Free Republic

HammeredPublished: Sunday, February 6, 2005 8:43 PM EST How blogs are shattering the arrogance of the Columbia Journalism Review ... and why that's good for journalism Laura Vanderkam Joseph Newcomer had never heard of the Columbia Journalism Review, the magazine of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, before friends told him to check out what CJR said about him in the January/February 2005 issue. Newcomer, a Microsoft programming teacher who has studied typesetting for decades, suspected the hubbub was about his recent assertions that CBS's 1972-73 memos on President Bush's National Guard service were fakes. Sure enough, "Blog-Gate," by...

THE ROE EFFECT The Empty Cradle Will Rock How abortion is costing the Democrats voters--literally. BY LARRY L. EASTLAND Monday, June 28, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT More than 40 million legal abortions have been performed and documented in the 30 years since the U.S. Supreme Court declared abortion legal. The debate remains focused on the legality and morality of abortion. What's largely ignored is a factual analysis of the political consequences of 40 million abortions. Consider: • There were 12,274,368 in the Voting Age Population of 205,815,000 missing from the 2000 presidential election, because of abortions from 1973-82. • In...

I was wondering if anyone here had fought a property tax assessment -- and won, thereby reducing your taxes? Is such a process difficult? I had read that most homes are overassessed.

BRICK, N.J. (AP) — A woman gave birth in the back of a car on the way to a hospital, but the vehicle then left the road and struck a utility pole, killing her husband. The newborn boy was in critical condition Thursday, and the mother, 22-year-old Atara Sasoon, was listed as fair. The car crashed Wednesday about a mile from the hospital in the Jersey Shore town of Brick. Binyhmin Sasoon, 22, was found slumped over the steering wheel and was pronounced dead at the scene. His wife was apparently ejected from the car and was able to stop...

<p>National headlines teem with debates about old people (Medicare) and married people (will gay marriage change the institution?). But locally, officials are eyeing a very different demographic.</p> <p>Tampa spent years turning Ybor City, an old cigar-making district, into a nightlife hub. Baltimore advertises its low living costs on the Washington subway. Memphis residents spearheaded a "Memphis Manifesto" — a statement on attracting creative individuals. In Louisville, the alumni club Bulldogs in the Bluegrass woos young Yalies to a home in the South.</p>

Dirty Little Secret: Parents Prefer BoysIt's a dirty little secret that you'll want to hide from your daughters: Boys hold their parents' marriages together, while girls break them up. That's the word from two leading economists at the University of Rochester and the University of California, Los Angeles who maintain that in the United States the parents of a girl are nearly 5 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of a boy, reports Slate magazine. The more daughters a couple has, the greater the chance of a marital split. For example, the parents of three girls are almost...

AUGUST 11, 2003 'Liberal' Papers More Likely to Criticize Clinton Study: While 'Conservative' Ones Leave Bush Alone By Greg Mitchell NEW YORK -- So-called "liberal" newspapers tend to be more open-minded and willing to criticize a like-minded U.S. president than their "conservative" counterparts, according to a report released last week. In a study for The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, Michael Tomasky looked at 510 editorials over the past decade. He found that on their editorial pages The New York Times and The Washington Post criticized the Clinton administration 30% of the...

College Students Can’t Write? What a “scoop.” By Stanley K. Ridgley The Chronicle of Higher Education recently discovered something that parents have known for at least the past 15 years — America's universities don't teach college kids how to write . . . at least, not how to write very well. In fact, hundreds of thousands of recent college graduates today cannot express themselves with the written word. Why? Because universities have shortchanged them, offering strange literary theories, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, and other oddities in the guise of writing courses. They've offered everything, really, but the basics of clear writing....

I'm trying to compile a list of history's greatest con artists -- people who cheated nations out of prime land, famous people out of their money, or who even faked their own death. So far I've got: *'Count' Victor Lustig who sold the Eiffel tower to greedy steel dealers -- twice. *Joseph 'Yellow Kid' Weil, who once set up a fake bank in Muncie, Ind., staffed by prostitutes, and conned a rich man into depositing $50,000. *Elmyr de Hory- art forger extraordinaire, whose bio was authored by Clifford Irving, who faked a biography of Howard Hughes. Some think Hory faked...

