Free Republic

CBSNews.com: So, Tom Ridge, who's been discussed. You think … Richard Land: That would be a catastrophe. CBSNews.com: Who’s on the list of people mentioned for VP that you think would most excite Southern Baptists and other members of the conservative faith community? Richard Land: Probably Governor Palin of Alaska, because she's a person of strong faith. She just had her fifth child, a Downs Syndrome child. And there's a wonderful quote that she gave about her baby, and the fact that she would never, ever consider having an abortion just because her child had Downs Syndrome. She's strongly pro-life....

Stars like P.Diddy and Alicia Keys rallied up to show their support for Obama at the BET awards on Tuesday. Diddy got on stage and started chanted "Obama or Die." He told the crowd, "If we all register and vote, we will have the first black president in the history of America." Diddy wasn't the only one overexcited about the possibility of having Obama as our next president. As Alicia Keys picked up her award for Best Female R+B Artist, she said, "Together we can do anything," before adding, "Obama y'all!"

Just as Sen. Barack Obama sought to distance himself from controversial racial remarks made by his pastor, an anti-American government, anti-white and virally anti-Semitic black supremacist party has endorsed the presidential candidate on Obama's own website. "Obama will stir the 'Melting Pot' into a better 'Molten America,'" states an endorsement from the New Black Panther Party, or NBPP, which is a registered team member and blogger on Obama's "MyObama" campaign website. The NBPP is a controversial black extremist party whose leaders are notorious for their racist statements and for leading anti-white activism. Malik Zulu Shabazz, NBPP national chairman, who has...

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright thinks that, given their treatment by white America, black Americans have no reason to sing “God Bless America.” “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America,” he told his congregation. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.” I’m not a believer in guilt by association, or the campaign vaudeville of rival politicians insisting this or that candidate disassociate himself from remarks by some fellow he had a 30-second grip’n’greet with a decade...

Key Tenets of Mormon Faith By The Associated Press – 18 hours ago Key tenets of the Mormon faith: _Nature of God: God once was a mortal who became an eternal being after a great trial. _Jesus Christ: Christ was God's first-born spirit child, his only earthly child and the only perfect mortal. _No Trinity: Mormons reject the idea of the Christian Trinity — God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit as one ethereal being. Instead, they believe the three are separate beings joined in a common purpose. _Pre-existence and the afterlife: Before their mortal birth, humans existed in pre-mortality...

Democrats Seek Protection from 'NASCAR People' Posted By Bobby Eberle On October 15, 2007 at 6:28 am Who's afraid of NASCAR people? The answer is the Democrats.... so much so that they're vaccinating themselves so they don't catch any rare disease such as NASCAR cooties or the bubba virus. It sounds ridiculous right? Well, it is, but unfortunately, it's true. The issue deals with a memo from the House Committee on Homeland Security which suggested that staff members receive vaccinations against hepatitis A and B in addition to other vaccinations before they travel to Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama and Lowe's...

It got the GOP's engines revving - a Democratic official suggesting staffers get immunized for several diseases before heading south from Washington and into the Red State wilds of NASCAR country to conduct research at a pair of races. The reaction on both sides illustrates just how valuable candidates for elected office consider the votes of NASCAR fans who pack grandstands by the thousands every weekend and the donations of business leaders who spend millions to sponsor the sport.It started last month, when an official with the House Committee on Homeland Security suggested that staff aides get immunizations before visiting...

It got the GOP's engines revving - a Democratic official suggesting staffers get immunized for several diseases before heading south from Washington and into the Red State wilds of NASCAR country to conduct research at a pair of races. The reaction on both sides illustrates just how valuable candidates for elected office consider the votes of NASCAR fans who pack grandstands by the thousands every weekend and the donations of business leaders who spend millions to sponsor the sport. It started last month, when an official with the House Committee on Homeland Security suggested that staff aides get immunizations before...

