Free Republic

Economic failure is all about us. Manufacturing jobs move, because capital is fluid and labor is immobile, from the United States to China, to India, to places where workers do not have the salaries and the benefits that workers acquired through slow time in this country. Bailouts of the undeserving, if they are powerful, and cruel indifference to the deserving, if they are unpowerful, are part of a larger problem. The stock market goes up, or goes down, but the economic degringolade continues. But in all the discussion of economic difficulties, editorialists, columnists, talking heads on television, speak and write...

At the risk of heresy, let it be said that setting up the two presidential candidates for religious interrogation by an evangelical minister -- no matter how beloved -- is supremely wrong. It is also un-American. For the past several days, since mega-pastor Rick Warren interviewed Barack Obama and John McCain at his Saddleback Church, most political debate has focused on who won. Was it the nuanced, thoughtful Obama, who may have convinced a few more skeptics that he isn't a Muslim? Or was it the direct, confident McCain, who breezes through town-hall-style meetings the way Obama sinks three-pointers from...

Whither The Secular State?Brucelewis.com 20080714 A Christian registrar who refused to carry out gay 'weddings' won a landmark legal battle yesterday. Lillian Ladele, 47, was threatened with the sack [being fired], bullied and 'thrown before the lions' after asking to be excused from conducting civil partnerships for same-sex couples because of her religious beliefs. But yesterday a tribunal agreed that her faith had been ridden roughshod over by equalities-obsessed Islington Council, which had sought to 'trump one set of rights with another'. The groundbreaking decision could lead to firms facing 'conscience claims' from staff who say their own beliefs prevent...

GENEVA (Reuters) - Islamic states are bidding to use the United Nations to limit freedom of expression and belief around the world, the global humanist body IHEU told the U.N.'s Human Rights Council on Wednesday. In a statement submitted to the 48-nation Council, the IHEU said the 57 members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) were also aiming to undermine the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. "The Islamic states see human rights exclusively in Islamic terms, and by sheer weight of numbers this view is becoming dominant within the U.N. system. The implications for the universality of...