Free Republic

Democrats are expected to make strong gains in state legislatures this fall, but what do these stronger Democratic majorities mean? A look at Washington State may show what is in store for the rest of the country. Public employee unions are handing over vast amounts of money to the incumbent governor's re-election campaign, while the governor is simultaneously sitting at the bargaining table negotiating contracts with these very unions. If it seems inappropriate for the governor, Christine Gregoire, who is locked in a very tight re-election, to benefit personally from the parties that her office is negotiating with, that's just...

..."80 percent of Planned Parenthood clinics are in minority neighborhoods." Planned Parenthood officials did not produce a response to this claim. The organization performed 22 percent of all abortions in 2005 (260,000 out of 1.2 million abortions). -snip- Blacks do, indeed, have much higher rates of abortions than whites or other minority groups. In 2000, while blacks made up 17 percent of live births, they made up more than twice that share of abortions (36 percent). If those aborted children had been born, the number of blacks born would have been slightly over 50 percent greater than it was. The...

Is a salmon born in a hatchery a different species from the same salmon born in the wild? It is hard to believe, but recent Federal court rulings are claiming that otherwise genetically identical fish are separate species, forcing an appeal being announced recently to the 9th Circuit Court. ...These decisions will dramatically affect a lot of people living in the Pacific Northwest. Protecting the salmon will make water much more difficult to obtain, and, without irrigation permits, many farmers and ranchers will have to stop watering their crops and livestock. Large areas of private property will have to be...

Retirees Shirley and Herbert Leu had a problem. Part of their backyard was collapsing into a ditch that ran along the U.S.-Canadian border. Before building their 4-foot-high retaining wall, the Leus made sure they were in compliance with all local regulations...It never dawned on the Leus that this would lead to an international incident and an ideological battle over private property. The debate became one of whether an international commission could simply come onto their property, remove their wall and then send them the bill. The controversy escalated to soap opera proportions with the Departments of State and Justice as...

What do you do when the police can’t protect you? Police may be the single most important factor for reducing crime, but there is something the police themselves understand: They almost always arrive at the crime scene after the crime has occurred. Expecting people to trust the police to protect them and to behave passively is a recipe for disaster. The last couple of weeks have seen a couple prominent murders where restraining orders did women little good. Numerous news organizations, such as ABC News, have run headlines asking "How Do You Stop a Stalker From Killing You?" Unfortunately, despite...

Understanding economics has never been a requirement to be a politician. With gas prices reaching $70 per barrel on Monday and hotels outside of the disaster area raising rates, "price-gouging" seems to be politicians' favorite phrase these days. In the coming weeks, as people living in the disaster area try to get everything from fallen trees removed to food, the outcry against higher prices will only get worse. Yet, if political threats of price controls and price-gouging lawsuits prevent prices from rising now, it is the consumers who will suffer in the long run. In Illinois on Monday, Democratic Gov....