I love history. I’m proud of my Southern heritage. But for me to be angry to the point of protesting a moment in Southern history that happened nearly a century-and-a-half ago would be just, well, nonsensical. And would in some ways tarnish that heritage.

“The government and the corporate media,” declares a prominent activist Web site, have created a “propaganda machine whose goal is to continue the expansion of a (fascist) state and to control every aspect of our lives and fortunes.” Sounds like one of a bajillion posts on a left-wing “netroots” Web site these days, right? Wrong. It’s from 1998. And I cheated a little. I’ve doctored the quote. “Fascist” was originally “collective.” The activist Web site? The populist-conservative FreeRepublic.com. The short history of the Internet is already long enough to repeat itself. In dog years, I’m 288, but in Internet years,...

Democratic political consultant Mark Mellman has a very good piece up today at The Hill on the baffling and illegitimate opposition among voters to Mitt Romney due to his religion. I liked his closing paragraphs: In July of 1958, 24 percent of respondents told Gallup they would not vote for a Catholic for president, almost identical to Gallup’s reading on Mormons today. Two years later, John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic to assume the oath of office. Within eight months, the number refusing to vote for a Catholic was cut almost in half. [snip] Mellman also discusses an interesting...

The goal was to work within the halls of Congress. Now, immigrant-rights groups want to replace the lawmakers who walk them. Labor unions, immigrant advocates and Democratic activists have spent the two weeks since the Senate squashed a comprehensive immigration overhaul bill constructing the early framework of a political payback plan. Capitalizing on the Latino voting bloc and its disaffection with the Republican Party, the groups intend to use the recent debate as a rallying shriek in the 2008 election. "We are the fastest-growing sector of the electorate, and we have shown a capacity to show up when we are...

Along with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez has been the Bush administration’s voice in an immigration debate that has divided Republicans. Gutierrez, a Cuban immigrant who became chief executive of Kellogg’s, said this week in an interview that he’s not disappointed by Republican opposition to the immigration bill, and that he hasn’t seen evidence that Democrats want to withhold a victory for President Bush. Gutierrez repeatedly framed the debate as a national security issue, predicting victory in part because of the “inevitability” of immigration reform. Q: If the Senate doesn’t approve a comprehensive immigration reform bill...

Call it by its right name. It's not the "immigration bill" or the "attempted immigration bill" or the "failed immigration bill" or the "immigration bill in need of amendment." The American government tried to pull a coup against its people. It failed. It did, however, succeed in giving me a feeling I'd completely forgotten. I was 5 years old. My mother gave her younger sister Margie enough money to take me, Margie, and her friend Harvey to a special kids' show which was five cartoons end to end; no feature film which 5-year-olds find boring. On the way to the...

On his radio talk show last Friday, dittohead in chief Rush Limbaugh was working himself into quite a lather. The subject? Immigration reform, specifically the controversial immigration bill now before the Senate -- or, as Limbaugh dubbed it, the Comprehensive Destroy the Republican Party Act. Though Limbaugh pummeled his usual targets on the left, complaining that the current immigration reform proposal was yet another Ted Kennedy-led scheme to destroy America, Limbaugh was also unsparing toward national Republicans: At the end of the day here, what we're talking about is the marginalization, if not the destruction, of the Republican Party. Look,...

A bunch of pictures........ To say that Americans who stand for the rule of law... and stand against illegal immigration... are all racist, is just typical and silly. It's just another ploy by the Left and now some Republicans... and even the President... to label their opposition a certain type of evil, like racist, enabling them to ignore our opinions and beliefs as they pertain to this most critical issue. When the ignorant regurgitate the usual... "but we're a nation of immigrants," they tend to forget, or ignore, the fact that this seemingly never-ending invasion of Mexican criminals has not...

RUSH: I was going to call in to the show on Friday and do some minor gloating and take a little credit here for the immigration bill being pulled, but right about the time I hit my third birdie on the front nine I said, "To hell with it, I'm going to keep playing golf." Besides, in all candor, it's not dead. It's still on life support. The president's going to meet with some people: Congress, GOP, probably Ted Kennedy, too, sometime tomorrow. It may even go up to the Capitol. The original meeting was supposed to be lunch at...

