Free Republic

Duke University plans to raise its student fees in order pay for students' sex reassignment surgery. Duke University recently made the decision to raise student fees in order add sex-reassignment surgery to their healthcare plan. The private university, located in North Carolina, follows Brown and other universities in offering coverage for the controversial operation. Administrators say they will cover the cost of the reassignment surgery up to $50,000 that will be covered with a cause a 0.3 percent increase to overall student fees. LGBT advocates on campus immediately celebrated the university’s decision.

The Searchers has its critics — but who seriously believes John Wayne had a drop of racist blood?Film critics, a tense and peculiar family (with apologies to the late Max Beerbohm), have spent a half century praising John Ford and John Wayne’s tense and peculiar movie, The Searchers, beyond all-reason. They do this because they believe it gives them a clean shot at calling the Duke a racist, something they enjoy doing, and which appears to be required by a Film Critics Union work rule. For those who haven’t seen the movie or don’t remember it, The Searchers tells the...

In another case in the annals of conservative "adaptation" to yesterday's liberal innovation, Ohio Republican senator Rob Portman has just announced that he now supports faux marriage. The change was motivated, he said, by his son having come out to him and his wife as a homosexual. Well, it's a good thing his son didn't announce that he was involved in bestiality. Talk about a pandering parent. We can also talk here about letting your personal life influence your public policy. If I were a statesman and learned that a child of mine were hooked on cocaine or had joined...

DURHAM — Duke University and 38 members of its 2005-06 men’s lacrosse team notified a federal judge on Wednesday that they’d settled the players’ lawsuit out of court.

I greatly appreciate the opportunity to debate and respond to Selwyn Duke's piece, which makes many very reasonable points. Its biggest deficiency is that it never actually proposes measures --whether specific new regulations or repeal of specific existing ones -- that would improve the current system. Instead, Mr. Duke says he would scale back gun laws from 22,000 to 5,000, two arbitrary numbers, neither of which bear any correlation to smart policy. Before discussing potential policy responses, let me say that Mr. Duke is quite right that thousands of gun laws, unsurprisingly, did not eliminate crime (I am unaware of...

Blair Holliday ’15, the promising wide receiver for Duke football who was in a near-fatal water ski accident last July 4th and who has made a miraculous recovery, has hit a brutal, unexpected bump: DukeCheck has learned that Duke University rejected his application to return this semester as a student. Before the accident, Holliday maintained a 3.75 grade point average, majoring in psychology. His doctors had cleared him to return. Beyond that, Holliday had an invitation from Head Coach David Cutcliffe and wide receivers coach Matt Lubick – great supporters during Holliday’s recovery period — to return to the football...

When Barack Obama called Mitt Romney a bull******* in a Rolling Stone interview recently, it was reminiscent of something involving a man who truly fits that description. What I’m referring to has to do with the 1990s, an intern, and America’s increasingly interned morality. After Bill Clinton said that he didn’t consider Monica Lewinsky’s services to be sex as he “understood it,” many observers pointed out that his lawyering of lasciviousness was influencing the young. “Hey, even the president, a Rhodes Scholar, says it isn’t sex!” It’s what you call trickle-down decadence. And now what Clinton did for intimate relations,...

DURHAM – A historian who’s written about the Duke lacrosse case must answer questions from Duke University lawyers defending the school from lawsuits filed by two groups of former lacrosse players, a federal court in Maine says. U.S. Magistrate Judge John Rich III said Brooklyn College professor K.C. Johnson has to give Duke’s legal team a deposition and turn over documents about his dealings with the players. Johnson invoked a form of journalist’s confidentiality privilege as he fought Duke’s subpoena. Rich acknowledged that such claims can be valid, depending on how the interests in each case balance out. In this...

Duke CEO Rogers rides political, corporate intrigue into DNCBy Bruce Henderson The Charlotte Observer Posted: Tuesday, Sep. 04, 2012 **SNIP** Craig Holman of watchdog group Public Citizen was more blunt about Rogers and his company’s involvement: “It is highly, highly improper,” he said, in light of the scope of government business on the utility’s plate. “The conventions are not supposed to be financed by Duke Energy.” In addition to the state investigations into the Duke-Progress merger, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission still has the merger open on its docket. Before the merger, Progress had asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to...

