Free Republic

The Republican base across the country looks more favorably on President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court than the cluster of conservative critics who are opposing her inside the Beltway, according to a Washington Times survey of state party chairmen. snip Eileen Melvin, chairwoman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, said she had just come from a meeting with state committee members in conservative Lancaster County, where she asked them what they thought of the Miers nomination. "They said we trust the president," she said. snip In Washington state, party Chairman Chris Vance said he e-mailed information about...

Nadia Abu El-Haj, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Barnard, is listed among the members of the MEALAC faculty at Columbia. A graduate student at Duke University, she turned her doctoral thesis into a book: “Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.” One admiring reviewer (from the University of Chicago) said the book offers “an anthropology of colonialism and nationalism, which follows Foucault and Said” in which “she points to the convergence of archeology’s project with that of colonialism.” Others have not been so kind. For this book is not really about archeology at all....

NORMAN, Okla. -- Norman police confirmed Thursday that they ran a routine investigation of a 21-year-old University of Oklahoma student who blew himself up on campus Saturday night. At a 2 p.m. news conference, Norman Police Department spokesman J.D. Younger said an off-duty, plainclothes officer overheard a conversation Joel Henry Hinrichs III had with the proprietor of a Norman feed store last Thursday at 4 p.m. The conversation centered on a purchase of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. "I think it's important to note that it's not a criminal activity to purchase ammonium nitrate fertilizer," Younger said. However, he noted that the...

Iskander SS-26: Too fast and flexible for known electronic defenses to stop Two generals were in Moscow on the same day, September 26: the head of Israel’s National Security Council Maj.-Gen (Res.) Giora Eiland and the Syrian chief of staff General Ali Habib. Both also called on the Russian chief of staff, Gen. Yuri Baluyevski. The Syrian general came out of his meeting with a brilliant contract for the sale of the advanced Iskander SS-26 surface missile. The Israeli general ran into a blank wall when he tried to persuade the Russian to withhold the missile from the Assad regime....

Current Well Status October 6, 2005 -We finished drilling Ma'anit #1 on July 14 and for the past ten weeks have been conducting completion operations. We have what appears to be a significant discovery of both oil and gas in a number of different zones, over a 2,100-foot interval between 12,500 and 14,600 feet deep. This has been determined through a number of different indicators, including (but not limited to): Increased penetration rates while drilling (drilling breaks) with natural gas shows on the chromatograph (measures natural gas components) Microscopic oil and gas stains on sample rock cuttings during drilling (sample...

October 9, 2005: The U.S. released parts of some captured al Qaeda documents, detailing arguments within Iraqi terrorists over the damage done by their attacks that kill Iraqis and other Moslems. Some al Qaeda leaders believe that all those dead Iraqis are causing increasing resistance to Islamic terrorism. You don't need captured documents to know this, for there has been a very public debate among Iraqi Sunni Arabs over that point. Al Qaeda has become the most feared and hated organization in Iraq because of all the suicide bombings. This has resulted in nearly all the terrorist attacks taking place...

All the Naked News That’s Fit to Print Clearfield,Utah: A 51 year-old Sunset, Utah man, who, it is alleged, has a certain fondness for appearing nude in public , was charged with lewdness after entering a local convenience store- wearing nothing but a tentative smile. Not content with that achievement,he reportedly made a trip –au naturel-past the drive-in window at a fast food restaurant. After being arrested and released on recognizance, the intrepid flasher telephoned the convenience store,asked permission to enter the store naked,and tried to talk employees out of testifying against him. Store personnel called the police-who watched as...

Hundreds of Palestinian insurgents entering Lebanon from Syria Geostrategy-Direct, www.geostrategy-direct.com, October 11, 2005 Lebanese security sources said hundreds of Palestinian insurgents have crossed the Syrian border into Lebanon over the past two weeks. The sources said the insurgents, aided by Syria, have brought large amounts of weapons to their bases in Lebanon. The government of Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora has asked the United States to help secure the mountainous frontier with physical barriers, lethal platforms and sensors. At the same time, Lebanese troops and police have been deployed along the eastern border with Syria. On Sept. 28, an FBI...

AUSTRALIANS must not forget their sense of outrage at the latest terrorist bombings in Bali, Prime Minister John Howard said today. Mr Howard moved a motion in Parliament today condemning the October 1 attacks and expressing Australia's outrage. "The sense of innocent outrage, the sense that people going about something as inoffensive as an Australian being on holidays should have their life interrupted, and in the case of four of our fellow Australians taken away, does produce in all of us a very deep and strongly held sense of outrage," he told Parliament. "And that is a depth of feeling...

Al-Qaeda has built at least one base in Sinai, from where terrorists are sent to Gaza and from there to Israel. Egypt has done nothing to stop it, says IDF Intelligence Chief Gen. Ze'evi-Farkash. Gen. Aharon Ze'evi-Farkash told the Cabinet ministers at their weekly meeting on Sunday that a gang of the international terrorist organization Al-Qaeda recently took over a large area in the Sinai Peninsula. After banishing the residents, they placed mines around their new base - signaling Egyptian police and army forces not to come near. Activities at the base include the training of terrorists and preparations for...

