Free Republic

One of the most polarizing figures in Idaho history is marking a triumph that changed the workplace and solidified the Republican hold on Idaho. Gary Glenn, now 52, was the baby-faced but ruthless leader of the long campaign to make Idaho the 21st of 22 states to outlaw "union shops," where workers are obligated to pay dues as a condition of employment. After the passage of Right to Work in 1985 over the veto of Democratic Gov. John Evans, voters affirmed the change 54 percent to 46 percent. The subsequent emasculation of a key component of the Democratic base has...

BOISE — U.S. House hopeful Raul Labrador’s cash-strapped campaign has moved to downtown Boise to conserve resources, setting up a new headquarters outside the congressional district he wants to represent. The penny-saving move underscores Labrador’s difficulty in fundraising compared to his Democratic rival, U.S. Rep. Walt Minnick, who has more than $1 million on hand and holds a 16-to-1 cash advantage. Labrador, a two-term Republican state lawmaker, opened his campaign headquarters in Eagle in June, a month after he upset decorated Iraq veteran Vaughn Ward to clinch the Idaho primary in late May. Labrador is now challenging Minnick for Idaho’s...

Public Service Announcements (PSAs) have been around for a long time as a product of governmental mandate -- a price traditional media pay for the use of broadcast bandwidth. PSAs are messages for the common good, at least in theory. PSAs are so pervasive that we scarcely notice them; they are like the persistent, oft-repeated criticisms and directives of our spouses that we tune out at regular intervals. But just as with our spouses' admonishments, we can not ignore PSAs completely. They seep into our subconscious, and we absorb the droning messages. Didn't someone named Huxley or Orwell write a...

I am sixty-five now. I have lived through many recessions. The first one I remember clearly was in 1958 and the worst one, by far, until now, was the one in the late 1970s stretching into the early 1980s, when we had double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment simultaneously. That should have been impossible, but thanks to union Cost of Living Adjustment contracts and skyrocketing oil prices, it was indeed possible. But the current recession, which really started with some very tense days in late 2007 and began in deadly earnest when Hank Paulson, possibly the most incompetent Treasury Secretary of...

Filmmaker Michael Moore, famed for his propagandistic left-slanted portrayals of America in such films as Roger and Me, Bowling for Columbine, and Sicko, is under fire for lifting the work of a writer from the Knoxville News Sentinel and reposting it on his own site in total despite that copyright laws disallow such a practice. On his site Random Mumblings the News Director of Innovation for the Knoxville News Sentinel, Jack Lail, reported that Michael Moore lifted an entire story and its accompanying video production from his newspaper’s website and reposted it all on MichaelMoore.com. Not only did he lift...

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - The safety of Utah's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community is the topic of a Tuesday night town hall meeting at the Salt Lake City Library. The Utah Pride Center says a panel will hold a discussion with police officers, prosecutors and community representatives. Pride spokesman Michael Westley says the group will release the results of a survey of 500 people on safety questions. Westley says nearly 70 percent of the respondents say they feel an increased sense of safety related to housing and employment discrimination issues. Only 26 percent of respondents said they feel...

Did you ever consider the lead character in Harper Lee's fabulous "To Kill A Mockingbird" to be a feminized male not in any traditional sense manly? Atticus Finch, one of the greatest male figures in modern American literature? Well, that's what Jesse Kornbluth wrote at Huffington Post on the 50th anniversary of this fabulous book being published. For those that are fans of this novel like so many Americans, the following quotes from this astonishingly silly piece are guaranteed to offend: "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a woman's book. Written by a woman, Harper Lee, but more, written by a...

What would a Klansman have to do to gain the good favor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)? Since its inception, the KKK has killed thousands, assaulted and maimed exponentially more, rigged elections and terrorized voters and politicians alike. “Sorry” probably wouldn’t cut it. Spending like a drunken sailor, however, might just do the trick. At least, that’s all it took for the NAACP to abandon its race-baiting long enough to forgive former KKK leader Robert Byrd for the transgressions of his mid-20s.

Happy 234th birthday America! The War Between the States Sesquicentennial, 150th Anniversary, runs from 2010 through 2015. The Georgia Division Sons of Confederate Veterans has an information page. Make it a family affair to attend the events planned throughout the USA . The National SCV Sesquicentennial Commission has a website. The fading photos and stories of Union and Confederate Veterans from that summer of 1913, shaking hands, sharing a meal and trading war stories is a special part of our National Heritage well worth sharing. Do young people know who Gen. Robert Edward Lee, Major Gen. George Edward Pickett and...

Every year around this time, the envelopes begin to arrive. Embossed curlicues on thick-stock, cream-colored paper ask for “the pleasure of our company” at “the union of,” “the celebration of,” or “the wedding of.” With every spring, our sighs get a little deeper as we anticipate another summer of rote ceremony, cocktail hour, and, finally, awkward dancing. Sure, some weddings are fun, but too often they’re a formulaic, overpriced, fraught rite of passage, marking entry into an institution that sociologists describe as “broken.”