Apollo 11 capcom and Apollo 16 lunar module pilot Charlie Duke addresses Monte Sano Methodist Church in Alabama, July 22, 2012. Congregants snacked on Moon Pies and Tang before heading into the sanctuary to commemorate Buzz Aldrin's "lunar communion" 43 years ago, Friday [Glenn Baeske/The Huntsville Times]. "It seemed only appropriate that astronaut Charlie Duke - the 10th human to set foot on the moon - was the guest of honor at the church's "Lunar Communion" service Sunday morning. Duke said he didn't have a spiritual experience, per se, during the 20 hours he spent combing the moon's surface.But...

. . . [Duke President Richard] Brodhead’s initial public statement said that people must uphold the presumption of innocence. But at a private meeting that included faculty members who signed the ad, he was excoriated for that statement . . . In a subsequent open letter to the Duke community, Mr. Brodhead canceled the lacrosse season, accepted the coach's resignation, and added several sentences about the evils of rape and the legacy of racism and misogyny. It made no reference to the lacrosse players' presumption of innocence. . . . In the end, justice was done, to some extent. North...

It wasn't just that ABC's Brian Ross was wrong in suggesting that the "Jim Holmes" he found on a Tea Party website was the same man who committed the heinous crime in Aurora, Colorado. It's that it was indicative of stupidity and corruption. --snip-- So there can be only two reasons why ABC would mention a possible Holmes/Tea Party (TP) association: either its people want to demonize conservatives every chance they get, or they think traditionalist thought constitutes a pathology. It turns out that Effluent Stream Media leftists are deeply involved in doing the former and generally believe the latter....

When a big lie is repeated often enough and becomes “truth,” there can be serious consequences. For reality is like a jigsaw puzzle: If too many pieces (little pictures) are wrong, you’ll never be able to assemble them and see the big picture. The result is dislocation from reality. What follows are 10 big lies that have gained currency — and the actual truth behind them. 1. Pope Pius XII was a Nazi Collaborator According to Rabbi David Dalin in his book The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, Pius saved at least 800,000 Jews from extermination at the hands of the...

DURHAM -- Crystal Mangum’s attorney withdrew from her defense Tuesday, saying she had compromised the case by sharing information with supporters who rallied for her the same day. “The truth will set Crystal Mangum free,” said Sidney Harr, of the Committee on Justice for Mike Nifong, which held a press conference Tuesday morning outside the Durham County jail. Mangum, 33, is charged with the murder of Reginald Daye, 46. Police found Daye with one stab wound in the torso April 3 at Mangum’s 3507 Century Oaks Drive apartment. Mangum was charged with murder after Daye died April 13. She remains...

This happened last month, but I just learned of the case because the trial court decision was just posted on Westlaw; Cline is appealing the removal. The decision is here; a newspaper article on the subject is here; the statute authorizing the removal, N.C. Gen. Stats. § 7A-66(6), provides that a D.A. may be removed by a court for “[c]onduct prejudicial to the administration of justice which brings the office into disrepute.” ... partly because it comes on the heels of the ouster of D.A. Nifong — Cline was the first D.A. elected following Nifong’s ouster, and had worked for...

When I was 12 years old, I played tennis at a certain public park in the Bronx. One day it got back to me that a black fellow at the courts, whose name I forget, said "Selwyn doesn't like black people." This raised my eyebrows. You see, I had never really thought about the man one way or the other. And what occupied my mind were forehands, backhands, topspin and volleys, not race. So the only thing I could figure was that I was probably in a funk one day and didn't hear and acknowledge a greeting he might have...

This is based on a genealogy table I made. Had a bit more trouble than I should have tracking down the first round results, wth.

DURHAM - Tracey E. Cline, a prosecutor who crusaded for victims and pledged to always do right, was permanently removed Friday from her office as Durham's elected district attorney after a judge found she made false and reckless attacks on Durham's senior judge, tainting her ability to seek justice. Superior Court Judge Robert H. Hobgood of Franklin County, who presided over the removal inquiry that began three weeks ago, dismissed Cline's claims of free speech protections and found she engaged in conduct "prejudicial" to the administration of justice which brought her office into "disrepute" in court documents filed against Superior...

LSU AD Alleva Deposed in Duke Lacrosse Suit Posted by: Walter Abbott on Saturday, February 4, 2012, 18:20 Louisiana State University (LSU) Athletic Director Joe Alleva was deposed last month in a lawsuit filed nearly five years ago regarding the notorious Duke Lacrosse Case, where a prostitute falsely accused three Duke University lacrosse players of rape. Alleva was Duke’s athletic director at the time and was famously quoted as telling lacrosse coach Mike Pressler as he was cancelling the team’s season that “It’s not about the truth anymore,” because of the intense media coverage of the controversy. Mike Nifong, the...

