Free Republic

A failed presidency for Barack Obama could turn into liberalism's worst nightmare. Barely six months into his term, the 44th president has succeeded in generating the most widespread and serious discussion of secession since the Civil War. Despite what Newsweek's Evan Thomas may claim, Obama is not the "God" who will bring us together but the autocratic sponsor of an overbearing, oppressive leviathan from which a growing number of Americans are seeking refuge. That refuge, according to author Paul Starobin, will come in the form of several regional republics that reflect the diverse character of Americans no longer bound in...

SEATTLE -- With mariachis, tequila and parades, Cinco De Mayo will be celebrated this week in parties across the nation, kicking off a commemoration of Mexican heritage in the United States as a pseudo-holiday that has been adopted by the general population. But for Dagoberto Reyes, a Salvadorian immigrant living in Los Angeles, May 5 is more a reminder of the dominance Mexican culture has in a country that is home to immigrants from many Latin American countries. His prime example: Los Angeles-area public schools. "Our kids go to this school system, and the school system is more preoccupied with...

GRAND ISLAND — About 50 to 80 Muslims quit at the JBS Swift & Co. meatpacking plant Thursday night. Dan Hoppes, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local No. 22, said the matter stems from the recent debate over break time for the purpose of prayer during the holy month of Ramadan. "There were some Muslim people who wanted to get the rest of the people to back them to moving their (dinner) break to an earlier time, and when that did not happen, the rest of the people went back to work and those people protesting...

The Bradley Project Releases Its Report, 'E Pluribus Unum' - Calls for National Dialogue on America's National Identity http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/06-03-2008/0004825455&EDATE= http://tinyurl.com/6jrswk Report Finds That America is Facing an Identity Crisis and is in Danger of Becoming Not "From Many, One" - E Pluribus Unum - But Its Opposite, "From One, Many" June 3, 2008 PR Newswire (press release), NY Sixty-Three Percent of Americans Believe Our National Identity is Weakening, and One in Four Believe the Nation is So Divided That a Common National Identity is Not Possible WASHINGTON, June 3 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Bradley Project on America's National Identity today released...

Summary: Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. But in fact, it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit, it is galvanized by modernization, and in one form or another, it will drive global politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer.

Hamad, 34, has shopped at Wal-Mart before, but never one like this. She is overcome with nostalgia as she spots Nido powdered milk and Al Haloub Cow, canned meat she calls the "Arabic Spam." "My father loves this," she says. "People from war-torn countries, this is what you lived on when you couldn't go out of the house to shop." This Wal-Mart, though, isn't in a war zone. It's in Dearborn, Mich., home to nearly a half-million Arab-Americans, the largest concentration of Arabs outside the Middle East.

In Africa last week, President Bush deplored the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, defended his refusal to send U.S. troops to Darfur and decried the ethnic slaughter in Kenya. Following a fraudulent election, the Kikyu, the dominant tribe in Kenya, have been subjected to merciless assault. People are separating from one another and butchering one another along lines of blood and soil. According to a compelling lead article in the new Foreign Affairs, "Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism," we may be witnessing in the Third World a re-enactment of the ethnic wars that tore Europe...

The decision by Britain, America and certain other European countries to recognise Kosovo as an independent state is mind-blowingly stupid and suicidal and of a piece with their obvious determination to capitulate in the war for civilisation. It is a rotten decision for the following reasons: 1) It endorses a breach of a country's right to maintain its own integrity. Serbia is a properly constituted democratic country. To recognise the validity of such a secession is to undermine the principle of a country's right to determine its own composition. It puts up two fingers to international law, which explicitly recognises...

Kosovo: Islamism's New Beachhead?   By Julia GorinFrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, February 22, 2008 As Americans look quizzically at their TV sets while non-Muslim protestors in Europe torch a U.S. embassy, they should know that yesterday’s 200,000-person protest in Belgrade (whose members are separate from the fire starters) is the first time in two decades that Serbs are showing a glimmer of rational behavior--amid 20 years of the “free world” foisting terrorist neighbors upon them.To put this in perspective, with advance apologies to any offended ethnic groups: How would Americans react if Latino gangs started ambushing police and killing government...

Even as the world rushes to embrace the newly manufactured Kosovo as a country, the rise of a splinter Muslim country in Europe can't help but give hope to Islamic terrorists fighting to create breakaway states in Thailand, the Philippines, Israel, India and Kenya among many others. Balkanization, or divide and conquer, has always been a key element in bringing down countries and with a global Islamic war, each country with a Muslim minority, natively converted or imported, is on the same track as Yugoslavia. What Hitler did with the Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans, across Eastern Europe, his former Muslim allies...

