Free Republic

US Secretary of State Albright cancels visit to Panama WASHINGTON, Dec 10 (AFP) - Secretary of State Madeleine Albright canceled planed to attend Tuesday's ceremony marking the handover of the US-administered Panama canal because of the progress in Middle East talks, a state department official said Friday. "A pivotal breakthrough in the Middle East peace process resulting from the secretary's trip there this week and the subsequent meeting of Middle East leaders in Washington next week made it impossible for the secretary to go to Panama," the official said. "The secretary regrets not being able to attend the historic ...

RALEIGH, N.C. - The Hobgood Academy's weeklong raffle of five guns has been a smashing success, despite criticism that schools and guns are a bad mix. Hobgood expects to clear $23,000 instead of the hoped-for $4,000, as gun advocates snapped up 2,500 tickets for $10 each. The proceeds will pay for a Future Farmers of America building at the Halifax County school. Doug Abernathy, owner of Doug's Guns in Williamston, which supplied the five guns at their $1,800 cost, said when it comes to fund raising, bake sales and barbecues can't hold a candle to guns in a hunting area. ...

Taxes & Government Spending Tyrannical taxation, and excessive government spending and borrowing, are not only threats to our economy - they erode the resource base of our freedom and our moral responsibility. The income tax is a twentieth-century socialist experiment and it has failed. Before the income tax was imposed on us just 80 years ago, government had no claim to our income; only sales, excise and tariff taxes were allowed. We need to return to the Constitution of economic liberty that our Founders intended to be a permanent bulwark of our political liberty. The income tax in effect makes ...

As Mrs. Clinton plans her move to New York State to run for the Senate, and the president now feels safely free of Monicagate and impeachment, the elite establishment liberal media has smugly turned its focus to settling some old scores with non-establishment conservatives. Nowhere was this more evident last week than in the venerable old newspaper of the left, The New York Times. In a hit piece of major proportions, Frank Rich, fresh from an honorable mention in my column "The Ethical Decline of Liberal Jewish Intelligentsia Under Clinton," attempts to dismember fellow Jewish, but conservative, Internet journalist ...

BENTONVILLE, Ark. (AP) -- A judge said Friday that prosecutors can seek the death penalty against two men charged with repeatedly raping and then murdering a 13-year-old boy. At a pretrial hearing, Benton County Circuit Judge David Clinger also granted a defense request that potential jurors can be given a questionaire to determine whether they had already made up their minds about the highly publicized case. But Clinger said lawyers could not delve too deeply into their private lives by asking questions such as what types of magazines they read. Davis Carpenter Jr., 38, and Joshua Brown, 22, are charged ...

MEDIUM RARE by Jim Rarey December 10, 1999 PRINCIPALS AND TEACHERS CHEAT ON TESTS, TOO? A recent news report about cheating on student testing at a public school by teachers and school officials has received little coverage or comment in the mass media. Evidently, students were being furnished with answers to test questions in an effort to raise the overall test results for the school. In these days of “situation ethics” and “pragmatism” (the end justifies the means), the cheating itself is almost unremarkable. However, the reason for the cheating speaks volumes about the condition of public education in this ...

© 1999 WorldNetDaily.com                   I guess it shouldn't surprise us that the Clinton                   administration is attacking the gun industry                   anew -- this time threatening to sue the                   manufacturers for all the gun violence at                   government-financed housing projects. The                   thinking defies logic; most of these places have                   never been what I would call "safe," because --                   unfortunately -- they have always attracted                   some of the worst elements.                   But rather than take any personal                   responsibility for the failure to make                   government housing complexes safer, Clinton                   is blaming gun makers ...

Friday 10 December 1999 PSEUDO CAPTION: President Clinton acknowledges the applause of his hometown crowd as he arrives to address the 133rd annual meeting of the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock, Ark., Friday, Dec. 10, 1999. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Enter Stage Right - A Journal of Modern Conservatism Hate-crimes? Yeah, I hate crime By Lewis J. Goldberg The other day I was having a discussion with an acquaintance about hate-crime legislation. We got to that topic through a larger discussion regarding federal government vs local control. He boasted that without the federal government being the pro-active body that it is, we would not have the prospect of nation-wide hate-crime legislation, he being a person that the proposed legislation would protect. So, instead of offering the obligatory "Amen" that would normally be appropriate when confronted with a comment like his, ...

Bushgore? Gorebush? Let's say you're the front-running candidate for your party's presidential nomination. When you're with people one-on-one or in small groups, you're warm, funny, natural, and engaging -- just a great guy. But when you're in front of TV cameras, you freeze up and respond to questions with memorized chunks of your campaign speech when you should be warm, funny, natural, and engaging. Even the reporters who cover your campaign agree that you're a terrific fellow in private but a bit stiff in public. Al Gore, you say? Naaahhh, that's old news. The new Warm, Funny, Natural and Engaging ...

