Free Republic

The leader of the National Council of La Raza said Friday that the organization is working with Kansas City officials to try to keep the 2009 convention in the city. That’s welcome news. Unless cool heads prevail, Kansas City could lose a valuable national convention. That possibility was raised this week because of continuing concerns about Frances Semler’s appointment to the city’s park board.

Lawmaker Says “Enough is Enough” After Two Years and $114 Billion (WASHINGTON, DC) – U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Littleton) today criticized runaway government spending on post-Katrina recovery efforts as excessive, and called for a halt to any additional appropriations amid rumors that additional Katrina requests for money are forthcoming. “The amount of money that has been wasted on these so-called ‘recovery’ efforts has been mind-boggling,” said Tancredo, “Enough is enough.” According to the White House, the federal government has provided about $114 billion in funding and resources for hurricane recovery in the gulf coast over the last two years –...

A federal judge has put a halt on a planned White House crackdown on employers who hire illegal immigrants while she considers a lawsuit filed by the AFL-CIO claiming the move would harm citizens and those working in the U.S. legally, the Washington Post reported on Saturday. Click here to read the report from the Washington Post. The ruling, issued by U.S. District Judge Maxine M. Chesney, bars the Department of Homeland Security from sending mail notices to 140,000 employers about suspect Social Security numbers. The AFL-CIO and the American Civil Liberties Union say that DHS is going beyond its...

Dallas, TX—Responding to comments by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that he is prepared to fill the “power vacuum” in Iraq, former House Armed Services Chairman and Republican presidential contender Duncan Hunter challenged the Bush administration to step up plans for a strike against Iran. Commenting to a group of veterans and supporters, Hunter explained, “Iran has made their intentions abundantly clear in the Middle East, specifically with respect to military action against Israel. Never before in American history has a nation so blatantly engaged in saber-rattling without facing serious military reprisals from the U.S.” He continued, “The White House recently...

President Vladimir Putin, when he is not busy restoring autocracy to a country that has known little else, has taken on the task of refreshing Russian history with a novel perspective—his own. He is on record lamenting the collapse of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." It was worse, apparently, than World War I, worse than World War II—worse, even, than the creation of the Soviet Union. Last year, the president informed a group of history teachers that Russia "has nothing to be ashamed of" and that it was their job to make students "proud...

Miami, the cruise ship "Mecca" and one of the top ten ports in the United States is also one of seven major U.S. cities listed by the FBI as "terrorist havens".  Miami Deputy Port Director, Khalid Salahuddin, an Orthodox Muslim, was a member of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakham's anti-Semitic thugs.  Today, he heads his own mosque, Masjid Al-Ikhlas, in North Miami.  Salahuddin has ties to radical Islam.  He officiated at a fundraiser for the American Muslim Association of North America, a group headed by Sofian Abdelaziz, who was Vice President of Hamas ran "Health Resource Center for Palestine"....

Recently I received some news items from various places about the shift to a victory mode in Iraq. They are quite remarkable. 1) Dave Kilcullen has a long piece in Small Wars Journal, called "Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt." http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/08/anatomy-of-a-tribal-revolt/ It appears al-Qaeda's tactic, not only in Iraq but elsewhere, is to intermarry with the locals, creating kinship ties that surpass ideology, even religion! That apparently backfired in Iraq. Here are the key paragraphs: Islam, of course, is a key identity marker when dealing with non-Muslim outsiders, but when all involved are Muslim, kinship trumps religion. And in fact, most...

European Union moves to restrict foreign investors' access to its energy industry have not gone down well in Moscow. The Kremlin described the Europeans as "near hysterical," while Russian energy monopolist Gazprom lashed out at what they called "economic nationalism." The Russian wrath is aimed at EU measures to split up its energy giants, which Brussels now says should apply to non-European firms too, in order to prevent foreign energy giants from snatching up European firms. Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin's deputy press secretary, told the Financial Times that "measures to discriminate against Russian companies would be totally unfair," and warned...

Destined To Be Holy " . . it is written, ’Be holy, for I am holy’" —1 Peter 1:16 We must continually remind ourselves of the purpose of life. We are not destined to happiness, nor to health, but to holiness. Today we have far too many desires and interests, and our lives are being consumed and wasted by them. Many of them may be right, noble, and good, and may later be fulfilled, but in the meantime God must cause their importance to us to decrease. The only thing that truly matters is whether a person will accept...

