Free Republic

The Honorable Tom Harkin 731 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 Dear Sen. Harkin, As a native Iowan and excellent customer of the Internal Revenue Service, I am writing to ask for your assistance. I have contacted the Department of Homeland Security in an effort to determine the process for becoming an illegal alien and they referred me to you. My primary reasons for wishing to change my status from U.S. Citizen to illegal alien stems from the bill which was recently passed by the Senate and for which you voted. If my understanding of the bill is accurate,...

From the irresistible rise and fall of real estate to Wall Street's meltdown to the tottering of print media, the epicenter of history seems always to hover around New York--or so New Yorkers always think. We haven't noticed that, of late, the narrative has changed subtly: It's all about how power is devolving away, how we've lost our credibility and perhaps our position as the national hub of finance, culture and news. Washington and therefore the country at large owns our great investment houses, while the Internet has atomized the music business and is fragmenting our print news institutions. The...

"A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. 'The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture, or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists.' " [emphasis added] Such stuff has long been a staple of the totalitarian "diversity" obsessives who pollute -- and often dominate -- political discourse at almost all of our universities, from coast to coast. The University of Delaware recently got a step ahead...

Charles Kaiser: Do you want to talk about your father’s unlikely party affiliation?Andrew Rosenthal: His communism? CK: Yes.AR: That was quite a revelation. My father was a member of the Communist Youth Party, or whatever it was called at the time. CK:This was a letter that you found from your aunt?AR: It was a letter from my aunt Ruth, who I never met, to her husband, George Watt, who was fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the Abraham Lincoln brigade. And they corresponded. She wrote one day that she had gone down to youth headquarters. Because it was “Sonny’s”...

Soghra, Sentenced to Death at Age of 13, Faces Execution Yet Again Despite the fact that two weeks ago the general court of Rasht, in northeastern Iran, released Soghra -- a young girl who was sentenced to death at the age of 13 and had spent the past18 years on Iran’s death row -- from prison on bail, the decedent’s parents have filed a legal request to carry out Soghra’s order of execution. Soghra, who is now 31 years old, has spent the past 18 years of her life in jail. When she was only 9 years old, Soghra was...

CHAPEL HILL - Whether the defendants in the Duke lacrosse case are guilty or innocent, Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong should disqualify himself, or be disqualified, from the case. On Friday, Nifong's own witness essentially accused him of breaking the law. An actual conflict of interest now exists between Nifong's need to defend himself against possible charges of misconduct and his obligation to prosecute the case fairly and effectively. In court Friday, the head of a lab that Nifong retained to analyze DNA samples testified that he and Nifong intentionally decided to exclude from the expert's report the fact that...

Ideology Has ConsequencesBush rejects the politics of prudence.by Jeffrey Hart Many Republicans must feel like that legendary man at the bar on the Titanic. Watching the iceberg slide by outside a porthole, he remarked, “I asked for ice. But this is too much.” Republicans voted for a Republican and got George W. Bush, but his Republican Party is unrecognizable as the party we have known.Recall the Eisenhower Republican Party. Eisenhower, a thoroughgoing realist, was one of the most successful presidents of the 20th century. So was the prudential Reagan, wary of using military force. Nixon would have been a good...

ZUCKER UNCENSORED - THE TAXMAN AD Youtube

Zero-sum positional conflict is avoidable in a liberal market society, argues Will WilkinsonHL Mencken once quipped that, ‘a wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife’s sister’s husband.’ Writing last April on the definition of poverty in The New Yorker, journalist John Cassidy takes the logic of Mencken’s satire of low-grade ressentiment fully seriously and plumps for its liberal application to public policy. Cassidy argues that it is indeed a hardship to make less than your wife’s sister’s husband—or your co-worker, your next door neighbour, or anyone within the same national boundaries—and proposes that for...

Why does the president call the secretary of state "Condi"? And what exactly is his philosophy? Thursday, July 27, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT Why does President Bush refer in public to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as "Condi"? Did Dwight Eisenhower call his Secretary of State "Johnny"? Did Jimmy Carter call his "Eddie," or Bill Clinton call his "Maddy," or Richard Nixon call his "Willie" or "Hank"? What are the implications of such informality? I know it is small, but in a way such things are never small. To me it seems a part of the rhetorical childishness of the...

Karen Armstrong has been described as “one of the world's most provocative and inclusive thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world”. Armstrong’s efforts to be “inclusive” are certainly “provocative”, though generally for reasons that are less than edifying. In 1999, the Muslim Public Affairs Council of Los Angeles gave Armstrong an award for media “fairness”. What follows might cast light on how warranted that recognition is, and indeed on how the MPAC chooses to define fairness. In one of her baffling Guardian columns, Armstrong argues that, “It is important to know who our enemies are… By making...

