Free Republic

I'm asking for prayers for my Great Nephew, Hayes Brown. He's 5 yrs. old, and is at St. Jude's Hospital in Memphis. He started seeing blood in his urine last week, so his parents took him to the doctor, who sent them directly to St. Jude's. His parents hadn't noticed the tumor, because it was growing inward, and he hadn't shown any symptoms until the blood in the urine. On Friday, they removed one of his kidneys in which they found a tumor the size of a grapefruit. They also removed some lymph nodes nearby, and are doing a biopsy...

Fair but Unbalanced How the media promote false pessimism about the economy. BY BRIAN S. WESBURY Thursday, August 9, 2007 12:01 a.m. Not that it needed any help, but the already energized debate about journalistic bias was electrified when Rupert Murdoch, owner of the "fair and balanced" Fox News Channel, struck a deal to buy The Wall Street Journal. I have no desire to take sides in this debate, or question anyone's integrity, but my role as a business economist gives me a unique view of this subject. I talk frequently with members of the print media, and I am...

Shortly after President Bush's State of the Union Address this January, I attended a conservative summit in Washington, where I heard a raft of criticism about the president's falling away from conservative principles. There was hope and energy, of course, but also more demoralization than I expected--a demoralization Joseph Bottum clearly shares... snip I am considerably more supportive of President Bush's stewardship. Mr. Bottum's judgments--many of which have force, I admit--require two general remarks. The first involves his claim that the war in Iraq is "already lost" (which he qualifies by adding "in perception"). The second is the criterion of...

Not for the first time, the world finds itself in an age of great movements of peoples. And once again, the United States is confronted with the challenge of absorbing large numbers of newcomers. There are approximately 200 million migrants and refugees worldwide, triple the number estimated by the U.N. only 17 years ago. In the United States alone, about a million new immigrants have entered every year since 1990, bringing the total immigrant population to more than 35 million, the largest number in the nation's history. Though Americans take justifiable pride in our history as a "nation of immigrants,"...

HAMPTON -- Gerry Brown says there is a chill in the air at NASA Langley Research Center. People are afraid to talk, he says - afraid that if they express concerns about safety, they'll suffer the same fate he did.

This a request for prayer for a young woman in my Parish. She is 32, married, with little girls ages 2 and 4, and is 5 months pregnant with her 3rd child. She was diagnosed last week with Stage 3 lung cancer. She obviously is not going to have chemo because of the baby, but the situation has been made more complicated because it looks as though a tumor is wrapped around her pulmonary artery, so is inoperable. They were taking her in to Dana Farber Cancer Institute yesterday to open her up and do some intense, directed radiation on...

<p>Leave it to the Public Broadcasting System to spread on the holiday spirit, in joyful disregard of church-state separation. This week the ding-dongs on high have merrily rolled out a three-part documentary on the rise of Islam, getting media tongues wagging just in time for the holiday talk shows.</p>

Confusion over California's insistence that home-schooling is illegal has prompted the state's superintendent of public instruction to call on lawmakers for help. The development comes as a local district enforcer of the state's mandatory school attendance statute says it plans to visit families who appear to be violating the law by teaching their children without a credential. Citing a barrage of angry responses from home-school advocates, Superintendent Delaine Eastin said in an Aug. 27 letter to state legislators that "false charges" and "misinformation" leveled at her "make me believe that the situation cries out for a legislative solution." WorldNetDaily reported...

REVIEW AND OUTLOOK When Andrea Yates drowns her five children in a bathtub, overnight a chorus of pundits, shrinks and child-care experts emerges avowing that home-schooling has obviously driven her to it. But when a team of home-schooled Tennessee teens wins a national competition that rewards thinking on your feet, nary a peep is heard, except from their hometown paper, the Chattanooga Times Free Press. In recent years, homeschoolers have been disproportionately represented in spelling and geography bees. But their victory this month in the National High School Mock Trial Championship, held in St. Paul, Minn., is more intriguing still,...

Bob Dugan, Roman Catholic, says he is no fan of his local diocesan leadership or, for that matter, of Pope John Paul II. He dreams of a Catholic Church in which priests can marry and have children, women can be ordained as priests, and homosexuals can feel welcome without question. He is also beside himself with anger and sorrow over the recent revelations of sexual abuse that have so rocked the church he loves. That is right: Mr. Dugan may be a dissident, but he loves his church, and would never dream of leaving his faith. Doing so, he says,...

