Free Republic

The McCain people have been floating the name of Governor Crist of Florida as a potential vice presidential candidate. I realize, of course, that publishing the names of several people in this way is a time-honored practice that gives them publicity and gains the support of people who have no chance of ending up as the vice presidential candidate. As a conservative Republican, I have had to swallow hard to embrace Senator McCain for president, but at least I have always felt that his views, including some that were badly mistaken, were honestly held.

Democrats have been playing the race card against Republicans for decades, so it should come as no surprise that race has become an issue in a contest with a black candidate running for president. However, Hillary Clinton’s “Willie Horton” campaign against Barack Obama has shocked most Americans and broken open a wide rift in the Democratic Party. For those who might not remember, during the 1988 presidential campaign, Republican George H. W. Bush ran ads against Democrat Michael Dukakis that featured the face of Willie Horton, an African-American man. While Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, Horton, a convicted murderer, was...

WASHINGTON - The State Department says it is trying to determine whether three contract workers had a political motive for looking at Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's passport file. Two of the employees were fired for the security breach and the third was disciplined but is still working, the department said Thursday night. It would not release the names of those who were fired and disciplined or the names of the two companies for which they worked. The department's inspector general is investigating. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said that for now it appears that nothing other than "imprudent curiosity"...

Army News video: Sentries posted to National War MemorialOTTAWA, Ontario — New duty for Reservists serving in the Ceremonial Guards around the nation´s capital.

You're about to meet a subway hero, who jumped onto the tracks to save a man. But as CBS 2 HD has learned, his leap of faith was just the beginning. Veeramuthu Kalimuthu -- or Kali – is a mechanic at Columbia University. His recent actions make him a hero in the truest sense of the word. And if not for someone else coming forward to tell his story, the public would never know what he did on March 14.

Judging by the way much of the Western media is dealing with the Iraq War's fifth anniversary, we're still fighting the acrimonious debates of 2002 and early 2003. Focusing on the past, however, may prevent us from understanding what's happening in Iraq today and its effect on the broader region. The war had three objectives: * To dismantle the regime of terror created by Saddam Hussein and his Tikriti clan. * To restore to the Iraqi people the power that the Tikritis had usurped. * To help Iraqis build a new system that might, in time, become a model for...

YOUR WORLD increasingly runs on lithium-ion batteries. Chances are good that your phone, laptop, camera, portable music and video players, radios, and game consoles keep going only as long as there are lithium ions churning around inside them. Lithium-ion batteries are getting into your power tools. Soon they’ll even be in your car. So it’s a shame that after nearly four decades of intensive development, lithium-ion batteries still leave plenty to be desired. They fade fast—although their energy capacity starts out higher than that of any other kind of mass-market battery, it can drop more than 25 ­percent per year...

The Supreme Court can do much today to remove the McCain-Fein gold speech-regulation law's stain if it decides to hear the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.... The 2008 election season is well under way, yet political speech remains decidedly un-free in America- held hostage to the vanity of John McCain and the cynicism of his accomplices in Congress and the media, who seek to silence their political opponents in the name of clean government.... Citizens United, an activist conservative group, wants relief from burdensome disclosure and disclaimers rules in ads for its documentary, "Hillary: The Movie." While...

The two-decade search for an AIDS vaccine is in crisis after two field tests of the most promising contender not only did not protect people from the virus but may actually have put them at increased risk of becoming infected, The Washington Post reported. Experts are questioning the overall strategy and scientific premises of the nearly $500 million in AIDS vaccine research funded annually by the government after the two field tests were halted last September and seven other trials of AIDS vaccines have either been stopped or put off indefinitely. The recently closed studies, STEP and Phambili, were halted...

Good Friday To You All!!!   Good Friday, also called Holy Friday or Great Friday, is the Friday before Easter (Easter always falls on a Sunday). It commemorates the crucifixion and death of Jesus at Calvary.  Six Things About Life I Learned from the Easter Bunny:Don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Everyone needs a friend who is all ears. There's no such thing as too much candy. Everyone is entitled to a bad hare day. Let happy thoughts multiply like rabbits. Some body parts should be floppy.  Believe it or not, the following announcements actually appeared in...

