Free Republic

(GOPUSA News) -- Attorney Ann Coulter is one of the most influential conservatives on the media scene today. Not only is Ms. Coulter a best-selling author, syndicated columnist, and political analyst, she is a pundit extraordinaire who captivates television viewers with her attractive style, flamboyance, and quick-witted humor. There is no denying that she is controversial in many of her opinions. Political correctness is anathema to Ms. Coutler! But whether you agree with Ann Coulter or not, her views are thoroughly intriguing and thought provoking, and that is the essence of her star quality. Ms. Coulter graciously welcomed an interview...

If you're like most Americans, you probably think air quality is bad, and that our fondness for SUVs is only going to make things worse. Fed a weekly dose of gloomy media accounts prompted by gloomy reports from environmental groups, it's no surprise that national surveys continue to find Americans are pessimistic on the state of the air. But what may surprise you is that this pessimism is misplaced. Air quality has been improving for more than two decades in most places, and will only get better in the future. So why haven't environmentalists caught up with reality? Happy endings...

Bill O'Reilly recently took command behind the pulpit of his alma mater, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After listening to O'Reilly answer questions I drew the conclusion that he is either totally naive or he is skirting unspoken, off-limit subjects. On the nightly O'Reilly Factor (Fox News) he appears to be shamelessly bold with no-holds-barred. However, when a student stepped up to the microphone and stated that he could count on two hands the number of conservative educators at Harvard, and asked,"why do you think that most professors are liberal -- O'Reilly replied that he had...

Sometimes it seems as if gen-nyew-wine, honest-to-goodness, red-blooded real Americans are a disappearing breed, but thankfully they aren't. They just aren't where one might think they should be. No, don't look at major media, news anchors (for mercy's sake don't look at CNN or Carville and company), chuck most of Hollywood in the dumpsters, and don't look at major cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Chicago or even Dallas where the handouts draw liberals like cowpiles draw flies. Forget the big colleges and universities that started out as bastions of freedom and seminaries for preparing American preachers ...

It was rumored at the first of the year that the Democratic party and its network of left-leaning public interest groups recognized that it was suffering repeated and significant political defeats. The answer to this erosion of political support was said to be a planned broad and invigorated full court press directed at what has become a powerful, and inspiring, Presidential administration, one that is decidedly conservative in principle. The reality of this position can be seen pretty clearly without a great deal of research. Henry Waxman has been rebuffed for nearly a year over his demands for documents from ...

Alright, it now appears that journalist Daniel Pearl's gruesome death scene not only involved a throat-slashing, but his decapitation at the hands of his captors, as well. And the tragic events were filmed, to boot. (UK Times). Undoubtedly, that tape needs to be made available for the public to see, albeit at a late viewing hour for the eyes of adults only. It would be fair to say that the captors wanted no remaining ambiguity as to Pearl's demise. And these psychopaths reportedly forced Pearl to admit to being a Jew and the son of a Jew, an unequivocal "enemy" ...

Over just the past few days several "international experts", leaders in academia, and reporters have repeated a high-brow notion that is generally accepted as fact among the "educated" sect; "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". Watch the news for a day or two and I'm sure it will be repeated. I pose the question here: is it really the truth? Or is it just simply another leftist assumption taken for granted in academia and the media that puts us on the slippery slope to anti-Americanism? Long-winded, convoluted, circular arguments can be made either way - but let 's ...

On January 28th of this year, one day before President Bush's State of the Union speech, Democracy Corps, a group led by James Carville, Stan Greenberg, and Bob Shrum, issued a memorandum to its ''friends'' as a preemptive strike to thwart Bush's increasing popularity. Their weapon? Enron. The memo, simplistically entitled ''Enron,'' is represented as the collective analytical work of Carville, Greenberg, and Shrum. The memo's goal is clear: ''Enron has the potential to shape the entire political environment for 2002, impact other issues and reduce confidence in the Bush Administration and Republicans.'' The survey, however, tells a much different ...

Lightning isn't supposed to strike twice in the same place, but tell that to Mark Sokolow. Mr. Sokolow survived the attack on the World Trade Center in September, barely escaping from his 38th floor office when the second plane hit and the building collapsed. Then on Sunday, Sokolow and his family were shopping in Jerusalem, where they had gone to visit a daughter studying there, when a suicide bomber, a Palestinian female, detonated a device that killed her and one other, and injured scores, including Sokolow, his wife and two remaining daughters. Americans are not used to this type of ...

In what can only be described as time to go, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Colin Powell has shown that he is (a), too much a soldier, (b), not enough a diplomat or statesman, and (c), a liability when it comes to the handling of the 158 detainees that are currently being held at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Their current situation as to their being handled was well described my friend and colleague Robert Yoho in his column last Friday, which I would recommend highly for your reading. ...

