Free Republic

Our common denomination, the United Church of Christ, has a suddenly serious legal and financial problem with the Internal Revenue Service. You, personally, are the cause of this problem. Candidly? I think you owe it to those of us who are your fellow congregants to help repair the damage that you have done.

NEW YORK(AP) Liberal activists are stepping up their campaign against Fox News Channel by pressuring advertisers not to patronize the network. MoveOn.org, the Campaign for America's Future and liberal blogs like DailyKos.com are asking thousands of supporters to monitor who is advertising on the network. Once a database is gathered, an organized phone-calling campaign will begin, said Jim Gilliam, vice president of media strategy for Brave New Films, a company that has made anti-Fox videos. The groups have successfully pressured Democratic presidential candidates not to appear at any debate sponsored by Fox, and are also trying to get Home Depot...

Former President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton are absolutely outraged that President Bush granted executive clemency to Scooter Libby, recently convicted of making false statements under oath. They obviously believe that Libby should serve his thirty month sentence. Does that mean that they now think that perjurers should go to jail? Or have they simply forgotten about Bill Clinton's own plea agreement in the last hours of his presidency — for making false statements under oath? Some people would call that perjury. One would have thought that Hillary and Bill Clinton wouldn't touch the Libby executive clemency issue with...

A Maine lawyer who released information in 2000 about President Bush's drunken driving conviction was arrested on Tuesday after he dressed up as al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and waved a fake gun at traffic. Police in South Portland, Maine, arrested Thomas Connolly, 49, of Scarborough, Maine, and charged him with criminal threatening. He was released on bail, local officials said. Lt. Todd Bernard said the police department received calls about a man wearing Middle Eastern garb and a bin Laden mask and carrying fake dynamite standing along an interstate highway. When police arrived, they saw Mr. Connolly holding...

MANHATTAN, Kan. -- Thousands of Saudi students are enrolling on college campuses across the United States this semester under a new educational exchange program brokered by President Bush and Saudi King Abdullah. This will quintuple the number of Saudi students and scholars in the United States by the academic year's end. And big, public universities from Florida to Oregon are in a fierce competition for their tuition dollars............... ....Clark Kent Ervin, a former inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said the U.S. government has yet to ensure proper safeguards are in place to do effective background checks...

If congressional Democrats acquire subpoena power by capturing a majority in either the House or the Senate in this fall's elections, the last two years of the Bush administration will be a nightmare for the White House. The odds that Democrats will achieve majority status in at least one chamber of Congress have improved, according to the nonpartisan analysis provided by the Cook Political Report.

A FEMA official angered a congressional panel yesterday when she discounted a congressional study that concludes that up to $1.4 billion of the individual aid paid out after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was misspent for fraudulent reasons. ............... Among the items bought with purchase cards intended for storm relief: • An all-inclusive, one-week Caribbean vacation in the Punta Cana resort in the Dominican Republic. • Five season tickets to New Orleans Saints professional football games. • Videos of "Girls Gone Wild." • Bottles of Dom Perignon champagne at $200 a bottle. .................... In a sharp exchange, Rep. Christopher Shays, Connecticut...

The father of a Westminster Marine killed in Iraq is planning to file a civil lawsuit against a religious extremist group that picketed at his son's funeral. The suit, to be filed in the U.S. District Court in Greenbelt on Monday morning, will claim the protesters intentionally disrupted the funeral of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder in March and inflicted emotional harm on the family, according to Sean Summers, a York, Pa.-based lawyer involved in the case. Albert Snyder will be suing the Rev. Fred Phelps and unnamed members of his Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church for defamation, invasion of privacy and...

George W. Bush, John McCain and Ted Kennedy -- indeed the majority of senators -- keep getting it wrong, just like the foreign criminals who keep trying to get a free ride on the backs of American citizens and legal immigrants. Give a nod to the president for calling immigration reform what it really and truly is -- "It's a difficult task," he told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce yesterday. The crux of the task is the insistence on pardoning an estimated 12 million criminals.

On the lookout The group Public Advocate of the United States said yesterday that it had set up sobriety checkpoints on Capitol Hill over the holiday weekend to protect the public against Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, and his son, Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, Rhode Island Democrat. "Citizen volunteers have responded to the call, and we have erected checkpoints at several intersections to prevent any Kennedy from driving in an impaired manner on Capitol Hill. We selected the long Memorial Day weekend due to the increased potential for a repeat of earlier car accidents," said Eugene Delgaudio, president of...

