Free Republic

Reading former National Security Council aide Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies--Inside America's Terror War, one half expects the omnipresent author to describe himself showing up in Philadelphia in 1776 to draft the original version of the Declaration of Independence--only to have it hopelessly rewritten by right-wing dolts like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin. By Clarke's account (see page 2 and page 6), he played a key role in many of the most significant national security crises of the last quarter-century. Things went well when his advice was heeded; disaster ensued when it was not. The place one would not expect...

Joseph W. Barr served the shortest term of any U.S. Treasury secretary. But thanks to the Alternative Minimum Tax, which he inspired, Barr may cast a long shadow over the finances of middle-class America. This is a cautionary tale about how tax-the-rich rhetoric can rebound on the middle class. The story also shows that even the Internal Revenue Service can get one right. President Johnson appointed Barr on Dec. 21, 1968. On Jan. 17, 1969, three days before President Nixon's inaugural, Barr testified before Congress's Joint Economic Committee. His testimony, immortalized on microfilm at the Library of Congress, was unabashedly...

"You have brought this country so much. I am proud to have you as my president," wrote 14-year-old Kayla D. French in a Feb. 3 letter to President Bush. But, she said, "There is one thing I do not agree on and that is the extradition treaty we have with Mexico." Kayla has good reason to oppose this treaty, and bring it to the president's attention. Ratified in 1980, the treaty allows Mexico not to surrender suspected murderers wanted in the U.S. unless U.S. prosecutors waive the death penalty. In 2001, following a Mexican Supreme Court decision that declared life...

If the University of Colorado is serious about protecting women from violence, it will never again put a young lady on its football team. Five years ago, Colorado reaped undeserved positive publicity when it suited up a woman -- reserve kicker Katie Hnida -- for a game. Today, Colorado is reaping richly deserved negative publicity for the barbaric behavior of some of its football players and recruits -- behavior that allegedly includes rape and sexual assault. Hnida (now enrolled at the University of New Mexico) has made the most widely publicized allegation, telling Sports Illustrated this month that an unnamed...

There are those who argue that "therapeutic" cloning -- in which a human embryo is cloned and killed -- is a great advancement for the human race. But when I read the recent Science article describing how researchers in South Korea had cloned human embryos, it occurred to me that cloning might be the perfect sin. It just might break all Ten Commandments at once.Follow my thinking on this.In Korea, 16 women volunteered for "ovarian stimulation." That yielded 242 human eggs. Researchers managed to "squeeze" the nucleus from 176 of these and replace it with the nucleus of another cell...

For days, the cable networks broadcast the sickening scene drawn from the security video of a Sarasota, Fla., carwash: A man in a mechanic's uniform grabs the wrist of a confused 11-year-old Carlie Brucia and leads her away.After five gut-wrenching days came the news everyone feared. The police had found Carlie dead. The worst nightmare of parents and children everywhere had come true -- again.In October 2002, the U.S. Justice Department published the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children. It discovered that the evil done to Carlie is all-too common in America.The study defined a category...

<p>President Bush should insist his commission investigating the performance of U.S. intelligence agencies answer this question: What did we know about Saddam's weather balloon program, and when did we know it?</p> <p>This is not a facetious suggestion.</p> <p>Mr. Bush's decision to name a commission came after the highly respected David Kay -- who resigned as director of the Iraq Survey Group, saying he didn't believe Iraq had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction -- told the Senate Armed Services Committee an outside investigation was needed.</p>

President Bush should insist that his commission investigating the performance of U.S. intelligence agencies answer this question: What did we know about Saddam's weather balloon program, and when did we know it?This is not a facetious suggestion.The president's decision to name a commission came after the highly respected David Kay -- who resigned as director of the Iraq Survey Group, saying he didn't believe Iraq had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction -- told the Senate Armed Services Committee that an outside investigation was needed. The most contentious point in Kay's testimony came when Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan asked...

"I watched the demonstrators as they came to Washington, and the advocates for life, and the number of 42 million human beings having been killed because of Roe vs. Wade," Democratic Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia told me last week in an interview for Human Events, "and it just grabbed ahold of me very strongly that what if one of my four great-grandchildren or four grandchildren had been one of those that never did get to enjoy the life that they have now." I asked: "So, now you've actually come all the way around to the opinion that you would...

Just Enforce the Immigration Law by Terence P. Jeffrey Posted Jan 14, 2004 If Congress enacts President Bush's immigration reform plan, liberals immediately will begin pushing to convert it into an unambiguous amnesty by asking questions the plan's Republican defenders will have a hard time answering: Can it be squared with our national ideals of meritocracy and equality before the law? Or will it create an unsustainable caste system in the American work force? As President Bush explained it, the plan would transform "the millions of undocumented men and women now employed in the United States" and "those in foreign...

