Free Republic

The American Civil Liberties Union asked a federal judge to stop the Miami-Dade County school district from removing a series of children’s books from its libraries, including a volume about Cuba which depicts smiling kids in communist uniforms. The ACLU and the Miami-Dade County Student Government Association argued in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Miami on Wednesday that the school board should add materials with alternate viewpoints rather than remove books that could be offensive. Last week, the board voted 6-3 to remove “Vamos a Cuba” and its English-language version, “A Visit to Cuba” from 33 schools,...

PASADENA - Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said the United States has an illusion of omnipotence - "the victory complex" - that's more dangerous than Russia's inferiority complex. "Both countries should overcome those feelings," he said, "and their leaders should reflect what the people want, and what the people want is dialogue." Gorbachev spoke through an interpreter Wednesday to a full house at the Distinguished Speaker Series at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. He said the United States has a right to claim a leadership role in the world based on its military, cultural and economic power. "But partnerships rather than...

     In a talk with the editor of the liberal Texas Monthly magazine who hosts a monthly interview show on Texas PBS stations, former CBS anchor Walter Cronkite uncorked some more liberal opinions. In praising the CBS-boosting, Joseph McCarthy-trashing movie Good Night and Good Luck, Cronkite liked how it reminded Americans that "one nut could endanger the democracy," was "locking up our democracy in a very dangerous way," and persecuting people who were "simply good Americans." When pressed to compare Vietnam and Iraq, Cronkite declared that the comparison was "almost exact."      On Thursday, the Poynter Institute's Romenesko Web site...

Here's Hillary Clinton going bananas over school vouchers, via FNC's Hannity and Colmes: Download and watch the video (Windows Media file). Hillary screeches that providing inner-city and poor students with more choice in education will lead to a a "school of the Church of the White Supremacist " and a "School of the Jihad." Transcript: CLINTON: Suppose that you were meeting today to decide who got the vouchers. First parent comes and says 'I want to send my daughter to St. Peter's Roman Catholic School' and you say 'Great, wonderful school, here's your voucher. Next parent who comes says, 'I...

I found the title of this DUmmie THREAD, "Can freepers be deprogrammed?" especially amusing since I just received a personal FreepMail message at the Free Republic from none other than DUmmie Doohickie. In case you don't remember DUmmie Doohickie, he was the author of some of our FAVORITE DUmmie threads called "I BELIEVE" in which he was cheerleading the DUmmie to BEEEELEEEEVE that John Kerry was going to be inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2005. These threads began shortly after the 2004 election and lasted until early Jan. 2005 when Doohickie took an embarrassed exit from DUmmieland but has recently...

When Nikita Khrushchev died in 1971, I was still a girl, but I remember him well. We used to visit him on the weekends on his farm at Petrovo Dalnee, about 30 miles outside of Moscow. I would work with him among the tomatoes or beehives. Although to me he was my kindly old great-grandfather, my family assured me that he was a great man, a world leader, a liberator -- someone I should be proud of.

The liberal media have been screaming about federal departments or agencies sponsoring or buying news here and abroad. But they were strangely silent when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced on December 13 that the State Department would launch an Edward R. Murrow Journalism Program to influence foreign journalists. It seems that a federal program honoring an icon of the liberal media is considered an acceptable mix of journalism and state. The Rice announcement buys into the myth perpetuated by the George Clooney movie, "Good Night and Good Luck," that Murrow, a CBS journalist who became director of the U.S....

Have you ever noticed how self-righteously outraged liberals become if you DARE to accuse them of being sympathetic to communism? They will accuse you of trying to smear them as well as go into a "How dare you question my patriotism?" mode. However, if you actually READ what the DUmmies and their leftist cohorts actually say to each other on the subject of communism, you will see not only sympathy but flat out LOVE for communism as you can see in this DUmmie THREAD titled, "Why do some people (DU'ers too) think that Communism is the worst?" As usual,...

"No free speech for fascists!" screamed two burly ruffians as they charged the stage where David Horowitz was attempting to speak. "I probably would have suffered some bodily harm," Horowitz later wrote on his blog. Luckily, he writes, about half a dozen supporters "sprang to my rescue and beat the living crap out of the two deserving reds, dragging them unceremoniously from the theater." (1)Mr. Horowitz was fortunate. But he remains a target. We now know that the October 21 attack at the Liberty Film Festival in Los Angeles was no random event. It is part of a wider effort, orchestrated...

Cindy Sheehan claims the media are "a propaganda tool for the government." A New York Post editorial (Aug. 16) argued that Sheehan's statement was self-evidently false, given the overwhelming and almost exclusively positive media attention paid to her in the last several weeks. But in a broader sense, Sheehan has a point: Almost all the news stories and columns in Denver dailies, like the vast majority of the rest of the mainstream media, have failed to inform their readers about what Sheehan really thinks. The night before Sheehan began her Crawford, Texas, vigil, she spoke at the convention of Veterans...