Shawn Ryan Grell was polite, cooperative and relaxed enough to suggest a lingerie bar to officers who stopped him for drunken driving only six hours after his little daughter was set on fire. He even joked with officers about a lady who had driven an 11-foot-tall truck under a 9-foot-tall canopy, and told them about the lingerie bar where he had been drinking. "You have to go there," Grell said. "You'd like it." In a 30-minute videotaped interview, Grell never gave any indication of the horror he would later admit he inflicted on 2 1/2-year-old Kristen Salem. In fact, ...

New York -- After a seven-year absence, the homeless are back! Hillary, whilst on one of her 34 government-paid trips to New York, discovered them. She announced her discovery to a group of 150 eminent black New Yorkers on November 30. Former Democratic Mayor David N. Dinkins was there as was the Hon. Charles B. Rangel, neither of whom had noticed the homeless since the grim days of the Bush Administration. The homeless whom Hillary has in mind are not the ones who bash pedestrians on the head with bricks, as a deranged man did on November 16, or ...

Chinese intelligence agents are continuing to spy on the United States, both here and abroad. According to a recent Pentagon intelligence report, China has obtained secret U.S. military manuals on submarine acoustic capabilities -- the noise made by the stealthy underwater vessels. The submarine secrets are among the most closely held because they can give the Chinese, with a new attack submarine on the drawing board, the data needed to hunt down and kill U.S. submarines in wartime, we are told. China is in the process of building a new generation of attack submarine, along with a new class ...

alabama $.18alaska $.08arizona $.18arkansas $.186california $.18colorado $.22connecticut $.36delaware $.23district of columbia $.20florida $.13georgia $.075hawaii $.16idaho $.25illinois $.19indiana $.15iowa $.20kansas $.18kentucky $.164louisiana $.20maine $.19maryland $.235massachusetts $.21michigan $.19minnesota $.20mississippi $.184missouri $.17 montana $.27nebraska $.246nevada $.2475new hampshire $.195new jersey $.105new mexico $.18875new york $.2265north carolina $.223 north dakota $.20ohio $.22oklahoma $.17oregon $.24pennsylvania $.259rhode island $.29south carolina $.16 south dakota $.21tennessee $.20utah $.245vermont $.20virginia $.175washington $.23 west virginia $.2535wisconsin $.238 wyoming $.09

BEIJING –– China issued a "strong protest" against the United States on Friday, accusing President Clinton of "grossly interfering" in its affairs by supporting Taiwanese participation in the World Health Organization, state media said. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi summoned a U.S. Embassy diplomat, Eugene Martin, to hear the protest over Clinton's signing of two bills backing Taiwan's participation in the U.N. agency, the state-run Xinhua News Agency said. Yang protested "the U.S. government's acts of seriously infringing upon China's sovereignty and grossly interfering in China's internal affairs," Xinhua said. He demanded that Washington "correct its wrongdoing and never ...

Editorial Section / Friday, December 10, 1999 Ten really dumb ideas BRADLEY GITZ As the end of the century approaches, we have been inevitably inundated with lists of the best of this or that, from the best movies to the best books and the best athletes. So for a change of pace, how about a list of the "worst" of something, in this case the 10 dumbest ideas in American politics in the 20th century? 10. Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. In terms of naive Wilsonianism, it doesn't get any better than this: a global treaty, sponsored by an American secretary ...

Ten really dumb ideas BRADLEY GITZ As the end of the century approaches, we have been inevitably inundated with lists of the best of this or that, from the best movies to the best books and the best athletes. So for a change of pace, how about a list of the "worst" of something, in this case the 10 dumbest ideas in American politics in the 20th century? 10. Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. In terms of naive Wilsonianism, it doesn't get any better than this: a global treaty, sponsored by an American secretary of state and a French foreign minister, ...

NEW YORK (AP) - A Republican city councilman criticized Rosie O'Donnell for bashing Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's homeless policies on her TV talk show, and called her a "shill" for first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, the mayor's likely opponent in a race for the U.S. Senate next year. Minority Leader Thomas V. Ognibene on Thursday also called O'Donnell a "pompous, fatuous fool" who knows nothing about Giuliani's homeless policies. A new Giuliani-backed policy requires homeless people to work for shelter, and puts parents who refuse at risk of having their children placed in foster care. On Wednesday, two state judges ...

Shed a tear for poor George W. Bush. The man can’t get anything right. First it was his fund raising. Every morning when he went out to get the paper, he had to rake 20-dollar bills off his lawn. Perfect strangers were driving by at all hours of the night to throw money at the house. From all the commotion this caused, you might have thought the neighbors were complaining about the greenback litter. His phenomenal success in collecting money to run for president was naturally taken to be a sign of weakness, proof that people only gave him money ...

COLUMBIA - Jurors on Thursday heard a former Charlotte Hornets cheerleader say team owner George Shinn coerced her into a sexual relationship that lasted two years. Excerpts of two videotaped depositions were shown in Circuit Court, where Shinn faces a civil suit alleging that he sexually assaulted another woman. Most of a third deposition was read to the court. Shinn is being sued by Leslie Price. She says Shinn lured her to his Tega Cay home by saying they would meet an attorney who could help her with her divorce. Once there, Price says, Shinn forced her to perform oral ...