Just as Howard Dean is discovering Jesus in anticipation of the Southern primaries, he also has discovered family farmers in anticipation of the Iowa Caucuses. In fact, the family farmer may be the only species of millionaire Dean professes to like. At a recent debate in Des Moines, Dean posed as a defender of Iowa's principal landholding caste. "People have a right to be angry with President Bush for all the things he's done to Iowa farmers, helping corporatize American agriculture," said Dean. "He is a president who appears sometimes to care more about the special interests that his political...

<p>The real life horror story that began 18 months ago when an Arab illegal alien named Youseff Balaghi showed up at a San Diego hospital, dying from what the Border Patrol initially and erroneously feared was radiation sickness, has now reached high into Mexico´s foreign service.</p>

HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE :: Mexican Diplomat Charged With Helping Smuggle Arabs Into U.S. by Terence P. Jeffrey by Terence P. Jeffrey Posted Dec 31, 2003 The real life horror story that began eighteen months ago when an Arab illegal alien named Youseff Balaghi showed up at a San Diego hospital, dying from what the Border Patrol initially—and erroneously—feared was radiation sickness, has now reached high into Mexico's foreign service. On Sept. 11, 2001, Imelda Ortiz Abdala was Mexico's consul in Lebanon. On Nov. 12, 2003, Mexican authorities arrested her, according to the Associated Press, "on charges of helping a...

The real life horror story that began eighteen months ago when an Arab illegal alien named Youseff Balaghi showed up at a San Diego hospital, dying from what the Border Patrol initially—and erroneously—feared was radiation sickness, has now reached high into Mexico's foreign service. On Sept. 11, 2001, Imelda Ortiz Abdala was Mexico's consul in Lebanon. On Nov. 12, 2003, Mexican authorities arrested her, according to the Associated Press, "on charges of helping a smuggling ring move Arab migrants into the United States from Mexico." The AP said Mexico had also arrested "alleged ring leader Salim Boughader Mucharafille." Boughader earlier...

While many graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy have spent 2003 defending our nation in Iraq, in Afghanistan or on ships at sea, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union have been plotting an act of cultural terrorism against the Navy here at home.The ACLU is targeting the voluntary lunchtime prayer that has been a tradition at the Naval Academy since its founding.In the ACLU's view, consenting adults have a right to do just about anything they want except say grace in a government cafeteria. Consensual sodomy, it believes, is a sacred right, while consensual public prayer is a sorry...

In the days before the Republican Congress sent Republican President George Bush the most expensive new entitlement since Lyndon Johnson left office, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich proposed a marriage of convenience for the GOP. The bride to be? AARP, the seniors’ lobby. "I think this is one of the great historic moments," Gingrich gushed of the impending enactment of an AARP-approved Medicare prescription drug bill.He even brought the new sweetie home to meet the kids. "Gingrich, speaking Wednesday to the regular weekly gathering of conservative leaders chaired by Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform," reported Cox News Service,...

Are marriages made in heaven, or in courtrooms? Are civil laws that define "the family" man's best effort to codify his understanding of God's law, or are they merely artificial constructions conveniently pieced together by legislatures and judges to suit their passing political and ideological interests? "Simply put," the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts said this week, "the government creates civil marriage." Therefore, the court concluded, same-sex couples have a "right" to marry under the Massachusetts Constitution which "affirms the dignity and equality of all individuals" and "forbids the creation of second-class citizens." The court might as well have said:...

<p>Why would the regime that runs China, which restricts both the foreign and domestic travel of its own people, insist on building rocket ships to send members of the People's Liberation Army into space?</p> <p>Unravel this riddle wrapped in a mystery, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, and you will discover the secret at the center of one of the greatest security risks facing the United States in the coming decades.</p>

<p>When we arrive willy-nilly on the plains of fiscal Armageddon, let no politician say bad intelligence put us there. Republican and Democrat, congressman and president, all have been forewarned.</p> <p>On July 25, 2001, David Walker testified in the House Budget Committee. As comptroller general of the United States, Mr. Walker is the budgetary equivalent of the director of Central Intelligence, and he presented the budgetary corollary of satellite surveillance photos.</p>

With his new book, Persecution—How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity (published by Regnery, a HUMAN EVENTS sister company), David Limbaugh ventures into the lion’s den, challenging federal courts and other public institutions that have targeted Christians in America for unfair treatment. Full of revealing, often infuriating, but must-be-told stories, Persecution exposes the anti-Christian agenda of the American left—and how it threatens American freedom. It destroys the myth that the Founding Fathers intended to build a wall of separation between church and state, and debunks the lie that the public schools are merely neutral bystanders in this cultural war. As...