The left has been making great inroads in their quest to remake society to their own specifications. From their perches in the media, universities and the halls of Congress, secular progressives (meaning Godless liberals) are winning the culture war. Their tactics are simple. Take control of a certain issue and immediately go on the offense. First, change the rules of debate to stigmatize dissenters. Then change the meaning of words to mean whatever they want them to mean (and outlaw certain others). Finally, keep opponents so busy trying to prove a negative they simply neglect to address the core issue....

On May 25, I wrote a column entitled “Latino Fear and Loathing” that has provoked considerable anger and recriminations among my fellow conservatives. In the column I asserted that, “Some people just don’t like Mexicans — or anyone else from south of the border,” and described some of the fears shaping these sentiments: “They think Latinos are freeloaders and welfare cheats who are too lazy to learn English. They think Latinos have too many babies, and that Latino kids will dumb down our schools. They think Latinos are dirty, diseased, indolent, and more prone to criminal behavior. They think Latinos...

In an episode that can only be described by a sane person as disgusting, homosexuals in the Castro District of San Francisco held an "anti-memorial" for The Rev. Jerry Falwell, who died today in Lynchburg VA at the age of 73. From SFGate: "Michael Petrelis, a blogger, longtime HIV survivor and organizer of the 5 p.m. event, said that the founder of the Moral Majority needed to be remembered for his legacy of hatred. "I remember Falwell's hatred of people with AIDS and gay people at the height of the AIDS epidemic," Petrelis said. "It was so un-religious. I feel...

A couple who sued a fertility clinic after the wife gave birth to a daughter whose skin they thought was too dark for her to be their child may proceed with their lawsuit, a judge has ruled. Thomas and Nancy Andrews, of Commack, N.Y., sued New York Medical Services for Reproductive Medicine, accusing the Manhattan clinic of medical malpractice and other offenses. They said the Park Avenue clinic botched the insemination of Nancy Andrews' eggs. The Andrewses' court papers say that on the advice of Dr. Martin Keltz, the couple agreed to in vitro fertilization of the eggs with Thomas...

When a candidate for president blows into town, most reporters show up. There’s always a chance he or she will say something surprising or stupid, and there could even be a chance to ask a substantial question and get an answer with some teeth to it, but it’s not likely. That’s just the way these things go. But when the Idaho press showed up today for Republican candidate Mitt Romney, his people were still rehearsing – badly - the drill of the classic obligatory campaign fly-through. They issued conflicting information about the place and time of the press conference, with...

FOX8 WGHP -- To no one's surprise (in this newsroom anyway), NASCAR fans in the Piedmont don’t like being stereotyped as toothless, white trash rednecks. The remarks were made after a group including Richard Petty and Darrell Waltrip went before Washington state lawmakers about wanting to build a race track in the Evergreen State. Washington state representative Larry Seaquist made this comment about NASCAR fans with southern roots: “These people are not the kind of people you would want living next door to you. They’d be the ones with the junky cars in the front yard and would try to...

The ABC show “The View� can’t give it up. It started with a discussion about James Cameron’s latest Titanic tale—the one about Jesus’ tomb—and it quickly degenerated into another round of mockery. About Catholicism, that is. Rosie O’Donnell began by demonstrating her command of the Bible by saying, ‘Weren’t, weren’t, wasn’t the Bible written 200 years after the death of Jesus?’ No, it wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t. Someone needs to clue her in—she’s only off by over a hundred years. But that someone is surely not co-host Joy Behar. Today she confessed that ‘I am not really a scholar. I don’t...

You have to see how smooth Romney handles this heckler: http://www.mittreport.com Unchecked bigotry, illustrated by this heckler, toward Mormons is unbelievable. If someone stood up and commented about a person's gender, race, etc., the public and media would be outraged. My guess the mainstream media lets this go unchecked. -MR

BE HERE, OR BE NOWHERE!

