Free Republic

Stefan KanferAll That Jazz Terry Teachout’s luminous biography captures the “sunlit, hopeful art” of Louis Armstrong. 22 December 2009 Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, by Terry Teachout (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 474 pages, $30) In the spring of 1998, Time commissioned Al Hirschfeld, the doyen of American caricaturists, to draw an unusual cover. It would celebrate five outstanding “Artists and Entertainers of the Century”—Pablo Picasso, Lucille Ball, Charlie Chaplin, Steven Spielberg, and Louis Armstrong. Much fanfare accompanied the announcement. That illustration was never published. A handful of staffers condemned the portrait of Armstrong as racist and made their feelings...

Perhaps no area of discernment is more difficult and more controversial than the Christian’s engagement with culture. Are we to be cultural gluttons, immersing ourselves in the culture around us so we can speak to it from the perspective of first-hand experience? Are we to be cultural anorexics, avoiding culture altogether lest it corrupt us? Or are we to take some middle ground where we appreciate aspects of it while rejecting others? In Hollywood Worldviews, filmmaker and screenwriter Brian Godawa (To End All Wars) weighs in on the task of “Watching Films with Wisdom & Discernment.” While looking at movies...

Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol as an indictment of nineteenth century industrialization and economic social classes. The following is a modern take on the tale exploring a different issue. Awaking in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore, and sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together, Scrooge had no occasion to be told that the bell was again upon the stroke of One. He felt that he was restored to consciousness in the right nick of time, for the especial purpose of holding a conference with the second messenger dispatched to him through Jacob Marley’s intervention. He...

Looks like the steadily growing list of constitutional, ethical and political outrages that constitute the Harry Reid version of Obamacare is sparking a rebellion in the states, as AP reports South Carolina's attorney general plans to investigate the vote-buying that surrounded the proposal in the Senate majority leader's office. According to AP, South Carolina's Henry McMaster is being joined by the attorneys general of Michigan and Washington state in a suit to determine the constitutionality of the Obamacare proposal. Their initiative was prompted by a request from South Carolina's two senators, Lindsay Graham and Jim DeMint, both Republicans. Attorneys-general in...

Hostile reviewers ruled him mentally unfit to practice law, he claims. Bryan Brown is a conservative, activist and unapologetic Christian. Of that there is no doubt. But does that mean he is also mentally ill? Too ill even to be a lawyer? The bureaucracy that controls access to Indiana's legal profession believes that very thing, according to a lawsuit in which Brown alleges that he was subjected to a series of hostile religious and political questions during a review of his fitness to practice law - a review that subsequently rejected him on mental-health grounds. The lawsuit, filed by Brown...

The Swiss minaret ban and the leaked climate e-mails are really the same story — or, more precisely, are symptoms of the same disease. In the Times of London, Oliver Kamm deplored the results of Switzerland’s referendum, consigned it to the garbage can of right-wing populism, and for good measure dismissed my analysis of Euro-demographics (“This is nonsense,” he pronounced magisterially). Instead, Mr. Kamm called for a “secularist and liberal defense of the principles of a pluralist society.” That’s not the solution to the problem, but one of the causes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for liberalism and pluralism...

Avatarocious Another spectacle hits an iceberg and sinks. by John Podhoretz 12/28/2009, Volume 015, Issue 15 AvatarDirected by James Cameron Avatar, we are told, does things with cameras and computers and actors that have never been done before. Its painstaking combination of real-life action and animation has, we are told, taken cinema to a new level. It cost anywhere from $328 million to $500 million, we are told, and took four years to make. It is a breakthrough, we are told, the boldest step into the future of filmmaking, an unparalleled achievement. What they didn't tell us is that Avatar...

Guy SormanBad Ideas Never Die Jean-Francois Revel’s career-long argument against utopian thinking 18 December 2009 Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era, by Jean-Francois Revel, (Encounter, 300 pp., $23.95) French public intellectuals have a reputation—well-deserved—for being socialists, Marxists, or Trotskyists. One thinks in this regard of popular figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Simone de Beauvoir, all with fan clubs on American campuses. Some French thinkers, however, have carried forward another intellectual tradition, that of classical liberalism—pro-democracy and pro-market—and running from the work of Alexis de Tocqueville to Albert Camus to...