This past weekend the "leadership" of the national Republican Party converged on Austin, Texas to ratify the second RNC head in as many years. The vote to elect former Montana Governor Marc Racicot was a mere formality with President George W. Bush's post-election/debacle decree that Racicot should be running the RNC going into the mid-term Congressional races. It is tradition, and good policy, that the occupant of the White House, or his advisers, select the chairman of the national party so that the strategies and messages coming out of both camps are coordinated. Because the now immediate past RNC Chairman ...

Do not miss Director Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down. Like the tribute in classic Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down is a motion picture memorial. Lest we forget, Black Hawk Down reminds us of our servicepeople's willingness to enter the fray, regardless of the political, tactical and numerical odds like the ones our soldiers faced in Mogadishu, Somalia on October 3, 1993. The movie, based upon Mark Bowden's Nobel worthy chronicle, honors the dead and wounded soldiers played by actors who rehearsed their military roles at Special Operations Command, Fort Bragg, North Carolina - the proving grounds for most of ...

Well, it's official! Congress has succeeded in telling the military retirees of this country that their 20+ years of service in defense of this nation don't mean diddly squat. They have told veterans in no uncertain terms that it doesn't matter that they gave the best years of their working lives to defend the freedoms of those in Congress, the White House and even the folks down on Main Street, Anytown, USA. Congress had the power to right a wrong directed at only one group of persons in this country, the military retiree. They failed miserably and delivered only lip ...

Unfortunately, it appears that we are inexorably moving toward a National Identification Card system, an Orwellian nightmare that would permit easy tracking and surveillance of individuals on a level once considered unimaginable. It's not happening in a blatant power grab by government, but in small, incremental steps that nonetheless will have the same deleterious outcome. Our society is "slipping and sliding" toward "Big Brother" snoopery with plans for embedding crucial identification data into microchips on our drivers' licenses. And, clearly, widespread encroachment upon our privacy is being significantly abetted by advancing technologies. Understandably, civil libertarians are sounding the clarion call ...

I noticed that the ground was beginning to shift last summer with the re-emergence of machismo males, or truly masculine men if you will, embracing their testosterone-driven behaviors, and coming back into style. In a scene reminiscent of the movie "Jaws", eight- year old Jessie Arbogast lost his arm stemming from an attack by a 7-foot bull shark on July 6th of last year in Florida. The young victim's uncle, Vance Flosenzier, was there to intervene in a spectacular manner at the onset. In an amazing accomplishment, Flosenzier proceeded to drag that dastardly shark, that carnivorous sea beast, to the ...

The dilemma of a free society is to balance the rights of its citizens against the responsibility of government to fulfill its first duty, which is to defend the lives and freedoms of those citizens. It is a delicate balance, especially in time of war, but it is important to remember that the U.S. Constitution is supposed to protect the life, liberty and property of American citizens, not those who would misuse the freedoms they enjoy here to destroy us and our way of life. We understand very well how to fight a war outside our own borders. We have ...

In June 1981, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in McCarty vs. McCarty that military retirement pay should not be divisible as community property. The Supreme Court Justices asserted and acknowledged that military retainer/retirement pay were different enough from federal and civilian retirement plans and therefore should not be treated the same in divorce situations. However, the Supreme Court did acknowledge that the need existed to help these former spouses and therefore left the door wide open for Congress to enact the Uniformed Services Former Spouse Protection Act (USFSPA). The USFSPA became law (Public Law 97-252) on September 8, 1982 and ...

Sooner or later, the fate of John Walker, a.k.a. Abdul Hamid, an American who fought with the Taliban against the West, will have to be determined. What should be done with him? UPI National Political Analysts Peter Roff, a conservative, and Jim Chapin, a liberal, face off on opposite sides of this critical question. Chapin: Fuzzy Wars; Fuzzy Nationalities; Fuzzy Laws President George W. Bush told Barbara Walters that Johnny Walker was a "poor fellow," which brought an explosion of rage from many on the right wing. The New York Post headlined the comment: "'Poor Fellow' or Traitor? ... It ...

Our current national travails have provoked much talk of a new spirit of "trusting government." Certainly, it is important and desirable that the citizens of a nation at war have confidence and trust in their government. We should be mindful, however, that this need for trust cuts both ways. War tends necessarily to increase the concentration of power in the federal government, and particularly in the executive branch. In a free republic, such times as war increase as well the necessity that citizens trust their own judgment. Even as we willingly accept the increased energy of the government in those ...

ONE OF THE TYPICAL ILLUSIONS of the Chomsky cult is the belief that its imam and sensei is not the unbalanced dervish of anti-American loathing he appears to everyone else, but an analytic giant whose dicta flow from a painstaking and scientific inquiry into the facts. "The only reason Noam Chomsky is an international political force unto himself," writes a typically fervid acolyte, "is that he actually spends considerable time researching, analyzing, corroborating, deconstructing, and impassionately [sic] explaining world affairs." This conviction is almost as delusional as Chomsky's view of the world itself. It would be more accurate to say ...