Free Republic

The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. By Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Regnery Publishing, 2004. Xv + 270 pgs. Thomas Woods' superb new book has already achieved fame as the first Austrian-inspired book to be on the New York Times bestseller list in many years. It also delivers much more than it promises. Woods offers his book as a guide to "those who find the standard narrative or the typical textbook unpersuasive or ideologically biased" (p. xiv). This suggests that Woods has principally students in mind as his audience; but many others will benefit from reading the book. Woods displays...

(CNSNews.com) - President Bush is moving forward with his plans to create a "Temporary Worker Program" that would allow millions of illegal aliens to remain and work in the U.S. for a minimum of three years with no fear of deportation or other punishment. Advocates of tougher immigration policies believe the president is ignoring the costs and potential dangers posed by illegal immigration. In his final, scheduled, formal press conference of the year, the president criticized current U.S. immigration policy. "The system we have today is not a compassionate system. It's not working," Bush said Dec. 20. "And, as a...

(Washington, DC—November 10, 2004) It wasn't quite "Read my lips," but in the last presidential debate in Arizona, George W. Bush clearly stated that he would not support amnesty for illegal aliens. One week after being narrowly returned to office, the president has reneged on that pledge. Bush has dispatched Secretary of State Colin Powell to Mexico City to open discussions with the Mexican government about the size and scope of amnesty for illegal immigrants and for a massive new guest worker program. "President Bush and Karl Rove have seemingly missed the message of their own, and the Republican Party's,...

Exit polls reveal that President Bush may have miscalculated in endorsing pro-abortion Republican Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter in his primary battle against conservative challenger Pat Toomey. Immediately following his narrow win, Specter was quick to declare his independence from the President and re-assert his pro-abortion credentials. After his November 2 win, Specter repeated the mantra, asserting that if he were to become Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, pro-life judges need not apply. Originally believing that a strong GOP Senate candidate in Pennsylvania could put the state's 21 electoral votes in the Bush column, the President campaigned with Specter and...

One thing we all have to realize is that there is a conspiracy of sorts between the media, poolsters, and both candidates to report close races. Everyone wins. 1. The media wins because ratings are much higher in a close race than a boring blowout. Ever been to a 40-10 football game? Yawn. 2. Pollsters win with close polls because people on both sides frequently check when a race is "close." Been to RCP lately? Only about every 5 minutes. 3. Bush wins because complacency is a winner's biggest enemy. Ever see a loser in a football game come back...

The Redskins are losing their last home game before the election 10-0 right now. Urban legend has it that if they win said game, the incumbent party keeps the White House, but if they lose the challenging party wins. Uh oh. ;-) (in good humor...)

Selected excerpt. But the director of the center, former Iraqi exile Sadoun al-Dulame, says 58 percent of the respondents said they don't care who wins the U.S. presidential election. "But in the end, those who said they care about what happens in America, Kerry [is] in front of Bush," he noted. "22.5 percent said we prefer to see Kerry as the next American president. And those who said we prefer Bush just 16 percent, no more. And, that's a decline for Bush because when we asked the Iraqis two months ago, Bush was in front of Kerry." In a further...

Two weeks before Election Day, the odds that President Bush will pull an upset and grab New Jersey's 15 electoral votes are growing slimmer, a Star-Ledger/Eagleton-Rutgers poll shows. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry leads Bush by 10 points, 48 percent to 38 percent, among registered voters and by 13 percentage points, 51-38, among likely voters, according to the survey of 805 registered voters conducted by telephone Oct. 14 to 17. [snip] Among New Jersey voters, Bush polls best with those who feel terrorism is the most important issue in the race, Murray said, "but the terrorism issue is saturated, and I...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic challenger John Kerry expanded his slight lead over President Bush to three points in a tight race for the White House, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Monday. The Massachusetts senator held a 47-44 percent lead over Bush in the latest three-day tracking poll, up two points from Sunday. Bush's support dropped one point and Kerry's support rose one point in the new poll.

      NewStandard Home Iraq in Crisis Civil Liberties & Security U.S. Business & Economy News ArticleHouse About to Strip More Civil Liberties in Name of Anti-terrorismby Madeleine Baran (bio) Oct 6 - Civil liberties and immigrant rights advocates say House Republicans are using legislation based on the 9/11 Commission's recommendations as cover to implement a series of troubling, un-related reforms condoning torture, limiting immigration and increasing surveillance of both non-citizens and citizens.The House will vote on the 9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act this week. Opponents say the Republican leadership rushed the legislation to the floor without much time...