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- A second blogger working for Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards quit Tuesday under pressure from conservative critics who said her previous online messages were anti-Catholic. Melissa McEwan wrote on her personal blog, Shakespeare's Sister, that she left the campaign because she was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the level of attention focused on her and her family. "This was a decision I made, with the campaign's reluctant support, because my remaining the focus of sustained ideological attacks was inevitably making me a liability to the campaign," McEwan said Tuesday night. Kate Bedingfield, a spokeswoman for the Edwards...

Two bloggers hired recently by Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards were criticized Tuesday by a Catholic group for posts they had written elsewhere on the Internet. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, demanded that Edwards fire Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan. "John Edwards is a decent man who has had his campaign tarnished by two anti-Catholic, vulgar, trash-talking bigots," Donohue wrote in a statement. "He has no choice but to fire them immediately." The Edwards campaign declined to comment. McEwan and Marcotte did not respond to e-mails requesting a response. Donohue cited posts that...

Immigrants wishing to live in a small Canadian town have been told they must not stone women to death in public, burn them alive or throw acid on them. This extraodinary set of rules has been released by the local council of Herouxville, Quebec. The declaration, published on the town's Website, has deepened tensions in the predominantly French-speaking province over how tolerant Quebecers should be toward the customs and traditions of immigrants. "We wish to inform these new arrivals that the way of life which they abandoned when they left their countries of origin cannot be recreated here," said the...

WASHINGTON -- Zalmay Khalilzad, who was announced this week as leaving as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, is the leading prospect to replace John Bolton as envoy to the United Nations. President Bush was reported by aides as looking for someone who approximates Bolton's combination of toughness and diplomatic skill and has tentatively decided on Khalilzad. A native of Afghanistan, he has served in government posts dating back to 1985 and is the highest-ranking Muslim in the Bush administration. Speculation on a new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations to succeed John Bolton is focusing on the current U.S. ambassador in...

A dog that refuses to go away is a problem that many will be familiar with. But in Israel, a dog which refused to leave the doorstep of a dead Rabbi house was the subject of a 'redemption ceremony' to get it to move on. The dog, believed to be a stray, appeared at the house of the recently deceased Rabbi Nahman Dubinky, and then wouldn't leave. Rabbis expert in Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, concluded the animal might have been possessed by unhappy souls seeking redemption from the departed Rabbi. By tradition, Ultra-Orthodox Jews do not keep dogs as...

Reiner: Gibson, Come Clean on `Passion' LOS ANGELES (AP) - Mel Gibson's apology for making drunken anti-Semitic remarks isn't enough to redeem him, actor-producer Rob Reiner said. The actor also must acknowledge that "his work reflects anti-Semitism," particularly the 2004 hit movie "The Passion of the Christ," Reiner told Associated Press Radio. "When he comes to the understanding that he has done that, and can come out and say, you know, 'My views have been reflected in my work and I feel bad that I've done that,' then that will be the beginning of some reconciliation for him," Reiner said....

(AP) Mel Gibson's apology for making drunken anti-Semitic remarks isn't enough to redeem him, actor-producer Rob Reiner said. The actor also must acknowledge that "his work reflects anti-Semitism," particularly the 2004 hit movie "The Passion of the Christ," Reiner told Associated Press Radio.

Open House organization decides to hold gay pride parade in capital this year More controversy? Jerusalem's Open House for Pride and Tolerance has decided Sunday to hold a gay pride parade in the capital this year as well, GLBT portal Gogay has reported. The decision was taken by a 5 to 1 vote during the Open House's management committee meeting, which featured various community members who expressed their views on the subject. Most participants backed another parade in order to show they would not capitulate in the face of ultra-Orthodox and homophobic threats. However, some participants did voice concern over...

