Free Republic

U.S. judges including those appointed by Republican presidents are increasingly sentencing defendants who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the Capitol to three-year terms of court supervision, fearing they could be misled into committing political violence in the 2024 presidential election.

You can always tell how insular a person has become in their politics when a term that has been used regularly regarding a topic that has been in the news for years strikes them as something "new."Of course, people who don't share columnist Monica Hesse's Bryn Mawr value system have actually been using the word for some time.Okay, I shouldn't be so hard on Bryn Mawr. After all, it has a politically diverse student body with only around 42% identifying as "liberal" and the rest identifying as Marxists.

March 24 is Palm Sunday, which means that millions of Christians across the country will be celebrating Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem by carrying palm leaves, often shaped in the form of a cross, into their places of worship. Where do these palms come from? Most likely they have been imported from one of a few Latin American countries: Guatemala, Belize, or southern Mexico, for instance. And most likely, they have been harvested in a manner that is harmful to the environment. Harvesters are often paid by volume rather than quality, and they have a strong incentive to cut as many...

Today the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in Snyder v. Phelps, a case about the nature and scope of basic rights -- those of free speech vs. those of privacy. But this case is fundamentally about wrongs and the law's imperfect ability to redress them. The facts of the case are well known. Matthew Snyder, a Marine lance corporal from Westminster, Md., was killed in the line of duty in Iraq in 2006. The Rev. Fred Phelps and members of his Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church traveled more than 1,000 miles to Maryland to picket his funeral and draw attention...