Free Republic

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- When the time comes for Barack Obama to make his first selection for the Supreme Court, Harold Hongju Koh, the dean of Yale Law School, is one of the people on his short list. A Koh nomination would be a severe blow to the pro-life movement as he would assuredly vote to uphold Roe v. Wade. During the campaign, so-called pro-life Catholic attorney Douglas Kmiec said Obama would want pro-abortion judges in the mold of Stephen Breyer and David Souter and mentioned Koh as a possible nominee. But Piero A. Tozzi, of the Catholic Family and...

After a one-week lull, the US has struck an al Qaeda training camp inside Pakistan's lawless tribal belt. US unmanned Predator aircraft fired four missiles into a camp in the village of Kumsham in North Waziristan, AFP reported. Up to 14 people have been reported to have been killed. "The strike successfully destroyed the camp," one source told AFP. "The militants were using the facility for training," another source said. Seven al Qaeda operatives and one local Taliban commander was killed in the attack, sources told the news agency. But there is no indication that senior al Qaeda or Taliban...

Assorted TV commentators keep opining that the Olympics are all about the brotherhood of man, rather than national ambition or patriotism. But don't tell that to the fanatically nationalist Chinese -- or to Kobe Bryant, the NBA star who is playing with Team USA in Beijing. In an interview Friday on NBC, the world's most famous basketball player told Chris Collinsworth how he got "goosebumps" when he received his Olympics uniform. "I actually just looked at it for a while. I just held it there and I laid it across my bed and I just stared at it for a...

Gearing up for 2009, liberals are eager to claim Massachusetts as a Valhalla of health reform. Their enthusiasm is apparently evidence-proof. Even Mitt Romney, who should know better, took to these pages recently to proclaim, "Health-care reform is working in Massachusetts." Shortly after Mr. Romney's self-tribute, Governor Deval Patrick wheeled out a new $129 million tax plan to make up for this year's health spending shortfalls. Yet partisans are cheering the cost overruns as a sign of success.

What if I told you that a prominent global political figure in recent months has proposed: abrogating key features of his government's contracts with energy companies; unilaterally renegotiating his country's international economic treaties; dramatically raising marginal tax rates on the "rich" to levels not seen in his country in three decades (which would make them among the highest in the world); and changing his country's social insurance system into explicit welfare by severing the link between taxes and benefits? The first name that came to mind would probably not be Barack Obama, possibly our nation's next president. Yet despite his...

Americans should be outraged at the latest sweetheart deal in Washington. Congress will put U.S. taxpayers on the hook for potentially hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It's a tribute to what these two institutions — which most Americans have never heard of — have bought with more than $170-million worth of lobbyists in the past decade. With combined obligations of roughly $5-trillion, the rapid failure of Fannie and Freddie would be a threat to mortgage markets and financial markets as a whole. Because of that threat, I support taking the unfortunate but...

BERLIN - More than 1,600 years after it was written in Greek, one of the oldest copies of the Bible will become globally accessible online for the first time this week. From Thursday, sections of the Codex Sinaiticus, which contains the oldest complete New Testament, will be available on the Internet, said the University of Leipzig, one of the four curators of the ancient text worldwide. High resolution images of the Gospel of Mark, several Old Testament books, and notes on the work made over centuries will appear on www.codex-sinaiticus.net as a first step towards publishing the entire manuscript online...

GENEVA - The United States said on Saturday after inconclusive international talks with Iran's nuclear envoy that Tehran must choose between cooperation or confrontation and give up sensitive nuclear work. "We hope the Iranian people understand that their leaders need to make a choice between cooperation, which would bring benefits to all, and confrontation, which can only lead to further isolation," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in a statement after the talks.

