Free Republic

The roads in Illinois are in decay. This may be the first state to go bankrupt. The question is not if, but when. State unions are so greedy that they are destroying the very state. This is exactly how Rome fell — government employees against the people. Seven states have constitutional provisions that state employee pensions must come BEFORE everything, including debt payments. Since the legislature in New Jersey was Democrat, they fought Governor Christie on pension reform. Their solution? On the ballot in November, there will be a provision to amend the state Constitution to put employee pensions before...

For many decades, and especially since the United States attained undisputed pre-eminence in science during World War II, a parade of cutting-edge technologies has accounted for much of America’s economic growth. Countless good jobs now ride on whether the Next Big Thing — and the several things after that — will be developed in America and not, as many fear, in China, India, the European Union, Japan, Korea or another of the powers now producing large numbers of scientists and engineers. Miller-McCune Cover Story June 14, 2010 The Real Science GapIt’s not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It’s...

Frustrated Owner Bulldozes Home Ahead Of Foreclosure Man Says Actions Intended To Send Message To Banks POSTED: 10:42 am EST February 18, 2010 UPDATED: 10:02 am EST February 19, 2010 MOSCOW, Ohio -- Like many people, Terry Hoskins has had troubles with his bank. But his solution to foreclosure might be unique.Hoskins said he's been in a struggle with RiverHills Bank over his Clermont County home for nearly a decade, a struggle that was coming to an end as the bank began foreclosure proceedings on his $350,000 home."When I see I owe $160,000 on a home valued at $350,000, and...

February & March 2010Table of ContentsFeatures:Mothers in Combat Boots By Mary EberstadtReassessing a military policy font-size: 300%; float: left; color: #000000; font-family: sabon,garamond,serif; In november 2009, one of the uglier fruits of the current practice of seeding mothers into the American military burst briefly onto the national stage. Ordered to Afghanistan from Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia, an Army cook named Alexis Hutchinson refused to go. A 21-year-old single mother, she explained that there was no one to care for her infant son because initial plans to leave him with her own mother had fallen through. What happened next should...

John H. McWhorterToward a Usable Black History It will help black Americans to recall that they have a history that transcends victimization and exclusion. Summer 2001 You brought me here in CHAINS! You brought me here in CHAINS!" James Baldwin exclaimed to a white interviewer in the late 1960s, summing up the sense of our history that most blacks have. Yes, we pay lip service to our having "survived" in this country, but the image most resonant to us is being brought here packed in ships, treated like animals for 250 years, and pushed to the margins of society...

Heather Mac DonaldChicago’s Real Crime Story Why decades of community organizing haven’t stemmed the city’s youth violence Winter 2010 Barack Obama has exploited his youthful stint as a Chicago community organizer at every stage of his political career. As someone who had worked for grassroots “change,” he said, he was a different kind of politician, one who could translate people’s hopes into reality. The media lapped up this conceit, presenting Obama’s organizing experience as a meaningful qualification for the Oval Office. This past September, a cell-phone video of Chicago students beating a fellow teen to death coursed over the...

Guantanamo guard reunited with ex-inmates By Gavin Lee BBC News Why would a former Guantanamo Bay prison guard track down two of his former captives - two British men - and agree to fly to London to meet them? "You look different without a cap." "You look different without the jump suits." With those words, an extraordinary reunion gets under way. The last time Ruhal Ahmed met Brandon Neely, he was "behind bars, behind a cage and [Brandon] was on the other side". The location had been Camp X-Ray - the high-security detention camp run by the US in...

What’s It Like to Work at Media Matters?Posted By Greg Gutfeld On January 6, 2010 @ 2:27 pm In Cable News, Fox News, New Media, Political Humor | 39 Comments So, just about every single day I get a slew of emails from a dude named Doug Stauffer, from Media Matters. The emails are press  releases – 99% of them devoted to Fox News. I’m sure some of you get them too. Now, the obsession would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so all-consuming for the poor goof. And it made me wonder, what it must be like to have a job...

Bruce BawerWhile Europe Sneered Kurt Westergaard and other brave critics of Islamic fanaticism continue to fend for themselves. 5 January 2010 Yesterday, a friend sent me a link to an article entitled “Eurabian Follies” on the website of the journal Foreign Policy. The author, Justin Vaïsse, took to task several authors, including me, who have warned in recent years of the Islamization of Europe. Vaïsse countered these authors’ mountains of hard facts with a big helping of the usual supercilious sneering. His thesis: Europe is chugging along just fine; Islam poses no real challenge to the continent’s freedom and...

Television   Spooked by IslamistsNICK COHEN January/February 2010  Matt Damon as Jason Bourne: Killing machine who became a target A year after the 9/11 atrocities, I made a documentary for Channel 4 which involved trying to discover what had happened to terrorist suspects the prison service was holding without charge. The director filmed me putting questions to a low-level functionary at the Home Office press office. We hoped he would stonewall and thus unwittingly illustrate a sequence about Whitehall secrecy. Fortunately for us, he obfuscated like a true PR. Channel 4 wanted a witty line in the commentary to emphasise how hard it was...

