Free Republic

"Where is LaRouche? Where is LaRouche? " a group of audience members began to chant in the middle of Joe Lieberman's speech. Lieberman froze. "I suspect he's in jail" Dean quipped. Al Sharpton appealed to the audience asking them to respect candidates' right to speak and was rewarded with a resounding round of applause. At that time I did not pay much attention to this incident. I assumed that a couple of hardcore Republicans decided to disrupt the debate and that LaRouche was some sort of a cartoon character that I was not aware of because of my Disney-deprived childhood....

This is Part Two of a longer article describing how the Ford Foundation is funding organizations that advocate an "Open Borders" immigration policy. In Part One, the authors had just begun describing Ford Foundation grantees and their political agendas; we join this list "in progress." Click Here to read Part One of this article. American Bar Association Commission on Immigration Policy, Practice and Pro Bono Once a bulwark of social conservatism and the rule of law, the American Bar Association has been lurching leftward for many years. It currently supports a moratorium on the death penalty, gun control measures, the...

Hastert visits Elgin: U.S. House speaker talks on immigration, energy, politics issues Elgin – Several weeks ago, President George W. Bush rolled out a program to grant temporary work permits to undocumented immigrants. But before the program can proceed, it needs to pass Congress — which probably won't happen, U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert told The Courier News Editorial Board on Thursday. "I don't think there's support to get that through Congress," the Yorkville Republican said. "But I think this is a chance to start a debate." Hastert acknowledged that immigration problems are growing in the Fox Valley, and with...

Let me start this by adding my voice in protest against the appalling, and ludicrous RCMP raid on my colleague Juliet O'Neill's home, and office, Wednesday morning. It is clear enough from the search warrant what they wanted: the name of the person who told Ms O'Neill that the government had made a hash of its case against Maher Arar. I do not have an opinion, even a private opinion, on whether Mr. Arar in fact had links with Al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization. This is an important question, and I don't think journalists are wise to take...

Watching Howard Dean go ape and John Edwards emerge as a viable contender A little over a month ago, in the Wall Street Journal, I wrote that Governor Howard Dean looked ‘like Bruce Banner just before he turns into the Incredible Hulk, as if his head’s about to explode out of his shirt collar’. On Monday night, Dean, a front-runner in the polls only a week ago, placed a very poor third in the Iowa caucuses — the first time, since he began his political career running for the state legislature in 1982, that the Vermonter has lost an election....

The Massachusetts senator leads Dean 31 percent to 21 percent, with a slipping Wesley K. Clark at 16 percent after skipping the Iowa caucuses. Sen. John Edwards is in fourth place with 11 percent, followed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman with 4 percent. Rev. Al Sharpton and Rep. Dennis Kucinich continue to barely register. Herald pollster R. Kelly Myers called it a ``dramatic turn-around for John Kerry.'' ``His once fledgling campaign has found new legs and he now finds himself the clear front-runner in this race,'' Myers said. The poll, of 501 likely Democratic primary voters, was taken by RKM Research...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The United States east of the Rocky Mountains will see extreme cold in the next two to three weeks with at least one forecaster calling it the coldest in 25 years, meteorologists said on Tuesday. "In the next six to 10 days, it will be colder than normal north of a line from Washington, D.C. to Denver," said Joe Bastardi of AccuWeather. "In the next 15 to 20 days, everybody is extremely cold including freezes into Florida and Texas. "In the worst-case scenario, in much of the energy consuming areas of the country, from the Rockies...

On Wednesday’s letters page, Mr Cathal Rabbitte of Adliswil, Swizterland wrote as follows: May I extend Mark Steyn’s list of events (such as heatwave deaths in France) which might never have happened had particular countries been run properly? In 2001 almost 3,000 Americans were killed in one single day as a result of virtually non-existent airport security. At that time no self-respecting non-welfare state needed to pay airport security staff anything more than a minimum wage; what was the point in wasting valuable tax dollars in a free market on pampering passengers? They might even turn all soft and French....

One of the proprietors-designate of the Daily Telegraph said yesterday that the newspaper could shift its political allegiance and no longer be the house organ of the Conservative party. David Barclay, one of the Barclay twins who have concluded a dramatic purchase of the controlling shares in the paper, said yesterday that the venerable rightwing publication would no longer automatically support Michael Howard and his team.

"A key member of an alleged Virginia jihad network pleaded guilty to federal weapons and explosives charges [Friday], denying that he intended to harm Americans but acknowledging that he and his co-defendants had sought to fight on behalf of Muslim causes abroad," the Washington Post reports: Randall Todd Royer, 30, of Falls Church, entered his surprise plea in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. He faces at least 20 years in prison when he is sentenced April 9. Another of the 11 men originally charged in the case, Ibrahim Ahmed al-Hamdi, 26, of Alexandria, pleaded guilty to similar charges and faces...