I'm trying to compile a list of "school horror stories," specifically ones that deal with bright children's minds being numbed by school in the name of egalitarianism. Example: a musical prodigy forced to play in an elementary school orchestra. A kid who already reads forced to take quizzes on the letters, because to let him move on would violate the principle of social justice. Can anyone help me out?

<p>When David and Margaret Mason of Lovettsville, Va., planned their summer trip to Poland, they encountered an unexpected obstacle: The country's biggest rental van holds only nine passengers. With six children already and an appointment in Poland to adopt four more, their family was about to become too large for one vehicle.</p>

<p>Starting Saturday, the government is free.</p> <p>For the rest of the year, you pay nothing for police protection. You pay nothing for the military. You pay nothing for Medicare or Medicaid. You pay nothing to keep our rivers navigable, our air paths clear, our highways patched. You pay nothing to keep our courts open, our campgrounds safe, our water clean. You pay nothing to house the poor or feed the hungry or clothe the needy. You pay nothing to finance our wars on cancer or poverty or terrorism. You pay nothing to finance government — local or state or federal.</p>

<p>Sometimes the most telling part of a study doesn't make it into print. That's the case with the 30th anniversary count of black elected officials that was released last month by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies (JCPES).</p>

<p>I've removed all of my flags. The one in my house window. The three magnetic ones on my car. (I had wanted them visible from any angle.) The antenna ball, too. And my array of patriotic lapel pins, even the Mickey Mouse one from the Disney Store — I've put them all away.</p>

<p>The Bush administration is trying to run roughshod over this country's only independent federal civil-rights agency.</p> <p>In a late-night ceremony last week, the White House had a judge swear in Peter Kirsanow as a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which earlier this year chastised Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, and Katherine Harris, the secretary of state, for their role in last year's election debacle in Florida.</p>

The streets of San Francisco will swell with protesters next Tuesday. Parents, teachers and children will march on the School Board to stop it from revoking the Edison Academy's charter. America soon will learn whether the government school establishment would rather plunge 515 low-income, minority students into ignorance than let them shine in private hands. Edison Elementary once was among San Francisco's worst schools. "Violence was so commonplace," former principal Ken Romines observed, "students expected to get hurt or hurt others." In the fall of 1998, the coincidentally named Edison Schools, Inc., began managing the K-5 campus as a for-profit ...

Robert’s Rules of Rallies How to cover a left-wing protest. By Tim Graham, White House correspondent, World Magazine & former director of media analysis at the Media Research Center April 30, 2001 8:25 a.m. Every year, tens of thousands of Americans come to Washington in January for the March for Life to mark the dark anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, and almost every year, the routine assembly of their impressive numbers are almost entirely ignored by the national media. There is, however, an entirely different slate of rules and generous exceptions granted if your protests are, well, just, in liberal ...

Barbara Kingsolver, renowned author of The Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer, wrote this call-to-action against the profound threats the new administration poses to the environment. Dear Friend, Okay, I'll admit it, I spent the inaugural weekend in denial. (He's not my president. Most of us didn't actually vote for the guy... ) Ignored the smarmy front-page photos of parades and balls, skipped straight to Section B to look for coverage of the protests. But the fact is, we now have a new administration that's hostile to the things I love most: human kindness, the dignity of diversity, and the wild ...

I received the following email.... URGENT! GLOBAL WARMING ACTIVISTS NEEDED! On Thursday, April 12 at 11 am, We will be having a press conference on wall street to announce that WE are pressuring our schools to adopt the standards of the kyoto protocol. When? NOW! WE need Ivy activists to come to wall street(NYC) and let national media know that we are not ok with our governments' nonaction, that we think Bush's "America First" is a bunch of crap, and that we DEMAND that our schools take action NOW! This is an amazing opportunity to let our nation know that ...

An excerpt: "The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning." --Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge "Michel Foucault would have been fascinated by late-twentieth-century presidential campaigns." --Lynne Cheney, Telling the Truth