Free Republic

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack gave his personal approval for a 381-acre clear-cut in America's largest stand of temperate rain forest. Not cool, President Obama. Not cool at all. The Obama administration has approved the sale of timber from the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. The 17-million acre forest is the largest stand of continuous temperate rain forest in the U.S. and contains a lot of old-growth trees. It's basically a snapshot of what the world looked like before we rolled heavy onto the scene. The U.S. Forest Service gave the green light for the sale after approval from Secretary...

Iowa First Lady Christie Vilsack, a key factor in John Kerry's primary sweep and the primetime convention speaker tomorrow, has derided blacks, southerners and easterners as bad speakers because she couldn't understand them. In inflammatory columns for her local newspaper obtained by the Herald, the normally soft-spoken Vilsack tore into several minority and ethnic groups while lampooning non-midwesterners for regional dialects. ``I am fascinated at the way some African-Americans speak to each other in an English I struggle to understand, then switch to standard English when the situation requires,'' Vilsack wrote in a 1994 column in the Mount Pleasant News,...