Free Republic

ARVADA - In a shocking new tack, Republican congressional candidate Rick O’Donnell said Tuesday that the Bush administration has bungled the war in Iraq and the United States should change course there. “What we’re doing right now isn’t working. That’s a failure of leadership from our president, from our secretary of defense and from our generals, ” O’Donnell said during a debate with Democrat Ed Perlmutter. The two are vying to represent Colorado’s 7th Congressional District, one of the most closely watched races in the nation. ...The O’Donnell-Perlmutter race is considered one of the most competitive elections in the country...

A desire for more rigorous academics and greater emphasis on black history also has led black families into home schooling, educators say. Although home-schoolers often are stereotyped as white and evangelical Christians, in 2003 about 9 percent of home-schooled students were black, and 77 percent were white, compared with a total student population nationwide that was 16 percent black and 62 percent white. The numbers of black and white home-schoolers rose about a third from 1999 to 2003 to encompass about 1.3 percent of U.S. black students and 2.7 percent of whites. Researchers say the number of black parents who...

Pelosi personifies every liberal ideal, from an instant pull-out from Iraq to a pervasive federal presence in the economy, far more intrusive than the New Deal legacy itself. To the far left, Hillary is yesterday's news. So how do these disaffected folks get Pelosi into the White House? Simple: by impeaching President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.[snip]A group called ImpeachPAC with help from something called Constitution Summer has managed to place on San Francisco's ballot a "sense of the city" resolution calling for "a full investigation, impeachment or resignation of President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B....

A declassified government intelligence report says the war in Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for Islamic extremists, breeding deep resentment of the U.S. that is likely to get worse before it gets better. In the bleak report, released Tuesday on President Bush's orders, the nation's most veteran analysts conclude that despite serious damage to the leadership of al-Qaida, the threat from Islamic extremists has spread both in numbers and in geographic reach. "If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide," the document says. "The confluence of...

The Dallas Morning News is scrambling for life boats. It’s not just the News. The newspaper industry worldwide is in a free fall, a decline so precipitous that nothing may be able to save it. A recent industry report predicted newspapers will lose at least $20 billion in revenues from advertising and circulation in the next five years. The Internet and cable news have eroded the timeliness of its reporting, the once-magisterial authority of its opinions, and, more important, its classified advertising. (Dillard’s ads and grocery-store inserts never paid the freight; columns and columns of classified ads did.) Even so,...

THERE'S a good reason why the four authors of the upcoming book "I Hate Ann Coulter!" are remaining anonymous - they're afraid for their safety. "None of us want our real names in the hands of gun-toting, abortion clinic-bombing, self-proclaimed 'wing nuts,' who follow Coulter," one of the scribes tells us.

With millions of books to be sold, this fall will see another surge in highly partisan polemics. Bill O’Reilly’s “Culture Warrior” will hit the stores first on Sept. 25, published by Broadway Books, with attacks on (among other newspaper pundits) Frank Rich, Richard Cohen, Jimm Breslin and Maureen Dowd, and the coining of a new dismissive phrase, “S-P,” for “secular-progressive.” Following in October comes “Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter,” the first book by Joe Maguire and published by William Morrow. It’s described by the publisher as an “unbridled look at a woman who twists the truth, misleads,...

You would think that the Pentagon’s top lawyer would intervene—or at least say something—about the Army’s continuing violations of Defense Department regulations exempting female soldiers from assignments in or near direct ground combat. You would also expect the Defense Department to comply with laws requiring advance notice to Congress if the Army wants to change those rules. Neither expectation has been met on the watch of Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II. Haynes, nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, is one of five nominees re-submitted by President Bush this month. All deserve fair votes...

LAST month, ... Donald Trump used his signature “You’re fired” line on his own “Apprentice’’ co-star, Carolyn Kepcher, ... Mr. Trump’s cool blond assistant...[snip]In fact, career counselors and business professors say, the dismissal of Ms. Kepcher, ...is an object lesson of what can happen when a protégé steps into the spotlight of a mentor. Eleven years ago, Mr. Trump hired Ms. Kepcher to run the Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. For the last five prime-time seasons, she sat with him in the television boardroom, helping him to decide who rolls a suitcase into the elevator and who...

Nobody is buying V. Gene Robinson's homosexual call to arms, even though every sermon he preaches starts and ends with himself. The Episcopal Church is not being flooded with homosexuals looking for a "sacred space" for their very unsacred behavior. As large orthodox cardinal parishes like Christ Church, Plano along with a host of large parishes in Florida and California leave with their money and parishioners, increasingly what are left are medium-sized parishes, small missions and parishes run by retired clergy. Across the country churches are slowly but surely emptying. The more so in liberal ones, death catches up with...

