Free Republic

A Future We Can Live With2005.01.29 A recent correspondent writes concerning the ongoing European population crash:It reminds me of things in the mid 5th century in Europe. After a long history of bad economic policies which stifled development and made child rearing expensive, and the growing use of foreigners to man the military, when the immigrants from the German areas began to move down to the Roman empire, it couldn't assimilate them or even stop the flow and the German elites took over, and the social disruption destroyed the Empire in the west.Very interesting. I agree. I too have wondered...

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Two green Adopt-A-Highway signs reading "American Nazi Party" have popped up on a rural road a few miles from downtown, and it's got people upset with the county for agreeing to put up the signs and worried about their neighborhood. "I know we live in a free world. But that's not part of freedom, anything to do with the Nazis," said Barbara Hamblin, a 64-year-old who lives in a mobile home park just down the road from one of the signs. "They had to have been off their rocker," she said. The two signs were erected...

GILBERT, Minn. - Promoting this town's proud history is one thing. Naming the town's festival Gilbert Whorehouse Days is another thing entirely. A group of angry citizens showed up at a City Council meeting Tuesday to protest the event. The festival's name refers to a time when Gilbert was known for its bars, gambling and "working girls" during Prohibition. "The damage has been done," resident Fran Marolt said. "This is not a family-oriented activity." The event doesn't include any of the activities that gave the festival its name, but City Council members still don't approve. "It would give us a...

No Name Calling Week?     1/12/2005By Warren Throckmorton, Ph.D.Yes, name-calling is wrong. But this event’s sponsors reveal the agenda behind banning it. “There is a special place in hell for people like you!” These words were directed at me by a teacher during this past summer’s National Education Association (NEA) convention in Washington, D.C. This delegate to the NEA convention made his prediction in response to my presence at the NEA’s Ex-Gay Educators’ Caucus booth in the convention exhibit hall. His cheery salutation caught me off-guard given the message of tolerance and acceptance I had been hearing around the exhibit hall....

SALEM -- They met her in a restaurant, told her she was "really cute," and offered her a chance to make easy money, police said. Within weeks, she was visiting a Salem apartment, watching videos about prostitution. And soon afterward, she found herself on a Boston street, using the name "Lovey" and getting into the car of a man who wanted to pay her for sex. The allegations were outlined in Salem District Court yesterday after police arrested two men on charges that they recruited teenagers as young as 14 to be prostitutes, allegedly training them in a Salem apartment...

Steve Sailer and others have developed lists of factors that appear to correlate fairly strongly with voting patterns in the most recent Presidential election and prior ones (white birth rates, among them). The February 2005 edition of Chicago Magazine (not yet online at www. chicagomagazine.com) offers a new insight. The tens states (including the District of Columbia ) with the highest ratio of psychologists per 100,000 residents, were, with the exception of Colorado, all blue states which supported John Kerry (D.C, Vermont, Minnesota, Massachusetts, New York, Colorado, Illinois, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania, in rank order from one to...

NASCAR promoters hoping to build a huge racetrack on Staten Island say they can manage traffic, but critics wonder if they're just going around in circles. The 80,000-seat, $550 million stadium would be built in the northwest corner of the borough, between two chronically choked highways and near the notoriously slow two-lane Goethals Bridge.

John Kerry carried New York in November, but he may not get the 31 electoral votes. That's because an error gave New York's 31 electoral votes to somebody named "John L. Kerry." State officials say they're rushing corrected copies of the documents. The mistake was found after the official "certificate of vote" appeared on the National Archives Web site.

WHITELAND, Ind. -- A 72-year-old minister died Tuesday, two days after being attacked and choked in front of the altar by a man who called him "the devil," police said. The Rev. Bill McElroy of Missionary Baptist Church had been hospitalized since the attack, which took place as church members were arriving for Sunday services. David J. Cooper, 40, was jailed on suspicion of attempted murder and other offenses. Police said the charges would be upgraded to murder. "I choked him until I knew he was not breathing," Cooper told police, according to court papers. "I couldn't kill a human...

Who's Missing From the Honored Guest List?

AS this link - re. a new "horror" cable channel - shows, there always seems to be a new cable channel springing up, for some niche market or other. Well, how about a BLUE STATE CHANNEL? What could they put on? No, not just softcore porn - that gets boring after 10 hours a day. How about a weekly half-hour show for intellectuals, "God is still dead," with different professors giving reasons why believers are stupid? For efficiency sake, they could also merge with the Lifetime Channel, so you'd have one go-to place for all the man-bad-woman-good TV movies ever...

