Free Republic

REVIEW & OUTLOOK Immigration and the GOP How to make Republicans a minority party once again. Wednesday, June 27, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT Immigration reform stayed alive in the Senate yesterday, albeit not without continuing rancor among Republicans. Restrictionists seem to believe the issue will harm the GOP if it succeeds, but we think the political reality is closer to the opposite: The greater danger for Republicans is if it fails. We've written often about the merits of immigration reform, and we have our own problems with parts of the Senate bill. But it's worth spending some time on the...

June 25, 2007, 0:00 a.m. Poll Positions An untangling. By Michael Barone The Republican-primary electorate is fluid; the Democratic-primary electorate is viscous. That’s my conclusion when I look back over the plentiful polls that have been tracking the two electorates’ choices in this wide-open presidential race. The shape of the Republican race has plainly changed over the past six months. In the 15 December and January polls compiled by realclearpolitics.com, Rudy Giuliani averaged a narrow 30 percent to 24 percent lead over John McCain, with 7 percent for Mitt Romney. In the 28 February and March polls, Giuliani’s lead over...

Unfairness Doctrine By The Editors Remember Jim Hightower? We didn’t think so. He was the former Texas state official who was, for a few minutes, the Left’s great hope for a liberal talk-radio host to challenge the domination of Rush Limbaugh. It didn’t work out. Neither did former New York governor Mario Cuomo, another failed radio talker. And neither did, most recently, Air America, the attempt to build an entire network of liberal talk. Nothing has worked too successfully for liberal political talkers. Rush, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, among others, are as dominant as ever. The only thing that...

Lori Boyer couldn't stop trembling as she sat on the examining table, hugging her hospital gown around her. Her mind was reeling. She'd been raped hours earlier by a man she knew — a man who had assured Boyer, 35, that he only wanted to hang out at his place and talk. Instead, he had thrown her onto his bed and assaulted her. "I'm done with you," he'd tonelessly told her afterward. Boyer had grabbed her clothes and dashed for her car in the freezing predawn darkness. Yet she'd had the clarity to drive straight to the nearest emergency room...

Published Sunday | June 10, 2007 Pals get in legal dust-up over CWS tickets BY TODD COOPER WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER College World Series tickets have been part of estate plans and divorce actions, street negotiations and dinner table mediations. But this may mark the first time they have been the centerpiece of litigation. An Omaha attorney and developer, Jerry Slusky, has sued another Omaha attorney, Howard Hahn, over rights to the eight season tickets the two have shared since 1977. In a filing in Douglas County District Court, Slusky said Hahn has refused to turn over four of the tickets...

Published Thursday | June 7, 2007 Jon Bruning officially enters Senate race BY ROBYNN TYSVER WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER It's official: Jon Bruning entered the 2008 Senate race today. Jon Bruning announcing his run for the Senate in the rotunda of the State Capitol.The second-term Nebraska attorney general said he will run for Senate whether fellow Republican and incumbent Sen. Chuck Hagel runs or not. "I am a candidate without reservations," Bruning said at a news conference in Lincoln today. "I'm running hard and I'm running to win." Hagel, who has angered many rank-and-file party members with his criticism of the...

GOP: Stepping back to move ahead? By George Will http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | One time, years ago, the veteran Baltimore newspaperman, H.L. Mencken, was checking copy coming in from the night editor and sighing at the rising number of errors he was noticing, errors of fact but also of syntax, and even some idioms that didn't sound quite right. He shook his head and said, as much to himself as to the editor at his side: "The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology." — Alistair Cooke, "Memories of...

Signs you'll see at the entrance of O'Connor's Irish Pub in the Old Market: "City Council: Please Send in the Non-Smokers." What you won't see is a "No Concealed Weapons" sign reminding customers that bars are among the few businesses in Nebraska where it is illegal to carry a gun. Almost three months after the start of a state law allowing people to carry concealed weapons, signs banning guns from privately owned businesses haven't exactly popped up all over the city. In fact, while some chains such as Bag 'N Save have posted signs and shopping malls such as Westroads...

Remember Christie Todd Whitman? As recently as four years ago she was held up as a symbol that the Republican Party was moving away from its conservative roots and would maintain national dominance by appealing to moderate, suburban women. Ms. Whitman herself won two terms as governor of New Jersey and was tapped to run the Environmental Protection Agency by George W. Bush. She left government in 2003, published a book called "It's My Party Too" and created a political action committee aimed at establishing her as a moderate anchor for the GOP.

