Free Republic

Vin Scully, the Hall of Fame voice of the Dodgers for 67 years, died, the club announced. He was 94. “We have lost an icon,” said Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten. “The Dodgers Vin Scully was one of the greatest voices in all of sports. He was a giant of a man, not only as a broadcaster, but as a humanitarian. He loved people. He loved life. He loved baseball and the Dodgers. And he loved his family. His voice will always be heard and etched in all of our minds forever. I know he was looking forward to...

Even as the White House claims that Joe Biden is not soft on crime, it has been reported that his administration has the potential to give nearly $200 million to a Soros-linked group to help criminal illegals escape punishment. Federal budget watchdog Open the Books revealed that Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services awarded a $164 million contract to left-wing advocacy organization Vera Institute of Justice to fund lawyers for illegal aliens and undocumented minors, according to Just the News. The award started as a $158 million contract in 2021, but this year HHS added an additional $6 million...

All right, where's Vin Scully? He's the most iconic baseball announcer in the game's history, but has obviously been snubbed by the East coast liberal establishment. Where did Scully's career begin? With the Brooklyn Dodgers, but that STILL doesn't buy him a seat with the terrible announcers from back East at THIS All Star game. This is an outrage!

--link only to Vin Suprynowicz editorial column--LVRJ-- -http://www.lvrj.com/opinion/steal-from-the-rich-give-it-all-to-me-181734921.html

Albuquerque police are trying to make life harder for car thieves. Police etched Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN) into car windshields and windows on Saturday free of charge. Brenda Baca said she isn't taking any chances as she had her VIN etched into all her windows. "Got a new car and I just thought this would be a good idea," said Baca. Virginia Garcia thinks it's good idea too, especially lately. "There's so many thieves out there. I mean they're just taking our stuff at liberty," said Baca. Police said they're cracking down on vehicle thieves hard and this is just...

I don't know how it facilitates a sober, studious, academic environment to allow kids at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Calif., to either wear American flag gear or paint their faces and bodies in red, white and green to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. Though perhaps it's my use of adjectives like "studious" and "academic" in connection with a modern, government-run high school that's really absurd. At any rate, it surely showed the "Three Stooges" level to which current "multicultural" political correctness has descended when Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez, at said youth propaganda camp on May 5, told a...

Last week, we were discussing the Obama administration's anti-freedom, anti-capitalist agenda. When a political leader snidely characterizing those who challenge his initiatives to vastly expand federal regulation and management of the economy as being in the pay of "greedy insurance executives," "big bankers," and the like, I don't see how anyone can argue he's not against the free market. In fact, they don't. Mr. Obama's champions respond by citing all the injustices which they believe are wrought by the free market. Therefore, by their own words, their agenda is anti-freedom. Their fall-back position appears to be, "It had to be...

Charlie Mitchener, the Las Vegas business owner who was handcuffed and disarmed after presenting a concealed weapons permit along with his driver's license to a police officer responding to a burglary call at his place of business Jan. 3, has provided me with his Jan. 19 follow-up letter to Metro. Mitchener says he decided to write police about his ordeal, detailed in this space on Jan. 10, lest his "silence may put someone else at risk." "Shortly before 5 a.m. Jan. 3, the alarms in my office sounded and notified TSI, our security provider, that a break-in had occurred," Mitchener...

Peace on earth, good will toward men. Fine sentiments. But as citizens of a republic, can we really assume we'll be held forever blameless for the actions of our government? Barack Obama, who if he were not in office would be applying for a Community Development Block Grant to stage anti-war rallies in Chicago, just authorized sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. But it's OK: He promises to pull them out in 18 months -- soon enough to guarantee they can't actually accomplish anything. A few hundred of these young American men will be sent home in coffins or with...

Only "two rogue scientists," as the oh-so-reassuring Climategate Deniers would have us believe? Walter Williams, esteemed economics professor at George Mason University, last week summarized Climategate, to date: "New evidence proves that climatologists and environmental policy advocates have not only fed us lies (and) engaged in scientific and academic fraud, but committed criminal acts as well. Last month, Russian computer hackers obtained thousands of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. CRU has the world's largest temperature data set. In collaboration with scientists around the world ... its research and mathematical models form...

Retro clothes are not vintage clothes. Retro clothes are new-made garments designed to imitate or evoke the fashions of as bygone era -- often, the 1940s, '50s or '60s. Vintage fashion is the real thing: sturdy garments well made in America (usually by union labor, if that matters to you) that remind us of an era when all the best stuff, from movies to muscle-cars, was "made in the U.S.A." It's about nostalgia, yes, but in this unrelenting recession it's also about the "recessionistas" -- that's what Alison Houtte calls her growing new customer base -- realizing they can get...