November 29, 2004 Gregoire's illegitimate recount As Seth notes below, John Fund asks in today's WSJ Opinion Journal "Will Democrats steal the Washington governorship?" Well they're certainly going to try. I heard on KUOW this morning (can't find any report on line) that Gregoire will definitely ask for a hand recount this week. How should the Republicans respond? First, it's important to reiterate that Dino Rossi won two statewide counts; even after the Gregoire people won all of their legal and procedural fights to obtain certain unfair advantages; even after they were permitted to hand in questionable (and in...

BOSTON (AP) -- The photo shows Bradford C. Bleidt, a prominent member of Boston's business community, dressed in suit and tie at a party for staff of the business news radio station he was selling as it ramped up to a new 24-hour format. But the faint smile on his face, drink in hand, seemingly enjoying the get-together, betrayed the inner turmoil spinning inside him. The next day, the savvy but sometimes overly optimistic entrepreneur showed another side -- Bleidt tried unsuccessfully to take his own life, the only miscue in his elaborate plan to end a two-decades-long deception that...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - On issues from global warming to corporate reform, public pension funds controlled by union officials and Democrats in states carried by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry increasingly see themselves as counterweights to Republican control of the nation's political agenda. As Bush plans a second term, multibillion-dollar investment funds - especially in so-called "blue states" such as California, New York, Connecticut and Illinois - have already forged alternate agendas on clean energy, the environment, executive pay, even gay marriage rights that can run counter to "red state" values. They also view themselves as an increasingly important check on...

BOSTON, Nov. 24 - It is a prejudicial, archaic concept that prohibited Native Americans from entering a city for fear members of their "barbarous crew" would cause residents to be "exposed to mischief." But it is more than notions and phrases in Boston. A ban on Indians entering Boston has been the law since 1675. Mayor Thomas M. Menino took a step toward repealing the ban on Wednesday, filing a home rule petition. Mr. Menino said a repeal would remove the last vestiges of discrimination from a vibrant, diverse city that is looking past old racial conflicts. "This law has...

<p>IN THE past fortnight, the Democrats have come up with lots of comfort-food explanations of George Bush's victory&#8212;from the idea that the rascal stole the election for a second time (there were a mere 3.3m votes in it, after all) to the notion that he rode into Washington, DC, at the head of an army of hooded fundamentalists. But perhaps the most dangerous of all these myths is the idea that Mr Bush terrified the voters into re-electing him. He divided the country along &#8220;fault lines of fear&#8221;, according to Maureen Dowd in the New York Times; he relied on &#8220;fear of and hatred for modernity&#8221;, added Garry Wills, polymath and devout Catholic. Sooner or later every Democrat starts saying that the president used terrorism to partisan advantage.</p>

NEW YORK IN A BUSH STATE OF MIND: THE CITY IS A LITTLE MORE RED THAN YOU THINK  New York turned a shade of red in last week's election New Yorkers are depressed right now. You've read in the newspapers how they are upset about President Bush's re-election. I've seen the looks on people's faces as they trudge around the City with a collective frown. Wednesday morning was a surreal one for John Kerry's voters. Upper West Side liberals spat out their coffee when they saw the New York Times banner headline announcing Bush's big night - it wasn't...

Big time fist throwing. Fans, players and more. Any thoughts ?

Bumper Stickers for a Red-State Nation Bush: Selected and Elected! I'm a Republican. I feel your pain! Kerry and Edwards: Hair today. Gone tomorrow. What happened? He had a PLAN. De Plan, Boss! De Plan! America won, you lost! Visualize: 60 million Bush fans. "There is NO Bush in the White House." -Iraqi Information Minister Liberals lost--but at least they'll be SAFER. If you're seeing RED, you must be feeling BLUE. John Kerry is STILL in Vietnam! Lurch lost. You can move on now. Howard Dean: He could have been a contender! Blue state. Blue dress stain. Blue all over....

It is amazing how bizarre, fringe, lunatic liberal thought becomes mainstream philosophy among the liberal intelligentsia. In 2002, commentators on Dogmatics Freethought Radio said President Bush was plotting to create a theocracy. [1] (Of course, they also said that Satan is not really that bad of a guy.) About this same time, Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation, made this same statement during the Chris Matthews’ Show – to his credit even Matthews thought her statement was bizarre. Recently, however, this concept has gained currency among the liberal chatterati. David Klinghoffer, writing for the November 16, 2004 Christian Science...