Free Republic

It's hard to say why former President Bill Clinton went so far off-script to defend his 1994 anti-crime law against Black Lives Matter hecklers at a Philadelphia rally for his wife's presidential campaign.

Please read and pass it on. When that is the subject line in an email message, most of us know to hit the delete button. But the sender was someone I knew. It was one of those forwarded emails you get; something sent to me and 25 other people. The message contained a first-person account by a man named Todd Petruna about an American commercial airlines flight on which "11 Muslim men" caused a near riot, purportedly as practice or a dry-run for hijacking an airplane. Petruna claimed he was a passenger who helped foil the coordinated attempt by the...

Considering the stubbornness of his opposition, I thought President Barack Obama was being quite generous in expressing "regrets" over his role in Washington's dysfunction. "It's one of the few regrets of my presidency," he said Tuesday during his last State of the Union address to Congress, "that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better." He shouldn't be too hard on himself, in my view. When it comes to stirring "rancor and suspicion," he had plenty of assistance from his stubbornly resistant conservative adversaries. I am not one to complain, as many Obama supporters do,...

The Rev. Michael Pfleger was cheered, booed, heckled and given a standing ovation at St. George Catholic Church in Tinley Park. And that was all in reaction to a speech urging everyone to join together to stop the killing of children on the streets of Chicago and throughout the United States. Makes you wonder what the reaction would have been if his topic had actually been something controversial.. Pfleger always sparks controversy. The priest, who has made his home base of St. Sabina Parish in Chicago a stopping-off point for national political leaders and Hollywood celebrities, has a knack for...

A new Pew Research Center report states that 52 percent of Americans support gun rights, the highest percentage in the last two decades. Yet the gun rights that they believe are guaranteed by law may very well be an illusion.. That's because we have allowed lawyers instead of language professionals to interpret the Constitution of the United States. Ask any high school English teacher to parse the Second Amendment, and they will say that it does not prohibit common-sense restrictions on the purchase and possession of guns, in spite of the National Rifle Association's claim to the contrary. The proof...

Police Officer Craig Taylor shouldn’t be sitting in a Markham courtroom. Taylor should be out protecting the citizens of Park Forest like he’s done since 2004. Taylor was performing his sworn duty to serve and protect when he was summoned to the Victory Centre in Park Forest on July 26, 2013, to quell a disturbance. He ended up firing beanbag cartridges at 95-year-old John Wrana, a resident of the facility. Taylor, an African-American, was one of five officers who responded to a call from staff that the elderly man was threatening them with a knife, a shoehorn and a cane....

Just when I thought David Duke had gone the way of the Betamax, buggy whips and record stores, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, Republican politician and jailbird has re-emerged to haunt the new Republican-controlled Congress. The new House Republican whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana apologized this past week for an honest "error in judgment" that led him to speak in 2002 to the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, a white nationalist group founded by Duke.

When Democrats rebounded after George W. Bush’s presidency, the reasons were obvious. Bush’s devastating and costly war begun under erroneous pretenses; the administration’s failures in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; the precipitous fall into the Great Recession; and a charismatic Barack Obama waiting in the wings. When Republicans rebounded with a big win last month after six years of a Democratic Senate and presidency, the reasons are not so plain to see. ******************************************************* It’s impossible to discount the role of the media in shaping the opinion of the electorate in any era. So when the media repeatedly cites anti-Obama sentiment...

Our famously gaffe-prone vice president, Joe Biden, has outdone himself. He stumbled through not one, not two, but three gaffes in less than 24 hours. For him, that's a personal best or, more accurately, a personal worst.. Yet if it is better to be criticized than ignored in politics, he can take little comfort from the way that hardly anyone outside of the Republican National Committee, whose website called it "Gaffetastic," seemed to care.

When I was pulled over by police many years ago on a remote stretch of Illinois 171 at 1 a.m., I was the same age as Michael Brown. Brown was the 18-year-old black teenager shot and killed Aug. 9 by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking weeks of street protests against Ferguson police. It was on another August night when my 21-year-old brother and I spent time at the Bluefront Lounge near Willow Springs, listening to our favorite country-and-western band. Later, I drove us home in my brother’s 1962 Chevrolet Impala with the convertible top down, while he sang...

You know what I admire about bigots? I’m referring to the real wackos, the warped, scary, neo-Nazi, open Klansman, proudly sign-their-name haters. You know what’s kinda great about them? At least they’re candid.

