Free Republic

Well, the guys over at the Center for Consumer Freedom have done it again. They are experts at tweaking the noses of those on the Left who believe that you're too stupid to know what foods you should eat and that animals are more important than humans. Their latest stroke of genius is a new website -- http://www.petakillsanimals.com/ -- that tells of the animals that PETA has had killed at its shelter at its Norfolk, Va., headquarters. Why is PETA doing this? Because it's too expensive for them to keep the animals alive and they have other financial priorities. The...

A controversial billboard campaign in Los Angeles continued to make headlines this week as anger rapidly turned to confusion and hysteria. The billboard, advertising a Spanish Language television station, originally made news by enraging many Americans with its aggressive Mexican Nationalist message --declaring that Los Angeles was no longer part of the United States, but was instead a Mexican city once again. Below the banner message in which "Los Angeles, CA" had been crossed out and changed in blaring red type to read "Los Angeles, MEXICO," the billboard pronounced in Spanish "Your City. Your Team." Now Gringo anger is the...

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank once again confirmed the paper's liberal tilt in a story headlined, "On a Bicycle in Beltsville, Blissfully Unaware," which ran May 12, a day after Washington received a scare when a small aircraft entered the no-fly zone surrounding the city. Bush, it turns out, had been riding his bicycle in a nearby Maryland suburb at the time the White House issued a red alert. "He was out at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Beltsville, riding his bicycle--at noon on a Wednesday--blissfully unaware," reported Milbank. "It was not the first time a crisis has focused...

The Free Muslims March Against Terror, scheduled for this Saturday and sponsored by Free Muslims Against Terrorism (FMAT), is generating considerable excitement among non-Muslims. Could this finally be large-scale Muslim anti-terror action that the world has longed to see since 9/11? Maybe. But there are some strange things about it. In the first place, there are many non-Muslim groups among the endorsers of the March: the Objectivist Center; the U.S. Copts Association; the Institute on Religion and Public Policy; DiversityWorking.com; American Family Coalition of Virginia; Government of Free Vietnam; Canadian Israeli Students Association at the University of Calgary; Fairfax Area...

"The doomsday theme is seeping into the normally circumspect world of economics," notes New York Times writer Daniel Gross. Actually, the doomsday theme never leaves The New York Times for long. It just changes form. In "The Perfect Storm That Could Drown the Economy," Gross claims, "increasingly, economists are prophesying that the American economy as a whole may be sailing into choppy waters." He finds several perpetually gloomy people to quote, including four refugees from the perpetually gloomy IMF. Yet as former Clinton adviser Jeff Frankel confesses, he and others "have been warning of this hard-landing scenario for more than...

Illegal immigration has long been a way for poverty-stricken people to seek greater opportunity. But in this age of international terrorism, illegal immigration is a much more pressing concern -- a matter of national security. We must control our borders and know who is coming into our country. Former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Admiral James M. Loy appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in February to counsel the Committee about improving immigration control at our nation's borders. He delivered a message that was not given wide media coverage but one that many Americans already knew. "Recent information...

* The vote to send the nomination of John Bolton to the full Senate was 10-8 -- party line. But the story is better than that. And worse than that. * Mr. Bolton has a reputation of being a tough guy to work for. As I said on Fox yesterday morning: "If being a thug to your staff is a disqualification for holding public office in this town, our parking problems are over." * There is a theory in Washington that in order to be the US Ambassador to the United Nations you have to be just the nicest darned...

A liberal advocacy group wants Democrats to write letters to the editor - using some handy "talking points" -- to stop the "radical Republicans" who may invoke the nuclear option next week. Democrats strongly oppose the "nuclear option," which describes a scenario in which the Senate would change its rules to prevent the filibusters of judicial nominees. Democrats are now filibustering seven of President Bush's conservative judicial nominees because there's no other way they can stop their confirmation by the full Senate. This is the first time in history that judicial nominees have been filibustered, and Republicans call it an...

With Republicans in charge of the White House and Congress and Democrats fearing that the next appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court could lead to the reversal of legalized abortion, one of the most liberal groups in Washington believes the only solution to such a "dire" problem is to elect more women. "When I look at what is happening right now in this city, I am horrified," said Ellen Malcolm, the president and founder of the abortion rights group Emily's List, while speaking to a group of feminists and Democratic Party regulars this week in the nation's capital. Malcolm believes...

"I CAN'T tell you," Paul Wolfowitz says with justifiable asperity, "how much I resent being called a Wilsonian." As he retires as deputy secretary of defense and becomes head of the World Bank, the man most responsible for the doctrinal justification of the Iraq War, and who has been characterized as representing Woodrow Wilson's utopian, rather than the realist, strain in American foreign policy, begs to differ. The question, he says, is who has been realistic for almost four decades. The sprouting of freedom through the fissures in the concrete of dictatorships began, he recalls, in Greece, Spain and Portugal...