A judge today suspended Durham District Attorney Tracey Cline from her elected office, ruling that there is probable cause that Cline should be removed permanently. Superior Court Judge Robert H. Hobgood of Franklin County set a hearing for Feb. 13 in which Cline will have a chance to defend her numerous court filings made over the past three months in a high-profile attack on Orlando Hudson, the senior judge in Durham. Hobgood was not required to suspend Cline before a hearing, but had the option under state law. Cline has been under scrutiny for her ongoing allegations against Hudson, allegations...

Here's a question: how can we expect to have small government if we condemn Congress for not growing it? It's always a disturbing experience when you're accosted with a picture of Harry Reid, as I was upon logging on to Drudge last Monday afternoon. But at least his image bore a fitting caption: "MOST FUTILE EVER." I then clicked the link and found myself at The Washington Times — normally a quite sane organ of the media — and learned the meaning of the caption: the Times was lamenting a do-nothing Congress and presented Reid as its poster boy. Writes...

DURHAM — Black students at Duke University are angry over a university research paper that found African-American undergraduates at the school are disproportionally more likely to switch from tough majors to easier ones. “The implications and intentions of this research at the hands of our very own prestigious faculty, seemingly without a genuine concern for proactively furthering the well-being of the black community is hurtful and alienating,” wrote the officers of Duke’s Black Student Alliance in an email sent to the state NAACP. The letter from Nana Asante, president of the alliance, challenged the faculty members involved in the research...

A lawyer for three members of Duke University’s 2005-06 men’s lacrosse team has subpoenaed the records of two public-relations companies Duke officials consulted in the course of dealing with false rape allegations a stripper made against the team. Durham attorney Bob Ekstrand has told federal judges information from the two firms, Burson-Marsteller and Edelman, is important to his clients’ civil-rights lawsuit against Duke because public-relations worries were central to the school’s response in 2006. “Duke’s media strategy drove its decision-making, including its decisions to deprive [players] of the procedural protections it promises to all of its students in connection with...

Crystal Mangum, the former stripper who falsely accused members of the Duke University lacrosse team of sexually assaulting her in 2006, is competent to stand trial on murder charges in the death of her boyfriend, a Durham judge ruled Wednesday. ... Mangum, an African American, accused three white lacrosse players at the prestigious private university of raping her at a house party. But Mangum's story did not hold up under scrutiny, and by April 2007, Roy Cooper, the state attorney general, declared the young men innocent, saying they had been caught up in a "tragic rush to accuse" in a...

An extraordinary legal shouting match has broken out in Durham, N.C., between the county’s beleaguered local district attorney and its senior Superior Court judge, who has chastised the D.A. in open court. In a harshly worded court filing, Durham Dist. Atty. Tracey Cline accused Judge Orlando F. Hudson Jr. of "moral turpitude, dishonesty and corruption" and complained that the judge "harbors animosity" toward her and has engaged in "retaliatory conduct" and "gross misconduct." Court filings are typically written in dry, obtuse legal argot. But Cline’s filing contains unusually accusatory and vituperative language replete with fractured syntax and spelling errors. She...

Duke Energy urges electric car owners to stop using charging stations after fireUpdated: 1:37 pm EST November 9, 2011 CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Duke Energy officials are asking customers who own the company's electric car charging stations to stop using the product after a house fire in Mooresville last month. A representative from the company has confirmed to Channel 9 that an email was sent to about 125 customers in North Carolina, South Carolina and Indiana who have the same type of charging station installed in their homes.

Power of the people? Hundreds voice opposition to rate hikeBy: Mike Conley Published: October 26, 2011 Hundreds of people packed the main courtroom at the McDowell County Courthouse to capacity Tuesday evening to show their strong opposition to Duke Energy’s request for another rate hike. Donna Edwards of Marion was one of those who testified to the N.C. Utilities Commission. “I don’t represent anybody except myself,” she said in her testimony. “We’re making choices in my house about whether or not to buy medications or pay the power bill. I am all for Duke Power making money. That is what...

Okay, you can lift your lower jaw off the floor. I haven’t joined the dark side: My problem isn’t economic but lexical. I do hate capitalism — the term. As you know, in the eyes of many, “capitalism” has become both a four-letter word and the target of such. For example, New York Magazine questioned a group of Wall Street protesters on October 2 and found that 37 percent believed capitalism was “inherently immoral.” If you find this unremarkable for Woodstock-meets-Wall Street rabble, consider a 2009 Rasmussen poll showing that “only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than...