BELGRADE, Serbia - Serb rioters broke into the U.S. Embassy Thursday and set fire to an office after a massive protest against Kosovo's independence that drew an estimated 150,000 people. Masked attackers broke into the building, which has been closed this week, and tried to throw furniture from an office. A blaze broke out inside one of the offices and parts of the facade also caught fire. Authorities drove armored jeeps down the street and fired tear gas to clear the crowd. The protesters dispersed into side streets where they continued clashing with authorities. The neighboring Croatian Embassy also was...

When the Great War comes, said old Bismarck, it will come out of “some damn fool thing in the Balkans.” On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot the archduke and heir to the Austrian throne Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, setting in motion the train of events that led to the First World War. In the spring of 1999, the United States bombed Serbia for 78 days to force its army out of that nation’s cradle province of Kosovo. The Serbs were fighting Albanian separatists of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). And we had no more right to bomb Belgrade than...

On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot the archduke and heir to the Austrian throne Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, setting in motion the train of events that led to the First World War. Kosovo Albanians from France and Germany, waving their national flag, left, and wearing a t-shirt of a black double-headed eagle on a red background, celebrate in front of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, eastern France, Sunday, Feb. 17, 2008. Kosovo declared itself a nation on Sunday, mounting a brash and historic bid to become an "independent and democratic state" backed by the U.S. and key European...

Serbia has been betrayed by the world. From this day forward, all "nationhood" is liable. No nation is safe, no ethnicity is secure--except those being used to destroy others. Today, Sunday, February 17, 2008, the Albanian Mohammadans (Muslims) living in the Serbian province of Kosovo have declared themselves an independent nation. They have the full support of Europe and the United States. Only Russia opposes the move, based on some dim, past notion that Serbia is part of the once grand "Soviet Union." BadEagle.com has been a faithful supporter of Serbian nationhood and sovereignty. With numerous journal entries and many...

President Bush on Monday hailed Kosovo's bold and historic bid for statehood, saying "The Kosovars are now independent."

SEVERAL hundred protesters threw stones and flares at riot police protecting the US embassy in Belgrade today after Kosovo's declaration of independence, witnesses said. One policeman was injured during scuffles as riot police fought to keep the protesters, mainly hardline football fans, away from the embassy building, the witnesses said. One embassy window was smashed. The protesters marched through the middle of the capital towards the US embassy chanting "Kosovo is Serbia" and anti-American slogans. They waved Serbian flags and vowed to protest "until Kosovo is returned to Serbia". After the scuffles, protesters dispersed in nearby streets, while the police...

PRISTINA (Reuters) - Kosovo Albanians will proclaim independence from Serbia on Sunday, ending a long chapter in the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia but cementing a bitter ethnic frontline in the Balkans. Kosovo will be the 6th state carved from the Serb-dominated federation since 1991, after Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Montenegro, and the last to escape Serbia's embrace. The Serbs vow never to give up the land where their history goes back 1,000 years. They will reject independence in defiance of the Albanians and their Western backers and will keep their grip on strongholds in northern Kosovo, making the ethnic...

Intenta McCain evadir preguntas sobre inmigración Expresa el aspirante a la candidatura republicana que respalda los esfuerzos para impedir el cruce de indocumentados; afirma que la gente pide que primero sean aseguradas las fronteras ...

24 January 2008 One of Spain's most influential dailies says that Kosovo's independence is imminent, and wrong. "Kosovo will soon declare independence, with the backing of Germany and the United States, despite the fact that the border change was not in keeping with international law, nor EU practice, and Spain is not heard or listened to by anyone in the EU," ABC's said today in an editorial. "The creation of an independent state for Kosovo Albanians will set a precedent for many parts of Europe with minorities who, often without reason, consider themselves discriminated," the daily wrote. "The self-determination of...

Bakersfield, Calif. (AP) -- A bid to make English the official language of this San Joaquin Valley city failed after much debate. The city council also shot down on Wednesday another proposal that would have made clear that Bakersfield is not a sanctuary for illegal immigrants, but it approved a resolution calling on the federal government to enact immigration reform. After the meeting, opponents of the English-only and the sanctuary resolutions praised the council for making the "morally correct" decision. . . . Famed labor leader Dolores Huerta, who spoke to city council members, called the defeated resolutions "hateful" and...

