Free Republic

Amid controversy over new protections President Barack Obama has extended to transgender people, a number of Jewish groups have welcomed them. A statement Friday from the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center praised the guidance issued the same day by the Justice and Education departments requiring that schools receiving federal funds end discrimination based on sexual identification. […] The National Council for Jewish Women said the guidance “provides needed clarity and best practices for public school districts and institutions of higher learning.” Also praising the guidance was Rabbi Jack Moline, who directs Interfaith Alliance, a coalition that includes major Jewish national...

In oral arguments Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear the government defend its kleptocratic behavior while administering an indefensible law. The Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937 is among the measures by which New Dealers tried and failed to regulate and mandate America back to prosperity. Seventy-eight years later, it is the government’s reason for stealing Marvin and Laura Horne’s raisins. New Dealers had bushels of theories, including this: In an economic depression, prices fall, so a recovery will occur when government compels prices to stabilize above where a free market would put them. So Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “brains trust”...

Bridget Johnson November 6, 2014 The first African-American senator to be elected from the South since reconstruction made dual history Tuesday as Tim Scott (R-S.C.) won the seat to which he was appointed after Jim DeMint’s retirement. Scott is also the first black senator to be elected in both the House and the Senate. “South Carolina voters vote their values and their issues and not my complexion. This is a great sign for what’s happening throughout the south. But certainly, a fantastic sign for the evolution that has occurred in South Carolina,” Scott told MSNBC this morning. His win versus...

THE Supreme Court has frequently handed down judgments that have shaken America to its core. Now, it has turned its attention to the raisin. A group of farmers has brought a complaint about the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937, under which the government confiscates part of the annual national raisin crop. The Court is considering whether the arrangement is constitutional. But why is a country that generally celebrates red-blooded capitalism regulating the raisin trade in the first place?Since the 1940s a government agency called the Raisin Administrative Committee has confiscated a portion of the annual raisin crop: 47% in 2003 and...

SADDAM HUSSEIN'S REGIME PROVIDED FINANCIAL support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq. An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support--temporarily, it seems--after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group. The...

Liberals are feeling their oats these days. The president’s poll ratings are down. Support for the Iraq war has eroded. Democrats in Congress are on the offensive charging the White House with misleading the country into war. An aide to the Vice President has been indicted, Congressman Tom DeLay is also facing charges, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is under the spotlight for stock transactions by his blind trust. It is, in other words, a perfect storm of opportunity for the left, which must also mean that it is time for leaders of major Jewish organizations on the political...

In recent years, Passover has undergone a make-over in the American Jewish non-Orthodox community, one that has converted it largely into a holiday devoted to celebrating human rights, protesting a long list of human rights abuses and promoting fashionable causes. The remake seems designed to make Passover a cosmopolitan holiday, one with a universal message in which all can join, in essence the Jewish answer to the Declaration of the Rights of Man of the French Revolution. Back in the 1960s, a series of Political Correctness Haggadahs were written, in which the message of Passover was turned into a celebration...