Fr. Matthew Muñoz Rome, Italy, Oct 1, 2011 / 12:29 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- John Wayne, for many, was a Hollywood legend who symbolized true masculinity and American values. To Fr. Matthew Muñoz, though, he was simply “granddaddy.” “When we were little we’d go to his house and we’d simply hang out with granddaddy and we’d play and we’d have fun: a very different image from what most people have of him,”  Fr. Muñoz told CNA on a recent visit to Rome. Fr. Muñoz was 14 years old when his grandfather died of cancer in 1979. In his lifetime, “The...

Recently I wrote an article about women's tendency to support statist candidates. As my emails attest, it was met with quite a positive response. Yet, not surprisingly, there was also a very predictable one: complaints about generalizations. For instance, one respondent wrote that she was tired of the "all men are this and all women are that" tripe. Of course, people only complain about generalizations when they hear one they don't like and, perhaps, are unable to refute. But you can rest assured that they generalize just like anyone else; in fact, generalizations are woven so seamlessly into our thinking...

We have all heard about the sex gap in voting patterns. This is the phenomenon whereby, in every election, women are far more likely to support liberal candidates than men are. For instance, in 1996, Bill Clinton captured 54 percent of the women's vote but only 43 percent of the men's. And in subsequent elections, the male-female gap has been as follows: in 2000, Al Gore, 42-54; in 2004, John Kerry, 41-51; and in 2008, Barack Obama, 49-56. In fact, even in the watershed election of 2010, during which we heard about the rise of the conservative woman, the fairer...

A Durham man who was set free by the state Court of Appeals over "repeated neglect" by Durham District Attorney Tracey Cline filed a civil lawsuit Wednesday against the prosecutor, the police officers who handled his case, and the city of Durham. Frankie Washington alleges that the authorities who put him behind bars for nearly three years acted in "bad faith." The officers and Cline concealed evidence, the lawsuit alleges, and conspired to violate his rights under the state and U.S. constitutions. Cline and the police had a "reckless and callous disregard of public justice in this State," says the...

DURHAM – Durham County District Attorney Tracey Cline and the editor of The News & Observer came to one agreement Wednesday evening – that they would participate in a forum at the N.C. Central University School of Law – but that was the only thing they agreed upon. Cline took out an ad in Sunday’s Herald-Sun to announce she was calling a Town Hall Meeting at the Durham County Courthouse to speak about a series of articles the Raleigh newspaper published about her last week. In the ad, she invited Andrew Curliss, the reporter who wrote the series, to attend....

Heritage Auctions spokesman Donn Pearlman on Tuesday said the auction will include more than 700 personal and professional items, including an eye patch Wayne wore in his Golden Globe-winning performance in "True Grit."

Unfortunately, many Americans have become inured to the trampling of freedom of association. You can work your fingers to the bone starting a business, and the government becomes a partner that contributes nothing but extracts much. It not only shares your profits and regulates you to death, but, more to the point here, dictates whom you must serve and the bases on which you may hire and fire people. And woe betide he who doesn't bow before Leviathan. A recent example of this is the Wildflower Inn, a Vermont B&B. After devout Catholic owners Jim and Mary O'Reilly refused to...

DURHAM – Lawyers in two of Duke-lacrosse-case-spawned lawsuits are due in court Wednesday morning to try to resolve some of their disagreements about how to handle the exchange of depositions and documents. The pre-trial conference is a continuation of a process, guided by a federal magistrate judge, that began earlier this month. Duke University and lawyers for two groups of players are trying among other things to figure out where and how many people should be questioned in the course of gathering evidence on the players’ claims against the school. The players contend that Duke administrators breached confidentiality promises and...

   MEDIA: HALLIBURTON PAID DICK CHENEY TO COMMIT RAPE IN IRAN August 3, 2011A front-page story by James Risen in The New York Times on Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008, reported on a "troubling trend" of sexual assaults committed by American employees of military contractors in Iraq. The centerpiece of his story was Jamie Leigh Jones, who claimed to have been brutally gang-raped in 2005 while working in the Green Zone. (Risen also interviewed other women claiming to have been sexually assaulted in Iraq and -- for journalistic balance -- their attorneys.) Jones famously claimed that days after arriving in Iraq...

RALEIGH, N.C. -- A family squabble over season tickets to Duke men's basketball games has resulted in a legal fight. A woman filed a lawsuit Friday against her sister, her sister's husband and Duke University regarding the transfer of two tickets that once belonged to her father for games at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Katina Dorton is seeking unspecified damages and asking the court to invalidate the "fraudulent transfer" to Gordon and Sophia Caudle that occurred without the knowledge or consent of her father or other family members, according to the complaint.

