Free Republic

L IBERALS are upset over U.S. Supreme Court rulings last week concerning the balance between federal and state powers, as well as who's covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The court used a series of 5-4 decisions to strengthen the power of states in their relationship with the federal government, holding that states can't be sued in state courts by individuals seeking enforcement of federal laws. "Congress has vast power but not all power," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote, in a case involving state employees from Maine who sued over violations of federal labor law. "When Congress legislates ...

It's Election Day and you're hundreds of miles from your neighborhood polling place. No problem. Just stop by the nearest ATM. Punch in the appropriate PIN number. The computer screen flashes a ballot. Using the ATM's keyboard, you mark your choices. You've just voted. Although fantasy for now, that scenario is the talk of the nation's secretaries of state and election officials gathered through today at the Regal Riverfront Hotel for a conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State. "It's the buzz," said Vanessa Keitges, product marketing manager for VoteHere.net, as she demonstrated her firm's Internet voting system ...

I N his June 22 speech to the Oklahoma City chapter of the Federalist Society, an organization of libertarian and conservative lawyers and students, Judge Laurence H. Silberman reviewed excessive regulation and the explosion of litigation in recent decades. He chided colleagues for refusing "to face the obvious explanation for their increasing unpopularity. The American people are reacting negatively to the vast increase in the number of lawyers and the growth of the legal process that this increase represents." This unhappiness is not limited to consumers of the legal product: "Many of my contemporaries, reaching the end of their legal ...

New of the Day. Pithy comments. Update and travelog from LisaFab and Towanda. These two were last "seen" on a mission for the procurement of refreshing beverages in Saratoga.

Instead of tossing kids who bring nail clippers to school, perhaps we should show the door to the ones with 'Kill your parents' T-shirts - - - - Two weeks ago in this space, readers learned about the hapless girl in the Sunshine State who got the boot from school for showing to class with nail clippers. The principal expelled her, he said, because he feared a massacre of Columbine High proportions, although he did not explain how such mayhem would be accomplished with a fiendish device such as that used in a manicure. Yet another reason, or should ...

  The Iceman Cometh A pathetic self-delusory arrogance (what other IceMan would have goneth?) masquerading as serendipity or irony often characterizes clinton farce. And so it was yesterday with the clinton curtain raiser at "The Iceman Cometh." It was almost Alleneque -- "The Purple Rose of Cairo" played backwards -- the dramatis personae jumping from the audience into the play rather than the other way around (or, in the curious case of the smarmy carpetbagging no-show abusing abused wife, jumping westerly if metaphorically while Castle-Granding somewhere on the West Side or Westchester or wherever). "The Iceman Cometh"is the perfect ...

America had barely recovered from the flap over Tinky Winky, the purse-carrying purple teletubby the Rev. Jerry Falwell outed as gay, when along came another doll controversy. You know the story: An Atlanta mother complained that her 11-year-old son was verbally deflowered by an Austin Powers action doll. Young Marvin had already seen "The Spy Who Shagged Me" -- whisked past the PG police by his father -- and now he was drawn to the bushy-chested doll in Union Jack underwear who asks the saucy question "Would you fancy a shag?" But it was the query on the packaging -- ...

A 35-year-old woman lived her last moments in terror, first raped, then stabbed to death in Belo Polje in Kosovo. In Prizren, an old man came home from shopping to find his 77-year-old wife had been hacked to death with an axe. The homes of 14 other families in the towns of Kacanik and Gjilane have been torched. The ritual of violence and terrorism continues in Kosovo. Only the ethnicity of the victims changes. After months of reading horrific tales about atrocities committed against ethnic Albanians in this fractured region of the world, now it's Serbians who are being ...

Because of the recent actions of the House, gun control, one of the liberal establishment's favorite subjects, is on the back burner for the moment. And their war is over for the moment as well. So, of course, it is time to return to another topic being pushed by the liberal establishment, namely so-called campaign finance reform. It is so interesting to watch these liberals. When it came to debating the flag burning Constitutional amendment in the House last week, we heard over and over again that flag burning was free speech and could not be curtailed. When it comes ...

Forbes hopes to have others fund campaign WASHINGTON (AP) - Publisher Steve Forbes, who spent $37.5 million of his own money on his first run for the White House, wants others to write most of the checks this time. Through $1,000-a-plate dinners and ''Dear friend'' letters seeking as little as $25, the Republican presidential candidate is trying to build a network of contributors to prove his 2000 campaign ''is bigger than one person'' - and one person's money. Aides say he's already raised $2.5 million. ''It's very important to demonstrate that people are willing to invest their time, their resources, ...

