Free Republic

It so happened that an 11-year-old boy came home from school one day and told his parents that the first European white people who came to America were so mean that they tried to kill the Indians by giving them blankets with smallpox germs. The boy’s father tried to use this as a teachable moment. He asked his son to think if that made sense, even if the first white settlers were that evil. How would they avoid getting smallpox themselves? The boy then let it be known that the American Constitution was written by the Iroquois Indians. The father...

'Inclusive' name change needles N.S. tree growerCBC News November 23, 2005 A spruce tree grower in Nova Scotia isn't happy his 16-metre Christmas tree has become a "holiday" tree in Massachusetts. Every fall, the province sends a tree to Boston as a thank-you gift for the help the New England city gave Halifax after the devastating 1917 ship explosion that levelled parts of Nova Scotia's capital. Officials with Boston's parks department decided it would be less offensive to some people and generally more inclusive if the word "Christmas" was dropped when they referred to the tree. "A lot of people...

Jerry Falwell and an army of conservative lawyers drew a line in the snow yesterday, warning Boston and other cities: Don’t mess with Christmas. And even before the first volley was fired, City Hall caved. Just after a top lawyer for the conservative Liberty Counsel blasted the Hub’s annual “holiday tree” ceremony, a Menino administration official scrambled to do damage control. “This is a Christmas tree,” Boston Parks Commissioner Toni Pollak insisted about the Nova Scotia spruce the city will light Dec. 1 on historic Boston Common. “It’s definitely a Christmas tree.” However, the city’s official Web site refers to...

PERHAPS the biggest weapon in the arsenal of the US's critics is carefully selective amnesia. Conveniently forgetting important historical facts enables tactical amnesiacs to make claims about US policy that seem to support their contention that the country's Government is uniquely evil. The latest evidence that George W.Bush is a war criminal has apparently come this week with the acknowledgment that the US military used white phosphorus (WP) on enemy positions in Fallujah. This is deemed an outrage. And the discovery that US soldiers refer to WP cavalierly as "shake and bake" seems to have come as an additional shock...

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. said yesterday that he is angry at "revisionism" from political opponents who question a much-repeated story about Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele being pelted with Oreos during a 2002 campaign debate in Baltimore. Versions of the story have been repeated over the years by Ehrlich, Steele and their supporters in describing what they call a pattern of racial slights against the black Republican, and accounts of the event have spread widely. Speaking on Stateline with the Governor on WBAL-AM yesterday, Ehrlich said he would not tolerate questions about the veracity of the incident. "This revisionism...

Inside the Pentagon, officials are arguing with Vice President Dick Cheney about a new set of US Defense Department guidelines for interrogating suspected terrorists. The debate over an anti-torture bill is a sad moment for a country that once stood for human rights. As someone who has spent decades representing clients who have been tortured under dictatorships, in dirty wars and by lawless governments around the world, I'm having a rough week here at home. My friend Sister Dianna Ortiz, an Ursuline nun whom I represented after she'd been abducted, raped and tortured by security forces in Guatemala, told me...

Appearing on Lou Dobbs Tonight, Congressman Curt Weldon charged “Lou, this is a cover-up. It’s not a third-rate political burglary. It’s a cover-up of information on the largest attack in the history of the country.” Congressman Weldon was speaking of Able Danger and the information he says Able Danger collected but was not allowed to present to the 9/11 Commission. Able Danger was a relatively small data-mining operation that ended in 2000. One of its members, LTC Anthony Shaffer went public, saying that his group had collected information that identified Al-Qaeda terrorists in several places in this country before the...

PITTSBURGH -- A remarkable story unfolded in this community this month, with implications far deeper than even the brave principals in the event realized. It was the successful "girlcott" of offensive Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts mounted by a group of young women who showed more character, more intelligence and ultimately more ingenuity than the apparel manufacturer. These protesters, part of the Women's & Girls Foundation of Southwest Pennsylvania, took their indignation to the public, and before a week was out they took it nationally. It's important to remember that this is not your father's Abercrombie, which created the sort of...

President Commemorates Veterans Day, Discusses War on Terror Tobyhanna Army Depot Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania Fact Sheet: Honoring America's Veterans In Focus: Honoring Our Veterans 11:45 A.M. EST THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all very much. Thank you all for coming, please be seated. Thanks for the warm welcome. I'm glad to be back in Pennsylvania and I'm proud to be the first sitting President to visit Monroe County. (Applause.) I'm especially pleased to see so many military veterans with us today. Those who have risked their lives for our freedom have the respect and gratitude of our nation on Veterans Day...

By 1 hour, 10 minutes ago OAKLAND, California (Reuters) - As U.S. gays and lesbians prepare to battle a raft of state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage that will likely be on the ballot next fall, activists are recasting the issue as one that needs to be fought on moral rather than political grounds. That is the message Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the oldest and leading U.S. grass-roots gay and lesbian coalition, has taken to more than 2,500 gay rights organizers at its annual conference held in Oakland this week. "What I...

