Free Republic

"Rebukes author for citing crime problems after calling for conversation"If blacks can criticize whites, then whites should be able to say the inner city “needs to get its act together.” That was the bottom line of “Being White in Philly,” a controversial article written by Robert Huber and published in Philadelphia Magazine. What followed was predictable. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter said the article was a “sin” and an “incitement to extreme reaction.” The mayor called upon the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission to “rebuke” the magazine and Huber. But not long ago, Nutter was calling for a “national conversation” about racial...

BE HERE, OR BE NOWHERE!

Al Gore has made his sharpest attack yet on the George Bush presidency, describing the current US administration as "a renegade band of rightwing extremists". In an interview with the Guardian today, the former vice-president calls himself a "recovering politician", but launches into the political fray more explicitly than he has previously done during his high-profile campaigning on the threat of global warming. Denying that his politics have shifted to the left since he lost the court battle for the 2000 election, Mr Gore says: "If you have a renegade band of rightwing extremists who get hold of power, the...

Equal Earthquakes with Unequal Results December 29, 2003 By Rabbi Daniel Lapin President, Toward Tradition Our television screens fail to convey the full horror of the recent earthquake in Iran that inflicted terrible deaths on over twenty thousand souls. America has once again led the international relief effort. It might seem callous to analyze thisdisaster even before all the victims have been buried, were it not for one timely parallel. Only a few days earlier, a small town on the California coast also endured an earthquake. Even taking the logarithmic nature of the Richter scale into account, from an objective...

WASHINGTON -- After Howard Dean last weekend declared Tom DeLay ought to be in jail, a longtime Democratic operative told me the party's national chairman had momentarily ripped off his muzzle but that it soon would be restored. My source erred, however, in believing that Dean ever had been muzzled. It's just that nobody has paid much attention to his rants. Since his election as chairman of the Democratic National Committee [DNC] on Feb. 12, Dean has studiously avoided most national television exposure. But he has been talking constantly to party gatherings across the country, and his intemperate language at...