Free Republic

Many of us hold assumptions about things for which we don’t have all the facts. I hear something from a trusted source, and I assume it is fact. That seems to be true about our local immigrant community. I decided to check into some beliefs about immigrants that get bantered about, and borrowed an information sheet I received from Centro Latino, a local nonprofit organization whose mission is to respond to critical needs of Latinos and to bridge the cultural gap between Spanish-speaking and non-Spanish-speaking members of our community I addressed issues with more current data I found online. Undocumented...

About eight years ago, I wrote a book called “What if George Bush were a Black Man?” The book was designed to analyze the vast impact that skin color has on our outcomes in a historically racist society. The summarized conclusion of the project was that disparities in the educational, economic and criminal justice systems give black men a much smaller margin of error than the one they would receive if they were white. A white kid in college caught using dope in a frat house gets a slap on the wrist. A black kid in the projects doing the...

Back in 2001, right after September 11th, I heard a twenty-something goofball disk jockey on a Hard Rock station talking about the attacks. He said to his co-host, “I can’t believe I was ever a Democrat.” Now today, the Republican Party has been so out-maneuvered on the PR front that Mitt Romney can’t beat Barack Obama in the middle of an economic depression, among voters just like that disk jockey. Voters like that disk jockey have tended to return to the Democratic fold. Why?Lots of people are blaming this reversal in attitudes on demographics, or the weather, or the media....

It only took 40 years. But finally, actress-turned-workout-specialist Jane Fonda has apologized for sitting on a Viet Cong anti-aircraft gun during her 1972 visit to North Vietnam. Fonda, who used her fame to push her radical leftism during her heyday, traveled to Hanoi in 1972 in solidarity with the Viet Cong. While there, she proceeded to blame the US for supposedly bombing a dike system, and did a series of radio broadcasts stating that US leaders were “war criminals.” Those broadcasts were replayed for American POWs being tortured by the Viet Cong. Later, when POWs spoke about their experiences of...

Throw President Obama and his constituency over the "Fiscal Cliff." The fiscal cliff affects all Americans and that is not good. It is time that America understands what Obama’s four year strings of trillion dollar deficits are doing. President Obama expects four more years of the same regarding yearly federal debt and that will cost all Americans. The post-progressives are going to be happy since the American people will have developed into a nation with social equality. However, the rub for the American people is that social equality will mean that everyone will have an equally low standard of living....

As the lack of opportunity in America becomes less of an issue of race and more of perpetual class separation, liberal reporters and academics continue to propose the same recycled, progressive policies which have little hope of solving the marriage problem but will undoubtedly bloat federal and state governments. For example, in a New York Times article printed this summer, Jason DeParle cast the growing trend of lower-class single mothers as one of class conflict. “Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as...

The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it. -Mother TeresaWas Mother Teresa a self-interested individual? Was it the pursuit of personal happiness that led her to Calcutta and to the building of one of history's great charitable organizations (Missionaries of Charity)? Would she have found contentment working her way up from account rep to CEO of IBM?Was Steve Jobs a self-interested individual? Was it the pursuit of personal happiness that led him to build one of history's great enterprises? Would he have found contentment as a volunteer for the Peace Corps?Let's...

This a question which has been asked and answered so many times, it probably seems like a boring topic for a blog post. But as with all things this blog covers, our fundamental perspective, of ideology as evovled Darwinian strategy, may offer a new view on this old subject.A lot of writers try to answer this in a positive uplifting fashion, and this is where they go wrong. They try to extol the virtues of Conservatism, the value of Liberty, and the societal strength which arises when men interact freely, and bear the responsibility for their decisions. Some try to...

The legalization of marijuana by voters in the states of Colorado and Washington has sparked consternation in other parts of the world. Raymond Yans, head of the United Nation's International Narcotics Control Board, says the approvals send ‘‘a wrong message to the rest of the nation and it sends a wrong message abroad.’’ “What the voters in these states have overlooked is that marijuana is an important cash crop in many Third World countries,” Yans pointed out. “Legalization, if it catches on, will depress the prices that can be charged. This will negatively affect the farmers who grow it, the...

So let’s cut to the chase and talk about what’s really going on here. Was the takedown of Colonel Allen West decided by a Machiavellian cabal in both parties that began with the redrawing of Florida Congressional voting districts, both state and federal? And was this alleged decision made to move him out of the district controlled by the Democrat Mark Foley called the Chihuahua in high heels? By insiders cutting a deal to move West up to the Democrat ex pat region of St. Lucie County, he would be folded in between GOP enclaves in both Martin and Indian...