If you saw a Native American walking across the street, would you yell out, “Hey, Redskin, you dropped your hat’’? I don’t believe you would, no matter how strongly you feel that the Washington Redskins should be able to keep their nickname. And I don’t believe Mike Ditka would, either, even though he has come out strongly on the side of intolerance, whether he realizes it or not. The say-anything coach went off on those of us who want to see the Redskins nickname go the way of medical bloodletting. In an interview with RedskinsHistorian.com — you always save up...

U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., claims liberals are waging a "war on whites." If so, Barack Obama must be at war with himself. That's how goofy Brooks' logic sounds. But he's not nuts. It is an old reflex, when cornered in politics, to lash back with the same charge others have leveled at you — or, put another way, to project your own flaws onto other people. What's sad about Brooks' claim is his feeble attempt to play the white victim card, plucking the strings of white nationalism, just to have his way with the nation's immigration policy.

It’s a picture-perfect summer day, bright sun, sparkling skies. And here I am, stuck waiting for another press conference in another stuffy meeting room. Up front stood a bundle of boys and girls, 25 or so, preschoolers in pigtails, strapping youths sporting football jerseys, assembled at the podium, to pose with the politicians and preachers. What’s wrong with this picture? These kids should be in play lots, parks and backyards. They should not be props at a photo op at a West Side church, waiting for the boring adults to make boring their speeches. Perversely, this is the best place...

Two weeks later the letters and blogs are still rolling in, reacting to my June 23 column, “Disparaging the president is Uncalled for.” Many echoed Terry Maher of Chicago (the letters are edited for space): “Seeing that you’re so agitated by ‘disparaging’ criticism of the president, could you please forward me all of the columns (there must be dozens, I’m sure) that you wrote decrying the vicious, vile and despicable things that were written and said about President Bush? Thanks, I’ll be over here turning blue from holding my breath.” Others added to the vitriol: “Yes, Ms. Washington, ‘R-E-S-P-E-C-T’ is...

‘R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” the song goes. It is easy enough to spell, but for some vocal critics of President Barack Obama, it seems exceedingly hard to do. As the president moves toward the land of the lame ducks, his political enemies are calling for blood. That’s no shocker at this stage of a presidency. In this case, the cuts go deeper. For some, it is not enough to disagree. Some high-status public figures seem determined to demean, denigrate and ridicule the president of the United States. On June 12 the Speaker of the U.S. House stepped to a podium and insulted Obama...

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Christopher Columbus discovered America. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had a "dream." We like to remember history in short and snappy bumper-sticker sound bites. Real life is a bit more complicated. Columbus "discovered" a "New World" that was new to him anyway, not to the people who already lived in it. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did free slaves in the states that seceded. He had to prod, cajole, bribe and browbeat Congress to free the rest. And the Rev. Dr. King had a "dream" that he described eloquently at the March on Washington for Jobs...

Yet, even if you buy that oversimplified view of history, as conservatives with selective memory often do, Paul completely omitted a much more important sea change, the seismic racial realignment that followed President Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 Civil Rights Act. In fact, Republican nominees continued to receive sizable black support; 39 percent to Dwight Eisenhower in his 1956 re-election, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and 32 percent to his vice president, Richard Nixon, in 1960. But after conservatives nominated Sen. Barry Goldwater, who voted against the civil rights bill, to oppose Johnson in 1964, LBJ...

Harry Belafonte in recent years has been positively Kanye-esque in his outspokenness. The 85-year-old singer — a revered icon in American pop music, the King of Calypso, the resonant voice behind the 1956 classic “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” — has tallied headlines for his frank opinions on matters ranging from U.S. foreign policy to race relations. In 2002, Belafonte likened Secretary of State Colin Powell to a “house slave” for his acquiescence to the invasion of Iraq. He called President George W. Bush “the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world” during a 2006 meeting...

Updated: January 15, 2013 2:17AM When President Barack Obama is sworn in for his second term, his hand will rest not only on President Abraham Lincoln’s Bible, but on Dr. Martin Luther King’s, too. As the ceremony falls on the federal holiday celebrating Dr. King’s birth, the civil rights leader would no doubt be proud as an African-American president is sworn in on the steps of a Capitol built by slave labor, about 170 miles from Jamestown where slave ships landed. We have come a long way. But Dr. King would not be satisfied. He marched to his own drummer,...