Free Republic

The world according to Mark Steyn Most of your can't get enough of the Mr. Steyn in print, and so here's a transcript of his weekly stint on the Hugh Hewitt Show: HH: It's Wednesday, the first segment, that means Mark Steyn, columnist to the world, joins me. Mark, welcome. Good to talk to you. MS: Good to talk to you, Hugh. HH: Mark, I want to start not with Europe, we'll get there, but with a little inside baseball in journalism. A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times ran a story about Bagram Air Force Base in...

In Defense of Certainty It's trendy to be suspicious of people with "deeply held views." And it's wrong By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER "And in [William] Pryor's case, his beliefs are so well known, so deeply held, that it's very hard to believe, very hard to believe that they're not going to deeply influence the way he comes about saying, 'I will follow the law.' And that would be true of anybody who had very, very deeply held views." --Senator Charles Schumer, during a hearing on the nomination of William Pryor for U.S. appeals-court judge, June 2003 These things come in waves,...

Piques at EU's polls By Mark Steyn Following yesterday's vote in France, Dutch voters Wednesday get to express their opinion on the proposed "European Constitution." Heartening to see democracy in action, notwithstanding the European elite's hysterical warnings that, without the constitution, the Continent will be set back on the path to Auschwitz. I haven't seen the official ballot, but the choice seems to be: "Check Box A to support the new constitution; check Box B for genocide and conflagration." Alas, this tactic doesn't seem to have worked. So, a couple of days before the first referendum, Jean-Claude Juncker, the "president"...

Preserve free speech By Diana West THE WASHINGTON TIMES If Kafka met Monty Python, and George Orwell edited their collaboration, they might have come up with something like the following real-life exchange. It took place in an Australian court where two Christian pastors were found guilty of "religious vilification" of Muslims by lecturing to their flock on Islam. At one point during the trial, defendant Daniel Scot began to read Koranic verses in his own defense. The Pakistani-born pastor hoped to prove to the judge that his discussion of the inferior status of women under Islam, for example, had a...

Invoking the 'nuclear option' -- there is no other option David Limbaugh (archive) April 8, 2005 | Print | Send I think Republican Party honchos may be underestimating the grassroots passion over the judiciary. The outrage against activist courts -- and by no means are all of them activist -- is real, growing and far from a fringe phenomenon. Conservative activists have been patiently waiting for some action, just some evidence that the Republican Party is going to pay more than hollow Beltway lip service to this issue. Year after year, though politicians are elected promising change, little evidence emerges...

Four Broad Lessons from Iraq Print Mail By Richard Perle Posted: Thursday, April 7, 2005 TESTIMONY House Committee on Armed Services (Washington) Publication Date: April 6, 2005 Mr. Chairman, As always, I appreciate this opportunity to share with the Committee some ideas and observations about the situation in Iraq and, more specifically, some of the lessons we should take away from our experience there. Within the Department of Defense, and among its many advisors and consultants there have already been several important "lessons learned" assessments. These cover everything from the effectiveness of specific weapons systems, procedures, organizations and training to...

THE POPE WHO TURNED ANTISEMITISM ASIDE By Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe Thursday, April 7, 2005 http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/04/07/the_pope_who_turned_anti_semitism_aside/ As a young boy in the 1930s, my father attended public school in Snina, a town in eastern Czechoslovakia. Twice a week, a Catholic priest would come in to teach the catechism, during which the few children who were Jewish were sent to wait outside. As they left the classroom, my father recalls, the priest invariably made some insulting remark about the Jewish people. For Jews in the Europe of my father's youth, such Christian contempt was a fact of life. Its origins...

Arabs Lift Their Voices By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: April 7, 2005 Until the recent elections in Iraq and among the Palestinians, the modern Arab world was largely immune to the winds of democracy that have blown everywhere else in the world. Why? That's a pretty important question. For years, though, it was avoided in both the East and the West. In the West it was avoided because a toxic political correctness infected the academic field of Middle Eastern studies - to such a degree that anyone focusing on the absence of freedom in the Arab world ran the risk...

Columbia's Whitewash By Ryan Sager Published 04/07/2005 Inopportune comments by Harvard President Lawrence Summers back in January about possible innate differences between men and women were enough to set off a national firestorm that raged for weeks and is still smoldering today. So why is the bullying and carpet-sweeping being perpetrated by Columbia University President Lee Bollinger with regard to student complaints of intimidation in the classroom by anti-Israel professors being ignored? If Summers' remarks were unfortunate, Bollinger's conduct has been downright unethical -- and it has done far more lasting damage to the reputation of the institution he serves....

Berger gets off too easily in review caper April 6, 2005 OK, so former national security adviser Sandy Berger didn't stuff classified documents in his socks to smuggle them out of the National Archives. But he did admit to stealing them twice (crammed them down his pants and in his coat), destroying some of them, and then lying about what he'd done. In addition to news media's big yawn, what's galling about Berger's intentional misconduct were the wrist-slap terms of his plea bargain, as confirmed by the Justice Department this week. By law, former President Bill Clinton's most influential adviser...