February 1, 2002 Pearl's Kidnappers Won't Win By TERRY ANDERSON THENS, Ohio -- Journalism can be a very dangerous profession. Daniel Pearl, after years of experience as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, must have known that before his kidnapping in Pakistan last week, as I did before I was taken hostage in Lebanon 16 years ago while working as a reporter for The Associated Press. It's not just the fact that journalists work in areas of armed conflict and have to run the risk of being shot, shelled or bombed like everyone else in those areas, soldier or ...

The New England Chapter of Free Republic is gathering this Saturday, Oct. 20th! We'll meet at "The Grille on Solomon Pond" in Northboro MA at 2 p.m. It is on Solomon Pond Rd. just South of I-290 about 1 mile West of I-495. There will be an hors d'oeuve buffet, but if folks want to bring cookies etc. for dessert, feel free! The cost per person will be about $12, but hey, we don't have to cook or clean up!!Little Bill really wants to get a group of people going who can be called upon to Freep when needed, and ...

Voice of America Under Pressure to Toe U.S. Line By FELICITY BARRINGER The Voice of America, born during World War II, nurtured in cold war propaganda and remade in the 1990's as a source of objective information for a global audience, is under renewed pressure to be a salesman for government policy in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Suddenly, as attacks on Afghanistan begin, people all over Washington have opinions on the mission and quality of an agency often ignored as a bureaucratic backwater. That is because in countries whose people have limited access to ...

FLOW OF INFORMATION New Slogan in Washington: Watch What You Say By ELISABETH BUMILLER WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 — A few Sundays ago, shortly after returning from a weekend of national security briefings at Camp David, President Bush walked into the White House with a small group of advisers and delivered a stern warning. "Anybody who discloses classified information could literally endanger somebody's life," he told the group, according to Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, who was there. On Friday, the president's worries about information in the capital extended to members of Congress. Angry about senators who had evidently ...

FORT A. P. HILL, Va., July 26— "We don't discuss it in front of the children," the Boy Scouts spokesman said simply of the issue of equal rights for gay people as more than 30,000 young teenagers settled in across 12,000 acres on this military post for the Scouts's quadrennial national jamboree. Dawn-to-dusk fun, not a fresh round of controversy, seemed the sole preoccupation of the scouts if not their 8,000 leaders and staff volunteers this week in the first jamboree since the Supreme Court upheld the organization's right as a private entity to ban gays from being leaders ...

MISSISSIPPI STILL BURNING - Paul Harvey (commentary transcript) Mississippi is still burning. Times have changed, but the incendiaries won't quit. Mississippi, statistically, could shame most of our states with its minimal per-capita crime, its cultural maturity and its distinguished alumni. But Mississippi has enough residual gentility of the Old South not to rub our noses in our own comparative inadequacy. The pack-media could not wait to remake the movie MISSISSIPPI BURNING into a TV version called MURDER IN MISSISSIPPI. Thus yet another generation of Americans is being indoctrinated with indelible snapshots which are half a century out of date. ...

Emotion carries day for banner By Jerry Mitchell Clarion-Ledger Staff Writer Mississippians showed as much resistance Tuesday to removing the Confederate battle flag as a symbol as they did when they repelled Union troops at Vicksburg 138 years ago. It took Union forces more than a year to capture Vicksburg, but supporters of the present state flag showed no signs of surrendering Tuesday. They won by a nearly 2-to-1 margin to keep the 1894 flag that incorporates the Confederate battle flag. "People tend to resist change," said Greenville native Shelby Foote, author of a three-volume history of the Civil War. ...

February 22, 2001 Healing does come John Mallon She yells, "come in" when I knock, and she's standing at the sliding door to the little atrium of her condo containing little statues of the Blessed Mother and St. Francis of Assisi. She says, "I'm going to quit, honest I am," indicating her cigarette as she exhales smoke into the atrium, "as soon as all of this is over." I hadn't said a thing about her smoking. The cats, Theo and Luis, look at me wide-eyed and a little anxious. They know that she's tense. "I'm gonna be all right, honest, ...

This editorial was written by a Lehigh Grad and former Attack Sub Lt. Bethlehem, PA - Editorial In another ninety-five days a new President will be sworn in as the forty-third President of the United States, thus ending the most disgraceful and scandal-ridden Presidency of the past two hundred and twenty-four years of our nation. This gives cause for a celebration and a reflection upon things that I never, ever again will have to be witness to. For those West Point, Naval Academy and Air Force friends of mine, I recognize the pain that you in particular have endured these ...