Good morning, and welcome to today's edition of "What's News?" A Senate committee has released a report alleging that two prominent European opponents of the Iraq War were paid off by Saddam Hussein as part of the U.N. Oil for Food program. I'll reveal their names in a moment. You will search in vain for this story on the print or Web versions of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, or the Chicago Tribune. I found it in The Washington Times and The New York Sun. The point here is not to beat up the...

The Bush administration is planning to submit CAFTA — the Central America Free Trade Agreement — to the Congress for approval. Democrats and labor unions are indicating their usual opposition, and a fight reminiscent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) battle over trade with Mexico in the early '90s seems about to begin. But the battle comes at a critical time for the political parties, since the Hispanic vote has come dramatically into play in the recent presidential election. While Al Gore beat Bush by 65-35 percent among Hispanics, Kerry won by only 55-45. Hispanics cast 10 million...

The United States has a strategy of encircling Russia, and it's working. But the real target of that strategy is beyond Russia — or, more precisely, south of Russia, all the way down to the Middle East. President George W. Bush's trip to Europe illustrates his ideological, as well as geopolitical, ambitions. When he visited Latvia last week, the president cheered conservatives here by denouncing the 1945 Yalta agreement, in which the U.S. recognized the capitalist-communist partition of post-World War II Europe. For the most part, to be sure, Franklin D. Roosevelt was simply acknowledging reality at the time of...

The most irresponsible argument in the debate over John Bolton as the U.S. representative to the United Nations — and there are many— was the op-ed essay in The New York Times suggesting that his brisk management style demonstrates a criminal pathology and a psychopathic personality. The piece, by a clinical psychologist who identifies herself as a consultant on "organizational psychology," was couched in the psychobabble of psychological expertise, based on one small, flabby survey, anecdotes and case studies built on innuendo drawn from "research" that illustrates what Shakespeare meant when he wrote about "the sound and the fury signifying...

The routine filibuster of judicial nominees is being portrayed by its defenders as one of the most hallowed traditions of American governance, up there with Robert's Rules of Order, congressional committee hearings and Rose Garden bill-signing ceremonies. But this tradition dates from only 2003, when Democrats found themselves in the minority in the Senate and desperate to block Bush judicial nominees. The judicial filibuster isn't a tradition, but an innovation; not a function of checks and balances, but a perversion of them; not an outgrowth of the Constitution, but at best irrelevant to it. The Senate has two broad traditions....

Discussions of school choice and vouchers nearly always assume that public schools are permanent parts of the American educational scene. Increasingly I wonder why. Why should there be any public schools? I don't ask merely because the public schools are performing badly, although (as usual) they are. Pamela R. Winnick discusses science teaching in a recent issue of Weekly Standard. One survey found that a whopping 12% of graduating U.S. seniors were "proficient" in science. Global rankings place our seniors 19th among 21 surveyed countries. Agreed: The national interest requires that all children be educated and that all taxpayers contribute....

All right, enough already. The Christians aren't coming to get you. I can take the somber, frightened "special reports" on National Public Radio, where you can literally hear the correspondents wringing their hands over the possibility that the "Darwin fish" affixed to their Volvos will be banned. I can even handle the dog-whistle shrieks of Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd types about the looming Inquisition led by an alliance of the new German (wink, wink) pope and the Kansas Board of Education. But the most recent episode of NBC's doddering "Law & Order" series is where I draw the line....

Most sexist stereotypes are false. Women are not worse drivers than men. Women can be just as decisive as men, just as competent, and, with proper inducement, they can even let rip a perfectly respectable belch. But I think we all know, in our hearts that at least one sexist stereotype is true. With notable exceptions, but by and large, in the aggregate, generally speaking, on the whole, in the main, qualifying this as much as possible to avoid disagreeable personal sanctions, women tend to Throw Like a Girl. Because Washington now has its own pro team, the town is...

When Reverend Sharpton ran for president, he accused the media of racism for ignoring his candidacy. Since the word racist gets recklessly thrown around, does it also apply to the "Today" show? Remember when the legendary actor/entertainer/philanthropist Bill Cosby said, "[I]n our cities and public schools we have 50 percent drop out. . . . No longer is a person embarrassed because they're pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child." He urged blacks to embrace education, speak standard English and obey...

Check your water cooler or dinner party conversations. These days, everyone's talking about the soaring prices of residential property. The market is on steroids. Prices have been rising at the fastest rate in five decades, double digits in most markets: up by 27 percent last year in California, over 20 percent in Florida, 15 percent in New York, 35 percent in Nevada. Compare all this with the three-year average annual return in a typical diversified stock fund, which has been about 5 percent or so, and you know why people are all stoked about the home real-estate market. It is...