Bogotá, Colombia - Lucia Castillo varies her shopping list little from week to week, typically filling her basket with the usual cheese, bread, eggs, and papaya. But this week Ms. Castillo added something out of the ordinary to her shopping cart: shares in a multibillion dollar oil company. Veering away from a Latin American trend of nationalization and greater government control of oil assets, Colombia put part of its state oil company Ecopetrol on sale Monday, hoping to capture the interest of tens of thousands of small investors, like Castillo, a retiree. < Redact> < /Redact> The plan is "perhaps...

As another anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington approaches it can be said no other subject during this period has been discussed as widely as Islam and Muslims. Yet much about both remains clouded. The Muslim world is not a monolith, and Muslim understanding of their faith-tradition -- Islam -- in lacking a centre analogous to the Vatican, remains widely dispersed. The differences among Muslims on how the Koran should be read and Islam practised reach back to the earliest years of Muslim history and have been the source of much internal conflict. These differences...

While the world sits on the sidelines, the U.S. continues to plug away at progress in Iraq. As we wait to hear the results of the surge, we are provided with a daily media reminder of the failure of the Iraqi government to meet the benchmarks established by the U.S. In the end, will we call this a military fiasco, with pundits claiming we should never have gone to war and that George Bush’s steadfastness was nothing more than stubbornness? The lens of history provides an opportunity to pave a new path in Iraq. For over five years, the world...

A federal judge has put a halt on a planned White House crackdown on employers who hire illegal immigrants while she considers a lawsuit filed by the AFL-CIO claiming the move would harm citizens and those working in the U.S. legally, the Washington Post reported on Saturday. Click here to read the report from the Washington Post. The ruling, issued by U.S. District Judge Maxine M. Chesney, bars the Department of Homeland Security from sending mail notices to 140,000 employers about suspect Social Security numbers. The AFL-CIO and the American Civil Liberties Union say that DHS is going beyond its...

Former Washington Times reporter Rowan Scarborough on Sabotage: American's Enemies within the CIA.

A cat today sparked a full-scale rescue after he chased a mouse into a three inch gap between two garages - and got stuck for two hours. Despite his 14 years, clumsy moggy Bert dashed down the narrow crack in pursuit of vermin but found he was too wide to get out the other end. His worried owners Michael and Glenys Howe found him after hearing his desperate miaows for help and spotting his green eyes in the tiny three inch crevice. Firefighters rushed to the scene and initially planned to lift Bert out with a net but instead were...

More than 100 Chinese companies are working inside Iran, providing a range of goods and services in such areas as energy, dam and shipbuilding, steel production and airport and seaport development, the London-based Realite-EU reported. Trade between Iran and China increased from $1.2 billion in 1998 to about $10 billion last year, while Iran is the second-largest oil exporter to China after Saudi Arabia, sending Beijing around $5.8 billion worth of crude oil along with petrochemical products.

Hillary Clinton is once again facing questions about inappropriate campaign contributions.  Anyone with knowledge of recent history is not shocked.  The Clinton’s have a long history of questionable campaign fundraising. Many, however, will once again try to paint this history as “old news” and as irrelevant to the current campaign.  But this pattern of behavior calls into question both her judgment and ethics and is directly relevant to her campaign for president.Carl Bernstein’s recent sympathetic Hillary biography gives some insight into how this pattern developed.  According to Bernstein, when her future husband Bill was running for Congress in 1974 he...

Grade 1 winner Lawyer Ron will try for his second straight graded stakes triumph at Saratoga Race Course on Saturday as he takes on seven challengers, including stablemate Magna Graduate, in the $500,000 Woodward Stakes (G1). Trainer Todd Pletcher will saddle both Lawyer Ron, who won the Whitney Handicap by 4 3/4 lengths in track-record time in his previous start on July 28, and Magna Graduate, a Grade 2 winner with a pair of Grade 3 victories from five starts this season, in the 1 1/8-mile race. Lawyer Ron has won three of his five starts this season, including the...

It wasn’t long ago that most conspiracy theories came from conservatives. The right, after all gave our country the John Birch Society. But these days, liberals have a virtual monopoly on loony ideas -- and they seem to be getting crazier all the time. For example, in case you haven’t noticed, the United States is sliding into fascism. Well, not sliding, actually. We’re being driven into fascism. By you-know-who. “Beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society,” Naomi Wolf wrote this year in Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “There is essentially...

District Attorney Mike Nifong will spend 24 hours in jail for intentionally lying in court.Angry Italians are giving up pasta on September 13 in protest to rising costs of coffee, mozzarella, bread, biscuits and schoolbooks.