BAGHDAD, Oct 10 (KUNA) -- The Multi-National Force (MNF) said on Monday that it arrested 750 insurgents, killed 12, and wounded eight others in a joint operation with the Iraqi security forces. Spokesperson for Task Force Liberty in the MNF said the joint US-Iraqi force executed over 175 attacks and missions during the first week of operation. The source added that over 50 road-side bombs were discovered on roads in northern and central Iraq, in addition to seizing over 50 mortar rounds, 80 mortars, 70 rockets, and anti-tank mines.

In a stroke of irony, Microsoft's Halo movie will be produced in Wellington by servers running the open-source Linux operating system. Universal Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox announced last week that Peter Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh will act as executive producers for the film, based on the best-selling game for Microsoft's Xbox gaming console. Bungie, the Microsoft-owned development firm which created the game, confirmed that Peter Jackson's post-production firm Weta Digital would be involved in the movie. Weta Digital uses more than 1000 dual-processor IBM blade servers running the Fedora version of the Red Hat distribution of the...

The advocates of "intelligent design," spotlighted in the current courtroom battle over the teaching of evolution in Dover, Pa., have much larger goals than biology textbooks. They hope to discredit Darwin's theory as part of a bigger push to restore faith to a more central role in American life. "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions," says a strategy document written in 1999 by the Seattle think tank at the forefront of the movement. The authors said they seek "nothing less than...

No Shirt, No Shoes and No Pants Means Jail Sat Oct 8, 8:36 PM ET CLEARFIELD, Utah - No shirt, no shoes — and no pants — has landed a Utah man in legal trouble. Last month the 51-year-old Sunset man allegedly entered a local convenience store in the buff on multiple occasions. Clearfield Police say in August he also made a trip through a restaurant drive-thru, au naturel. City prosecutors have charged the man in justice court with misdemeanor lewdness. But now the Davis County District Attorney's office is investigating allegations of witness tampering, which could result in third-degree...

Words are as fragile and sensitive as the human beings who utter them. They need careful nurturing and appropriate context and presentation for their meaning and intent to be realized. This point was made effectively in a best-selling book on punctuation a few years ago that showed how a sentence pointing out the simple truth that "The panda eats shoots and leaves" takes on a new life and meaning with the addition of a few commas, becoming "The panda eats, shoots, and leaves." So we have it with the recent almost-too-ridiculous-to-discuss incident with Bill Bennett's alleged racist remarks on his...

Bush and the revival of small-government conservatismBy KATE RICK Guest Commentary AS PRESIDENT BUSH'S second Supreme Court nominee enters stage left with a large "kick me" sign on her back, outraged Republicans are finally facing a question we've kept on the back burner for years: In an age of so-called moderation, and with all of the compromises that politics entails, what exactly does it mean to be conservative? Is the answer based on the social questions of the day? Is it abortion? Affirmative action? Gay marriage? Or is the answer more about American nationalism? Is it always conservative to be...

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert . . . Thursday night . . . quickly reversing positions . . . to quell the first really serious split in House Republican ranks since the GOP took control of the chamber a decade ago. Thursday, 1,000 conservatives were in a foul mood . . . outraged by the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court . . . were not shy about privately expressing their intense unhappiness . . . also were aggrieved by the record of spending and big government by the Republican president and the Republican Congress. Denny Hastert's somersault...

Op/Ed, More on Collier County, Florida Karl Rove - The Left clings to another Last Hope If you did a Google search at all this weekend on "Karl Rove", you would have gotten seemingly thousands of results of news stories. Karl Rove was called upon to testify for tbe fourth time. He couldn't be guaranteed that he wouldn't be indicted. Stories also suggested that as many as 22 indictments were forthcoming. But, as usual, these headlines were simply made to get the attention of the left's extreme wing, the headlines readers.

Props and sets from the Wallace and Gromit films are believed to have been destroyed in a warehouse blaze. Fire crews were called to Oscar-winning Aardman Animations' Bristol site, which contained the company's "entire history", a spokesman said. Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park said it was "dreadful" for the company but comparatively "not a big deal". The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the new Wallace and Gromit film, has just gone to the top of the US box office chart. Company Spokesman Arthur Sheriff said: "It couldn't have come on a worse day - we were supposed to be celebrating,...

HARARE -- In the logic-defying double-speak to which Zimbabweans have become accustomed, President Robert Mugabe this week blamed international agencies for Africa's food shortages. In what can best be described as a caricature of the well-known Zimbabwean blame-dodging phrase "I am not the one" Mugabe somewhat incoherently told a joint regional Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and World Health Organisation (WHO) conference on food safety for Africa that food relief agencies had retarded the continent's agricultural development. Officially opening the two-day conference in Harare, Mugabe said African governments had neglected agricultural development and ignored the need for food self-sufficiency because...