Hofstra's 11th Presidential Conference, William Jefferson Clinton: The "New Democrat" From Hope wraps up Saturday. Among those scheduled to attend are former U.S. Ambassador Richard Gardner, former presidential counsel Mickey Kantor and Clinton White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart. Panel topics include Clinton's impeachment, foreign policy and humor and the presidency. If you missed the first two days of the conference, webcasts of Clinton's address and the opening keynotes for each day are available online, along with photographs and text recaps. For information on Saturday's sessions, please visit our online schedule. Check out our conference information page to see the...

Powerline notes the outlandish claims being made by Michael Scheuer, formerly of the CIA: The pathetic Michael Scheuer claims that, “in the war against al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein was one of our best allies.” And the selectively pathetic Chris Matthews gives Scheuer a free pass on his big lie. Thomas Joscelyn has the details. JOHN adds: That’s an interesting change of heart on Scheuer’s part. Scheuer was the head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit in 1998, when Clinton’s Justice Department indicted bin Laden. Here is a paragraph from Count 4 of the indictment: Al Qaeda also forged alliances with...

The British government operated a secret torture centre during the second world war to extract information and confessions from German prisoners, according to official papers which have been unearthed by the Guardian. More than 3,000 prisoners passed through the centre, where many were systematically beaten, deprived of sleep, forced to stand still for more than 24 hours at a time and threatened with execution or unnecessary surgery. Some are also alleged to have been starved and subjected to extremes of temperature in specially built showers, while others later complained that they had been threatened with electric shock torture or menaced...

Douglas Brinkley massages clinton numbers, ego + legacy at (clinton-was-an-utter-failure-containment-scheme-team) revisionist confab C-SPAN historians find no clinton "greatness" irrespective of moral-authority deficit   by Mia T, 11.10.05 Speaking on the opening day of a three-day conference at Hofstra University examining his presidency, Clinton challenged a statement by noted historian Douglas Brinkley, who opined that Clinton would be deemed a great president were it not for his impeachment. Bill Clinton, at Long Island conference, calls impeachment `egregious abuse' of Constitution FRANK ELTMAN Associated Press Writer clinton's ranking will likely get worse over time. Economic issues fade in importance over time....

“It will help people to understand why the world is the way it is today,” said Richard Bradley, founder of Lion Television, which has produced The Crusades: Crescent and The Cross — a documentary series that will premiere in 130 countries on The History channel on November 13 and 14. The Crusades: Crescent and The Cross unfurls two centuries of war about two cultures impassioned by belief. The series will be an epic of human drama against the back drop of the holy. It was a collision of two great faiths and of two of the the world’s most enduring...

When Elia Kazan, one of the twentieth century’s great American theater and movie directors, died two years ago, the obituaries almost all struck the same sour note. As the New York Times put it, in addition to his artistic accomplishments, Kazan committed “what many still consider one of the great ideological betrayals in American performing arts history.” The Los Angeles Times, the movie business’s hometown paper, announced his death with a straightforward page one headline, elia kazan, 1909–2003, but then got down to cases in the subhead: stage and screen triumphs were eclipsed by his testimony against colleagues in the...

Johannesburg - The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa has come out in support of polygamy and homosexuality - provided they promote the cause of the Gospel. The church's bishop, Louis Sibiya, said on Sunday that there was not a simple "yes" or "no" answer as to whether a self-confessing gay person could be married and even ordained in the church, or whether a polygamist could be ordained into the ministry. "Rather, we should ask how the acceptance and/or non-acceptance of these promote the course of the Gospel," he said, speaking at 30th anniversary celebrations of the church in southern...

I am in debt to liberal scholars across America. After I wrote about the leftward tilt on campus, they sent me treatises explaining that the shortage of conservatives on faculties is not a result of bias. Professors helpfully offered other theories why conservatives do not grace the halls of academe: 1 Conservatives do not value knowledge for its own sake. 2 Conservatives do not care about the social good. 3 Conservatives are too greedy to work for professors' wages. 4 Conservatives are too dumb to get tenure. I've studied these theories as best I could (for a conservative), but somehow...

MONTPELIER, Vt. --A car parked outside the Statehouse bore a bumper sticker saying, "Regime change begins at home." Inside, about 100 Vermonters gathered in the House chamber for the Vermont Independence Convention --devoted to Vermont creating a regime of its own. If participants have their way, the state whose former governor was laughed out of the 2004 presidential race after the infamous Iowa scream is going to take what some call its wackiness and others call its sanity in a crazy world and go home. ... Ethan Allen, who led the Green Mountain Boys to take Fort Ticonderoga from the...

Wikipedia is an online, user-editable encyclopedia located at en.wikipedia.org/wiki . It has untold thousands of articles, and, unlike paper encyclopedias, it can immediately cover current events. Alexa says it's the 49th most popular web site, so it has a good deal of influence. In reading through some entries, I'm struck by a certain "liberal" bias. Examples can be found in the entries for Bill Bennett, Mike Malloy and other Air America hosts, Media Matters for America, the Minuteman Project, U.S. Immigration, and many others. Thankfully, there's something you can do about this. WP entries can be written and edited by...