Free Republic

On a May night in 2005, Debra Bolton, a lawyer and single mom from the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia, was leaving the Café Milano in Georgetown after socializing with some friends. She had driven her SUV only a few hundred yards before she was pulled over by D.C. police for driving with the headlights off. She told the officer the parking attendant at Café Milano probably had turned off her vehicle's automatic light feature. Not mollified, the officer asked Bolton to step out of the car, walk in a straight line, recite the alphabet, stand on one foot, and...

Ms Rabbit wanted to know what "hyperbole" meant. (She thought it was pronounced "hyper-bowl".

No one alive at the close of the 19th century could have missed the "scramble for Africa". A motley collection of robber barons, imperialist ideologues, explorers, rogues and adventurers - the likes of Cecil Rhodes and the appalling Leopold II, King of the Belgians - carved up the continent in the name of five European powers. Today, few appear to have noticed that a second "scramble for Africa" is under way. This time, only one giant country is involved, but its ambitions are every bit as momentous as those of Rhodes and company. With every day that passes, China's economic...

Your immediate help is essential as Planned Parenthood responds to the disastrous U.S. Supreme Court decision issued just hours ago. It's a dark day for women's health and safety. With Bush appointees John Roberts and Samuel Alito leading the way, a 5-4 majority turned its back on more than 30 years of Supreme Court decisions that protected women's health from dangerous laws that restrict abortion. In the cases of Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood and Gonzales v. Carhart, the court has now made the Bush abortion ban the law of the land. There is no way we will let this stand....

The Bush Administration has indicated it wants doctors, clinics, and hospitals to provide flu immunizations to illegal immigrants. In an interview with KFOX-TV, Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt was asked if the federal government has any safeguards to prevent illegal immigrants from catching the flu. Leavitt responded by saying doctors should give flu shots to "every person."..............

DELHI -- The discovery of a backpack stuffed with three loaded guns and an assault rifle prompted a lockdown at Delhi High School and Delhi Middle School on Monday. A man searching for aluminum cans found the backpack at 9 a.m. near a trash can on the western edge of the Delhi Educational Park, the campus that houses the middle school and high school. Inside the backpack was a loaded .357 magnum, a 40-caliber automatic pistol, a 380 semi-automatic pistol and an SKS assault rifle with a 30-round banana clip stocked with ammunition, said Sheriff Mark Pazin. "There's nothing more...

I’ve spent much of the past week trying to get a letter to the editor published in The New York Times in response to the recent Tom Friedman rant (subscription required) against GM (see “Hyperbole and Defamation at The New York Times,” June 1). I failed. This is my story. For those of you who haven’t read it already, Mr. Friedman spent 800 words on the Times op/ed page to accuse GM of supporting terrorists, buying votes in Congress and being a corporate “crack dealer” that posed a serious threat to America’s future. He suggested the nation would be better...

A northwest suburban high school board member seeks to ban seven books from classroom use because she thinks the profanity, depiction of graphic sex, and drug and abortion references in the literature are inappropriate for teenagers. Leslie Pinney admits she only read passages of the controversial selections, including Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Toni Morrison's Beloved, which were on the American Library Association's 100 most challenged books list between 1990 and 2000. But Pinney said perusing the questionable parts of the books made it clear they weren't suitable for children and should be taken off Township High School District 214's proposed...

President Bush accuses those of us who want to secure America's borders and fully enforce our immigration laws of lacking "compassion." Huh. Well, I have yet to hear an ounce of compassion from President Bush for America's countless casualties of lax immigration enforcement. Where's the sympathy for innocent, law-abiding citizens who have lost their lives at the hands of illegal aliens and their open-borders enablers? Nope, we haven't heard a word about the victims as the White House pours on its unadulterated pro-illegal alien rhetoric and "undocumented workers do the jobs Americans won't do" propaganda -- all in support of...

MSNBC's talk show host Chris Matthews is a man who obviously: (1) Believes he is the smartest man on television; (2) Enjoys bullying women such as Michelle Malkin; (3) Enjoys bullying senior citizens who may not be as quick with the mouth as he is; (4) Is irrelevent except for a few of his fellow moonbats who actually believe he's a mental giant; (5) Is of the opinion that he's really competition for Fox News Channel's lineup. During a speech he gave in Canada at the University of Toronto, Matthews did what most American liberals do when in a foreign...

