Free Republic

Scandalous Decoys by: Malcolm A. Kline, April 22, 2008 When legendary director Alfred Hitchcock wanted to build suspense and throw off moviegoers he would distract them with what he called a MacGuffin, which Webster’s defines as “an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance.” Arguably, some of the wayward college presidents fired by boards of directors in recent years fit this description. For example, the former president of American University, Benjamin Ladner, racked up about half a million dollars a year in expenses that included...

Africa’s AID Problem by: Bethany Stotts, April 10, 2008 William Easterly’s 2006 book, White Man’s Burden, places the amount of aid sent to Africa over the last 50 years at over $2.3 trillion dollars—yet poverty, corruption, and the AIDS crisis continue to be insurmountable problems there. Foreign aid’s ongoing failure to spark change recently incited Edward Luttwak to declare that things would improve if only the international community would leave Africa alone. “If anybody cared about Africa what they really would want to do is to do the very opposite: do everything possible to bring about the disappearance of the...

The NAFTA Controversy by: Cliff Kincaid, March 14, 2008 On another critical issue, McCain has emerged as a vocal proponent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), despite the fact that one of its major supporters, Robert A. Pastor, admits that, in one key respect, it has been a colossal failure. Pastor, a Democrat who runs the Center for North American Studies at American University, says that NAFTA has resulted in economic integration and increased trade but has “fueled immigration by encouraging foreign investment near the U.S.-Mexican border, which in turn serves as a magnet for workers in central...

The Taliban’s former spokesman, Rahmatullah Hashemi, is now an undergraduate at Yale University, The New York Times reveals in a lengthy cover story by Chip Brown in its Sunday magazine this weekend. The cover line reads, “He was the Taliban’s spin doctor. So what’s he doing at Yale?" In fact, the story shows, Hashemi was at Yale once before—in 2001, appearing at a forum representing the Taliban, a few months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A small clip of Hashemi appears in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” film. “In some ways,” Hashemi, 27, says today, “I’m the luckiest person in the...

Five years after the controversial 2000 presidential election, ex-President Jimmy Carter now says he's certain Al Gore defeated George W. Bush. "Well I would say that in the year 2000, the country failed abysmally in the presidential election process," Carter told a panel Monday at American University in Washington, D.C. "There's no doubt in my mind that Al Gore was elected president."

A few weeks ago I was watching a program on C-Span pertaining to the impact of foreign court opinions upon the U.S. justice system. The primary participants in the discussion were Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer, and the event took place at the American University Law School in Washington D.C. rtsp://video.c-span.org/archive/sc/sc011305_scalia.rm The debate revolved around questions asked by a moderator named Professor Norman Dorsen, and the first multi-part question asked was, "When we talk about the use of foreign court decisions in U.S. Constitutional cases, what body of foreign law are we talking about? Are we limiting...

A Chinese-American dissident who won global sympathy after Beijing police locked up her five-year-old son yesterday admitted to working as a Communist secret agent. Gao Zhan pleaded guilty to sending almost £1 million of sensitive American technology to China for use in missiles. She also pleaded guilty in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, to tax evasion, as did her husband, Xue Donghua. Gao told the court she sent 80 computer chips to China without the required authorisation of the United States Department of Commerce. She faces up to 13 years in prison, and hundreds of thousands of pounds in...

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Arab anger at U.S. threats toward Iraq and American support for Israel was evident Wednesday, but passions that had sent celebrants into the streets in the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks were muted. There were few services across the region honoring the more than 3,000 victims of the terrorist attacks. Those that were held were mainly at U.S. embassies. In Egypt, a few of those who wanted to remember strolled through a downtown Cairo lobby turned gallery for "Images from Ground Zero," a touring exhibition sponsored by the U.S. State Department. "It is an international...