I posted on Nov. 11 at www.lvrj.com/blogs/vin/ a response to a letter-writing government schoolmarm who contends she should not be held responsible for the failure of her young charges to learn anything, since it's all their parents' fault. I answered, in part: "Teachers from 1620 through 1950 didn't go home with their kids to tuck them in, either. Yet Americans with eighth grade educations through all those centuries could read, write, spell and do basic arithmetic well enough to run circles around your pathetic charges ... even if today's pathetic inmates sit through a full 12 years of your progressively...

How gratifying to hear from so many veterans in response to my Oct. 25 column on Mitchell Paige and Guadalcanal. I heard from Clayton Fisher, 87, of Henderson, who served under Chesty Puller in the 1st of the 7th Marines, receiving his first purple heart at Guadalcanal (the night before the action I described in my column) and his second at Palau. I heard from Gordon Williams, now 92, who served on the destroyer Porter (DD356) in the Battle of Santa Cruz, which was being fought over the same two days -- Oct. 25 and 26, 1942 -- as the...

It's hard to envision -- or, for the dwindling few, to remember -- what the world looked like on Oct. 26, 1942, when a few thousand U.S. Marines stood essentially stranded on the God-forsaken jungle island of Guadalcanal, placed like a speed bump at the end of the long blue-water slot between New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, the most likely route for the Japanese Navy to take if they hoped to reach Australia. On Guadalcanal, the Marines struggled to complete an airfield. Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto knew what that meant. No effort would be spared to dislodge these upstart...

As fans of the Yankees have had much to enjoy this October -- from the Alex Rodriguez resurgence to the first classic games at the new Yankee Stadium -- it has been a difficult month for fans of the Mets. Sure, the break from seeing one Met after another fall to the ground in pain has been welcome. But what pleasure can a National League New York fan get watching the Mets' primary in-division rival head inexorably toward a battle with the team's primary in-city rival? The answer is a simple one: the broadcasting of Dodgers announcer Vin Scully. With...

Clark County commissioners voted last week to stop picking up and caring for unwanted pet Mojave Desert tortoises as of the end of the year. The county has been funding the care of the cast-off tortoises at a 220-acre conservation center operated by state and federal agencies. About 98 percent of the 1,000 tortoises delivered yearly to the center are unwanted pets, county officials say, and all those extra tortoises have pushed the county's yearly tortoise maintenance costs to $700,000. The county also pays $104,000 a year to a private firm that drives around collecting the critters. Federal wildlife officials...

Unemployment continues to tick upward. Small businesses forgo profits on two-for-one deals just to keep the doors open. But we're in recovery. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the guy who couldn't get around to paying his own taxes, says so. After all, government is doing all it can to speed the recovery, isn't it? "Fed keeps key rate near zero," the Business page headline screamed on Sept. 24. Low interest rates should get things "stimulated," shouldn't they? Then, three days later, over a Washington dateline, "Jobless benefits extension backed: Lawmakers voted 331-83 to extend jobless benefits by 13 weeks in 27...

The main point that probably deserves further mention about last week's Dead Kennedy Funeral Parade was the behavior of the press, which wept and moaned and gnashed its collective teeth with hardly a dissenting soul to say, "Enough, already," as though the corpse of a pharaoh was headed for its final hoedown with the sun god. I'm surprised they didn't decide to embalm the guy so people could troop past and touch the yellowed cadaver like they've been doing with Vlad "The Impaler" Lenin in Moscow for the past 70 years. It was all further evidence that statism has now...

The most revealing moment in Edward "Ted" Kennedy's political life came Nov. 4, 1979, just three days before he would officially launch his challenge to a sitting president of his own party, Jimmy Carter. In a televised interview, CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd asked the already stout Massachusetts senator a "giveaway" question, a question about as tough as a quiz show host trying to help break the ice with a nervous contestant by asking, "What color is grass?" Roger Mudd asked: "Why do you want to be president?" Ted Kennedy, 47, was about to challenge an incumbent president of his...

Today, the socialists have taught most Americans to expect lots of things -- government schools, government fire and police protection -- are and should be "free." They're not. Everything has to be paid for. Is free health care "a right"? You can't have a right that imposes an obligation on anyone else. (Jury service is slightly problematical, though because jury service can be -- ought to be -- voluntary, that needn't be a problem.) If I have a right to medical care, do I have a right to put a gun to the head of a doctor and threaten to...