Free Republic

U.S. Border Patrol Agents are Still in Prison! Call the White House and Tell President Bush to Pardon Ramos and Compean! On February 17, 2005, U.S. Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean were guarding the Mexican border near El Paso, TX when they intercepted a van carrying 743 pounds of marijuana. They attempted to prevent a Mexican drug-smuggler from crossing the border and illegally entering the United States. After the U.S. government intervened and granted immunity and a temporary visa to the illegal drug-smuggler in exchange for testimony against Ramos and Compean, the two border guards were convicted...

In the Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama rolled up more than 90 percent of the African-American vote. Among Catholics, he lost by 40 points. The cool liberal Harvard Law grad was not a good fit for the socially conservative ethnics of Altoona, Aliquippa and Johnstown. But if Barack had a problem with Catholics then, he has a far higher hurdle to surmount in the fall, with those millions of Catholics who still take their faith and moral code seriously. For not only is Barack the most pro-abortion member of the Senate, with his straight A+ report card from the National Abortion...

“Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has taken a giant step backwards into its Soviet past, and nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of energy politics. Modern Russian politics and energy sources, first oil and then both oil and gas, have been inextricably connected in a way unmatched by any other major power in the history of the world.” That’s how Michael J. Economides and Donna Marie D’Aleo open their book, “From Soviet to Putin and Back: The Dominance of Energy in Today’s Russia.” Central to the Russian psyche is its preference for strong leadership and, after what the...

A New Jersey judge recently confronted an issue that courts have been avoiding for years: are restraining orders constitutional? Accused criminals have "due process" and many other constitutional rights, but the feminists have persuaded many judges to issue orders that restrain actions of non-criminals and punish them based on flimsy, unproved accusations. These restraining orders are issued without the due process required for criminal prosecutions, yet they carry the threat of a prison sentence for anyone who violates them. Mr. and Mrs. Crespo were divorced and rearing their children in the same household when they had a fight, and Mrs....

STIFF RIGHT ALERT: Liberty CounselLos Angeles, CA – Today, the California Court of Appeal upheld the fundamental right of parents to homeschool their children. The ruling comes after a request for a rehearing, and reverses an earlier adverse determination. Liberty Counsel filed a brief on the case in favor of a parent’s right to homeschool their children. The court concluded that “California statutes permit homeschooling as a species of private school education and the statutory permission to homeschool may constitutionally be overridden in order to protect the safety of a child who has been declared dependent.” Much of its decision...

Lynn Moses, a Driggs, Idaho man, will enter the federal prison in Sheridan, Oregon today at 2 p.m. in an unfolding story of government tyranny. Mr. Moses lost his wife to an unexpected heart attack 1 ½ years ago, and suspects that the stress created by this abuse of federal power is responsible. And yesterday he was forced to leave his 17-year-old daughter Whitney at home in tears, who will now have to experience her senior in high school without the companionship of either of her parents, both of them taken from her by the repressive power of the central...

Lynn Moses will be locked up in federal prison next Wednesday. His crime? Protecting the city of Driggs, Idaho from flooding. When Mr. Moses began to develop a subdivision along Teton Creek in 1980, Teton County required him to implement an engineer’s plan to modify the Teton Creek stream bed to prevent the flooding of subdivision property, caused by the buildup of gravel bars and downed trees, during high water flows in the spring. In fact, the county would not allow him even to record the plat for the subdivision until the modification work had been done, and only allowed...

“The Arctic may hold 90 billion barrels of oil, more than all the known reserves of Nigeria, Kazakhstan, and Mexico combined, and enough to supply U.S. demand for 12 years.” One would have thought Joe Carroll’s Bloomberg News report would have evoked some interest by the public and other media outlets. Instead, news of the U.S. Geological Survey was greeted mostly by a giant collective yawn. “One third of the undiscovered oil is in Alaskan territory, the agency found…” Considering that the Democrat-controlled Congress adamantly refuses to let drilling occur for the oil known to exist in and off-shore Alaska,...

By Chuck BaldwinAccording to numerous press reports, President George W. Bush plans to attend the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in Beijing, China later this month. Bush said that it "would be an affront to the Chinese people" if he stayed away. Other world leaders, including Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, are choosing to not attend the opening ceremonies in the communist country. It is hard for this writer to laud President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but in this case, even the socialist Roosevelt showed more integrity than our so-called "conservative" President, George...

If you are not yet alarmed and outraged by radical Republican John McCain’s “bipartisan” campaign finance “reform” package, which is in no way bipartisan, Monday’s revelation from the American Conservative Union Foundation (ACU) should put an end to your complacency. In its latest report, “Who’s Buying Campaign Finance Reform?” (1) the ACU unveils the secret that some conservatives have suspected all along: The campaign finance reform ‘movement’ has, contrary to its anti-big money agenda, raised and spent more than $73 million since 1996; has, contrary to its bipartisan claims, been funded by “wealthy Democratic Party soft-money donors, ultra-liberal foundations and...

