Free Republic

Iconic rock star Pete Townshend, guitarist and songwriter for The Who, isn't the first prominent rock star you might expect to be caught up in child porn accusations. His image has never been sneeringly libidinous, like Mick Jagger's, or transgressively intellectual and blandly creepy, like David Byrne's. (Since one can't be too safe in this current hysterical environment, let me underline that I am not accusing either man of an interest in or possession of child porn.) Townshend's niche has always more big brotherish—concerned, conflicted but honest, deeply fascinated with and understanding of the confusions, manias, and travails of...

1. "Dum medium silentium teneret omnia..."– "While earth was rapt in silence and night only half through its course, your almighty Word, O Lord, came down from his royal throne" (Antiphon to the Magnificat, 26 December).On this Holy Night the ancient promise is fulfilled: the time of waiting has ended and the Virgin gives birth to the Messiah.Jesus is born for a humanity searching for freedom and peace; he is born for everyone burdened by sin, in need of salvation, and yearning for hope.On this night God answers the ceaseless cry of the peoples: Come, Lord, save us! His eternal...

Now that Trent Lott has resigned as Senate Republican leader, the firestorm over his casual remark at Senator Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party has clearly become a watershed moment—one that could help define the politics of race relations in America for years to come. As everyone who hasn't been hiking in the wilderness without a radio knows by now, Lott fondly recalled the South Carolina senator's 1948 run for the White House on the segregationist Dixiecrat ticket. Proudly pointing out that his home state of Mississippi voted for Thurmond, he added, "If the rest of the country had followed...

<p>JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israeli soldiers are training with chemical agents, learning how to detect them to warn the public in case of an attack. Israel TV reported Sunday.</p> <p>The report said officers, including the chief of the Home Front Command, Maj. Gen. Yusef Mishlab, volunteered to enter a room in protective gear, and chemical agents, some of them dangerous, were sprayed into the room. All of the officers emerged unharmed, according to the TV report.</p>

"Do two rights make a wrong?" asks the left-leaning LA Weekly on its cover this week. "Not this time," it concludes, with an article about Pat Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos's new magazine, The American Conservative. The cover feature, by Brendan Bernhard, gives a new political magazine a lot more attention than such magazines would customarily get. But Pat and Taki's operation has earned them nearly as many newspaper and magazine articles as they have readers for their 12,000-circulation baby. Staking a contrarian corner within its own apparent turf makes the magazine a more bracing (and certainly more enjoyable) read...

So 60 Minutes does a story on Mississippi juries sticking big civil awards on big out-of-state companies in perverse rounds of "jackpot justice."So what do the jurors mentioned on the broadcast do? Sue the TV show for $6 billion. That's $597 million in actual damages and $5.9 billion in punitive damages for their defamation.

Issue settled. The Atkins Diet—the famous high-fat, low-carb regime that lets dieters load up on pork rinds and Scrapple as long as they avoid potatoes and Wheaties—works. The American Heart Association has been wrong all along, as has essentially the entirely American medical establishment. Not only is gorging on fat the key to becoming thin, it's heart-healthy to boot. So say the headlines: • "High Fat, Low Carb Diet May Finally Be Getting Its Due" (CNN) • "Fats Win Latest Round in Diet War" (Chicago Tribune) • "Low-carb Atkins Diet Beats Low-Fat American Heart Association Plan in Head-To-Head Comparison" (CNBC)...

Joseph Stalin made Martin Amis laugh four times. Amis reports that he read "yards" of books about Stalin to write Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (Miramax), a meditation on the monstrousness of Stalin and the consequent historical vulnerability of a left that has never fully dealt with its past complicity in mass murder. Indeed, much of the left is still able to laugh nostalgically about the Soviet Union despite its unspeakably horrific past, and that, thinks Amis, makes it morally guilty."Nothing Stalin did makes you laugh," writes Amis. Rather, it’s the things Stalin was capable of saying,...

For decades after the first tobacco lawsuit was filed in 1954, cigarette manufacturers consistently defeated attempts to hold them legally responsible for the health consequences of smoking. The most important factor working in their favor was the common-sense understanding that people know smoking is dangerous but choose to do it anyway. The counter-argument—that the decision to light a cigarette and suck smoke into one's lungs is not truly voluntary—has made serious headway only in recent years. By contrast, the idea that people do not really control what they eat, dismissed as patently absurd when New York attorney Samuel Hirsch sued...