Sunday, December 27, 2009 Rough sea for yachtsmen under Maine use-tax law 30 days in port triggers levy on boats ‘from away’ Tom Toye poses at a marina in Portland, Maine. Toye has sued the state over a $60,000 “use tax” bill for a 72-foot yacht he bought in Florida and brought to Maine. (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS) By Clarke Canfield THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 3 comments | Add a comment PORTLAND, Maine —  A retired Maine businessman thought he was helping the local economy in 2005 when he spent more than $100,000 in Portland on repairs to his 72-foot luxury yacht, newly...

Stefan KanferAll That Jazz Terry Teachout’s luminous biography captures the “sunlit, hopeful art” of Louis Armstrong. 22 December 2009 Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, by Terry Teachout (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 474 pages, $30) In the spring of 1998, Time commissioned Al Hirschfeld, the doyen of American caricaturists, to draw an unusual cover. It would celebrate five outstanding “Artists and Entertainers of the Century”—Pablo Picasso, Lucille Ball, Charlie Chaplin, Steven Spielberg, and Louis Armstrong. Much fanfare accompanied the announcement. That illustration was never published. A handful of staffers condemned the portrait of Armstrong as racist and made their feelings...

AMERICAN.COM A Magazine of Ideas A Keystone Election By Michael BaroneTuesday, December 22, 2009 Filed under: Government & Politics, Culture, Numbers, Public Square A lot of attention has been given to the results of the November 3 gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia. But another recent election, in Pennsylvania, also deserves attention. A lot of attention has been given to the results of the November 3 gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia. But another election worthy of some attention was held in Pennsylvania, which has been a target state in the last three presidential elections. Pennsylvania elects its...

- Big Government - http://biggovernment.com - Posted By Bob Parks Obama: A Republican Plant? Many of us had no idea the Republican Party had it in them, but to devise and implement such a plan was ingenious. Think about it; party leadership acting totally inept while a charismatic young Democrat presidential candidate captures the imagination of the normally lethargic youth vote, captures the senior vote, women, and even sends a thrill up the leg of the media.And within a few short months after attaining the presidency, he conducts himself in a manner (personally and in office) that had not only...

Avatarocious Another spectacle hits an iceberg and sinks. by John Podhoretz 12/28/2009, Volume 015, Issue 15 AvatarDirected by James Cameron Avatar, we are told, does things with cameras and computers and actors that have never been done before. Its painstaking combination of real-life action and animation has, we are told, taken cinema to a new level. It cost anywhere from $328 million to $500 million, we are told, and took four years to make. It is a breakthrough, we are told, the boldest step into the future of filmmaking, an unparalleled achievement. What they didn't tell us is that Avatar...

Mexican cops train for tourist police force Three cities plan to launch effort in the spring By Sandra Dibble, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERSaturday, December 19, 2009 at 1:18 a.m. Earnie Grafton / Union-TribuneSan Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders congratulated a Mexican police officer at a ceremony yesterday for officers from law enforcement agencies in Tijuana, Ensenada and Rosarito Beach who participated in a training session offered by the San Diego Police Department. Earnie Grafton / Union-TribuneMexican police officers lined up for photos after a ceremony yesterday marking their completion of a training course in San Diego. The officers received instruction in a...

Guy SormanBad Ideas Never Die Jean-Francois Revel’s career-long argument against utopian thinking 18 December 2009 Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era, by Jean-Francois Revel, (Encounter, 300 pp., $23.95) French public intellectuals have a reputation—well-deserved—for being socialists, Marxists, or Trotskyists. One thinks in this regard of popular figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Simone de Beauvoir, all with fan clubs on American campuses. Some French thinkers, however, have carried forward another intellectual tradition, that of classical liberalism—pro-democracy and pro-market—and running from the work of Alexis de Tocqueville to Albert Camus to...

Dec 18 2009 10:38 AM EST 'Avatar': Pass The Kool-Aid, By Kurt Loder The greatest movie, uh, ever? James Cameron's "Avatar" is the most amazing ... no, wait: the most staggeringly amazing, jaw-droppingly triple-awesome unbelievable movie ever made. That's the feeling among the reviewers aggregated at Rotten Tomatoes, anyway. I quote: "An overwhelming feast of visual artistry unlike anything you have ever seen before." "Much more than a film. It's a prescribed cinematic experience." "An entertainment to be not just seen but absorbed on a molecular level." "Cameron has achieved no less than a rebirth of cinema." "Make sure you...

Motorcycle rocket launcher: definitely try at home Step one: make extra powerful bottle rockets by mounting model rocket engines to skewers. Step two: make custom launch tubes, spray paint, mount to fairing. Step three: mount launch controller within easy reach. Step four: commence mayhem. Congratulations sir, you've just managed to make motorcycling even more dangerous.

Marcus A. WintersTeachers’ Unions vs. Progress—Again New York resists reforms that would bring in millions and improve teacher quality. 14 December 2009 Ever wonder how effective your child’s teacher is? Officials in Albany would rather you didn’t know. At least that’s the lesson one has to take from their refusal to allow data systems to match students to teachers, though doing so would help the state compete for a pot of perhaps hundreds of millions of federal dollars. Narrow political interests stand in the way of improving our schools and easing New York taxpayers’ burdens. The use of data...