Free Republic

At a White House Diwali celebration on Tuesday afternoon, First Lady Michelle Obama said that she and her husband wanted to celebrate all the faith and culture traditions 'that make us who we are as Americans." Even as she was saying this, there were 200 plaintiffs pursuing 77 lawsuits asking federal courts to protect their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion from a regulation issued by the administration under Obamacare that requires health insurance plans to cover sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion inducing drugs and devices.The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty maintains a website that tracks the lawsuits.The...

The old adage that one lie leads to another is never more apparent than when modern American public officials deal with issues arising from sexual immorality. President Bill Clinton, for example, started a chain of lies when he decided to have an adulterous relationship with a White House intern. Clinton first lied to his wife, then to a federal court, then to the American people. Nor could Clinton's lies, delivered as president, be his lies alone. His partisans in Congress either had to abandon him or add another link to the chain of lies by declaring that perjury and obstruction...

Barack Obama is the most pro-abortion presidential candidate ever. He is so pro-abortion that he refused as an Illinois state senator to support legislation to protect babies who survived late-term abortions because he did not want to concede -- as he explained in a cold-blooded speech on the Illinois Senate floor -- that these babies, fully outside their mothers' wombs, with their hearts beating and lungs heaving, were in fact "persons." "Persons," of course, are guaranteed equal protection of the law under the 14th Amendment. In 2004, U.S. Senate-candidate Obama mischaracterized his opposition to this legislation. Now, as a presidential...

Frist a Major Shareholder in Reputed For-Profit Abortion Provider By Terence P. Jeffrey Bill Frist (R.-Tenn.), reportedly the White House choice to succeed Trent Lott (R.-Miss.) as Senate majority leader, is a major shareholder in HCA, a for-profit hospital chain founded by his father and brother. HCA reportedly provides abortions to its customers.So now Republicans face this question: If it is disqualifying for their Senate leader to make offensive remarks interpreted as endorsing an immoral policy that denied African-Americans equal rights, is it also disqualifying for their Senate leader to make money from a hospital chain that denies unborn...

Before President Bush gets anywhere near casting his first veto to ensure that the government of the United Arab Emirates can manage elements of six U.S. ports, someone ought to put before him pages 137-139 of “The 9/11 Commission Report.” If Bush doesn’t then cancel the UAE port deal, Congress must demand testimony from every person named in those pages and the footnotes. That includes former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet; former CIA Deputy Director for Operations James Pavitt; former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger; Gen. Hugh Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Maj. Gen....

It was a powerful argument for war made by a politician with long years of experience in the White House. "(I)ntelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability and his nuclear program," said this national leader. "(I)f left unchecked," the politician argued, "Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capability to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too...

London-based Group Seeks One-World Islamic State by Terence P. Jeffrey Posted Aug 10, 2005 After British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced last week that his government would deport foreigners found to be “fostering hatred” and ban a Muslim radical group called Hizb ut-Tahrir, the London Evening Standard reported that officials in Blair’s Home Office were “stunned.” “Home Office officials had advised against the move just a few weeks before,” the paper reported, “and the department’s own study of Muslim youth found the group was non-violent.” The Financial Times said: “Home Office officials have since confirmed that Hizb ut-Tahrir is not...

When George Bush first ran for president, he said he would name "strict constructionists" to the Supreme Court, citing Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas as models. Now, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is being mentioned for a vacancy. But is he like Scalia and Thomas? When In re Jane Doe, the first test of Texas's parental notification law, came to the Texas Supreme Court in 2000, then-Justice Gonzales sided against then-Justice Priscilla Owen, whom Bush later named a federal appellate judge. Doe, the 17-year-old daughter of pro-life parents, sought an abortion. The law required she first notify her parents unless she...

“A Supreme Court judgeship is perhaps the closest our country has come to clothing mortals with deistic powers,” wrote James Harvie Wilkinson III in a 1974 book about clerking for Justice Lewis Powell. In anticipation that Chief Justice William Rehnquist may retire, speculation abounds about which mortal President Bush may now offer these “deistic powers.” The rumored “short list” features some stellar federal appellate judges with credible records as strict constructionists: Michael Luttig of the 4th Circuit, Edith Jones of the 5th, Samuel Alito of the 3rd, and Michael McConnell of the 10th. Conservatives would be thrilled with any of...

The Washington Times www.washingtontimes.com Connect the dots, nowBy Terence P. JeffreyPublished November 20, 2004 "We should have secured the Mexican border."     That could be the pitiful lament we hear from negligent U.S. officials if al Qaeda pulls off an attack on the United States using weapons of mass destruction smuggled across our southern frontier.     Were that horrendous event to happen, leaders in the administration and Congress would be justly hit with the same question perhaps unjustly cast at them and their predecessors after the unprecedented September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: Why didn't they connect the dots?     This time, they...