Sociologist Philip Rieff, who wrote erudite analyses of cultural decline and was known in particular for his critiques of Sigmund Freud, died Saturday at his Philadelphia home after a long period of deteriorating health. He was 83. The longtime University of Pennsylvania professor, who retired in 1992, made his reputation with "The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud" (1966), a difficult work with a pessimistic view of Freud's influence on Western civilization. It was one of three major works on the founder of psychoanalysis, including a 10-volume "Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud" (1963) that Rieff edited.

Liberalism entered the 1960’s as the vital force in American politics, riding a wave of accomplishment running from the Progressive era through the New Deal and beyond. A handsome young president, John F. Kennedy, had just been elected on the promise to extend the unfinished agenda of reform. Liberalism owned the future, as Orwell might have said. Yet by the end of the decade, liberal doctrine was in disarray, with some of its central assumptions broken by the experience of the immediately preceding years. It has yet to recover. What happened? There is, of course, a litany of standard answers,...

I thought you might like to see the email I sent Juan Cole in response to his August 8th post about my husband. Sorry if it runs a little long - "Was American journalist Steve Vincent killed in Basra as part of an honor killing? He was romantically involved with his Iraqi interpreter, who was shot 4 times. If her clan thought she was shaming them by appearing to be having an affair outside wedlock with an American male, they might well have decided to end it. In Mediterranean culture, a man's honor tends to be wrought up with his...

Ron Reagan's Pere Pressure By Richard Cohen Thursday, July 15, 2004; Page A21 ... Let's leave aside the implied accusation that Bush is publicly religious not out of conviction but "to gain political advantage" and question the appropriateness of the statement -- at the burial and citing the dead Reagan. And let us also concede that if Ron Reagan were not his father's son, not only would he not have been at that funeral -- by virtue of what achievement? -- but no one would have paid him any attention. He had, as he well knew, expropriated his father's fame...

Sgt. Jared Zabaldo in Baghdad writes: I just got back from an embed with the Iraqi army's 2nd Battalion. The 2nd Battalion is actually part of the Iraqi army's Iraqi Intervention Force. It's a special force in the army specifically trained in counter-insurgency operations. Once again I managed to be in the thick of it again. I walked through the streets of Baghdad July 1 on the Iraqi army's first foot patrol in Baghdad. In fact I made two patrols that same day on the same market-place street. This is a street that I have traveled down many times at...

D-DayThe liberation of Europe has lessons for today's war leaders.BY PAUL JOHNSONThursday, June 3, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT LONDON--To launch a large-scale opposed landing across many miles of water is the most hazardous of all military operations. Nothing before or since has ever been mounted on the scale of Operation Overlord, though the U.S. invasion of Iraq after the 9/11 outrage employed more firepower. The D-Day landing that began June 6, 1944, involved three services, airborne and glider troops, submarine landing, undercover agents and saboteurs, and an astonishing array of technological gimmicks. It was the most carefully planned operation in...

Stressed for Success?By DAVID BROOKSPublished: March 30, 2004Many of you high school seniors are in a panic at this time of year, coping with your college acceptance or rejection letters. Since the admissions process has gone totally insane, it's worth reminding yourself that this is not a particularly important moment in your life. You are being judged according to criteria that you would never use to judge another person and which will never again be applied to you once you leave higher ed. For example, colleges are taking a hard look at your SAT scores. But if at any moment...

Hello Everyone. I just wanted to pass this information along to each of you so you know what a truly compassionate and caring man we have in President Bush. My first cousin, Shawn Kettler, and his wife, Suzanne, and daughter, Laramie, lost their 6 year old son, Sam, in a drowning accident this past Saturday (March 6th), outside Gatesville. They all live within a few miles of the President's place in Crawford TX. Sam and a young friend of his were walking around a tank when the mud gave way and Sam fell in the tank. The tank is a...

CLAREMONT, Calif. - A professor who claimed she was targeted in a hate crime that stirred student protests at the Claremont colleges is suspected of staging the vandalism herself, police said Wednesday.   Kerri F. Dunn's car was vandalized and covered with racist, anti-Semitic and sexist epithets on March 9, leading faculty to cancel classes and students to stage rallies the following day. Two witnesses interviewed by police investigators allegedly saw Dunn, a visiting professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College, commit the vandalism, police said in a statement. Dunn also gave inconsistent statements during two interviews conducted jointly by...