Free Republic

Imagine that a Republican seeks his party's endorsement for the U.S. House of Representatives, despite having been allied with a white supremacist organization just a decade earlier. Imagine that this candidate had once sarcastically proposed setting aside certain states for white citizens and had shared a stage with a speaker known for excoriating Jews as "bloodsuckers." You're right. That man wouldn't get his party's endorsement. He would probably want to go into hiding after the howl of negative media coverage. So how did we get Keith Ellison? State Rep. Keith Ellison of Minneapolis is the DFL-endorsed candidate for the Fifth...

Rep. Martin Sabo's partisan attack piece ("GOP hypocrisy on homeland security," Aug. 1) is disappointing and counterproductive to improving homeland security. As the 9/11 commission report reveals, our security vulnerabilities and intelligence community shortcomings are much too serious for "politics-as-usual." To charge the administration with "double-talk" and "hypocrisy" unfortunately politicizes government's most critical function. Congress and the president need to act expeditiously on the commission's recommendations in a bipartisan, pragmatic and common-sense way to fix homeland security deficiencies and strengthen intelligence capabilities. We know Al-Qaida plans to attack us again soon, and time is not on our side. It's imperative...

A SCANDAL? STM ISSUE HEATS UP WITH PLOS TV ADS, LEGISLATIONFor years the academic library community has fought what it has called a serials crisis in STM publishing, slowly making headway in pushing the public's interests vs. the interests of commercial publishers. Those efforts now appear not only to have taken root, but bloomed. This week a national campaign will shift into gear, breaking the STM issue out of library conferences and professional literature and onto popular television. A TV commercial, funded by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), touting free access to publicly funded research, will run during episodes...