Dec 18 2009 10:38 AM EST 'Avatar': Pass The Kool-Aid, By Kurt Loder The greatest movie, uh, ever? James Cameron's "Avatar" is the most amazing ... no, wait: the most staggeringly amazing, jaw-droppingly triple-awesome unbelievable movie ever made. That's the feeling among the reviewers aggregated at Rotten Tomatoes, anyway. I quote: "An overwhelming feast of visual artistry unlike anything you have ever seen before." "Much more than a film. It's a prescribed cinematic experience." "An entertainment to be not just seen but absorbed on a molecular level." "Cameron has achieved no less than a rebirth of cinema." "Make sure you...

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Charter Colleges? Deborah Lambert, December 18, 2009 Amid the heavy-handed bureaucracies that dominate our nation’s colleges and universities, there are seeds of opportunity. Professor Marvin Olasky noted in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education that a move toward Charter Colleges might be the answer. Dr. Olasky, editor-in-chief of the news magazine World and a journalism professor at the U. of Texas, Austin, hails Rob Koons, “the University of Texas professor removed last fall as head of a UT Western Civilization program, who is proposing that Texas legislators back the creation of charter colleges, as they now support...

It's a cool night in early October when about 200 members of the Class of 1959 from Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, nearly a third of the class, gather for our 50th reunion. Washington-Lee has received some attention over the years as the alma mater of entertainers Shirley MacLaine, Warren Beatty and Sandra Bullock. No one in our class achieved that kind of fame. We turned out a number of physicists, pastors, businessmen, teachers and career servicemen; one lobster fisherman, one sheep farmer, one felon (pederasty); a few professors, a handful of writers (including Tom DeBaggio, a local herbalist, who...

A Times Square bloodbath was narrowly avoided because the machine-pistol-toting thug who fired at a cop flipped the gun on its side like a character out of a rap video, causing the weapon to jam after two shots, law-enforcement sources said yesterday. When scam artist Raymond "Ready" Martinez held the MAC-10-style gun parallel to the ground, it caused the ejecting shells to "stovepipe," or get caught vertically in the chamber, the sources said. The gun is designed to be fired only in a vertical position. If he had fired the weapon -- which had another 27 rounds in the clip...

Question Of the Month: A few weeks ago, I went and bought my oldest 2 daughters (aged 17 and 15) a lovely new Bible each, complete with a bookmark. And after the evening meal on the Sunday I quietly announced that we were going to read and discuss the Bible together as a family. The reaction of my oldest daughter, 16 was, shall we say.... vigorous! She nearly hit the roof!!! We were ramming religion down her throat. She even accused of child abuse! Needless to say, she didn't say thank you for the Bible. Nobody else I know does...

The mainstream media and blogs cannot get enough of the controversy surrounding golfer Tiger Woods. Wherever one turns, whatever channel one watches, whatever newspaper’s website or blog one visits, there are Woods and his mistresses again. And I’m not just talking about the American media, it’s even all about Woods where I live, in the Netherlands. It’s like Groundhog Day gone wild – without Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell and the groundhog, but with playmates, porn stars, prostitutes and a world famous athlete. Meanwhile, here I am like Murray, so sick of the repetition that I’m wanting to drop a toaster...

The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund said yesterday that it would file a federal civil rights complaint accusing the Philadelphia School District of failing to address violence against Asian immigrant students at South Philadelphia High School. The complaint will claim that the district violated the students' right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment, said Cecilia Chen, a staff attorney with the organization. Chen said the complaint would be filed with the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. The news came on a day when the city schools chief and South Philadelphia High principal spoke out publicly...

Putting a Poll in the Field By Norma Zager When I awoke this morning, I wasn’t certain if I wanted to jump out of bed and begin the day or curl myself back into a groggy bundle beneath the quilt. After a moment or two deciding my best course of action, I put a poll in the field. It was decided 54 to 46 percent with a margin of error 2 or 3% I should get my lazy butt out of bed and get to work. When I received my credit card statement I noticed the bank had raised my...

There has been a lot of media focus dedicated to the alleged Tiger Woods scandal - even so much that when examined quantitatively, it overshadows more serious issues. So what will the net result of this media scrutiny be for Tiger? CNBC's sports reporter, Darren Rovell, took at crack at answering that on the Dec. 10 broadcast of "Squawk Box." "It's 12 straight days in the [New York] Post right now," Rovell said. "Everyday since Nov. 29, there's been a Tiger Woods story. When does it end? We don't know. I'm not going to get into the details of this,...