The differences between Democratic and Republican positions on almost all subjects of major importance are growing so great that it is fair to say that we are experiencing a second American civil war. These areas include the American role in the world, the role of God and religion in American society, abortion, capital punishment, the war in Iraq, and much more.  But four recent actions by Democrats illustrate that the divide is even greater than many of us had imagined. It has to do with the preservation of our civilization.  First, last month, Democratic Massachusetts Senator John Kerry used the...

Last week, I had occasion to mention Trevor Phillips, head honcho at the Commission for Racial Equality and a key player in the demise of Kilroy. Mr Phillips intervened in the Birmingham One's recent troubles to suggest that all would be well if, like glassy-eyed political prisoners paraded on TV in your average ramshackle dictatorship, the ex-presenter agreed to make a full public confession, enter re-education camp and give an unspecified proportion of "his vast earnings" to a Muslim charity. "Then I would say he has been properly contrite," said Mr Phillips, generously. But what's it got to do with...

The Syrian president, Bashir Assad, may soon have a bigger problem with Hezbollah than Israel has. This is because, after a generation of hosting the most psychopathic arm of Iran's psychopathic theocracy, Mr. Assad no longer wants to know them. His minority Alawite, Baathist dictatorship, which Hezbollah has helped to sustain over the years, suddenly finds itself in a position where it must make new friends. Specifically, it is in urgent need of better relations with Turkey, the United States, and Israel; and Hezbollah is not popular with any of them. It isn't in the forefront of the news, but...

The French president, Jacques Chirac, recently took it upon himself to vindicate the secularizing or (more accurately) "laicizing" traditions of the French Revolution by banning religious insignia from French state schools. His main target seems to have been the hijab, or headscarf, worn by Muslim girls and women as an assertion of their modesty. But the measure extends to Sikh turbans, Jewish yamulkas or skullcaps, and visible Christian crucifixes. It also applies to signs and symbols of political affiliation — but more nebulously, leaving school principals with broad powers to decide what is or isn't "apolitically correct". Mr. Chirac's measure...

Now that Kilroy's temporary suspension has become permanent, I was wondering if you would post the column you wrote a few years ago about being fired by the BBC. It might cheer him up.  Diana Wright Bedfordshire I doubt it. But his departure was much more dramatic than mine. Almost exactly six years ago, I was sitting in the BBC studios at Rockefeller Center, just before the start of a weekly talk show I used to host for Radio Four. With the minutes ticking away and the guests arriving, the head of BBC New York was niggling with me over...

<p>In 2000, the American electorate was evenly divided. Now, as we enter another voting season, the Gallup Organization has released a study, based on 40,000 interviews, that shows that 45.5 percent of voters identify with or lean toward the Republican Party and 45.2 percent identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party. So is that it?</p>

The morning after the 2000 election, Americans woke up to a disturbing realization: our electoral system was too flawed to say with certainty who had won. Three years later, things may actually be worse. If this year's presidential election is at all close, there is every reason to believe that there will be another national trauma over who the rightful winner is, this time compounded by troubling new questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines. This is no way to run a democracy. Americans are rightly proud of their system of government, and eager to share it with the...

OLDWICK, N.J. -- On May 5, 1996, when I was halfway through my first term as governor of New Jersey, there was a picture of me on the cover of the Sunday magazine of The New York Times, accompanied by the headline "It's My Party, Too." I liked that message so much, I had it framed and hung it in my office in Trenton and, later, Washington, D.C. To moderate Republicans like me, that headline proclaimed our belief that there was still room for us in the party of Lincoln. Now, almost eight years later, many moderate Republicans feel even...

Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Husaini al-Sistani, Iraq's highest-ranking Shia cleric, has begun seriously throwing his weight around in Iraq, helping to organize a demonstration in Basra yesterday of tens of thousands of Shia faithful, to chant "No to America!" and demand immediate mass elections — in a country which has not had a reliable census in several decades, and where the infrastructure for a fair general election does not yet exist. Raising the temperature further, the second-ranking Shia cleric, Hojat Al-Islam Ali Abdulhakim Alsafi, has written a sarcastic public letter to President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair,...

Would Iraqis prefer clean water and electricity or Britain’s taxpayer-funded ‘gender advisers’? Following the successful liberation of their country from the tyrannical rule of Saddam Hussein, ordinary Iraqis are once more beginning to experience some of those things which we in the West take for granted: electricity, telephones, fresh running water and the likes of Deirdre Spart from the Haringey Women’s Collective. If there is still a lot of work to be done in establishing security in the country, one thing which isn’t being ignored is the agenda of Western feminists. Never mind that many women’s pressure groups were vociferous...