Utah will join the Pac-10 Conference as its 12th team -- with an announcement coming as soon as Friday, a source tells ESPN. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah's Board of Trustees will hold a public meeting Thursday afternoon. The meeting agenda was not revealed. Mountain West Conference commissioner Craig Thompson, interviewed Tuesday, would only say that he has been in contact with the Pac-10 regarding Utah. "I did state yesterday morning that I had not spoken to [Pac-10 commissioner] Larry Scott," Thompson said during a break at the Collegiate Commissioners Association meetings. "Twenty-four hours is a long timeframe."

All across America, on web sites and among social networking groups, sports fans are playing in fantasy baseball leagues. Even Major League Baseball operates a particularly sophisticated site that allows participants to draft players and create their own rosters, all to compete against other fans. The goal is to demonstrate skill in assessing the attributes and predicting the performances of athletes. Harmless fun. Now it’s come to light that a group of male students at Landon School, an upscale Maryland college prep academy, created their own fantasy sex league last fall. Not harmless at all. First of all, the online...

The latest PPP survey on hypothetical 2012 match-ups shows President Obama leading the field of Republican hopefuls. But not so among independent voters: One thing that's very interesting about these numbers is that Ron Paul is the most popular out of the whole group with independents. They see him favorably by a 35/25 margin.

In the Midwest, we don't have damp, blustery fall days: We have Big Ten weather. We don't have mammoth land-grant universities: We have Big Ten schools. You may insult our climate, our politicians or our Miss America contestants, but not the Big Ten. Right now, people in high positions are talking about expanding the nation's oldest collegiate athletic conference. What they may overlook is that it's not just a sports association. It's an identity in a region that needs one.

Idaho joined with 12 other states in suing the federal government Tuesday immediately after President Obama signed the new health-care bill into law. Thirteen Republican state attorneys general sued to block the law, calling it unconstitutional. Idaho Gov. Butch Otter said the lawsuit was needed to "stop this insanity." "The sovereignty of the state of Idaho is very important to us," Otter said in an televised interview on Fox News. The lawsuit says the health care reform law infringes on the sovereignty of the states by imposing onerous new operating rules that they must follow, Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden...

Editor's note: The following is excerpted from an article with the same headline by Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman that was published in the Wall Street Journal on April 17, 1996. Friedman died in 2006. A related editorial appears nearby: In a chapter in his novel "The Cancer Ward" titled "The Old Doctor," Alexander Solzhenitsyn compares "private medical practice" with "universal, free, public health service" through the words of an elderly physician whose practice predated 1918. . . Mr. Solzhenitsyn himself had no personal experience on which to base his account and yet, in what I have long regarded...

At an outdoor rally today, the president described the health-care debate as a referendum on the “character” of the country, and I do believe he was correct. The president is pushing legislation that a clear majority of the people dislike, and whose details neither he nor his supporters can explain in simple language. Its ends-justify-the-means passage will require legislative gymnastics that border on the unconstitutional, and in Orwellian fashion are designed to reassure its sheepish supporters that they can appear not to be voting for the bill they vote for. And to achieve a House majority, Obama must offer an...

WASHINGTON – A loose coalition of conservative interests with ties to Glenn Beck’s 9-12 Project, the Tea Party and similar causes plans a protest outside of Rep. Walt Minnick’s office this weekend, with the claim that the Democratic congressman co-sponsored one of the health care bills being considered by Congress. But their assertion is untrue. Minnick never sponsored such legislation. Minnick, who was one of 39 Democrats to vote against health care legislation in November, has said repeatedly over the past week that he has will not support the bill on Sunday when it is now expected to come up...

Democrats in Washington, D.C., hope to pass health care reform soon, but Republican state leaders in Idaho are preparing to go to court to fight it. Gov. Butch Otter signed the Idaho Health Freedom Act on Wednesday in his first public bill signing of the 2010 session. "If I am (first), I'm glad," said Otter, who was flanked by several Republican lawmakers. At least 36 other states are considering similar legislation in response to the drive by President Obama and congressional Democrats to expand health insurance to 30 million uninsured Americans, in part by requiring them to buy insurance. Virginia...

On ABC last Wednesday, both World News and Nightline featured a report filed by correspondent Dan Harris in which he linked the activities of some American evangelical Christian pastors with anti-gay hatred and attempts by Uganda’s parliament at passing death penalty legislation to punish homosexuals in the African nation. Each of the reports focused on the extreme views of American pastor Scott Lively and Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa, without including the views of more mainstream American evangelical leaders. On World News, anchor Diane Sawyer teased: "Gay terror: Have some American evangelical ministers helped threaten the lives of homosexuals in Africa?"...