Free Republic

That’s the question John McCain must be asking himself after hearing a strange assertion from Bill Clinton about Hillary Clinton’s qualifications. Bragging that “the girl” has more former military commanders endorsing her than anyone else, Bill said that her unique experience among all of the candidates on the Senate Armed Services Committee made the difference. If so, the commanders must be as bad at research as Bill, because McCain has served on that committee since before Bill and Hillary ever came to Washington: He continued to highlight the military issue later in Cary, accentuating his wife’s gender to emphasize his...

I HAVE a vivid recollection of a conversation with a friend at an Evangelical seminary we attended ten years ago. Walking over, he said, "Scott, I’ve been reading fascinating stuff on the sacraments." "Sacraments bore me," I replied sharply. Little did I know. I thought of the incident recently as I made my way home from an inspiring hour of Benediction. I got the urge to write about the Scripture study which led me into a Catholic understanding of the Holy Eucharist (and eventually into the Catholic Church) about five years ago. It all started with a Sunday morning service...

DENVER, Colo. (Denver Catholic Register) - In a fact-filled talk in Denver on March 4, journalist-author John Allen spoke about mega-trends facing the Church and tied them to Pope Benedict XVI’s upcoming U.S. visit. The pope will visit Washington D.C. and New York City April 15-20. Allen is the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, and also a CNN correspondent. He spoke before a sizeable crowd of 250 people in Bonfils Hall at the John Paul II Center. Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., invited Allen, a close friend, to speak. Allen spoke about the Catholic Church becoming a...

Analysis of two recent scandals says they do to print edition iPod friendly Share this site A common complaint of conservative media critics is that the mainstream media downplay the party affiliation of a Democrat who is involved in a scandal, while playing up the party identification of a Republican in a scandal. So I decided to see how the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post had treated two recent scandals, one involving New York Democratic Gov. Elliot Spitzer and the other involving Florida Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Foley. Spitzer, of course, resigned March 12 after a federal investigation...

The Honorable John W. Hickenlooper Mayor's Office Denver, Colorado Dear Mayor Hickenlooper: I read that your efforts to raise funds for the 2008 Democratic National Convention are falling far short of your needs, that you will need to raise $40.6 million by June 16 in order to pay the expenses occasioned by the August 25-28 convention in your city. I am sure you have lots of very good ideas about how to do this, but as an experienced fund raiser myself and as someone sympathetic with your plight, I wonder if I might be so bold as to offer up...

John McCain is one lucky fellow. Of course you can make your own luck, as the saying goes. That's what McCain did with great courage to survive five-and-a-half years at the Hanoi Hilton. And he made his own luck again by advocating a surge of troops in Iraq that later proved to be successful. In winning the Republican presidential nomination, however, McCain has mostly been just plain lucky, no thanks to his own fortitude or foresight. Conservatives inadvertently aided him by failing to line up behind a single rival. Mike Huckabee ruined Mitt Romney's strategy by beating him in Iowa....

Unconditional Talks with Iran Could Lead to War Mar. 21, 2008 Talk to almost anybody in Washington about foreign policy these days and you are likely to hear that Iran is the number one "international problem" for the United States. Pundits and politicians are unanimous that dealing with the Islamic Republic will be one of the key issues of the presidential election campaign. The question is: what to do about Iran? It is clear that the leadership in Tehran, boosted by last week's parliamentary elections, is in no mood to offer concessions. The choice facing policymakers is between standing up...

Next time, maybe Bill Richardson should consider text messaging. Something along these lines, perhaps: I M not 4 U. Me & BHO: BFF. CUL8R Of course we can only imagine how Hillary's reply would have read. But Richardson did have the moxie to make one of the world's tougher phone calls: informing Hillary Clinton that despite having been appointed by her husband to two cabinet positions, he was endorsing Barack Obama. Kidding aside, think of what it says about Hillary's personality that so much press attention has focused on the call. Imagine if Richardson had instead decided to endorse Clinton....

Nearly nine years after she was arrested and six years after she went to prison, Sara Jane Olson will once again call St. Paul home. Olson, who pleaded guilty to a failed plot to kill Los Angeles police officers and to her role in a deadly bank robbery, was released from the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla on Monday and is expected to arrive in the Twin Cities by today. A young man who answered the phone at the family home in St. Paul early Friday evening said the family would have no comment. Olson is scheduled to report...

On some issues the public is ahead of its political leaders. Sex education is one of them. By substantial margins, Floridians favor providing students with information about sexually transmitted disease prevention and contraception rather than just an abstinence-only approach favored by the Bush administration. The Legislature should hear this call and put the health of Florida's teens ahead of a narrow, religiously grounded agenda. According to a recent St. Petersburg Times poll, of the nine in 10 Florida voters who agree that the public schools should offer some form of sex eduction, only 8 percent said it should be abstinence-only....