  This is the best history of Kosovo with an ethnic cleansing timeline that I have seen.Long but worth it.Something good to print out and show your liberal pro war friends. ====================================================== Pre-1989 Albanian Rule in Kosovo Discriminated Against ALL non-Albanian Minorities Why is there Civil War in Kosovo, Why Did Clinton Get Involved and What has Been Accomplished? By: Dr. Stephen K. Stoan, Ph.D. History, Duke University, 1970 Director of Library and Information Services, Drury College Springfield MO 65802 Why is there a civil war in Kosovo, why did the Clinton administration get involved in it, and what has ...

VLASTICA, Kosovo -- When Dr. Peter Markesteyn was a little boy in Holland during World War II, he collected letters dropped from trains carrying Jews to the Nazi death camps and posted them. A lifetime later, Manitoba's chief medical examiner yesterday sifted through the bones of some of the 13 Albanians believed to have died in a massacre allegedly carried out April 30 by Serbian security forces in this village, an hour's drive southwest of Kosovo's capital, Pristina. "Tuesday at one o'clock, the trains would come by. You could set your clocks by it," the 68-year-old Winnipegger recalled grimly ...

To hear President Clinton tell it, the country owes its present economic prosperity all to him. So too a higher budget surplus. In fact, he says the fiscal policies of the Reagan-Bush era were ''reckless.'' Hogwash. For someone who decried playing politics just a few days ago, Clinton wasted no time in sharpening up the partisan needle. ''In the 12 years before I took office, reckless fiscal policies quadrupled our debt, bringing us higher interest rates, higher unemployment, higher inflation.'' Huh? When President Reagan took office, the unemployment rate topped 7%. By the time he left, it was under ...

First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's expected race for the Senate is opening one of the deepest gender gaps in recent polling history, with female New Yorkers from both parties rallying to her as the new national champion of women's rights and many men vowing to support anyone else, Scripps Howard News Service reports. GOP pollster Frank Luntz says his June 10 survey of 800 New Yorkers shows that a Senate race between Mrs. Clinton and New York's Republican Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani would be a much closer contest than many pundits have projected. Mr. Luntz's poll showed Mr. Giuliani ...

June 29, 1999, 12:21 p.m. Court's states'-rights decisions endanger the Union By EDWARD P. LAZARUS IN its final opinions of the term, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of passionately disputed 5-4 rulings, dramatically expanded the power of states to disregard federal laws. The court majority held that Congress cannot authorize individuals' suits against states in their own courts for violations of federal law. According to these justices, permitting the federal government to authorize such suits would violate the states' "sovereign immunity." In 1996, the same five-justice majority ruled that individuals cannot sue states in federal court for ...

WEBSTER HUBBELL, the former associate attorney general of the United States, has once again agreed to plead guilty to a felony charge brought by independent counsel Kenneth Starr. What precisely Mr. Hubbell will admit to will not be made public until later today. But he will apparently admit that he lied about his and Hillary Clinton's work at the Rose Law Firm on a shady deal known as Castle Grande. Such a plea would complete Mr. Hubbell's shameful descent from a high law enforcement officer to a multiple felon. According to the indictment, Mr. Hubbell, along with Mrs. Clinton, performed ...

By Bruce Bartlett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. On Monday, Bill Clinton proudly announced new budget figures that increase the size of already projected federal-budget surpluses by $1 trillion over the next 15 years. Under current projections, Mr. Clinton believes it is actually possible to pay off the national debt by 2015. While the thought of paying off the national debt may sound sweet to many taxpayers, these projections are implausible on their face. I do not mean to suggest that the administration is cooking its books--the Congressional Budget Office is likely to show even ...

Jesse Ventura wants to reform the Reform Party. The in-your-face Minnesota Governor, a former professional wrestler whose surprise victory last November made him the most successful candidate in the party's brief history, has been saying for weeks that Ross Perot, the party's founder and all-powerful eminence, should step aside and give others a chance. Now he's going after Russell Verney, the party chairman and Perot's closest political ally since the heady days of 1992, when Perot first ran for President and won nearly a fifth of the vote. Ventura insists he does not want to run the party himself ...

IS IT NEWS any more when the White House is caught in another, uh, misimpression? To quote still another exposé, this one in the New York Times, of this administration's adversarial relationship with truth:        WASHINGTON--Senior White House officials were informed that China might have stolen U.S. nuclear secrets nearly a year earlier than the Clinton administration originally disclosed, according to current and former U.S. officials. . . .    Is anybody shocked, or even surprised? Why, sure, this administration has safeguarded the country's top secrets. Why, sure, it acted quickly when it was informed of security leaks. ...

The news this week is that even President Clinton can no longer deny that Washington has been taking excess taxes from the American people. But he still doesn't want you to know that he's fighting ferociously to hold onto as much of that excess as possible, for spending programs that make taxpayers dependent on Washington. This is the big political picture behind Mr. Clinton's plan this week to deal with the "surprise" federal budget surplus of some $3 trillion over 10 years, a mere $1 trillion over five. For some of us, this is no surprise at all. Supply-side economists, ...