Free Republic

My brother and I have been having an argument. Between the time that the McCain lost the election, and the day that Zero was sworn in, I have been very angry with Bush for betraying his stated principles in the War on Terror by ignoring Iran. I assert that simply by giving the proper order, Bush could have terminated the ruling mullahocracy and set Iran's nuke program back at least eight years in a high-intensity aerial campaign lasting about two weeks. The only explanation I can come up with for his failure to act is moral cowardice. My brother, on...

A MESSAGE TO THE RICH The Washington Post ran a column a few days ago, in which a Mr. Joel Berg applauds the Obama Administration for reducing the amount of charitable deduction that The Rich are allowed to take when they write a check to charity.  Mr. Berg – who runs a charitable foundation that feeds the poor — explains things for us thusly:    “…It is wrong to give them [the very rich] unilateral power to decide whether their taxpayer-subsidized donations should go to, say, well-heeled operas or lavish care of pets rather than to organizations that meet more pressing communal...

A lot of people have noticed that the UN has not really reacted to Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. Some people take this as a good sign. I do not. They think that the UN intends to let Israel destroy Hamas in Gaza so that Fatah can take over again and the 'piece process' can resume. I don't think so. I forsee a nightmare scenario. I believe that the UN and Hamas are waiting for Obama to take office. When he does, they intend to issue a very harsh ruling condemning Israel, that the US would support. Following that...

Dear President Bush, I thank you for the service to our country. As your term passes the 99% mark, you seem to have decided to allow the next four weeks to pass without doing any additional work. If so - SHAME ON YOU. You took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the USA. Your term of office is not over, and it despite the fact that Congress and the Media wants you to fade away quietly, your sworn duty demands otherwise. Respectfully, get off your ass and get back to work. There is much to be done...

WorldWatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card February 3, 2008 The Insanity of Parties I'm writing this as the Super Tuesday results are starting to come in, and you know what? I'm going to be miserable no matter who wins. And do you know why? Because there's not one candidate who comes close to representing my positions on all the issues I care about. Love McCain's position on the war. Happy with his position on illegal aliens, at least as it used to be. Loathe his position on almost everything else. Hate the...

Published: November 29, 2007Sleepwalking Into a NightmareSpeech by Newt Gingrich Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich delivered the following remarks to a Jewish National Fund meeting Nov. 15 at the Selig Center. I just want to talk to you from the heart for a few minutes and share with you where I think we are.  I think it is very stark. I don't think it is yet desperate, but it is very stark. And if I had a title for today's talk, it would be sleepwalking into a nightmare. 'Cause that's what I think we're doing. I gave a speech at the American Enterprise...

      |     WorldWatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card December 1, 2007 A Stand-up President I keep hearing how Ronald Reagan was such a great president because he always stood up for what he believed and did the right thing no matter what. Funny -- that's not the Ronald Reagan I saw. I watched Ronald Reagan start us down the long ugly road of capitulating to Muslim terrorists. Maybe there was no choice but to withdraw the Marines after the barracks was bombed in Lebanon in 1983. Certainly...

Call Me Pelotit (The Real Sins of Sodom and Gemorrah)November 2, 2007 — rabbirussellfox Who was Pelotit? In our biblical stories there are many individuals (many of them women) who are not named in the Torah, but are given names in the midrashic stories of the rabbis. One of them is Pelotit, a daughter of Lot.In this week’s Torah portion we read of the infamous cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and how Abraham pleads with God to spare the cities if only enough righteous people live there. Now our fair state, Oklahoma, likes to think of itself as a righteous...

... The West itself has largely fallen under the control of civilization Dr. Kevorkians. Some call them "Tranzis." "Tranzi" is short for "Transnational Progressive" or "Transnational Progressivism." For a more complete account of their program, look up John O'Sullivan's Gulliver's Travails or some of what Stephen den Beste has written on the subject. You might, dear reader, also look at John Fonte's The Ideological War within the West. Lastly, for purposes of this little essay, look up Lee Harris' The Intellectual Origins of America Bashing. These should give you a good grounding in Tranzism: its motives, goals and operating techniques....

Summer 2004 The Path Not Taken Rand Simberg n June 21, 2004, with thousands in attendance in the small southern California desert town of Mojave, a sexagenarian test pilot performed the first trip to space in a privately-built spacecraft. SpaceShipOne, as it is called, cost less than $30 million and was funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Occurring seventeen months after the loss of the shuttle Columbia put America’s manned space program on hiatus, the SpaceShipOne flight received a surprising amount of publicity. The achievement, while impressive, was also limited: SpaceShipOne’s flight was only a suborbital test, roughly the equivalent...

