much as 20 cents a gallon less than the competition, exercising his right to work outside the rigid system that has controlled U.S. milk production for almost 70 years. Soon the effects were rippling through the state, helping to hold down retail prices at supermarkets and warehouse stores. Taking on Big Milk For three years, starting in 2003, a coalition of milk companies and dairies lobbied to crush an initiative by a maverick Arizona dairyman. Hein Hettinga chose to work outside the rigid system...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 — A draft report on strategies for Iraq, which will be debated here by a bipartisan commission beginning Monday, urges an aggressive regional diplomatic initiative that includes direct talks with Iran and Syria but sets no timetables for a military withdrawal, according to officials who have seen all or parts of the document. While the diplomatic strategy appears likely to be accepted, with some amendments, by the 10-member Iraq Study Group, members of the commission and outsiders involved in its work said they expected a potentially divisive debate about timetables for beginning an American withdrawal. In interviews,...

Readers, especially before elections, watch The Post closely for any hint of political bias. Recently, such complaints have come mostly from Republicans. [SNIP] In Maryland, profiles of Senate candidates -- Republican Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele and Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, a Democrat -- were neutral to positive, as were those of the gubernatorial candidates, Democrat Martin O'Malley and incumbent Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R). I longed for a more critical eye, especially in the Cardin piece, which seemed relentlessly positive. Several readers thought Steele's profile should have mentioned that he flunked the bar exam, but a lot of...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A motorcycle bomb killed seven people and wounded 45 others as it ripped through a crowded motorbike market in Baghdad's Shi'ite Sadr City district on Thursday, an Interior Ministry source said. The bomb, detonated by remote control, targeted shoppers in the Mureydi market. The source, quoting police at the scene, said officers initially thought the explosion was caused by a rigged car but later determined the explosives had been planted on a motorcycle. The densely populated and impoverished area is often targeted by Sunni militants. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki demanded the U.S. and Iraqi military...

More news on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals continued war against reason. In the case Fields v. Palmdale (November 2, 2005), parents sued the Palmdale School District for giving a survey, which included ten questions of a sexual nature, to students between the ages of seven and ten. The School District sent a note home to parents asking for parental consent to engage their children in a survey of early trauma. The note did not mention sex. The School District, collaborating with the School of Psychology and Seymour, developed and administered the questionnaire to first, third, and fifth grade...

A BIBLE featuring Adolf Hitler's version of the Ten Commandments has been discovered. The dictator ordered the book rewritten to remove all references to lews. In the Nazi bible, found in a German church, the regime who stole, murdered and plundered their way across Europe scrapped the likes of Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal and Thou shalt not covet your neighbour's wife. And Hitler got his theorists to alter the Commandments - and add two more - in a bid to further the Aryan ideal for the book Germans With God. New "Commandments" included Honour your Fuhrer...

Nearly two years ago I attended a lecture by Samantha Power, author of "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" (a book I highly recommend), at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She spoke on the same day the government of Sudan got a seat on the UN Human Rights Commission. On the negotiations to end the killing in Darfur, Power warned that peace talks are sometimes just cover so nations can look the other way at atrocious behavior. But how do you stop such behavior before it becomes a full-blown genocide and once it does how do...

Tehran, Iran, Mar. 29 – Radical Islamists in Iran’s western province of Lorestan were invited during a ceremony on Wednesday to enlist in garrisons to carry out suicide attacks against the United States. The People’s Headquarters in Continuation of the Path of the Martyrs in Lorestan, a newly-founded government-backed group, began enlisting “martyrdom-seeking volunteers” to “confront possible threats by America and the West” against Iran.

Elaine Pagels, the famous historian of early Christianity, once told a revealing story about the social world behind the scenes of high-powered biblical scholarship. As a young up-and-coming professor at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, she was invited to a closed-door, after-hours smoker. The men there (Pagels was the only woman) were all prominent Bible scholars. Many of them didn't even believe in God, and those who still called themselves Christian were anything but orthodox. The liquor flowed freely, and as these men got in their cups, they began to sing old gospel songs. To her...

We have kept the Republic. - Senator Bob Byrd. I believe that goodwill will prevail. - Senator John McCain. Politicians are in politics. They are less self-denying than self-aggrandizing. They are given fame, respect, the best health care in the world; they pass laws governing your life and receive a million perks including a good salary, and someone else--faceless taxpayers, "the folks back home"--gets to pay for the whole thing. This isn't public service, it's more like public command. - Peggy Noonan. For the last week bloggers, Free Republicans, editorialists and all manner of conservatives have erupted in righteous anger...