It's hard to imagine that The New York Times' editorial page could misconstrue an issue involving guns, seeing as how the writers of the Gray Lady's editorials are so open-minded about the Second Amendment. (That, dear readers, would be sarcasm.) An offering last week about legislation before the U.S. House that would protect gun manufacturers from nuisance lawsuits posited: "This extraordinary shield, written to the diktat of the National Rifle Association, is so sweeping that it would have barred the D.C. sniper settlement and other valid negligence claims." Hmm. Sounds like an editorial written to the diktat of the Brady...

Many feared George W. Bush would nominate a Supreme Court justice in the mold of David Souter, Anthony Kenney or Sandra Day O'Connor – Republicans in name only, with no real principles or convictions, the kind of people who would be swept up by the Beltway culture to become, at best, unpredictable votes in future rulings. It appears that fear has been unfounded. In fact, in nominating Harriet Miers, Bush, who pledged to seek out candidates in the mold of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, has found someone with more in common with the likes of activist Ruth Bader Ginsburg....

hereby officially pronounce the conservative movement dead. May it rest in peace. It was killed by its faith in men, not principles – men like George W. Bush. The appointments of John Roberts as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and Harriet Miers as associate justice serve as the epitaphs for the political movement. But even before these betrayals, conservatism was on life support. It could not have survived the irresponsible spending by the Republican Congress, approved by the president during the last five years. The conservative movement, in the best of times, represented a defensive effort to slow...

Make no bones about it: I am a liberal who believes that guns in themselves are not evil. Are you shocked? You shouldn’t be. Some conservatives like to present the cliché counterargument that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people in debates about gun control. However, the question still remains: Exactly what argument do they think they are countering? It is not the “liberal stance” that guns in themselves have the ability to kill people and are evil. In fact, anyone who believes this nonsense, liberal or conservative, is just plain dumb. In fact, I – and most intelligent people...

This past weekend I did some personal undercover work at a local CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) fundraiser. I made off with a pocket handbook containing some deeply disturbing instructions to their members. I would like everyone to read it. It will only be available at this link until the end of the week so I suggest downloading it and distributing it to all who are concerned:http://www.unitedamericancommittee.org/cairguide.gif-JP United American Committeehttp://www.UnitedAmericanCommittee.org info@unitedamericancommittee.org

A 17-year-old youth walked into an Italian restaurant in Burlington, N.J., to order two large pizzas. Emblazoned on his white T-shirt was a large yellow smiley face with the tip of a cat's tail protruding from of the smiley's mouth. Beneath the design was an explicitly depraved, three-word sentence that would offend almost any woman. "I will not take your order so long as you are wearing that shirt," the counter woman told the customer. "Get your mind out of the gutter," the youth shouted at her. "Get that shirt out of my store," the woman yelled. "Does your mother...

Last week, the Senate approved a bill that would make the average citizen less safe. The gun-industry immunity bill passed 65-31 by the Senate on Friday and virtually assured passage in the House would shield gun manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits by people hurt by firearms. At a time when the country is on perpetual high alert because of the terrorist threat, the bill is dangerous for any number of reasons. Instead of making it more difficult for criminals to obtain guns, this bill would make it easier. Manufacturers and dealers whose negligent business practices let weapons fall into the...

Would you favor it if the government suddenly quit feeding and giving liquids to the political detainees being held at Guantánamo Bay, because they had become an expensive nuisance? Or would you take to the streets to protest against the viciousness of it? Would you be in favor if one of our state governments decided to starve to death its prisoners because they had become too expensive to house? Or would you be demonstrating at prison gates or in front of the Capitol -- objecting to the inhumanity of it? If you believe it would be inhumane and vicious to...

A leading Catholic priest who visited Terri Schiavo on two separate occasions in the hours before her death says Terri was in a weakened medical condition from 13 days of starvation but was responsive until her death. The disabled woman even prayed with her family. "Last night, I spent about two hours with her until past midnight, together with Bobby Schindler and Suzanne, and then again this morning for about an hour and a half, and then right up until about ten minutes before she died," Father Frank Pavone said. Pavone, the director of Priests for Life, said most of...

President Bush will make remarks on the death of Terri Schindler (Schiavo) at 11:40 am EST.