   Home      About Dan      News      Books      Forum      Art      Writing Well June-July 2007 Message from Dan Greetings Readers, Friends, and Other Visitors:It’s May as I write this and the subject of Iraq is much in the air. Of course, the subject of Iraq has been much in the air for years now, but it seems to be coming close to reaching some critical mass or tipping point. And everyone in political life or among the Trinities (NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, PBS, etc.) agree that September is the swivel point . . . that something will have to...

      |     Civilization WatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card April 29, 2007 Don't You Dare Ask for Proof! In last Sunday's News and Record, columnist Andrew Brod heaped ridicule on those who dare to contest the religion of global warming. What is his proof? He doesn't think he needs any. In fact, he's against proof. He likes it when governments make massive changes without any evidence that those changes are necessary. He spends his whole column citing political documents like the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on...

Keeping Things CivilAfterword to the novel Empireby Orson Scott Card The originating premise of this novel did not come from me. Donald Mustard and his partners in Chair Enterainment had the idea for an entertainment franchise called Empire about a near-future American civil war. When I joined the project to create a work of fiction based on that premise, my first order of business was to come up with a plausible way that such an event might come about. It was, sadly enough, all too easy. Because we haven't had a civil war in the past fourteen decades, people think...

Another Tack: A beautiful friendship Sarah Honig, THE JERUSALEM POST Jan. 18, 2007 We'll call her Naima (though she anglicizes her name). She's my daughter's pen pal of sorts. They met on a LiveJournal Web site and soon featured on each other's "friends" lists. Naima grew up in the US and was brought back to Jordan by her folks a year ago. Her dad is quite wealthy, and the family resides in a posh Amman suburb. Naima is the quintessential antithesis to a Muslim fundamentalist. A young adult, she's hardly religious, fanatic only about soccer, a confirmed feminist and an...

December 25, 2006 -- Uri Dan, The Post's Mideast correspondent in war and uneasy peace for the past quarter-century, died of lung cancer in Tel Aviv yesterday at 71. The author of more than a dozen books on the Middle East, Dan - who would always greet Post colleagues with a warm "Hello, my friend" - also wrote for the Israeli newspapers Maariv and The Jerusalem Post, and was a regular on Israel Radio's daily "It's All Talk."

Civilization WatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card December 17, 2006 Honoring Those Who Died I was on my way home from speaking to officers at an air base, so when, during a brief layover, I saw a young man in uniform waiting for the same flight as me, I thought nothing of it -- I was used to uniforms. It happened that during boarding, we were nearly alone at the back of the plane for a few minutes. We struck up a conversation. This young man was nearing the end of his...

Civilization WatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card October 8, 2006 Groupthink and the Intellectual Elite One of the most amusing things about the movement to force immigrants to speak only English is that we have a much more serious language problem on our hands -- and it's centered in the universities. There are whole departments where English has been effectively banned and replaced with "Theoretics," a language designed so that the speaker can make the listener feel stupid without the speaker actually having to be smart. I will give you a genuine...

Civilization WatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card September 17, 2006 Homework, Part I The Worst Job in the World What if you had a really lousy job? You're only employed for seven hours a day, but you have to ride the bus for half an hour each way. While you're there, they only let you go to the bathroom at certain times. You only have ten minutes to get from one work station to another, and somehow you also have to use the toilet and get your new work materials from a...

      |     World WatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card July 16, 2006 Know Thy Enemy I do hope that the readers of this column already know that no decent person could ever advocate that Israel negotiate with Hamas and Hezbollah or give in to their demands in the slightest in order to get their kidnapped soldiers back. The slightest concession would only guarantee that more and more Israelis would be kidnapped in the future. The only way to extinguish kidnapping is to make sure that it never,...

June 18, 2006 “The Israelis Live Over There, So I Don’t Have to Forgive Them!” I intended to publish this essay last year, but it got bumped and put into cold storage. Here it is after a too-long delay. – MJT MOUNT LEBANON - Photojournalist Dan and I hitchhiked from the broiling and humid Mediterranean shore to the cool heights of the Mount Lebanon region where we could walk, breathe, and hang out in the sun without feeling like we had been dipped in a hot tub with our clothes on. Dan wanted to go sight-seeing in comfort. I...