By Diane AldenSYNOPSIS Billions of dollars of federal set asides for Small Business are being gobbled up by multinational corporations. Go to the original source here: 'Small' Business Association.DIANE ALDEN COMMENTARY Was no one paying attention while the US fell apart? Or is it that it was falling apart in so many varied places, we all went into information overload which provided cover for the worst of the crooks and liars to tear the nation apart? At times I am forced to wonder if such corruption and collusion is so wide and deep and constant - that no one pays...

“Comparable Worth” = Government Wage Control! The House of Representatives is gearing up for a vote this week on a bill that would institute the longtime feminist dream of comparable worth. Decades ago, in order to address the so-called gender pay gap in America, the feminists invented the code words “comparable worth,” “pay equity,” and the elusive “glass ceiling.” Contrary to feminist dogma, the gap is not created by a conspiracy of male chauvinists, but by the voluntary division of domestic labor. Clearly, a degree in education or women’s studies simply doesn’t earn the same pay as a degree in...

In an overt attempt to sabotage Proposition 8, California’s marriage protection amendment, Attorney General Jerry Brown has reworded the ballot summary. The initiative that 1.1 million California voters signed and was to have appeared on the ballot read “[Proposition 8] amends the California Constitution to provide that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”" With Brown’s creative writing, the new ballot summary says that it “‘changes California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry.” Further it claims that the state will be impacted with a potential revenue loss of several...

In open defiance of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down the Washington D.C. gun control law, the City Council passed an “emergency” law that keeps in place almost all of the law that was ruled unconstitutional. For example, though the Court ruled specifically that the city’s ban on handguns violated the Second Amendment, most handguns still cannot be registered because D.C. bureaucrats classify semi-automatic pistols as “machine guns.” Even Dick Heller, who brought the case against Washington’s gun ban, was rejected when he tried to register his handgun because any “bottom loading” firearm is a “machine gun” according to the...

Joseph Farah, founder and president of World Net Daily, one of the oldest and most read Independent news sources on the Internet, has a new book out for election 2008, None of the Above: Why 2008 is the Year to Cast the Ultimate Protest Vote. In it Farah invites his readers - not tongue in cheek mind you - to cast a protest vote for “none of the above,” or rather, for the third party or write in candidate of our choice. If we don’t register this protest, he warns, it will business as usual, a steady push to the...

When I was a young woman married to a Delta Airline pilot - there was a great story that went around Coweta County, Georgia. A veterinarian told it to me. The story went: ‘”what are the two most dangerous things in rural Georgia?” The answer: an out-of-control loaded pulp wood truck careening down hill, and … a pilot in search of an investment. In the 70s, airline pilots with Delta or Eastern often lived in rural Coweta, Carroll or other Georgia boonies outside of Atlanta. Some pilots and airline personnel, at that time, made a good bit more money than...

H.R. 3221*, the American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008, was passed by the House 272-152 on Wednesday, July 23, 2008. (*The government website may not yet be updated following yesterday’s vote.) The Senate is expected to vote on the housing bill on July 25th or 26th. Enactment of this legislation would be a victory for socialism and big government, but a travesty for U.S. taxpayers and limited government. This one-time energy bill was transformed into a vehicle for mortgage foreclosure prevention, then very recently revised again to include plans for preventing the failure of Fannie Mae and...

Missing the Mark With Religion, Part 7 As a child growing up in New York, I was attracted to the opposite sex. When I saw a pretty little girl flash a smile, my heart fluttered, my cheeks blushed, I shuffled my feet and shyly looked the other way. I always liked girls. No one had to tell me that I should. I just did. When I became a teen, little changed. I still adored them, though when I thought of females, I began to think of marriage. Holy matrimony seemed like a prerequisite to happiness and completeness. Don't ask me...

From my friends at the Idaho Values Alliance: Rank and file Republicans seem to appreciate that open primaries are a form of political insanity, in that they give the opposition the opportunity to help you choose your candidates for the general election. To the average observer, regardless of party affiliation, that makes no political sense whatsoever. Why would the Yankees let the Red Sox help them pick their starting lineup? In a classic showdown between grassroots Republicans and the elites of the Idaho Republican party, the GOP state chairman has come out against party-affiliation primaries, regardless of the fact that...

Things are not always as they seem. Marxism's war on religion presents evidence-a-plenty that this notion is true. From both the left, in the name of Social Democracy, and from the right, in the name of Secular Government, Marx's Atheistic teammates have pushed, shoved and pressed upon religion in public life until a bipartisan squeeze has effectively crushed what was once publicly pervasive into the less than popular enclave of that which is now publicly suppressed. Christianity, today, though tarred and feathered, spit upon and lied about, has not given up however, and thanks be to God has begun to...