......It is almost inconceivable that an argument is taken seriously that we don't have the right to secure our borders and determine who shall enter our country. Not only has such lunacy become respectable, but our mainstream media instantly, instinctively embraces such a position. Every radio headline newscast, almost every newspaper and television report willfully refuses to distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants. Each report stamps the mark of evil on the forehead of all who would guard our borders. ......

While immigrants in the United States have held huge demonstrations in recent weeks, the hundreds of thousands of undocumented Central Americans in Mexico suffer mostly in silence. Although Mexico demands humane treatment for its citizens who migrate to the United States, regardless of their legal status, Mexico provides few protections for migrants on its own soil. The level of brutality Central American migrants face in Mexico was apparent Monday, when police conducting a raid for illegal aliens near a rail yard outside Mexico City fatally shot a local man, apparently because his dark skin and work clothes made officers think...

If one was to find anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States, where would one go to look? This was the question "Dateline" producers pondered for an upcoming show. The answer apparently, as Michelle Malkin reported on her blog, is a NASCAR racetrack. So the producers decided to recruit willing Muslims to be filmed at a race. After all, Southern white males are, if anything, bigots who hate everyone else not like them.

Georgia Democratic Rep. Cynthia McKinney's recent run-in with a security official at the nation's Capitol reminded me of an earlier dust-up. On New Year's Eve 2002, while I was a visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, the superintendent -- the distinguished three-star Vice Adm. Richard J. Naughton -- tried to enter the academy without wearing the photo ID required of all military and civilian personnel. Naturally expecting that the young Marine sentry on duty would recognize his all-important superintendent, Adm. Naughton boldly tried to pass. But instead, the Marine asked him to produce identification. Angry words and...

Larry Elder's Townhall.com column on "How does Mexico Treat Illegals" has a link to the following article. Mexico’s Glass House How the Mexican constitution treats foreign residents, workers and naturalized citizens By J. Michael Waller (J. Michael Waller, Ph.D., is the Center for Security Policy’s Vice President for Information Operations.) Center for Security Policy 1920 L Street NW, Suite 210 • Washington, DC 20036 • (202) 835-9077 • www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org Introduction Every country has the right to restrict the quality and quantity of foreign immigrants entering or living within its borders. If American policymakers are looking for legal models on which...

"Here's a way to save money come the next natural calamity: Abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency and give its job to the media, Rev. Jesse Jackson and other know-it-alls who accused Hurricane Katrina rescuers of incompetence, indifference or racism," Dennis Byrne writes at www.realclearpolitics.com. "The 'critics' obviously could have done it better, so the new emergency management czar would be Ted Koppel, the ABC News 'Nightline' anchor. His questioning of FEMA director Michael D. Brown indicated that Koppel believed that any buffoon could have done a better job. Being any buffoon, Koppel is perfect," Mr. Byrne said. "Jackson would...

<p>WASHINGTON -- An alert this week from backers of Judge John Roberts cautions not to take seriously Democratic complaints that they cannot stop his confirmation. A three-page memo sent to thousands of conservatives across the country warns that the assault on President Bush's first Supreme Court nominee is yet to come. A major reason cited for this belief is the man back at Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's side on the Senate Judiciary Committee: James Flug.</p>

Maybe the U.S. Government shouldn't be in the revival business at Guantanamo in the first place. Why shouldn't the prophet's followers furnish their own sawdust? The official line of the Pander Corps appears to be, different strokes for different folks. A crucifix in urine, the Virgin Mary in elephant dung, is High Art, but if someone accidentally steps on a Koran it's time to haul out the guillotine.

A former high-level D.C. schools official has been charged with plotting global terrorist acts while also struggling to renovate classrooms and rid city schools of asbestos. Kifah Waed Jayyousi, the former facilities director for D.C. public schools, was ordered held in Detroit yesterday after he was arrested for providing material support to terrorists and plotting acts of terrorism outside the United States.

The next-worst thing to hearing of yet another child abducted by a known molester is yet another tutorial by the newest media darling - pedophile pundit Jake Goldenflame, whose Dickensian name seems more suited to porn credits than serious commentary. Goldenflame is nearly as ubiquitous as porn these days, recently inescapable as television news producers leave no rock unturned to find fresh voices to opine on current events. When the day's breaking story is a disappeared child, who else to call but a registered sex offender? Thus has Goldenflame become the Talking Head du Jour. A self-described "recovering pedophile," the...