If a long-time member of Congress lost a primary battle for re-election, and his/her campaign entourage shouted racial epithets at reporters and about her opponent after defeat, do you think this would have been on the evening news? Well, if said member of Congress was a Democrat, the answer apparently is “no,” for not one of the broadcast networks felt it was newsworthy to report Tuesday evening's events involving Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia). For those that haven’t heard, McKinney’s campaign entourage now includes members of the New Black Panthers. After her primary defeat Tuesday to Hank Johnson for Georgia’s 4th...

In the weeks leading up to the release of The Passion of the Christ film over two years ago, Tim Rutten, media columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote no less than six hyperventilating columns that dealt almost exclusively with breathless concerns over anti-Semitism in Mel Gibson's film. At one point, Rutten attacked Mel Gibson as "a little brat" and "an unwholesomely willful child playing with matches."  Yet when the blatantly anti-Christian and anti-Catholic The Da Vinci Code was released a few months ago, Rutten's reaction was a ho-hum and a yawn; far from a concern, Da Vinci is "only...

he New Testament story describes Jesus walking on water in the Sea of Galilee but according to a study led by Florida State University Professor of Oceanography Doron Nof, it's more likely that he walked on an isolated patch of floating ice. The study points to a rare combination of optimal water and atmospheric conditions for development of a unique, localized freezing phenomenon that Nof and his co-authors call "springs ice." In what is now northern Israel, such ice could have formed on the cold freshwater surface of the Sea of Galilee -- known as Lake Kinneret by modern-day Israelis...

An Afghan village elder, points to a footprint of an extremist who burned the Neizi Kran Shaku Village School on July 17 in the Parwan Province, Bagram District. U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Robert R. Ramon Extremists Destroy Afghan School Village vows to continue children's education after extremists burn their school. By Army Staff Sgt. Robert R. Ramon 345th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan, July 18, 2006-- Extremists destroyed a school in the Bagram District, Parwan Province on July 17. "We were very angry. Since they burned the school I haven't been able to sleep at...

The war over immigration reform among conservatives continues, and, as in most wars, truth has been one of the first casualties. Those who disagree with the hardening positions of people who would adopt more restrictive policies or with people who favor less restrictive measures are attacked as know-nothings, traitors or handmaidens of evil forces out to destroy the America we live in. Many conservatives reacted angrily to the way the Bush administration tried to demonize opposition to the president’s quasi-amnesty and guest-worker proposals when they were first introduced. Critics at the time were characterized as racists or “nativists” more interested...

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has changed the way it chooses nominees for best foreign-language film and eliminated a rule requiring entries to be in the official language of the submitting country. The academy’s governors approved a new process in judging foreign-language films, allowing New York-area academy members to participate in the selection for the first time, according to a statement issued last week. A shortlist of films from nine countries will be chosen by the same Los Angeles screening committee that has traditionally viewed the approximately 60 submissions. That shortlist will...

A group of 50 pro-Israel Christian tourists came under attack Wednesday from some 100 residents of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea She'arim in Jerusalem. Three of the tourists and a police officer were wounded in the attack. They received treatment at the scene. The tourists arrived at Mea She'arim wearing orange T-shirts with the words "Love your neighbor as yourself" printed across them. As they neared one of the squares, the local residents apparently identified them as Christians and began to hit them. Police forces in the area stepped in to stop the violence, but did not make any arrests....

GOP leaders: No immigration bill this year By DAVID ESPO, AP Special Correspondent 33 minutes ago In a defeat for President Bush, Republican congressional leaders said Tuesday that broad immigration legislation is all but doomed for the year, a victim of election-year concerns in the House and conservatives' implacable opposition to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants. "Our number one priority is to secure the border, and right now I haven't heard a lot of pressure to have a path to citizenship," said Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., announcing plans for an unusual series of hearings to begin in August on...

Here are the dominant liberal reactions to President Bush and the Republicans' call for a vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would amend the Constitution to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman: 1. Virtually every news report about President George W. Bush's support for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman describes it as "pandering" to the "far Right," the "radical Right" or, less pejoratively, "social conservatives" of the Republican Party. 2. Democrats regularly describe the amendment as enshrining "discrimination in the Constitution." In the words of...

