Free Republic

'ROSEMARY'S Baby" ("outdoes Hitchcock" -- Roger Ebert), "China town" ("outstanding" -- Variety) and "The Pianist" ("definitive" -- The New York Times) are fine films. They've been rightly honored and praised. The question is whether their excellence justifies criminal acts. The controversy over director Roman Polanski's arrest in Switzerland on his way to a film festival exposes a stark front in the culture war. The divide is not necessarily between right and left, but between an artistic elite that thinks it deserves its own moral rules, and the rest of us who'll never win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film...

Keith Ellison's Excuse Brigade -- the "don't touch Keith" crowd in the DFL, the media and the blogosphere -- has gone into overdrive for the man who is the DFL's choice to represent Minnesota's Fifth Congressional District in our nation's capital. The Brigade cut its teeth on Ellison's 40 or so unpaid parking tickets, and his nine moving violations since 2000. Its candidate hit the campaign trail in June with a suspended driver's license, thanks to his failure to pay his fines. This was nothing new for Ellison, who seemed unfazed. "I don't know how many prior suspensions I've had,"...

The Psychology of Junior Sniper Lee Malvo by Michael J. Hurd The defense psychiatrist for the D.C. sniper, Lee Malvo, claims that Malvo was unable to distinguish right from wrong. In other words, he didn't know that it was wrong to shoot innocent people at gas stations and department stores. Why not? Not because he was psychotic or schizophrenic, meaning completely out of touch with reality (in which case he would not have executed these shootings so competently). Instead, we're supposed to believe that he was so "pathologically loyal" to the elder sniper John Muhammad that he couldn't help but...

I've been watching C-SPAN's coverage of a meeting of the OAH, the Organization of American Historians. One of the speakers called the Bush Administration an "illegal regime."

Although Iraq has accepted the UN resolution for an extensive inspection of its arsenals, the US is adamant to attack Iraq. Now the US is pressing the UN Inspectors even before the start of their work, to be “aggressive” and create a situation in which US war mongers could quench the thirst of Muslim blood. This article of Abid Ullah Jan analyses the possible aftermath of such a bloody adventure. –Editor Now that the Bush administration has settled on a plan for a possible invasion of Iraq, the fear of Arab holocaust is fast turning into reality.Imagine the human cost...