The frontier TV series "Daniel Boone" was big in its day, but that was more than 40 years ago. No matter. The show's first two seasons, which come out Tuesday on DVD, are among the top 10 sellers for this week's releases at Amazon. Fess Parker, who starred as the famous historical figure, knows why the 1964-70 series remains popular. "The show has lots of adventure and deals with groundbreaking themes that still attract audiences," said the actor, now 82. "The writing and acting was always superb, and when you do a show that good, it always resonates with old...

In mid-2004, John and Karen Philbrook bought a home in Sacramento’s North Highlands neighborhood, when buying a house seemed like a sure ticket to security. They opted for an interest-only, adjustable-rate mortgage and counted on the value of their house continuing to rise as a way to build up equity. ...[snip] In 2004, Karen and John realized their dream by buying a house in the North Highlands section of Sacramento that’s situated several miles northeast of downtown. It’s a small, three-bedroom bungalow, with a brick chimney running down its wooden exterior. With John’s two jobs and Karen’s at Safeway, the...

For months, Republican leaders tried pushing Katherine Harris out of the U.S. Senate race in hopes of finding a candidate that could win, and she responded by talking about "the party elite" with disdain at just about every campaign stop. But now that the party is stuck with her as its candidate to face Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, Republican leaders will welcome Harris as President Bush visits Tampa and Orlando Thursday to raise money to help the party maintain the governor's office, its hold on the Cabinet, and its dominance in the Legislature and U.S. House delegation. The star...

It’s not often that you see a current American president and his predecessor in New York City, on the same morning, trying to foster peace in the Muslim world, and trying to burnish their own legacies as statesmen. Bill Clinton greeting Laura Bush at his world issues conference Wednesday, after she announced a $10 million federal commitment for an African water project. Nor is it common to have the wife of one of them on hand to help out the other guy. But there was President Bush meeting with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, at the Waldorf-Astoria. And there was...

If California’s nonvoting adult population made their voices heard at the ballot box, much of the political status quo could change—dramatically. A report released today by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), with funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, looks at the state’s electorate from 1990 through May 2006 and paints a provocative picture of the gulf in political preferences between the state’s voters and the majority of its adult population. On issues ranging from Proposition 13, to raising taxes, to imposing limits on government, the eight million Californians expected to vote in this November’s election have...

The government and a rebel group reached a cease-fire agreement in May, but since then, rapes in and around camps for people displaced by the fighting have surged, aid groups and residents say. The International Rescue Committee has recorded more than 200 sexual assaults among residents of a single camp near Nyala, a town in South Darfur state, during a five-week period in July and August. More and more often, women in Darfur face the starkest of choices: Risk being raped by leaving the camps in search of firewood and grass, or starve. If they invite their brothers or husbands...

Over the past three decades, conservatives have been procreating more than liberals -- continuing to seed the future with their genes by filling bassinets coast to coast with tiny Future Republicans of America. Take a randomly selected sample of 100 liberal adults and 100 conservative adults. According to an analysis of the 2004 General Social Survey -- a bible of data for social scientists -- the liberals would have had 147 kids, while the conservatives would have had 208. That's a fertility gap of 41 percent. Even adjusting for other variables like age and income, there is a gap of...

Looks like an income tax cut is coming your way. Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., and legislative leaders say there are enough votes in a special legislative session next week to take what Huntsman says is a "first step" in tax reform/tax cuts. While less certain, the leaders say it also appears that they can get the two-thirds needed to put on the November ballot a citizen referendum on raising sales tax by a quarter-cent to pay for needed road, transit and airport improvements around the state. Huntsman's income tax reform is a dual-track system. First, he would spread the brackets...

The American Civil Rights Union (ACRU) joined with former California state Attorney General and now Congressman Dan Lungren to file a friend of the court brief today in the United States Supreme Court in support of the Sea Scouts in Berkeley, Calif. The Sea Scouts are a subdivision of the national Boy Scouts of America. Seventy years ago the Scouts gave away to the City of Berkeley 80 tons of rock and fill from a nearby Scout-owned quarry to build the city's marina and breakwater. In return, the City agreed to allow the Sea Scouts to use several berths on...

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced an important visit to Shiite neighbor Iran, as a debate over a plan to divide Iraq into autonomous regions fuelled sectarian tension at home. Maliki is due in Tehran on Monday for his first official trip, described by his spokesman as a "cordial visit" that will focus on "security and political relations, besides developing and promoting bilateral relations." To the dismay of Maliki's US allies, Iran has become a major player in Iraqi politics since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the Shiite premier must walk a tightrope if he is to keep friends...