Free Republic

<p>Politicians can't stop school choice now.</p> <p>Yesterday's broadly written Supreme Court ruling upholding a school choice program in Cleveland has been a long time coming. It was back in 1983 that the Education Department issued its "Nation at Risk" report warning of "a rising tide of mediocrity" in the schools. Two months later, the Supreme Court opened a first crack in the door of school choice when it declared that states could allow taxpayers with children in private schools to deduct tuition and other expenses from state income taxes. Yesterday's ruling represented the high court's final and complete retreat from the suspicion it once displayed towards school choice and the role religious schools can play in it.</p>

While successful television and radio shows succeed even more when they go into re-runs, Yasser Arafat has now demonstrated again that he can succeed by re-running his cancellations. After a big build-up in the Israeli media that Arafat would issue a clear and televised condemnation of suicide bombers on Thursday (June 20), Arafat did what he has done several times before: he got the high ratings and then cancelled the show: March 1996 at Sharm al-Sheikh, Taba and Sharm al-Sheikh July and October 2001, and many, many more. It was a show that had been performed for Bill Clinton, Yitzhak...

<p>June 28, 2002 -- As 17,000 workers get pink slips today at the collapsing WorldCom, one of their top bosses is moving ahead to finish building his $15 million mansion at a Florida resort.</p> <p>Scott Sullivan, the 40-year-old financial brain accused of the devastating profit-rigging at WorldCom, went into seclusion yesterday but progress continued at his palatial hideaway being built in Boca Raton, Fla.</p>

I decided to support the Republican party after years of Democratic faithfullness (this isn't true, but they always start with a lie, so what the heck). It was a hard decision I came to after a long internal struggle (nope).The Democrats had always been the party of the people, the under-dog, the voiceless (the armed robber), but there was something about Albert Gore that caused me to itch and scratch and occasionally lose my lunch.What was it?Was it the lengthy pole up his butt? The inability to tell truth even when knowing how easily he could be found out and...

<p>June 28, 2002 -- WASHINGTON - Three Big Apple Democrats swam against the congressional tide yesterday, refusing to join the overwhelming support for a resolution to keep the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.</p> <p>Reps. Gary Ackerman of Queens, Jerrold Nadler of Manhattan and Nydia Velazquez of Brooklyn chose not to vote for or against the pro-Pledge measure, which the House approved by a lopsided 416-3 vote.</p>

<p>No FBI director has ever broken bread with apologists for the murderers of Americans. J. Edgar Hoover, for all his faults, never addressed the German-American Bund or the American Communist Party.</p> <p>But Robert Mueller III, unembarrassed by his bureau's string of intelligence failures, intends to deliver a lunch talk today to the American Muslim Council - a group with well-established links to supporters of anti-American terrorism.</p>

MANILA, Philippines, Jun 28, 2002 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- A major battle was under way Friday against the al-Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf group in the southern Philippines, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said. Arroyo prefaced a major policy speech on the utility sector with a brief statement that troops were going after the group's top two remaining leaders and already had overrun four Abu Sayyaf camps.

<p>June 28, 2002 -- Martha Stewart is sweating bullets - so much so that the domestic diva has hired cops to guard her and her Westport, Conn., digs as the feds continue their criminal probe of her smelly stock deal.</p>

Fresno Support Our Troops Rally, Tonight!Corner Blackstone and Shaw Tonight, 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Be there if you can! Thank You, Jim Robinson On behalf of the Fresno/Central Valley Chapter

A Few of FR's Finest...........Every Day FR is a Treasure Trove of talented, compassionate, patriotic, wonderful people who gather every day to discuss the latest news and issues; salute and support our military and our leaders; tell a few jokes; learn a new word; write poetry; pray for those in need; and congratulate those who are deserving. Thank you, Jim Robinson, for giving us the vehicle in which we can express ourselves. Free Republic made its debut in September, 1996, and the forum was added in early 1997. I can remember lurking when there were only a few regulars...

Arafat victim of a deterioration of its mental faculties (press) Friday June 28, 2002 - 8h06 GMT ROME, June 28 (AFP) - the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is victim of "une progressive deterioration of his mental faculties ", indicated Friday the Italian weekly magazine Panorama, quoting a report/ratio prepared by foreign experts of the information. "same calming which formerly tranquillized it and attenuated quiverings of its face, the problems of Yasser Arafat worsen now. Long amnesias, black holes with the improvist, continuous variations of logic ", writes the weekly magazine. According to Panorama, this report/ratio would be at the...