<p>WASHINGTON -- By striking down the District of Columbia's extraordinarily strict gun control law, which essentially bans guns, a federal appeals court may have revived gun control as a political issue. It has been mostly dormant since autumn 2000, when Al Gore decided he was less interested in it than in carrying states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania: "Gore Tables Gun Issue As He Courts Midwest" (The New York Times, Sept. 20, 2000). The appeals court ruling appalls advocates of gun control laws, and should alarm the Democratic Party.</p>

Goldman Sachs has been one of the most aggressive firms on Wall Street about taking action on climate change; the company sends its bankers home at night in hybrid limousines. --The New York Times, Feb. 25 Written without a hint of irony--if only your neighborhood dry cleaner sent his employees home by hybrid limousine--this front-page dispatch captured perfectly the eco-pretensions of the rich and the stupefying gullibility with which they are received.

February 13, 2007 Op-Ed Contributor Patenting Life By MICHAEL CRICHTON YOU, or someone you love, may die because of a gene patent that should never have been granted in the first place. Sound far-fetched? Unfortunately, it’s only too real. Gene patents are now used to halt research, prevent medical testing and keep vital information from you and your doctor. Gene patents slow the pace of medical advance on deadly diseases. And they raise costs exorbitantly: a test for breast cancer that could be done for $1,000 now costs $3,000. Why? Because the holder of the gene patent can charge whatever...

Feb. 9, 2007 - The number of American dead is still a fraction of what it was in Vietnam, and yet the horror that Iraq has become could eclipse that earlier misadventure. Supporters of the war warn that if American troops leave precipitously, then Iraq will descend into a bloodbath the way Vietnam and Cambodia did when the Democratic Congress withdrew funding from the South Vietnamese government, in effect sending hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of innocent people to their deaths at the hands of the North Vietnamese. As Congress grapples with a war gone bad, the ghost of Vietnam hovers...

On February 2, an AEI research project on climate change policy that we have been organizing was the target of a journalistic hit piece in Britain's largest left-wing newspaper, the Guardian. The article's allegation--that we tried to bribe scientists to criticize the work of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)--is easy to refute. More troubling is the growing worldwide effort to silence anyone with doubts about the catastrophic warming scenario that Al Gore and other climate extremists are putting forth. "Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the...

A new poll on Thursday underscored deep Arab unhappiness with the United States but said the negative image could be repaired if Washington brokered a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement. The survey of 3,850 people in six Arab countries rated President George W. Bush as the most disliked world leader, while the United States and Israel were viewed as significantly greater threats than Iran. Sixty-seven percent of the respondents said the United States could improve its image by brokering a comprehensive Middle East peace agreement. A smaller number - 33 percent - said this image change could happen if Washington withdrew...

A rabid left-wing, antiwar writer, William M. Arkin, billed as an expert on military affairs by the Washington Post and NBC News as a "military analyst,” has described U.S. troops in Iraq as "mercenaries” who are being spoiled rotten by U.S. taxpayers with the "obscene amenities” being sent them. His comments have ignited a firestorm among fellow journalists who fully support and admire the men and women serving in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan. Arkin has become a prime target of Fox News Channel's Bill O’Reilly who has been crusading about media bias, and NBC's noticeable tilt to the...

According to polls, Hillary Clinton holds an early and significant lead among Democratic voters (43%, compared with 22% for Barack Obama, according to a Fox News poll 10 days ago). She is of course the killer fund-raiser of the race, with one of her contributors crowing this week that she'll raise more money than all the other candidates combined. So let's call her the likely Democratic nominee, even though Mr. Obama hasn't even announced yet. On the Republican side it's Giuliani time, with Fox News putting him at 34% among GOP voters and John McCain coming in second with 22%....

CHICAGO — Eighteen years ago, Richard M. Daley went into the family business, which is the business of being mayor of Chicago. Back then, he hardly could have imagined that he would become an accomplished practitioner of today's new wrinkle in public finance, here and elsewhere. He says his father, who died in 1976, would approve, but one wonders.

Background There is a heated debate about whether health professionals may refuse to provide treatments to which they object on moral grounds. It is important to understand how physicians think about their ethical rights and obligations when such conflicts emerge in clinical practice. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional survey of a stratified, random sample of 2000 practicing U.S. physicians from all specialties by mail. The primary criterion variables were physicians' judgments about their ethical rights and obligations when patients request a legal medical procedure to which the physician objects for religious or moral reasons. These procedures included administering terminal sedation...

Feb. 7, 2007 - In Texas, they still admire George W. Bush, leastwise the Republicans do. But when I was in Dallas the other day, they had moved on from worrying about him to a new question: Could Rudy Giuliani get the GOP nomination? They were wary of Sen. John McCain, remembering past feuds, and of “mavericks” generally. They were fascinated by Rudy, however. They loved his can-do-ness, and thought that perhaps he was the only Republican who could save the party in ’08.