I have to admit that The News of the World, which just yesterday was the largest circulation newspaper in Britain and, beginning tomorrow, will have ceased to exist, has never been part of my literary diet. I am not entirely sure I have ever actually seen the paper, though I know a juicy story involving alcohol, a prominent journalist, his concerned wife, and the paper, the details of which I will save for my memoirs. . . . In the meantime, the word is that the scandal which put the paper out of business — hacking into the voicemail of...

People often assume that self-described liberals are more supportive of due process than self-described conservatives. That certainly isn’t the case when we talk about the illiberal bureaucrats who run the United States Department of Education. The notion that an adult charged with a felony should be put on trial using the same standard of evidence used for someone who has been issued a parking ticket is absurd. In fact, it is more than absurd. It is offensive to well-established principles of due process and fundamental fairness. Recently, however, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has announced new...

Raleigh, N.C. — An eastern North Carolina lawmaker is standing behind his characterization of the NAACP and its state president as racist. Rep. Stephen LaRoque, R-Lenoir, sent a May 14 e-mail to the NAACP, in response to an announcement from the group about a Greenville news conference to protest budget cuts proposed by Republican lawmakers. The announcement read, in part, "Tea Party extremists seized the Republican Party and declared war on African Americans, poor people and other minorities." "I have no interest in receiving anything from a Racist such as William Barber," LaRoque wrote in his reply, referring to the...

I often wonder that if John Wayne were alive today, what would he think/do/say regarding the current events of the world. Not just the current regime in DC and Congress, but Iraq, Afghanistan etc....

Crystal Mangum, the woman who claimed three Duke lacrosse players raped her five years ago, could soon be facing murder charges after the man she's accused of stabbing has died.

A grand jury has indicted Crystal Mangum in the murder of her boyfriend Reginald Daye. She was accused of stabbing her boyfriend, Reginald Daye, during an argument. Police were dispatched to 3507 Century Oaks Drive at 3:15 a.m. April 3, and found Daye stabbed in the torso. Daye, 46, died last Wednesday at Duke Hospital, police spokeswoman Kammie Michael has said. Mangum, the woman at the center of the Duke University lacrosse scandal five years ago, is in the Durham County jail. She originally faced a charge of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury....

Reginald Daye has died after suffering stab wounds in Durham, North Carolina on April 3. His alleged assailant has been identified as Crystal Mangum. Jesse's girl. Crystal Mangum is the woman who accused members of the Duke Lacrosse team of assaulting her sexually five years ago. KC Johnson began a blog called Durham-in-Wonderland in 2006 to follow this case and has done a superb job with it. A case narrative can be viewed here. The bottom line was that the three Duke Lacrosse team members were falsely accused. Jesse Jackson flew to Mangum's side to defend her as the episode...

BREAKING NEWS: Man that police say was stabbed by Duke University lacrosse scandal accuser has died, medical examiner says.

Durham, N.C. — Family members of a man who was stabbed in his home April 3 say he died Wednesday evening. Crystal Mangum, the Durham woman who falsely accused three Duke University lacrosse players of rape in 2006 has been charged with assaulting him. Durham police could not be reached for comment on whether her charges would be upgraded. Mangum, 32, was charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury and was being held in the Durham County jail on a $300,000 bond. Police said Mangum stabbed Reginald Daye, 46, in the torso with...

The woman who accused three Duke University lacrosse players of rape five years ago was arrested Sunday, suspected of stabbing her boyfriend, police said. Officers responding to a call early Sunday about a stabbing at an apartment in Durham, North Carolina, found a 46-year-old man who had been stabbed in the torso, police said. He was taken to Duke University Hospital for treatment of serious injuries. Officers later arrested the man's girlfriend, Crystal Mangum, 32, at a nearby apartment. She was charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious injury, police said.

Durham, NC - Authorities say the woman who falsely claimed she was raped by Duke lacrosse players has been accused of stabbing her boyfriend in the chest at a North Carolina home. Durham police say 32-year-old Crystal Mangum was arrested Sunday morning several hours after the stabbing that seriously injured her 46-year-old boyfriend.

DURHAM (WTVD) -- Police say former Duke lacrosse accuser Crystal Mangum was arrested again overnight. Authorities say Mangum was arrested Saturday night and is being charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to commit robbery and inflicting serious injuries. Mangum is being held at the Durham County Jail with no bond. She will make her first apperance in court on Monday. Police have not released any further information on the arrest. snip