“A vote for this amendment is a vote for bigotry, pure and simple.” Thus spoke Sen. Ted Kennedy in reference to the Marriage Protection Amendment being debated in the Senate today. One cannot help but wonder what His Eminence Sean Patrick Cardinal O’Malley of Boston thinks of Sen. Kennedy’s thunderous pontificating. Cardinal O’Malley, along with all seven other U.S. Catholic cardinals, signed a statement on behalf of the Religious Coalition for Marriage supporting the amendment and urging the Senate to pass the measure along to the states for ratification. Presumably, by Sen. Kennedy’s lights, Cardinal O’Malley and the three score...

A Jordanian media firm hopes its new TV cartoon series can achieve what politicians have failed to do so far: bridge the cultural divide between East and West. It sounds like a tall order, but the Rubicon firm - named after the river Caesar crossed to establish the Roman Empire - is armed with an equally mighty motto: "to embark on a mission from which one cannot turn back." Even more important is that the cartoon, called "Ben and Izzy" and aimed at 8 to 11 year olds, has royal backing from Jordan's media savvy rulers, King Abdullah II and...

Hollywood’s 9/11 Propaganda Docudrama Opens A New Box of Demons "United 93" is an odd film by any standard. Filmmaker Paul Greengrass (notable for his terrific 2002 docudrama "Bloody Sunday" about the 1972 British Army massacre of 27 civilians in Northern Ireland) wrote and directed what is a disturbingly prosaic piece of dramatic conjecture about one of the most puzzling events of 9/11. As a fictionalized docudrama, "United 93" punctures all suspension-of-disbelief because of the intrinsic absurdness that the mightiest military power on earth couldn’t scramble a dozen squads of F-16 fighter planes to perform aerial escorts for the "11...

Extremists Declare 'Open Season' on Immigrants: Hispanics Target of Incitement and Violence Overview As the public debate over immigration reform has taken center-stage in American politics and public life, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other racists have declared "open season" on immigrants and attempted to co-opt and exploit the controversy by focusing their efforts -- and their anger -- on the minority group at the center of the controversy: Hispanics.   As a result, to a level unprecedented in recent years, America's Latino immigrant population has become the primary focus of hateful and racist rhetoric and extreme violence -- aided, abetted...

Pennsylvania State University has cancelled an art exhibition about terrorism and the destruction of Jewish historical and religious sites claiming it "did not promote cultural diversity." The ten-piece exhibit, by student Josh Stulman, was the result of years of preparation. It was called "Portraits of Terror" and focused on images of Palestinian terrorism, hate-propaganda cartoons printed in PA newspapers and photos of Jewish holy sites destroyed by Muslims. Just three days before the exhibition was to take place, Stulman received an email from the School of Visual Arts saying that his exhibit on images of terrorism "did not promote cultural...

State Board of Education member Connie Morris took exception Wednesday to a picture of a made-up creature that satirizes the state's new science standards hanging on a Stucky Middle School teacher's door. Fellow board member Sue Gamble told The Eagle that Morris asked for the picture to be removed. The creature, called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is the creation of Bobby Henderson of Corvallis, Ore. It looks like a clump of spaghetti with two eyes sticking out of the top and two meatballs flanking the eyes.

Congratulations to Dummie steve2370! After over a year of probation, you have finally REDEEMED yourself and came up with an hilarious DUmmie thread again worthy of publication in the DUmmie FUnnies. Yes, DUmmie steve2470, you are back in the spotlight again with your incredibly ENTERTAINING cluelessness. For those of you unfamiliar with DUmmie steve2470, he is the author of two of the FUnniest threads featured in the DUmmie FUnnies. The first of the classic steve2370 threads appeared in the February 21, 2005 DUFU edition titled, Clueless about women, please help me out in which our boy couldn't figure out...