Backing seen weakening for Abbas By Charles A. Radin and Sa'id Ghazali, Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent | April 5, 2005 RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is being hailed internationally for his peacemaking efforts with Israel, is failing on virtually every important domestic front and is rapidly losing support in the territory he governs, Palestinian and Israeli officials, activists, and analysts say. Violence has surged in the West Bank. Firing by Al Aqsa Brigades gunmen at Abbas' own headquarters last week was just the most widely publicized of numerous recent incidents in which militants disrupted public...

BOOKSHELF Look Back at Anger Why the "vast left-wing conspiracy" failed to unseat President Bush. BY JACOB LAKSIN Tuesday, April 5, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT It was several months before Election Day. George W. Bush and John Kerry had pulled to a statistical dead heat, and the pundits were poring over the polls in an effort to divine the reasons for the latest shift in public opinion. But MoveOn.org had more pressing concerns. It was moved to ask its network of true believers: "Why aren't we talking about a landslide in November?" Such groundless conviction "was not at all unusual...

GLOBE EDITORIAL Terri Schiavo's affliction April 5, 2005 RIVETED BY the personal and political battles over Terri Schiavo's rights to life and death, the country is largely ignoring a chance to act on an underlying issue: eating disorders. Schiavo was an overweight kid who reportedly wept when she bought clothes, fearful of being teased about her size. After high school she lost weight, dropping from over 200 pounds to 150. When she was 26 she weighed 110 pounds. On Feb. 25, 1990, less than three months after her 26th birthday, she collapsed. Her heart stopped, depriving her brain of oxygen...

Where Did They Get That Idea? There's a reason people think that the Terri Schiavo "talking points memo" was written by Republicans. by Scott Johnson 04/04/2005 12:00:00 AM Increase Font Size Printer-Friendly AFTER 60 Minutes II broadcast its fraudulent story on President Bush's Air National Guard service on September 8, 2004 holy heck broke loose on the Internet. Virtually anyone with eyes to see the evidence that accumulated during the days after the report came to the conclusion that the documents on which the story was based were fraudulent; yet CBS stonewalled for 12 days before admitting that its story...

By John Leo End of the Affair Some final notes on the Terri Schiavo case. The behavior of conservatives: Uneven and sometimes awful, with lots of vituperation and extreme charges. (Jeb Bush does not remind me of Pontius Pilate; I don't think it's fair to circulate rumors that Michael Schiavo was a wife-beater.) Worse were the revolutionary suggestions that the courts be ignored or defied, perhaps by sending in the National Guard to reconnect the tube. This is "by any means necessary" rhetoric of the radical left, this time let loose by angry conservatives. Where does this rhetoric lead? The...

Public execution Mark Steyn New Hampshire Do you remember a fellow called Robert Wendland? No reason why you should. I wrote about him in this space in 1998, and had intended to return to the subject but something else always intervened — usually Bill Clinton’s penis, which loomed large, at least metaphorically, over the entire era. Mr Wendland lived in Stockton, California. He was injured in an automobile accident in 1993 and went into a coma. Under state law, he could have been starved to death at any time had his wife requested the removal of his feeding tube. But...

It Is Ended How the justice system failed Terri Schiavo, and us. by William Anderson 03/31/2005 10:15:00 AM Increase Font Size Printer-Friendly Email a Friend Respond to this article SO IT HAS ENDED. The nightmare of judicial execution by dehydration is finally over. How could such a thing have happened? Students of law, medicine, and ethics will examine this tragedy for decades to come. Any system charged with the management of human affairs will fail on occasion. We must recognize that it is often unwise to change procedures long in place, lest unintended adverse consequences supervene. That said, it is...

Terri deserves better Linda Chavez (back to web version) | Send March 30, 2005 As Terri Schiavo lay dying, her organs slowly mummifying from the effects of prolonged, court-ordered dehydration and starvation, the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear an appeal from her parents that might have saved her life. Her parents argued that Schiavo's right to due process under the law had been denied, a claim summarily rejected -- without even the pretense of a full hearing -- by a District Court and upheld by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Less than one week later,...

March 26, 2005 Whose Life Is Worth Living? By Orson Scott Card It wasn’t that many years ago when I happened to be in Raleigh at a gathering of literary folk who were quite full of their own superiority. They started talking about people who (gasp!) let years go by without reading a single book. “Why do they even bother being alive?” asked one of them. Almost everyone laughed. They went on and on about the worthlessness of the lives of non-intellectuals. Shopping in malls. Eating at McDonald’s. Driving their gas-guzzling cars. I did ask where they shopped, and which...

March 25, 2005 Myth of 19 Judges and Ignoring the Will of Congress By Thomas Sowell Liberals have repeatedly used the talking point of how many judges have heard the case of Terri Schiavo. But that is as misleading as most of the rest of what they and the mainstream media have been saying. When a case goes up to a higher court on appeal, the issue before the appellate court is not whether they agree with the merits of the decision of the lower court. In a criminal case, for example, the issue before the appellate court is not...