This week proved yet again a statement from someone a lot more politically savy than me, who had stated something similar to: "Pay close attention to what Liberals say. Whenever they accuse or blame someone of anything, that is EXACTLY what they are up to" This has been proved time and time again. This thread is to allow FReepers to post the Liberal hypocrisy since, say, 1945. Go at it!

The Burning Heart " Did not our heart burn within us . . . ? " —Luke 24:32 We need to learn this secret of the burning heart. Suddenly Jesus appears to us, fires are set ablaze, and we are given wonderful visions; but then we must learn to maintain the secret of the burning heart— a heart that can go through anything. It is the simple, dreary day, with its commonplace duties and people, that smothers the burning heart— unless we have learned the secret of abiding in Jesus.Much of the distress we experience as Christians comes not...

Hungry, desperate and afraid for his life, Pedro Pablo Montoya shot the commander he was supposed to protect. He then severed the commander's right hand -- as proof he'd killed one of Colombia's most wanted men -- and deserted the once-powerful rebel group to which he had pledged allegiance. The slaying this month of Manuel Jesús Muñoz, a member of the ruling directorate of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, was a dramatic signal that a rebel group known for its resilience is engulfed in an internal crisis that could lead to its implosion after four decades of armed struggle....

Ma has based his campaign on promises to reverse the pro-independence direction of outgoing President Chen Shui-bian and leverage China's white-hot economic boom to re-energize Taiwan's ailing high-tech economy. He has proposed a formal peace treaty with Beijing that would demilitarize the Taiwan Strait, 100-mile-wide waterway that separates the two heavily armed sides. But he has drawn the line at unification, promising it would not be discussed during his presidency. Economically, he wants to lower barriers to Taiwanese investment on the mainland — it already amounts to more than $100 billion — and begin direct air and maritime links between...

When Sen. Obama’s preacher thundered about racism and injustice, Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father - religious right leader Francis Schaeffer denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush Sr. Every Sunday thousands of right-wing white preachers (following in my father’s footsteps) rail against America’s sins from tens of thousands of pulpits. They tell us that America is complicit in the “murder of the unborn,” has become “Sodom” by coddling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evolutionists...

A host for a Milwaukee-based radio talk show, Crosstalk America, says she will be leading a protest against the city's local newspaper, the Journal Sentinel for publishing on Good Friday an advertisement for an explicit sex show being highlighted as part of "The Res-erection" tour. The advertisement is for "Puppetry of the P----," which is to appear next month at the city's Miramar theater. The ad features two men, partly in silhouette, who appear to be nude, and whose privates are covered by "The Res-erection Tour!" slogan. "As a long time reader of the Journal Sentinel and a national Christian...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Standard & Poor's Ratings Services on Friday revised its status on Financial Guaranty Insurance Co. and holding company FGIC Corp. to CreditWatch with negative implications from CreditWatch with developing implications. PMI Group (PMI: 5.92, 0.00, 0.0%) , Financial Guaranty Insurance's principal owner, said recently that it no longer views the company as a strategic investment and will not be participating in any recapitalization plan.

SAN'A, Yemen (AP) - An Al-Qaida terror cell was behind a mortar strike against the U.S. embassy in Yemen that missed its target but killed a security guard and wounded 13 students at a nearby school, an Interior Ministry official said Saturday. The official, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, said al- Qaida militant Hamza al-Dayan launched three mortars at the embassy Tuesday before fleeing the scene in a vehicle with three accomplices. The mortar shells crashed into the school in the downtown Sawan district of San'a, killing the security guard and wounding 13 schoolgirls, three grievously. On Thursday, the...

"I'm sure," said Barack Obama in that sonorous baritone that makes his drive-thru order for a Big Mac, fries and strawberry shake sound profound, "many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed." Well, yes. But not many of us have heard remarks from our pastors, priests or rabbis that are stark, staring, out-of-his-tree, flown-the-coop nuts. ...snip... It is Barack Obama's choice to entrust his daughters to the spiritual care of such a man for their entire lives, but in Philadelphia the senator attempted to universalize his peculiar judgment – to claim...

The Canadian government has ordered a Christian ministry that teaches doctrine and the differences between Christians and cults shut down because its reference materials were "critical" of the beliefs of those who are not Christian, WND has learned. So what used to be called MacGregor Ministries with offerings in how to recognize and eliminate "faulty fads" in Christian churches has been re-created in the United States, and now operates under the name MM Outreach Media Ministries. Lorri MacGregor, who has dedicated her life to explaining the straight and narrow of Christian beliefs since she found her way out of the...