By Brian Braiker Newsweek Updated: 6:04 p.m. ET Oct. 2, 2004Oct. 2 - With a solid majority of voters concluding that John Kerry outperformed George W. Bush in the first presidential debate on Thursday, the president’s lead in the race for the White House has vanished, according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll. In the first national telephone poll using a fresh sample, NEWSWEEK found the race now statistically tied among all registered voters, 47 percent of whom say they would vote for Kerry and 45 percent for George W. Bush in a three-way race. Removing Independent candidate Ralph Nader, who...

LONDON, Sep 21 (IPS) - The first visit by an Amnesty International team to Darfur over the last several days showed that the U.S. human rights record has weakened its case to intervene in a human rights crisis elsewhere. ''It has made it much harder for the U.S. to take on its self-described role as human rights leader,'' executive director for Amnesty International U.S. Bill Schulz told IPS. Schulz, who returned from a visit to Darfur Tuesday as a member of an Amnesty team said the visit showed that ''the U.S. loses an effective voice as a moral force in...

"Need to know what Saudi Arabians are thinking?" [ Click Here ] Released: September 21, 2004 Race for President Falls Back into Dead Heat, New Zogby Interactive Presidential Battleground Poll Reveals The race for President of the United States continued to tighten during the last two weeks, as President Bush continued his long, hard slog back toward parity with Democratic challenger John Kerry, throwing the race into a virtual dead heat, the latest package of polls by Zogby Interactive shows. Based on individual polls conducted simultaneously Sept. 13-17 in 20 battleground states, neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Kerry holds...

Interactive version: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-battleground04-frameset.html Sen. John Kerry's state tally shrank but his overall position appears to have stabilized among likely voters in many of the 16 battleground states, according to the latest Zogby Interactive poll. Mr. Kerry now leads in 11 states -- down from 12 states he held two weeks ago and 14 a month ago -- and his leads over President Bush in Florida and Arkansas are less than one percentage point. At the same time, he maintained or added to comfortable advantages in Michigan, Oregon and New Mexico -- states that have been largely in his camp since...

Claims that America is engaged in a total war against terrorism are greatly exaggerated. President George Bush cannot selectively fight some terrorists, while ignoring or even supporting other kinds of terrorists, and still claim to be fighting a War on Terror. Bush cannot declare that we oppose all who practice terrorism, including all their supporters, in theory, and then employ a double standard in practice. We cannot say that the 9/11 bombers are terrorists, but that those who blow up busses in Israel are not terrorists because they are engaged in a political process, as was claimed by Secretary of...

Where's George Orwell when we need him? Because we Americans need him. We desperately need him. Consider: in August 2001, immediately after reading a memo entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US", President George Bush went bass fishing - and never called a meeting to discuss the issue. A month later, on September 11, when he was told that the terrorists had attacked, Bush spent the next seven minutes reading a children's book, The Pet Goat, with a group of schoolchildren. And when it comes to his own military service, recent revelations show that Bush got out of fighting...

President Bush' former Harvard Business School prof says his ex-student supported the Vietnam War but wanted somebody else to fight it. Yoshi Tsurumi said yesterday that Bush told him his father's connections got him into the Texas Air National Guard. "But what really disturbed me is that he said he was for the Vietnam War," said Tsurumi, who has also taught at Baruch College and the City University of New York. "I said, 'George, that's hypocrisy. You won't fight a war that you support but you expect other people to fight it for you.' He just smirked." Tsurumi, who crossed...

When U.S. Marines were ordered to withdraw from Fallujah last April, I titled my column “Fallujah: High Tide of American Empire.” For the pullback meant that America was either unwilling to take the casualties to crush the Sunni resistance in Fallujah or unwilling to pay the price of Arab rage if they won a bloody battle. Whatever the motive of the generals in ceding Fallujah, it was a retreat. The Islamic world saw it as such. Since then, fighting in the Sunni Triangle, Sadr City, Najaf, and the Shia cities of the south has escalated. When Baghdad fell, Gen. John...

President George W. Bush may have unwittingly given homosexual activists just the boost they need to get state governments to pass domestic partnership laws, which put gay unions on an equal footing with marriage. OK. Perhaps I'm being charitable, but I would prefer not to believe it was a cold, calculated attempt to pander to yet another voting block. On Aug. 15, in an interview with CNN's Larry King, the president was talking about his support for a federal marriage amendment when King asked him, "What about the union of gays?" Mr. Bush said, "Well, that's up to the states,...