Free Republic

What does it mean when a country that likes to proclaim itself a defender of freedom plays a song about liberation to people it is torturing? When the architects of torture assert that enhanced interrogation is strictly “by the book,” it turns out that they mean this in a more literal sense than we might have imagined: the Bible, it turns out, was used as a form of torture at Abu Ghraib. Iraqi POW Haj Ali Shalal (“the man behind the hood”) has reported that he was forced to listen to loud and constant repetitions of Psalm 137—in the jaunty,...

Last January, then-candidate Barack Obama caused quite a stir among his fellow Democrats when he defended remarks he'd made to the Reno, Nev. Gazette-Journal: I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the '60s and the '70s, you know, government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms...

Every so often, history serves up an analogy that’s uncomfortable, a little distracting and yet still very relevant. In the summer of 1933, just as they will do on Thursday, heads of government and their finance ministers met in London to talk about a global economic crisis. They accomplished little and went home to battle the crisis in their own ways. More than any other country, Germany — Nazi Germany — then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to...

Remember Mitch Snyder? For those of you who don't, he was a tireless advocate of the homeless who had his 15 minutes in the '80's for going on hunger strikes to raise the national level of attention to the plight of the homeless. He ran the Community for Creative Non-Violence, which operated a shelter that catered to the needs of a great number of homeless persons in the District of Columbia. For a time, he was very popular for the principled stand that he took on behalf of the homeless. Unfortunately, that's not the only thing he was known for....

Yes, we're going through tough times, but President Obama has repeatedly invoked the Great Depression and it's scaring the heck out of consumers. Who's going to go buy anything if we're headed for an economic catastrophe? People will horde every penny they get and businesses will suffer and things will only get worse. In a well-written op-ed piece in Friday's Wall Street Journal, University of Nevada-Reno economics professor Bradley R. Schiller takes Obama to task for spreading fear itself to win votes for his stimulus package. In his article titled, "Obama's rhetoric is the real 'catastrophe,' " Schiller points out...

WESTERN CIVILISATION at the present day is passing through a crisis which is essentially different from anything that has been previously experienced. Other societies in the past have changed their social institutions or their religious beliefs under the influence of external forces or the slow development of internal growth. But none, like our own, has ever consciously faced the prospect of a fundamental alteration of the beliefs and institutions on which the whole fabric of social life rests. . . .Civilisation is being uprooted from its foundations in nature and tradition and is being reconstituted in a new organisation which...

National security team nominees are prepared to meet today's challenges and tomorrow's emerging threats, U.S. Vice President-elect Joe Biden said Monday. "I hope and believe that the American people will come to feel as I do that we brought together one of the most talented national security teams ever assembled," Biden said at a news conference in Chicago, during which President-elect Barack Obama introduced his national security team. "A team prepared to meet the serious challenges we face today and the emerging threats that will confront us tomorrow."Obama designated Sen. Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state and said he...

Joe Biden's denunciation of his own campaign's ad to Katie Couric got so much attention last night that another odd note in the interview slipped by. He was speaking about the role of the White House in a financial crisis. "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed," Biden told Couric. "He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'" As Reason's Jesse Walker footnotes it: "And if you owned an experimental TV set in 1929, you would have seen him. And you would have said to yourself, 'Who is that...

Sarah Palin is going to shake the Democratic leftist-liberal house to its foundation, and then bring it down...in fact, she's already doing so. She, her family, their faith, their values, and their story represent the absolute refutation of all the tired old liberal mantras and victimology that they malignantly use to mentally, psychologically, and financially enslave whole classes of people. From women's rights, to family values, to gun rights, to abortion, to energy policy, to taxation, to envrionmentalism, to fundamental governing principal, to U.S. soveriegnty and independence, and on and on...she is a wrecking ball to the leftist, libneral, socialist...

Uncontacted" Amazon Tribe Actually Known for DecadesKelly Hearn for National Geographic NewsJune 19, 2008 Recent photos of an uncontacted tribe firing arrows at a plane briefly made these Amazon Indians the world's least understood media darlings. Contrary to many news stories, the isolated group has actually been monitored from a distance for decades, past and current Brazilian government officials say. No one, however, is known to have had a face-to-face meeting with the nomadic tribe, which lives along the Peru-Brazil border. And no one knows how much, if anything, these rain forest people know about the outside world. The tribe—whose...

" Have you ever thought that you stand a better chance to woo a girl by going green? Well, a recent study conducted by US car maker General Motors has revealed that nearly 88 per cent of women surveyed would chat to a guy who owns a green car than a sports car. Quite an award for going green! "

BET founder Bob Johnson, despite his consistent support of Hillary CObama’s election as President during a segment on Wednesday’s "American Morning." "I believe that if Senator Obama leads this country the way he ran the primary, it will become a historic event for African-Americans, probably greater than the Emancipation Proclamation, which was signed in 1863."linton, placed an unequivocal importance on Barack

Finally, after nearly a year we get to the bottom of the story. Last spring, you were held up as a parody of environmental correctness when you proposed restricting the use of toilet paper to one square per bathroom visit. What was that about? I think it’s a fantastic and eye-opening example of how the media is operated by political figures, of how Karl Rove was humiliated in the media and how, within 24 hours, he was able to humiliate me and take any sort of credibility away from me. What are you saying? You think Karl Rove leaked the...

President Clinton has been touting his wife's commitment to Africa on the campaign trail by telling interested voters that "Hillary was the first U.S. Senator to call Darfur genocide." He used that exact line with voters in Aiken, S.C., yesterday, and it has been pointed out more than once over the course of this campaign. The usually shy Chelsea also touted her mother's record on Darfur, telling a group at Stanford University earlier this month that she was "really proud that my mom was the first Democratic senator to call it genocide in May of 2004 and put a lot...

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...