The Republicans had "a minor outbreak of sanity" (Jehu's words) when they floated a paper that questioned current intellectual property law. Then they quickly decided that they didn't mean it. The mass of corporations in this country go with the flow, and if that means supporting the Democrats, then they do so. The Republicans can't seem to figure out that their theoretical support for business and markets doesn't translate into support for their party; quite the opposite. In particular, their support for nearly perpetual copyright and tough copyright enforcement benefits those corporations that are most hostile to the Republicans, corporations...

On Thursday evening, November 15th, an audience of several hundred people sat in rapt attention at Temple Israel on New York City's Upper East Side, as they heard the compelling narrative of a most unusual man. Kasim Hafeez, 28, is a British born Muslim of Pakistani descent whom was raised in an environment where he was taught that, "Jews control the world, and Israel is at fault for just about everything." As many other young Muslims in the United Kingdom, he embraced the teachings of radical Islam and internalized the visceral hatred for Israel that is endemic to this philosophy....

From The People's Cube ABOUT THAT WAR II Here's what I wrote in last week's roundup about the war that wasn't a war. 3. This is still not a war. What will most likely happen is that Israel will carry out some more air strikes and possibly even a limited ground operation. Some Hamas terrorists will die along with some Israeli civilians. 5. Phone calls from Washington and London will warn Netanyahu to wind down the operation. Turkey or Egypt will offer to negotiate a truce. Israel will pull out. Hamas will celebrate the usual victory of insurgencies, that...

The first U.S. multi-family condo built of used shipping containers is slated to break ground in Detroit early next year. Strong, durable and portable, shipping containers stack easily and link together like Legos. About 25 million of these 20-by-40 feet multicolored boxes move through U.S. container ports a year, hauling children’s toys, flat-screen TVs, computers, car parts, sneakers and sweaters. But so much travel takes its toll, and eventually the containers wear out and are retired. That’s when architects and designers, especially those with a “green” bent, step in to turn these cast-off boxes into student housing in Amsterdam, artists’...

Some architects believe that in order to build the sustainable cities of the future, we need to look back to the log cabin era and build “skyscrapers” out of wood. Just over a century ago, the architects and engineers who invented the skyscraper set us on the path to becoming an urban world. Tall buildings of concrete and steel helped make urban density—and the increased sustainability that comes with it—possible. But the buildings themselves come at a heavy, and often hidden, environmental price. Concrete and steel are some of the most energy-intensive materials on the planet. The manufacture and transport...

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — An estimated 11.5 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States. And most of them live in hiding. But now, a small group of mostly young people are opening up about their status. They admit -- and sometimes shout -- that they are undocumented and unafraid. Often undocumented people who are interviewed choose to use fake names, like this man who spoke through a translator after a series of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Flagstaff four years ago. "There was one night during the raids we didn’t have anything for dinner," he told me. "My 4-...

The Church of England just recently said no to women bishops. There were howls of outrage from all the predictable quarters, for whom such a troglodyte move is just smack-the-forehead baffling. Now I can understand a vote against women bishops as a preliminary move to try to undo the ordination of women priests. And I can understand a vote for women bishops as the next logical step after having established the practice of ordaining women priests. What I don't get is the affirming the ordination of women priests and opposing them as bishops. The pig, once swallowed by the python,...

Oceanside Man Killed Wife, Cooked Her On Stove, Police Allege November 23, 2012 A 68-year-old Oceanside man is accused of killing and dismembering his 73-year-old wife. He pleaded not guilty this week. Deputy Dist. Atty. Katherine Flaherty told Vista Superior Court Judge J. Marshall Hockett that police found hunks of meat cooking on the stove at the family home and a severed head in the freezer. Hockett ordered Frederick Joseph Hengl kept in jail on $5-million bail. Police are unclear when Hengl's wife, Anna Faris, was killed. They went to the couple's home after neighbors reported a strange smell and...

The fake “reporters and journalists” we are forced to put up with have destroyed our sacred freedom of the press. Their lies and half-truths lead trusting readers to only the conclusions they want Americans to reach. The truth about the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers & Grain Millers Union (BCTW&GMU) is a good example of the kind of information the fake media hides from us. The leadership of the BCTW&GMU is a gang of greedy crooks who are only concerned with filling up the trough they push their snouts into. That trough is constantly refilled with the dues money of workers...

Car thieves avoiding Toyota Prius By Zach Bowman RSS feed Posted Nov 21st 2012 4:30PM The National Insurance Crime Bureau has taken a closer look at how often car thieves target the Toyota Prius. As it turns out, the most popular hybrid on US roads has a very low theft rate, and when it does get stolen, law enforcement are quick to return the machine to its rightful owners. All told, 2008-2012 Prius models saw a theft rate of one in 606 vehicles compared to one in 78 for all models on the road from the same model year period....