Poles pleaded with Hitler to free them from Stalin's grip New documents on attempts to Polish officers from Soviet POW camps have been found in the archives of the German Foreign Office. Russians continued negotiations concerning freeing a few hundreds Polish army officers even long after they had been shot death in the spring of 1940 - a Polish institute probing Nazi and Stalinist crimes has found out. Families of a few hundreds of Polish officers wrote letters to German Foreign Office pointing out their German origin or other kinds of connection to get their husbands, brothers and fathers back...

N.C. Hearing Opens on 1979 Klan Killings By TIM WHITMIRE, Associated Press Writer 32 minutes ago Signe Waller, right, is comforted by Cory Wechler, a friend, on stage as she reads her prepared statement, Friday, July 15, 2005, during the public hearing of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Greensboro, N.C. Waller was at the November 3, 1979 anti-Ku Klux Klan rally when a violent confrontation between Communist Workers Party members and the Ku Klux at Morningside Homes in Greensboro, left five CWP members dead, including her husband Dr. Jim Waller. (AP Photo/Lynn Hey) GREENSBORO, N.C. - The widow...

THE U.S. military values some lives more than others. That’s the only conclusion you could draw from the trials of two U.S. soldiers--one accused of killing two American officers, the other of executing two Iraqi civilians. Last week, Sgt. Hasan Akbar was sentenced to death for using grenades and his rifle at a base camp in Kuwait to kill two officers and injure 14 other soldiers shortly after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. The chief prosecutor at the military trial, Lt. Col. Michael Mulligan, said that “[Akbar] is a hate-filled, ideologically driven murderer.” But Akbar’s military attorney never presented...

International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), a front group for the communist Workers World Party, has released a video that agitates for 'civil war' at President Bush's inaugural parade on January 20 in Washington, D.C.According to reports, the group has received demonstration permits from the U.S. Park Service for at least two positions along the parade route on Pennsylvania Avenue: the Navy Memorial and Freedom Plaza.The release of the video follows on the announcement that Ramsey Clark, a founder of ANSWER and its parent group, the International Action Center (IAC), will be one of Saddam Hussein's...

NEW YORK -- A document released for the first time today by the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that President Bush issued an Executive Order authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods against detainees in Iraq. Also released by the ACLU today are a slew of other records including a December 2003 FBI e-mail that characterizes methods used by the Defense Department as "torture" and a June 2004 "Urgent Report" to the Director of the FBI that raises concerns that abuse of detainees is being covered up.

Doctors at the Austrian clinic that treated Ukraine’s opposition leader confirm there was a plot to kill him MEDICAL experts have confirmed that Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine’s opposition leader, was poisoned in an attempt on his life during election campaigning, the doctor who supervised his treatment at an Austrian clinic said yesterday. Doctors at Vienna’s exclusive Rudolfinerhaus clinic are within days of identifying the substance that left Mr Yushchenko’s face disfigured with cysts and lesions, Nikolai Korpan told The Times in a telephone interview. Specialists in Britain, the United States and France had helped to establish that it was a biological...

WASHINGTON - The American Civil Liberties Union is seeking information from the FBI on why bureau task forces set up to combat terrorism also looked into anti-war, animal rights and environmental groups. Dozens of organizations have been subjected to scrutiny, according to the ACLU, which was filing Freedom of Information Act requests with the FBI on Thursday to try to find out why. "We think it's clear that the public is interested in the possible return of FBI spying on political and religious groups," said Ann Beeson, the ACLU's associate legal counsel. The FBI denies singling out individuals or groups...

In downtown Seattle, they light a big Christmas tree for the holidays. But in Fremont, they're going to light up -- what else? -- the big statue of Vladimir Lenin. Lenin will be lighted at 5 p.m. Dec. 3 at the corner of Fremont Place North and North 36th Street. (It's the intersection with the big statue of Lenin.) The monument will be bedecked with garland and lights -- and probably not just red ones. It will be the first time the 18-foot bronze statue has been lighted since it came to the Center of the Universe in 1995 by...

Woodstock performer Joe McDonald (Country Joe and The Fish) leads crowd in singing 1960s antiwar songs Thin, clean-shaven, balding and slightly stooped, the 62-year-old McDonald says he's still a socialist but confesses he's now part of the middle class. Organizers had tried to get people out. Groups involved in the protest included the Edmonton Coalition Against War and Racism, Marxist organizations, non-Muslim supporters of the Palestinian cause, members of the Unitarian Church and the occasional Vietnam war draft evader and army deserter. McDonald's sound system was handled by Mike Tulley, an American army draftee who arrived in Canada in April...

...[T]here is no greater Cold War icon than Alger Hiss, the once high-ranking State Department official who went to prison for denying that he'd passed government secrets to the Soviet Union. Nearly 60 years after he was exposed before Congress by Whittaker Chambers, a communist underground operative who later became a senior editor at Time magazine, belief in Hiss' complete innocence remains an article of faith for the political left. For anti-communists, Hiss remains the prime example of how the Kremlin infiltrated the highest ranks of the U.S. government.... Over the years, Davis remained unpersuaded by new evidence of Hiss'...