Free Republic

Conservative pundits love to lecture liberals on "personal responsibility" and "government interference in our daily lives." Apparently it's just rhetoric. Republicans are now taking aim at free speech in our universities by proposing to give students the power to censor their teachers when they feel offended. I wonder if they are even aware of the irony as they attack the very thing our flag represents. How about a solution to the threat of "liberalism" more in line with conservative rhetoric? If our children are mature enough to fight and die in our wars, certainly they can take personal responsibility for...

JAKARTA – Indonesian Muslims have reacted in fury over the planned debut of a local edition of raunchy magazine Playboy, fueling growing debate on pornography in the world's most populous Muslim nation. "Playboy simply has no place in our social norms and culture," Hasyim Muzadi, the chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia's largest Muslim organization, told Agence France Presse (AFP) on Sunday, January 22. "Indonesia is not Europe or America, whose culture and reaction towards nudity are totally different than ours," he maintained. Ponti Carrolus, director of PT Velvet Silver Media which holds the Indonesian license from the US-based magazine,...

SOME stories just slip away, even from plain sight. One such story began on January 30, in Auburn. It was a Saturday. Elections were being held in Iraq. The Iraqis in Sydney, as in Iraq, were voting in large numbers after years of repression. Almost 12,000 people registered to vote in Australia, most of them in Sydney. A polling booth was set up in Auburn, near the heart of the city's Iraqi community. This did not sit well with some people. About two dozen men from several Middle Eastern countries gathered near the polling booth to intimidate voters. They took...