Free Republic

President Biden used the word “boy,” a term considered to be racial epithet when used to describe black men, to refer to Democratic Gov. Wes Moore, Maryland’s first black governor, in a speech on Wednesday. “You got a hell of a new governor in Wes Moore, I tell ya,” Biden said during remarks on the economy Wednesday to an audience of IBEW union workers in Lanham, Maryland. “He’s the real deal, and the boy looked like he could still play. He got some guns on him,” Biden added, eliciting cheers from the crowd.

The Constitution provides that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." But, as Gary Scott Smith of Grove City College writes in his new book, Religion in the Oval Office, "Throughout American history many citizens have viewed strong faith as an asset, if not a requirement, for politicians, especially presidents." The biography of faith, such as it is, of the Republican presidential candidate who has led the polls for six months starts with First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, Queens. That is the church Donald Trump's parents attended...

The first-known footage of the Eastland disaster was found by Jeff Nichols, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, while he was looking for unrelated material about World War I, the Chicago Tribune reported. Nichols found the footage on Europeana’s 1914-1918 website. Nichols said he found the clips in Dutch newsreels. Title cards describing what happened precede them. "It's as easily recognizable to someone who cares about Chicago history as the Titanic, so I knew what I had right away," Nichols, who has lived in Chicago for 20 years, told the Chicago Tribune. "I knew folks would...

Last Monday, on the final day of its 2008-09 term, the Supreme Court decided its most controversial recent case, Ricci v. DeStefano. This concerned the now-famous claim by a group of firefighters--17 white and one Hispanic--that New Haven unlawfully discriminated against them on the basis of race. A majority of five justices, with Justice Anthony Kennedy writing, held for the firefighters, reversing a panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that included Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's nominee to succeed Justice David Souter. The four dissenting justices, meanwhile, made plain their belief that the Ricci decision...

WASHINGTON - Counterterror officials suspect that an Arab student linked to one of the Sept. 11 hijackers may have cased the presidential ranch in Crawford, Tex. - six months before the 9/11 attacks. Muhammad Al-Gurashi and three other Arab men suspected of close ties to hijacker Hani Hanjour rented a car in Phoenix and drove to Freeport, Tex., in March 2001, intelligence and law enforcement sources say. They are believed to have stopped near President Bush's ranch to assess security for a possible terrorist attack, the sources told the Daily News. Al-Gurashi, a 28-year-old Saudi who attended Arizona State University,...

I guess we all know that the Democrats, and especially the Democrats from the Judiciary Committee are a bunch of %#&*@!, I mean really, the Democrats that sit there are the essence of crazy lunacy. But that's not the point of this post. Recently I was doing a little research on the history of judicial nominations and I found a little information about senator James O. Eastland from Mississippi (of course a Democrat). Of course you could easily suspect that a Southern Democratic senator in the 50s, 60s and 70s would be a racist, but HE was really something: (from...

AR RAMADI, Iraq (Dec. 14, 2005) -- Marines with Company I, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, and soldiers from the local Iraqi Army recently conducted a patrol through the streets here Nov. 18. The patrol, which was the first to be planned and executed by the IA, is an example of the growing cooperation between Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces, said Lance Cpl. Kevin Wollam, an infantryman with Company I. “We took two squads of IA out and helped them perform the basics of a patrol,” said the 20-year-old Eastland, Texas, native. “It went really well, especially compared to previous...

If you were a Senate Democrat, you'd filibuster those Bush judges. Yes, you would. When it came time to vote on a targeted nominee in this new Congress, you'd know the deal. You'd know that Republicans would move for cloture to limit debate, and that if they succeeded, the nominee would get an up-or-down vote. But you'd also know that, under those very useful Senate rules, they would need 60 votes to prevail, and that because the Republicans number just 55, your side would win so long as at least 41 of you hung together. Yes, if you were a...

How the Supreme Court's ruling on medical marijuana will impact not just the drug war, but the judicial concept of federalism.ASHCROFT V. RAICH, the "medical marijuana" case argued this week in the Supreme Court, is less about marijuana and its medical effects than it is about federal power--specifically the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce. Liberals worry that a court that in recent years has somewhat limited that power will use Raich to make serious forward progress with its "new federalism agenda." To judge by the oral argument, however, no majority seems ready to do that. Yet if, as...

It was last February 12 in Washington. Memories of romance were in the air: "I graduated from high school in 1934. I liked a pretty, pretty girl, too. She was not in my class. She was in the next class behind me, and she was the daughter of a coal miner. And that coal miner played a fiddle. His name was Fred James. I took a liking to that daughter of the coal miner. And I tell you, you young ladies, and young men as well, who are pages here, I tell you how I courted my girl, my sweetheart,...