Free Republic

Sport defines the Cultural Heart Of Australia. In the Federal Election last year, a highlight for me was seeing Becky Spelman, one of the most powerful anti-corruption conservative voices in that campaign, have fun getting catching practice with a mostly Labrador dog named Driver. In the state election in November Becky stepped back from being a lead candidate and moved her allegiance to the Freedom Party of Morgan C Jonas. She was Morgan's running mate in that election. Most of her previous voters followed her. God Bless Sport and all other healthy forms of competition. In God And Freedom We...

Today, we analyse the news of a missile strike in Poland, close to the Ukrainian border, discuss the diplomatic moves made at the G20 in Indonesia and we interview Dr Olga Onuch about Ukrainian politics, society & democracy.

The gunman who opened fire inside a packed movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, Thursday night, was John Russel Houser, police said at a news conference this morning. Houser, 59, is among three people who died, police said. Nine others were injured.

Victims, gunman identified in Grand 16 shooting The victims who died in last night's shooting at The Grand 16 have been identified as 21-year-old Mayci Breaux of Franklin and 33-year-old Jillian Johnson of Lafayette. The shooter, who shot himself in the theater, has been identified as 58-year-old John Houser of Alabama. Police say he was a "drifter" who had been in the Lafayette area since early July. He fired 13 rounds into the theater during the 7 p.m. showing of "Trainwreck." One of the victims and the gunman died at the scene. A second victim died at an area hospital....

LONDON — For a long time Barack Obama’s mother was little more than the “white woman from Wichita” mentioned in an early Los Angeles Times profile of the future president. She was the pale Kansan silhouette against whom Obama drew the vivid Kenyan figure of his absent Dad in his Bildungsroman of discovered black identity, “Dreams from My Father.” Now, thanks to Janny Scott’s remarkable “A Singular Woman,” absence has become presence. Stanley Ann Dunham, the parent who raised Obama, emerges from romanticized vagueness into contours as original as her name. Far from “floating through foreign things,” as one colleague...

The Massachusetts drifterTony Blankley (archive)  This makes you go... September 22, 2004 | Print | Send  "(He is) decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent." Does anyone come to mind? Those were actually Winston Churchill's words describing the Hitler appeasers leading the British government prior to WW II. But it is an uncannily evocative description of John F. Kerry on the matter of Iraq in 2004. In the last few months, Mr. Kerry has been for more troops and less troops, for believing the war was...

breaking now..

I recently finished reading a book for my college class. The book is entitled "Working with Words" and it is by Brian Brooks, James L. Pinson, and Jean Gaddy Wilson. The book is supposed to teach you the writer how to write using AP style. I was fine with the book until the 13th chapter. The subject drifts completely away from grammer, and the authors go into a unrelated diatribe on racism. Naturally being a conservative I was very upset by this, and will use this the next time I hear some liberal say that America's colleges aren't left leaning....