Free Republic

Merry Christmas to all of you wonderful Americans, Christians, and patriots! Not only have we almost made it through 2020, but also it’s the most wonderful day of the year. The (symbolic) day that Christ was born and God came to Earth in human form. It’s the most important and wonderful day of the year. So, don’t be afraid to say “Merry Christmas.” Just say it. Be a brave Christian and let everyone know that you believe in the Lord and are joyously celebrating his symbolic birthday. And don’t be afraid to do so; that’s what we’re celebrating. It’s Christmas,...

Sky News Australia definitely didn’t pull any punches in its criticisms of CNN’s nutty idea to put Greta Thunberg on an experts panel for its COVID-19 town hall last night.

The crew at Pow3rline points us to this exceptional shredding of Erica Jong at, of all places, the Huffington Post. "1. Are you allowed to drive a car? Y/N 2. Must you be accompanied at all times in public by a male escort? Y/N 3. If you were to say "what the hell" and drive to the mall by yourself, would you be immediately surrounded by bat-wielding male police officers? Y/N 4. Could you be beaten for saying “what the hell”? Y/N 5. When you go outside on a hot summer day, can you wear shorts and a t-shirt? Y/N...

Victoria's Secret has canceled its TV show, citing the new chill wind blowing through the airwaves since Janet Jackson got pawed in prime time. Unless they have plans to drape tarps over all their storefronts in the malls of America, this seems a bit exaggerated. No one watches a Victoria's Secret TV special expecting modesty and cerebral pursuits; they watch to see women composed mostly of legs and lips parade around in articles of clothing containing up to 16 molecules of silk. No one sees "Victoria's Secret Special" in TV Guide and thinks it's a program about a 19th century...

This is a War – not terrorism, insurgency, or uprising For about a year now, a baby-faced grotesque thug, Sadr, dressed up in a cleric's robes and backed by two or three thousand gangsters has held world-wide televised press conferences as he pompously boasted about his promised imposition of Iranian-style theocracy upon 26 million other Iraqis. Forget that in most municipal elections in the first year of the reconstruction Iraqis had shown not much interest in his crackpot Shiite paradise on earth. Forget that this criminal was not a holy-man at all, but a murderer who shortly after the liberation...

Of all the many meaningless US election polls around at the moment, the one that tickled my fancy was an Associated Press thing from Friday. Here's the score: Bush 46%, Kerry 45%, Nader 6%. That's Nader, as in Ralph, the gadfly consumer advocate and declared "independent" presidential candidate. In the 2000 election, he got 3%, which embittered Democrats say was enough to throw the election to Bush. Well, some of the embittered Dems say that. The really embittered ones say Bush got his poppa's judges on the Supreme Court to throw the election to him. But the point is, if...

Direct from the Paulitburo, your cut-out-and-keep guide to all the things the Prime Minister is clear about. How much clarity can one Liberal government stand? The Prime Minister… • on demonstrating that he couldn't have known nuthin', no way: “I think that what will happen, for instance, is that the deputy minister of finance will eventually be testifying. He'll demonstrate that he didn't know anything about this, that the whole Department of Finance didn't know anything about it, and of course when that comes out it'll be very clear that in fact the minister couldn't have known anything about it." – Paul...

As David Blunkett contemplates the chaos and fury triggered by his decision to downgrade the law on cannabis, he could do worse than consider the case of Dominique Lansdowne. Eleven years ago, when she was 18, the former care assistant from Swindon started smoking cannabis once a week. ‘After a couple of weeks, I found it was addictive’, she said. ‘As soon as you start you get the feeling you’re completely relaxed and calm, but then you crave it. I used it more and more until I was smoking it every day. Then I couldn’t work because I was too...

What used to be called the "post-Cold War world" has gone through three distinct periods. First, the "Long 1990s", beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and ending with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, marked a time of drift and, at least in international politics, American confusion and indecision. The second, from 9/11 until the March 19, 2003, invasion of Iraq, was a period of transition, during which the Bush administration struggled to fashion a response to events that destroyed its illusions that the world's problems could be "managed" by a small knot of confident...