Free Republic

“trib·al·ism noun: loyalty to a tribe or other social group especially when combined with strong negative feelings for people outside the group” (Merriam Webster Dictionary) It’s been 151 years since the end of slavery in America. That end, we should understand, came at the cost of 629,000 lives lost in a civil war, the vast majority of those deaths white – not black – soldiers. While some of black America seem to have gotten the word, a whole lot of others haven’t. Isn’t it time America asked itself, “Why is that?” Well, one of the reasons is that there is...

The new media do themselves and the world's news consumers a great disservice by referring to the old media as "mainstream" media. As anyone who seeks "the rest of the story" knows, they are anything but mainstream in their reporting. Those of us who have used the word "mainstream" in referring to big media have not helped the cause of honest reporting. Those in the independent media model used this reference in an attempt to draw attention to the favorable Democrat and unfavorable Republican reporting that characterizes the bulk of big media's product. That effort has failed. Worse, it is...

There's only one name on Robert Schindler's list: Terri Schindler Schiavo, his beloved daughter. Terri is at the center of the "right to die" movement's latest efforts to advance its agenda in America. There's only one problem. Terri, their latest poster-child, left no indication that she wanted the job. Indeed, her husband Michael Schiavo, collected nearly $1.6 million in malpractice insurance awards several years after the heart attack that left Terri brain-damaged. He did this by pleading with the jury to make it possible for him to care for and rehabilitate his wife. All but $54,000 of that $1.6 million...

In my junior year at college, I had a very eccentric professor. We had no papers to write, no tests to take, just a final examination which was entirely verbal. Our professor intensely disliked behavioral psychologists, so he invited the new chair of the psychology department around. We were graded on how well we could destroy his arguments that work with rat behavior applied to human beings. About midterm, Jonas Salk – inventor of the polio vaccine – came to lecture the medical students at the college. We pleaded to be released from the professor's class to hear him. "It's...