Tetovo, Macedonia, 21 Sept. (AKI) - Macedonian authorities may bring charges against a professor who at an ethnic Albanian rally in the northeastern town of Tetovo, called for the creation of a 'Greater Albanian nation' consisting of Albania, Kosovo and parts of Macedonia. "It is our universal right to live in one country," the professor, Miljaim Fejziu, said at the gathering held on Thursday to launch the Macedonian branch of the Unity of World Albanians (UWA) movement. Macedonia's State Prosecutor's office said that if Fejziu, who teaches at a university in Tetovo - which has a population of 80,000 of...

PRISTINA, Serbia (AFP) — A strong blast in the Kosovo capital Pristina killed two people and injured 11 on Monday amid renewed tensions arising from the future of the UN-administered Serbian province. A double-storey business centre on Bill Clinton Boulevard was severely damaged by the explosion at 2:10 am (0010 GMT), which damaged at least a dozen shops, cafes and restaurants at the premises, police said. One person was immediately killed, the other died of injuries in a hospital, while another victim was in critical condition, local police and medical authorities said, adding that the others' lives were not threatened....

For at least the last twenty years the cultural and political elites of the United States have championed the cause of multiculturalism by claiming that diversity was something that made all of us better. Little effort was ever made to define precisely just what was meant by diversity, difference or most crucially "better." Nor was there any significant research that provided empirical support for the claim that multiculturalism and diversity translated into better people, better communities, better organizations and businesses or a better country. But now a considerable amount of solid evidence about multiculturalism is in, and it suggests that...

John Edwards: "Just a few months ago, I was in Canton, Mississippi, as part of a poverty tour, and I met with poultry workers who worked in a poultry plant in Canton, Mississippi. And one of them was a man named Daniel who had been badly hurt on the job. And because of his injuries, he wasn't able to work. And when he asked about trying to get health care or workers' compensation, the first question they asked him was, "What's your immigration status?" This is a perfect example of what's wrong with Washington and why the government is not...

MIAMI -- For the first time in a U.S. presidential campaign, candidates vying for the Democratic nomination will take part in a debate Sunday that will be broadcast across the U.S. in Spanish. The event, held at the University of Miami and broadcast by the Univision Network, marks the Democratic candidates' recognition of the growing political muscle that the country's more than 44 million Hispanics could wield in the 2008 election. Seven of the eight Democratic candidates will be taking part in the debate — including front-runners Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and...

I kid you not.Go see for yourself, to the link above, at US.GOV, the official website of the United States of America.Go to the right. Read the text closely. For oldertimer Freepers, get out your reading glasses.

A federal judge has put a halt on a planned White House crackdown on employers who hire illegal immigrants while she considers a lawsuit filed by the AFL-CIO claiming the move would harm citizens and those working in the U.S. legally, the Washington Post reported on Saturday. Click here to read the report from the Washington Post. The ruling, issued by U.S. District Judge Maxine M. Chesney, bars the Department of Homeland Security from sending mail notices to 140,000 employers about suspect Social Security numbers. The AFL-CIO and the American Civil Liberties Union say that DHS is going beyond its...

As an everyday citizen of the United States, what are your realistic options when you believe your country to be in a death spiral from which it almost assuredly won’t recover? If you are an American who still deeply believes in the promise of our republic, how can you fight back against those from within, intent on destroying everything you hold sacred by subverting traditional family values, western civilization, national security, and just plain commonsense? Shockingly, maybe you can’t. I’m told it’s basically too late to save the nation that represents the last best hope for mankind. Six months ago,...

US President George W. Bush, leaving behind thousands of anti-Bush protesters in Rome, got a hero's welcome in Albania on Sunday as he became the first American president to visit this tiny impoverished nation. When Mr. Bush arrived on his brief stop in Tirana, the hills overlooking the capital boomed as military cannons fired a 21-gun salute to the president. Thousands of people gathered in the downtown square on a brilliantly sunny day to see the president and first lady Laura Bush

President Bush, getting a hero's welcome as the first American president to visit this Balkan nation, said Sunday that there cannot be endless dialogue about achieving independence for neighboring Kosovo. "Sooner rather than later you've got to say `Enough's enough. Kosovo's independent,'" Bush said during a news conference with the prime minister of this tiny, impoverished country. Bush's press for statehood was aimed at Russia and others that object to Kosovo's independence. Standing alongside Prime Minister Sali Berisha, Bush said any extension of talks on Kosovo must have "certain independence" as the goal. In response to Albania's push for NATO...

To judge how important assimilation is to senators John McCain (R.- Ariz.) and Ted Kennedy (D.-Mass.), peruse their immigration bill, now before the Senate. “Assimilation” appears only once in this legislation, and not until the 343rd of 347 pages. “Americanization” never emerges. Too bad the most sweeping immigration measure since 1986 shortchanges assimilation. Whether America ultimately absorbs 12,000 or all 12 million illegal aliens estimated to live here, it will be better for them and this nation if they speak, study, and vote in English, understand America’s Constitution and political culture, respect our history and civic traditions, and honor our...