Last Gasp for the Death Penalty By Tracy Robinson For decades, a reliable minority of Supreme Court justices has dreamt of outlawing the death penalty. So far, however, anti-death penalty activists have had to take comfort in limited victories at the state level (such as the recent moratorium in Illinois) along with ever-increasing restrictions declared by the Supreme Court. Last Thursday's ruling in Atkins v. Virginia -- which held executions of the mentally retarded to be unconstitutional -- was yet another such nail in the death penalty's coffin. Unless the composition of the Court changes radically, and soon, a total...

Judge Not By George Neumayr Should the people who believe the least define the most about America's public life? Yes, says the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Its 2-1 ruling against the Pledge of Allegiance is a stunning victory for a minority of malcontents determined to create a nation under nothing. "This is more about me than her," said Michael Newdow, the Sacramento atheist who brought the lawsuit against the Pledge of Allegiance on behalf of his daughter. "Newdow acknowledged that he is, in effect, using his daughter to support his cause," reports the Los Angeles Times. "He said...

Here is a must have item for anyone who opposes the Sundquist / Naifeh / Wilder / efforts in Tennessee! Just right-click and save this PNG file and print it on transfer paper. It's already set up as a mirror image for use in creating a t-shirt transfer. All you do is print it out and iron it on. Then go to Nashville and give 'em hell.

Four members of a fraudulent driver's license ring were sentenced Thursday to the nearly five months they've spent in prison awaiting trial on the federal conspiracy charge. Khaled Odtllah, head of the scheme to get the New York City men Tennessee driver's licenses with a phony Cordova address, was released hours after being sentenced by U.S. Dist. Judge Bernice Donald. But his three co-defendants - Mohammed Fares, Abdelmuhsen Mahmid Hammad and Mostafa Said Abou-Shahin - remained in custody to face deportation, a process that could take a year. They were in the country illegally at the time of their arrest...

Mychal Judge Law Angers Conservatives Thursday, 27 June 2002 WASHINGTON -- Speculation is rife in Washington as to the origin and trajectory that lay behind the White House's approval Monday of the Mychal Judge Act -- a new law that gives federal death benefits to named beneficiaries, including same-sex partners, of firefighters and police officers killed in the line of duty. The New York Times reports the only White House acknowledgement of the bill-signing came in a one-sentence e-mail announcement that was sent out the evening President Bush delivered his much anticipated Middle East policy speech, ensuring scant press coverage...

<p>It is summer reading time, and I have a perfect book for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat, to bring to Martha's Vineyard, that posh resort where she and husband Bill always find a nice captain of industry to loan them a cottage with servants and golf clubs. The book is a modern French masterpiece, "L' Effroyable Imposture," by France's next Jean-Paul Sartre, Thierry Meyssan, a sleepy-eyed moderate leftist, whose title, translated into English, reads "The Horrifying Fraud."</p>

<p>CALGARY, Alberta — The Bush administration went out of its way — 60 miles out, in fact — to isolate and infuriate U.S. reporters covering the G-8 summit, sowing ill will that appears unlikely to fade anytime soon.</p> <p>Frustration boiled over among reporters, who were all but shut out of a three-day meeting among leaders of eight of the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world. Even the most mild-mannered White House correspondents were angered by a summit beset by logistical errors and lack of interest among low-level Bush staffers.</p>

CHICAGO — What did Arthur Andersen know, and how could it have approved financial statements full of corporate chicanery? The questions that arose in Enron's meltdown have surfaced again with WorldCom. And while Andersen blames WorldCom for the latest debacle, some experts say the manipulation of the telecommunications giant's books should have been clearly evident to its former auditor. The concept is so fundamental, says accounting professor Roman Weil, that he teaches it in the second week of class at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. "It's basic accounting stuff," said Weil. "An auditor who looked into this...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- On Feb. 23, 1945, after four fierce days of battle, five U.S. Marines and a U.S. Navy corpsman raised an American flag atop Mount Suribachi on the vital Pacific island of Iwo Jima. The picture of those six Americans raising that flag won photographer Joe Rosenthal a Pulitzer Prize and became the most reproduced photograph in history. A few months later, on Aug. 14, 1945, a torn and tattered flag that had flown over Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, was raised over 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., to mark the end of World War II. On May...