Free Republic

Those Bush girls sure love to party. A dishy profile in the upcoming edition of New York magazine tells how the President's rambunctious twin daughters have been carousing all over Manhattan in recent months - knocking back tequila shots and closing down clubs with some of the city's richest kids. The two 22-year-olds are known to their Secret Service agents as Twinkle (Jenna) and Turquoise (Barbara). And they're seen out on the town most nights, with the agents in tow as a very, very secure car service. Among the stories the magazine tells: One night Barbara and a group of...

A gasp of disbelief, a sad shake of the head and a feeling of general disgust. That's how San Marcos residents reacted Saturday morning at the sight of graffiti spray-painted on the still under construction Hays County Veterans Memorial. Sometime overnight, someone used yellow spray paint to write "Kill Bush" on a section of the memorial where names of local veterans are displayed on a sloping wall. The same slogan, along with others, was repeated on the back of the memorial. "It's very disgusting," said Robert Guerrero, who served in Germany during the Vietnam era. "I have a lot of...

<p>AS if embattled Disney chief Michael Eisner didn't have enough problems with insurgent stockholders, he's probably reaching for the Maalox if he's read early reviews of "The Alamo," which opens nationwide next Friday starring Dennis Quaid and Billy Bob Thornton.</p>

<p>A short while ago, I chanced to be in Dallas, Texas, making a documentary film. One of the shots involved a camera angle from a big commercial tower overlooking Dealey Plaza and the former "book depository," and it was later necessary for us to take the road through the celebrated underpass. The crew I worked with was younger than I am (you may as well make that much younger) and consisted of a Chinese-Australian, an English girl brought up in Africa, a Jewish guy from Brooklyn and other elements of a cross-section. As we passed the "Grassy Knoll," and looked up at the window, and saw the cross incised in the tarmac, I was interested by their lack of much interest. The event of Nov. 22, 1963 isn't half as real to them as the moment, say, when the planes commandeered by suicide-murderers flew into the New York skyline. Nor, as I realized, is it half as real or poignant to me as the site of Ford's Theater in Washington D.C. Time has a way of assigning value.</p>

Michael Stravato for The New York Times In 1857, Mexican-American freight haulers were hanged on an oak tree at the courthouse in Goliad, Tex. GOLIAD, Tex., July 16 — In history books, the killing of more than 300 Texan rebels by Mexican troops here has long been known as the Goliad Massacre. But to many residents of Goliad, with its 18th-century Spanish fort and towering monument to the dead, that brutal episode in its history is still open to interpretation. At the heart of the dispute, largely between Anglos and Mexican-Americans, is the porous definition of who is a Texan...

<p>Hordes of quivering GOP lawmakers and vast throngs of proudly homophobic right-wing Christian Americans fell into an adorable tizzy the other day as the entire really, really big country of Canada announced it will change its law to allow full-on homosexual marriage anywhere in the whole country including Vancouver and Toronto and even "that weird province with all the gay French people."</p>

<p>Stop. You've found it. This is the place. Americana HQ. Patriotism in a giant tin bucket. This is where souls recoil, children wail, dreams die.</p> <p>This is Wal-Mart. The glorious consumer mecca, the epic wonderland/wasteland of prefab landfill merch, not only the world's largest and most powerful retailer and the most aggressive snarling frightening happy-place marketer and quite possibly the most hideously overlit soul-draining monster empire you will ever know in your entire lifetime, but also the very multibillion-dollar pseudo-Christian kingdom that censors their offerings and refuses to sell certain music CDs and bans "risqué" beer-'n'-babes mags like Maxim and FHM and Stuff, because, you know, pretty girls are evil.</p>