Free Republic

Get this: Conservatives give better graduation speeches than their more liberal-minded counterparts. After reviewing two commencement-speech anthologies - "The World is Waiting For You," which features 18 speeches by liberals, and "Remembering Who We Are," which showcases 30 conservative speeches - Washington Post blogger and book critic Carlos Lozada gives five reasons why conservatives do a better job. First, he writes, conservatives are more likely to speak to graduates as individuals, rather than as members of a movement or generation. Whereas liberal speakers say things such as, "you are the first generation that ...," conservative speakers are more likely to...

Much of America's political conversation is couched in code. And so it was that recently the McCain campaign accused Barack Obama of playing the "race card," two four-letter words that, taken together, trail a wealth of innuendo like a comet's tail. Using the term "race card" as a pejorative is almost always meant to promulgate the big lie that takes hold everywhere from the workplace to the classroom: that black men and women commonly use race as a bludgeon and an excuse, and that they will always blame failures or disagreements on racism. This is belied by objective reality. To...

Buried among prairie dogs and amateur animation shorts on YouTube is a curious little mini-documentary shot in front of an abortion clinic in Libertyville, Ill. The man behind the camera is asking demonstrators who want abortion criminalized what the penalty should be for a woman who has one nonetheless. You have rarely seen people look more gobsmacked. It's as though the guy has asked them to solve quadratic equations. Here are a range of responses: "I've never really thought about it." "I don't have an answer for that." "I don't know." "Just pray for them." You have to hand it...

For the National Institute for Reproductive Health (NIRH), columnist Anna Quindlen, and the film’s producers, this was the “gotcha” question that revealed a gaping hole in pro-life rhetoric. In the latest issue of Newsweek, Quindlen said the demonstraters in the video try to “worm their way out of hypocrisy,” because they chose not to judge and criminalize women in crisis situations. Historically, women were not imprisoned for having abortions -- the doctors who gave them were. From a moral standpoint, there were two victims -- mother and child. Why should it be any different now? Neither the filmmakers nor Quindlen...