Free Republic

I must confess that I no longer have a clear understanding as to how many of our major newspapers operate. It had been my assumption -- and you know what they say about assuming things -- that a large percentage of the employees at these papers were actual reporters who, in an ethical, professional, and totally unbiased manner, aggressively investigated stories, looked at all sides, followed the facts to their natural and honest conclusions and then wrote about their findings for their loyal readers. That is what I thought. But now when I review The New York Times, The Washington...

I spoke recently with a senior Democrat strategist who offered up a quite logical and incredibly frightening scenario for those who are desperate to vote Barack Obama out of office in 2012. His theory goes like this: That the Obama White House and the Obama re-election team are going to work overtime behind the scenes to push enough of Texas Republican Ron Paul's "libertarian" buttons to eventually have him declare as a third-party candidate. This strategist believes that as unemployment continues to remain above 9%, as the president's poll numbers continue to slide, and as more and more of the...

After Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., voted in favor of a jobs bill endorsed by President Obama and the majority of Senate Democrats, I immediately heard from a number of Republican friends in and around Washington, D.C. who knew I am a conservative from Massachusetts. The questions were rapid fire and the anger was surprising. “How dare he side with Obama?” “Is he just a Kennedy Republican?,” and “Where do I go to get my donation back?” My response to all was, “You have got to be kidding me. This guy has not been in office a month, he’s only taken...

America's long war over abortion has classically been defined as a struggle between competing rights -- depicted as the right of a woman to have an abortion versus the right of an unborn child to the protection of life. This long-familiar framing of the issue suggests, at the very least, that the rights of women and their unborn children are, or at least they can be, presented as an irresolvable conflict. From the very beginning, this has been an unsatisfactory approach to the abortion controversy. Those who contend for the sanctity of human life at every stage of development are,...

Incidents similar to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are occurring every day in the United States and around the world, but few people are doing anything about it. This was the overarching message presented by leading feminist Catharine MacKinnon during a provocative lecture yesterday that underscored the parallels between the ongoing war on terror and what she sees as a war on women. “A kind of war is being fought, but there is no name for this war in which men are the aggressors and women the victims,” she said. MacKinnon, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School,...

Did you know that “aggression against women” represents a war, and that “the domestic criminal laws are so under-enforced that they can be considered not there.” The speaker further explained, “International law doesn’t capture the reality that half of society is attacking the other half. This is a real war that has gone on for millennia.” It’s hard to imagine a speech that is more inflammatory or hateful than the one that Catherine MacKinnon gave at Stanford Law School last week. The speech was sponsored by Women of Stanford Law and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Most...