Who Am I? Valor Corp. .25-caliber Pistol I'm a .25 caliber pistol—a so-called Saturday Night Special—made by defunct gun maker Raven Arms. Although I'm an inanimate object, I've been found legally culpable in the 2000 classroom shooting of a West Palm Beach, Florida school teacher. More specifically, a jury has just found gun distributor Valor 5 percent guilty in the tragic murder, which occurred when a 16-year-old student stole an unloaded version of me and some bullets from a family friend and then killed his teacher. The local school board and the family friend—though not the actual shooter—shouldered the rest...

It's a truism of American politics that the Democrats want to take all your money but will let you live the way you want, while the Republicans will let you keep your money, but want to tell you how to live. Another political truism is that elections are fought between the Evil Party and the Stupid Party. When the Evil Party is in power, they pass Evil laws. When the Stupid Party is in power, they pass Stupid laws. But sometimes both parties agree and then we get laws that are both Evil and Stupid. We in Washington call that...

Imagine raising a family for years, only to find out one day that your children are not really yours. Imagine, after the divorce, being told by the courts that you have to continue paying financial support for these children.Is this a Kafkaesque nightmare, or an unfortunate necessity to protect the children’s interests?No one knows exactly how many men -- and children -- around the United States are confronting this question in their own lives, but the individual cases that have made it into the spotlight are wrenching.One such story, told recently on NBC’s Dateline, is that of Morgan Wise, an...

Well, stop staring at me.Tap dance!

<p>Race cards are sometimes deuces. Let's hope the same applies in the Senate race.</p>

There was a time when conspiracy theorists looked for discrepancies in the record before they started speculating in public about who killed whom. No matter how firmly you may believe the official accounts of the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Vince Foster, and Ron Brown, you have to give the conspiracy crowd credit: They based their theories on head wounds and bullet angles and comparably concrete stuff. If you wanted to dispute their data, there at least were data to dispute. Not so with Paul Wellstone, the Minnesota senator who died in a plane crash last Friday. Less than...

<p>Republicans entered the last week before elections buoyed by a GOP leader with the highest job approval ratings in half a century for a president entering his first midterm elections, according to a new poll.</p> <p>President Bush had a job approval of 67 percent headed into the midterm elections, according to the ABC News poll, which is slightly better than the 61 percent job approval President Eisenhower had in the Gallup poll before the 1954 midterm elections.</p>

A serial rapist's account of how he battered the Central Park jogger with a tree limb and a rock doesn't match up with the woman's horrendous injuries, members of her medical crew have told the Daily News. The discrepancies could undermine Matias Reyes' claim that he alone — not five teens who went to prison for the attack — raped and brutalized the 27-year-old investment banker in 1989. "Reyes' story doesn't jibe with her head injuries," said one person on the medical team that saved the jogger's life. When the jogger was found in a dark ravine hours after being...

<p>CHICAGO (AP) -- Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan acknowledged Saturday that suspected sniper John Allen Muhammad is a member of the religious group.</p> <p>But Farrakhan said the man would be ousted from the Chicago-based group if he is convicted in the series of shootings that left 10 people dead and three wounded.</p>

<p>BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- President Saddam Hussein on Friday urged Chechen rebels to free their hostages in Moscow, saying the standoff will anger the Russian people when the real enemies of Islam are Americans and Israel.</p> <p>"The tyrant of the age, namely Zionism and America, and not Russia, or China or India are our enemies," Saddam said in a statement read by an announcer over Iraqi state television.</p>

Like most New Yorkers, like most Americans, the attacks of September 11 made me very angry. In the days after the attacks I was incredibly moved by the generosity and humanity that arose as people from all over the country drove instantly toward New York to help, to work, to dig, to rebuild spirits. Still I was angry. Why New York? New York more than any other city in the world encourages diversity of faith. The peaceful coexistence of different cultures and beliefs in this city is nothing short of a miracle. A few years ago I did a movie...