Every aspect of the current immigration bill, and of the arguments made for it, has “fraud” written all over it. The first, and perhaps biggest, fraud is the argument that illegal aliens are “doing jobs Americans won’t do.” There are no such jobs. Even in the sector of the economy in which illegal immigrants have the highest representation — agriculture — they are just 24 percent of the workers. Where did the other 76 percent come from, if these are jobs that Americans won’t do? The argument that illegal agricultural workers are “making a contribution to the economy” is likewise...

Today's immigrants are not assimilating into our culture.  Ted Kennedy's Immigration Reform Act of 1965 has created a situation in which 85 percent of our immigrants hail from the Third World and Asia. This portends the destruction of the western civilization that has given us everything we hold dear, from our  freedom to our prosperity, not for reasons of race, but because of circumstances at least partly created by Americans ourselves. Assimilation is not a process magically initiated upon setting foot on American terra firma.  Rather, it only occurs when one or both of two conditions are met: The foreign...

I will say publicly what many people are whispering privately in barbershops, soul food restaurants, and church parking lots in South Los Angeles. If relations don't improve between African Americans and Latinos in Southern California, we are headed for a major racial conflict. And the notion that Latinos are killing blacks to "ethnically cleanse" their neighborhoods is extremely troubling.

DALLAS -- As the only Spanish-speaking staffer in his division, Dallas city employee Norman Herrera takes at least one call a day from a resident en español. The questions range from where to pay a parking ticket to how to get trash pick up on a day other than Thursday. "We get those calls in English all the time. When you get those in Spanish, you want to answer them," said Herrera, a special assistant to the Dallas mayor. "If we can't communicate with them ... I don't think we're doing our job." Demand for bilingual employees like Herrera is...

Imagine sending your kids off to school, but when they get to the bus they are told they can't get on because they speak English. That's right, English. It happened to a few children in St. Paul and now the school district is apologizing. Rachel Armstrong sent her kids to pick up the bus as usual Monday, but after the driver let the kids on, he told them he would not pick them up again. He even said he wouldn't take them home that afternoon. Armstrong left work early Tuesday, forced to pick up her kids from Phalen Lake Elementary...

New York, 18 Dec. (AKI) - Serbs living in the United States are reported to be deeply disturbed and worried by recent arrests of fellow Serbs in connection with the 1990s Balkan wars, community leaders have said. In a six-state swoop, American agents arrested 13 Serb immigrants last week and are looking for another three who are still at large. One of those arrested, Nedjo Ikonic, is being investigated for allegedly having taken part in the massacre of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica when it was overrun by Serb forces in...

Podgorica, 8 Dec. (AKI) - Montenegro's special prosecutor for organised crime, Stojanka Radovic, on Friday indicted 18 ethnic Albanians, including five United States citizens, for planning terrorist attacks in the southern Malesia region, aimed at putting it under ethnic Albanian control. The group planned to take over police stations, border crossings to Albania and all key institutions in Malesia, with the aim of expelling the non-Albanian population and creating an ethnic Albanian controlled territory. The operation called the Flight of Eagle, which is an Albanian national symbol, was averted a day before it actually carried out its plans and maximal...

Austin area school, government and emergency services are influenced by non-English speakers.Spanish tops the list of languages other than English spoken in the Austin area, followed by Asian languages like Vietnamese and Korean. But Urdu also can be heard in Austin, along with Dutch in Round Rock and Russian in Hays County. It's a language smorgasbord prevalent throughout the state and the country. About 6 million Texans older than age 5 spoke a language other than English in 2000, and of those, about 2.7 million spoke English less than "very well," the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. In 14 million U.S....

The vaunted ability of the Republican Party to get out the vote where it really matters is about to be tested. If the party can survive the midterm elections without heavy losses (especially if it retains control of the House) despite the current abysmal poll ratings for the Bush administration and the congressional leadership, then its strategy of attending to its loyalist base will be vindicated. If the party gets the drubbing that Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, assorted congressional scandals, and those awful poll numbers all point to, then the message for 2008 will be different: Republicans must look beyond that...

Is the idea of civil war in Iraq being promoted deliberately by a group anxious to see the new republic torn into 3 pieces -possibly for its own benefit ? What's Joe Biden's role in all this ? What does GFA REALLY stand for ?