Sotomayor Uses "Undocumented Immigrant" in Supreme Court Opinion; Never Happened Before From this: In an otherwise dry opinion, Justice Sotomayor did introduce one new and politically charged term into the Supreme Court lexicon. Justice Sotomayor’s opinion in the case, Mohawk Industries v. Carpenter, No. 08-678, marked the first use of the term "undocumented immigrant," according to a legal database. The term "illegal immigrant" has appeared in a dozen decisions. This is a relatively minor issue, but expect things to get worse and maybe even much worse. At this point in time, it's worth looking back at those who basically took...

The Detroit Public Schools posted the worst scores on record in the most recent test of students in large central U.S. cities. The scores came on the Trial Urban District Assessment, a national test developed by the Governing Board, the National Center for Education Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education and the Council of the Great City Schools. The test for urban districts is part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress test given to school districts nationwide. “There is no jurisdiction of any kind, at any level, at any time in the 30-year history of NAEP that has...

Record Level of British Population Is Foreign-Born More than one in 10 people living in Britain today were born abroad, a record level, new figures show. By Tom Whitehead 08 Dec 2009 The proportion of the population who are foreign-born has almost doubled in the past two decades to 11 per cent, or 6.7million people. Record numbers leaving UK but half a million migrants still arriving each year One in four of population will be over 65 by 2033 One in nine British residents was born overseas Britain now home to more pensioners than children for first timeAt the same...

This is an opinion piece about the awful Twilight series of books and the inevitably horrible movies that will follow. I am only posting the link because the opinion piece is chock full of profanity but I thought it was funny as hell... THE DEVIN'S ADVOCATE: WHY BREAKING DAWN MUST BE MADE INTO A MOVIE

As Britain approaches a general election, commentators on the present "British sickness" or "British crisis" usually dwell on one of several areas. Here are some of them: • Destruction of trust in the Parliamentary and political system. About half Britain's MPs have been found to have broken either the spirit or the letter of the law with dodgy expense claims, "flipping" primary and secondary residences to avoid capital gains tax and in other ways showing contempt for the taxpayer -- a contempt now being heartily reciprocated. It is hard to see how any major party will be able to find...

The larger question, though, is whether a nation is any more than a geographic entity. If some Parisian Rip Van Winkle wakes up one distant morning and finds himself in a nation that speaks Arabic, where the people are Muslim, food is by law halal and the government follows Sharia law. Is that fellow still, in any meaningful sense, in France? Is it simple racism for, say, the Dutch to want their nation to stay Dutch -- not just in terms of geography -- in terms of language, food, religion, government, architecture and all the things that make up a...

Christmas. Who needs it? Not Best Buy, that's for sure. After all, Best Buy is loathe to use that hateful word in its advertising. It's so "religious" and tinged with racism, America, and tradition. It makes Best Buy shudder to think of using that fowl word, Christmas. But, advertising for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha? Heck, why not? What could be more welcoming and tolerant? And so, Best Buy has issued a Thanksgiving sales flyer wishing all good multi-cultural, Muslim loving Americans a happy Eid al-Adha this year. Read the rest at Publiusforum.com...

The unemployment rate is advertised at a concerning 10.2%, but more honest assessments are pegging the number at closer to 17.5%. What the media isn't telling you is that the unemployment rate for young black Americans is closer to a shocking 35%. It seems that destroying the black middle class is one war Obama is totally OK with.

They must denounce exclusionary biases and embrace the vision. (Or else.) Do you believe in the American dream -- the idea that in this country, hardworking people of every race, color and creed can get ahead on their own merits? If so, that belief may soon bar you from getting a license to teach in Minnesota public schools -- at least if you plan to get your teaching degree at the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus. In a report compiled last summer, the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group at the U's College of Education and Human Development...

On September 12, 2001, Americans were nearly unanimous in their belief that terrorism was a very real and serious threat to our country. September 11, 2009, eight years later, after not only no new terrorist attacks on the United States, but some thwarted terrorist activities, we have grown complacent on terrorism, and we have adopted attitudes along the way that are so soft on terrorism that the likelihood of an attack inside the United States is as great today as it was in 2001. Since the eighth anniversary of 9-11 two months ago we may, in fact, have already experienced...

The truth is out. Illegal immigrants commit crimes at a much higher rate than Americans and legal immigrants. A new Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) report nails it. It proves the lies and smashes the myths of the “noble” illegal immigrant who only wants to “do the jobs Americans won’t do.” Using Freedom of Information Act requests to access otherwise embargoed government data on immigrant crime, the CIS establishes the fact that illegals commit “relatively high rates of crime.” The phony “academics” that’ve made careers of lying about the destructive impact of illegal aliens on our society are proved wrong....