"We should have secured the Mexican border." That could be the pitiful lament we hear from negligent U.S. officials if Al Qaeda pulls off an attack on the United States using weapons of mass destruction smuggled across our southern frontier. Were that horrendous event to happen, leaders in the administration and Congress would be justly hit with the same question that was perhaps unjustly cast at them and their predecessors after the unprecedented Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: Why didn't they connect the dots? This time, they will have no good answer. We have seen warning signs: Al Qaeda wants...

When the Candidate was a Terrorist by Terence P. Jeffrey Posted Sep 22, 2004 By turns, Shamil Basayev has been an Islamist terrorist in the murderous mold of Osama bin Laden, a top candidate for the presidency of Chechnya and the Chechen prime minister. Now he is back in his Osama bin Laden mode. As Americans debate future foreign policy--in an era when terrorism is the greatest threat--we would do well to study the Russian experience with Basayev. It raises the question: Will promoting democracy in remote lands be effective in defending America against terrorists? Basayev took credit last week...

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com CIA's fumblesBy Terence P. JeffreyPublished July 16, 2004 The Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on prewar U.S. intelligence in Iraq inspires two unexpected questions: (1) Why didn't more elected officials question the Central Intelligence Agency the way Vice President Dick Cheney did? (2) Did any politicians question the CIA enough?     Americans have grown accustomed to the manifest excellence of our armed forces. When our elected leaders told them to take Iraq, they did it in a matter of weeks, with remarkably little collateral damage or loss of life. Government doesn't get any more efficient than the 3rd...

On the morning of July 1, the news was so good out of Iraq that the liberal Washington Post and New York Times almost failed to find something negative to report about it on their front pages. For months, the Times and Post have specialized in taking anything bad that happens in Iraq--no matter how minor--and hyping it as major news. But on June 30 nothing bad had happened in Iraq. Indeed, there had been a long string of good news: Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist Abu Mu-sab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian Palestinian, had overplayed his hand in a series of attacks...

This week, a five-member majority of the Supreme Court, presumably sensitive to the public outrage that would greet such a controversial decision in a presidential election year, refused to rule on the question of whether the Constitution allows public school students to voluntarily utter the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. The justices reversed the anti-Pledge ruling of a lower court on technical grounds, leaving for another day the underlying issue. It will return -- and soon -- because the liberal judges who control our courts have long been laying the precedents to expel God from our public life and...

<p>President Bush's speech Monday at the Army War College was steeped in the realistic perspective that America will need to stay the course in Iraq over the next 18 months as we work to implant a stable government in Baghdad.</p>

<p>If America was beginning to forget who our true enemy is in the War on Terror, the enemy has now reminded us. On Tuesday, this enemy made a gruesome posting on the Internet: It was a graphic videotape purporting to show al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist ringleader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, or one of his lieutenants, beheading a young American civilian who had gone to Iraq to repair communications antennas.</p>

If America was beginning to forget who our true enemy is in the War on Terror, the enemy has now reminded us. On Tuesday, this enemy made a gruesome posting on the Internet: It was a graphic videotape purporting to show al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist ringleader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, or one of his lieutenants, beheading a young American civilian who had gone to Iraq to repair communications antennas. The murdered American, Nick Berg, had been missing since April 9. His body, the Associated Press reported, was found in Baghdad on Saturday. By Monday, the State Department had informed his family of his death. Then...

As better information emerges about the recently foiled terrorist strike against the Jordanian intelligence headquarters in Amman, the event just might demonstrate that Secretary of State Colin Powell hit the bull's-eye when, speaking before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, he made his most incriminating charge against Saddam Hussein. Powell said then that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, "an associate and collaborator of Usama bin Laden and his al-Qaida lieutenants," had taken sanctuary in Iraq after the U.S. invasion chased him out of Afghanistan. Invited by an agent of Saddam, Zarqawi's organization migrated to the Kurdish controlled area of Iraq,...

Admitted felon Ilyas Ali, who once ran a butcher shop in Minneapolis, Minn., is also a master of political spin. When a reporter visited Ali in a Hong Kong jail last year after Ali had been arrested for trying to trade heroin and hashish for shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles that he intended to resell to al Qaeda, Ali posed as the victim of Attorney General John Ashcroft and his over-zealous Justice Department. American law enforcement "screwed up 9/11 and now they're arresting innocent people for political purposes," Ali, a naturalized citizen born in India, told the Associated Press. "I'm very, very...