Luis Bañuelos didn't speak a word of English five years ago when he moved to Modesto from Nayarit, a state on Mexico's west coast. He still doesn't speak English, and he's not trying to learn. "I haven't really needed to learn English since there are so many (Spanish-speaking) Latinos already here in this country," Bañuelos, 25, said in Spanish. "I mostly stay in my own neighborhood so I won't get stuck in a situation where they only speak English." Whenever that happens, Bañuelos runs "to find someone who can translate for me." He's not alone. Nearly one in five Stanislaus...

CARBONDALE - Adrienne Davis graduated from Carbondale's Roaring Fork High School in 1999. She is now a teacher at Edwards Elementary School where in a few years all the classes will be taught in both Spanish and English. Starting this fall, all kindergarten classes will be dual language. And as those classes move up, eventually the entire school will be bilingual. It is a solution that is working in Edwards, Davis said, where formerly about 80 percent of the kids in the elementary school were Hispanic. "It is definitely a positive thing," Davis said. "The kids are all playing together....

ALERT!CLINTONS CONTINUE ATTACK ON RELIGIOUS RIGHT by Mia T, 6.15.06     "For ... the so-called Christian right and its allies, their great sin has been believing they were in full possession of the truth." bill clintonTanenbaum Center For Interreligious Understanding*New York, New York, 16 June 2006 * Note the irony WHY THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT MUST MOBILIZE AGAINST HILLARY:CLINTON CONFLATES EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS AND ISLAMO-FASCIST TERRORISTS by Mia T, 03.16.06 It is wrong to demonize and cartoonize one another and ignore evidence and to make false charges and to bear false witness. Sometimes I think our friends on the other side...

We are a fragmented nation. Erosion is slowly chipping away at the belief system that once served to tie us together as a people. Indeed, movements are afoot, and their radical self interest goals at odds with the vision of our founders. Perhaps most frightening are large numbers of people so focused on their own wants and needs that they are oblivious to the threat, and unconcerned how each tear in the collective fabric of our country effects their lives in the long run. The patchwork quilt, constructed from the assortment of ethnic groups making up our unique population, is...

America's motto is "E pluribus unum," Latin for "Out of many, one." Some U.S. senators seem to be reading it backward. This week the Senate will consider legislation that would create an independent, race-based government for Native Hawaiians. If the bill becomes law, it would create a racial spoils system that would hand special privileges to up to one-fifth of the state's population--including many with only a trace of Hawaiian blood. It could inspire mainland groups such as Hispanic separatists to seek similar spoils, should they ever gain enough political leverage.

MOST people would struggle to point out Pridnestrovskaya Moldavskaya Respublika on a map, let alone pronounce it. Those who can, know it as a hotbed of smuggling, the site of a vast Soviet-era weapons dump, or perhaps the home of Sheriff Tiraspol football club. But this tiny sliver of land, known in English as Transdniestr, is the latest European enclave to make a bid for independence following Montenegro’s decision to declare statehood last month. Igor Smirnov, Transdniestr’s “President”, has announced that its 550,000 people will vote in a referendum in September on whether to seek formal independence from Moldova. “The...

The last time we wrote about the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, in July 2005, we called it secessionist, unconstitutional and un-American. And that was being kind. Our view of the bill -- which, like Freddy Krueger, refuses to die -- hasn't changed. But now that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has promised to bring it to a cloture vote in the coming days, it's worth reminding readers what this ugly drama from the beautiful state is all about. The Reorganization Act -- better known as the Akaka Bill, after its U.S. Senate sponsor, Democrat Daniel Akaka -- would create...

What's black and white and read all over and is more self-destructive than pre-9/11 thinking?   by Mia T, 5.14.06   re-clinton thinking, that's what.... Putting doctrinal purity ahead of making sure a defective and dangerous clinton never again controls this country is pre-clinton thinking. We no longer have the luxury of time or circumstance to massage our sensibilities, to indulge our indignations. We will not survive another clinton. (We may yet not survive the first one.)     ALBRIGHT1: 'Bin Laden and his Network Declared War2 on the United States and Struck First and We Have Suffered Deeply'by...

THREE WOMEN AND A FUNERAL:HOW THE CLINTONS ARE HANDLING THE HILLARY DUD FACTOR 3   by Mia T, 03.18.06   er head bobbed nonstop in servile compliance.... Her gaze was fawning, fixed on him.... Her mouth was frozen shut, corners upturned a carefully calibrated nine degrees above the horizontal.... Not a smile.... (Never a smile).... Just enough of an upturn to hide the always-present anger. His sock puppet was on display.... Finally.... He spoke for both of them, alternating between oily racist and reliable misogynist. Instead of striking out as her own person in this friendly venue--it was the...