ABC's "Dancing With the Stars" 2008 begins and we've got a review of the reality show's premiere. Also, "The Bachelor…London Calling" follows right behind and we'll be reviewing this new reality show as well. All with pics and video you'll find nowhere else on the Internet. If nothing else, click in to find the Easter Bunny. It’s a hilarious pic of the day.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the first official to meet with the Dalai Lama since violent protests broke out in Tibet, calls on the world to denounce China's rule.

The South Rises Again by: Malcolm A. Kline, March 20, 2008 Academics’ attitudes towards the South color their teaching about the region, particularly lessons on the Civil War, and their histories, thus, often project myth rather than reality. “Many historians, myself excepted, go in with an argument before they have done their research and seek to impose their present policy positions on the past,” University of Pennsylvania historian Walter McDougall said on March 11 in an appearance at the Cato Institute here. “I prefer to go in plug ignorant.” McDougall is the author of the recently released Throes of Democracy:...

But that is not the question. The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave...Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction. His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence and (b) white guilt. (a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother... "I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was...

Eliot Spitzer is in therapy in the wake of the hooker scandal that swept him out of office.....The randy politician's penchant for ladies of the night came when analysts noticed several unusual financial transactions from Spitzer's bank accounts. Thinking it might be evidence of bribery (that someone co-opted Spitzer's good name), investigators uncovered his involvement with a high-end sex ring--Emperors Club VIP---one of 10 deep-pocketed johns caught on wiretaps arranging for trysts with top-dollar hookers. Spitzer has not been charged with a crime, but federal prosecutors are following the money trail to see if the fallen Democrat used campaign money...

Arizona Hug Ban by: Deborah Lambert, March 20, 2008 First there was the ban on hugs and high-fives at a Fairfax County, Virginia middle school last year that resulted in a flap over a 13-year-old male student, putting his arm around his girlfriend while walking down the school corridor. This year, the Mesa, Arizona school district caused a campus uproar by enacting its own hug ban. Seeking to calm the storm, The local TV news channel (TV News 5) reported that school officials sought to calm the storm by brokering an agreement with the students that allowed hugs of two...

Campus Bedlock by: Deborah Lambert, March 20, 2008 At the U. of Hawaii, things got a little testy recently when a request by two homosexual students to reside in the “married” dorm was turned down. The students promptly filed a discrimination lawsuit, claiming that the university’s decision “devalued the couple’s relationship as inferior to different-sex couples, violating the Hawaii Constitution’s guarantee of equality,” according to the Star Bulletin. The bizarre situation inspired blogger J. Grant Swank to muse in print about why America has come to the point where lodging for a same-sex couple is under consideration, i.e., that their...

(IsraelNN.com) Palestinian Authority children in Gaza are being raised to believe the ancient Eastern European blood libel myth about Jews, with a twist: in this version, the Jews don't make matzah from children's blood; they burn them alive.. According to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), Gaza children were recently taken to an exhibit depicting Israel burning children in a crematorium. The exhibit was created by a body named “The National Committee for the Defense of Children from the Holocaust.” The exhibit also featured a black platform with the words, “Stop the Israel’s Holocaust” [sic]. Both are used to reinforce programs on...

I am celebrating the death, burial, and resurrection of my Lord and Savior. Here are two YouTube videos that I'd like to share with you.

Islam and Europe’s Future by: Bethany Stotts, March 20, 2008 ... George Weigel....contradicted this prediction, saying that he believes in a “muddled” outcome, with Sharia-dominated countries mixed among traditional European societies. “Some are going to make it and some are not. It’s very difficult for me, for example...to imagine a future for the Netherlands and Belgium that is not dramatically different...thirty, forty, fifty years from now than it is today,” he said... Another speaker at the forum, Phillip Jenkins, remains skeptical of arguments predicated on a Muslim demographic surge, arguments which he asserts overlook European’s nascent rediscovery of its own...