KABUL (AFP) — More than 400 militants have been killed in a 10-week-old operation led by US Marines in a remote district of southern Afghanistan but fighters remain in the area, a commander said Wednesday. Marines and British troops under NATO command in late April launched the operation in Garmser district, a desert area on the border with Pakistan described as an insurgent "logistics hub" and key opium-producing centre. Citing figures from Helmand province governor Gulab Mangal, the Marine commanding officer in Afghanistan told reporters in Kabul that more than 400 Taliban-linked rebels had been killed.

Leaders of the G-8 nations are gathered this week in Toyako, Japan, to root out the culprits in a food crisis that has moved hundreds of millions from subsistence to starvation. They need look no further than an old group photo. The G-8 countries' interventions have distorted global agricultural markets to the paralysis point. Politicians legislate price supports to enrich farm voters. Lobbies extort tariffs to block cheap food imports and subsidies to underwrite food exports at prices that destroy competitors in poor countries. Conservationists have agitated to set aside productive land and pay farmers not to grow. And now...

Congress is back in session and oil prices are still through the roof, so pointless or destructive energy legislation is all but guaranteed. Most likely is stiffer regulation of the futures market, since Democrats and even many Republicans have so much invested in blaming "speculators" for $4 gas. Congress always needs a political villain, but few are more undeserving. Futures trading merely allows market participants to determine the best estimate – based on available information like supply and demand and the rate of inflation – of what the real price of oil will be on the delivery date of the...

As the Senate prepares to vote on its mortgage bailout this week, one part of Banking Chairman Chris Dodd's bill deserves more scrutiny. It's a section called "affordable housing allocations," and while it sounds innocuous, in practice it amounts to a new tax to create a permanent subsidy for state governments and political activists. Like the bailout that has already passed the House, the Senate bill features a special new tax on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We have long urged reform of the two mortgage giants, which operate with an implicit government guarantee and therefore a license to endanger...

Senator John McCain has been accused of flip-flopping on immigration. Supposedly he tacked right during the primaries and now is tacking left. Actually, McCain has been all too consistent. As he has twice in recent weeks told Hispanic leaders, he remains committed to a “comprehensive immigration reform” that increases enforcement but also creates a “temporary guest worker” program and lets many illegal immigrants become legal residents. His one concession has been a matter of timing. During the primaries he said that the public would need to see enforcement work before it would tolerate the other elements of reform. He did...

"I want you to think about this," Barack Obama said in Las Vegas last week. "The oil companies have already been given 68 million acres of federal land, both onshore and offshore, to drill. They're allowed to drill it, and yet they haven't touched it – 68 million acres that have the potential to nearly double America's total oil production." Wow, how come the oil companies didn't think of that? Perhaps because the notion is obviously false – at least to anyone who knows how oil and gas exploration actually works. Predictably, however, Mr. Obama's claim is also the mantra...

Behold, a miracle: Public anger over $4 gas is forcing at least some of our political class to confront their energy contradictions. Last week, Republicans Jim Walsh of New York and Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland -- two longstanding opponents of offshore drilling -- asked for a mulligan. We can now add John McCain to the roll: In a speech in Houston yesterday, the Senator finally came out in favor of increasing domestic energy supplies. This is progress, even if it did come dressed in some of Mr. McCain's familiar policy confusions. In the past, the Republican has been a chief...

Nearly seven years after 9/11, the U.S. homeland hasn't been struck again and American civil liberties remain intact. So how does Congress say "thank you"? By trying to ruin the men who in good faith set the legal rules that have kept us safe. That's the political story unfolding in Washington, as Democrats fire up their latest round of "torture" hearings. Prevented from trying to impeach President Bush by cooler heads, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers has resorted to issuing subpoenas to assail current and former officials for allowing aggressive interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other murderers. About 60...

As the first anniversary of the credit crisis approaches, it's clear that a major part of the problem was a spectacular failure of information, with complex asset-backed securities turning out to be far riskier than anyone thought. But as sophisticated as we consider ourselves, this is just a contemporary example of what might be called the Problem of the Oblong Dice. The first game of dice, played by ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, used astragali, animal ankle bones that are more oblong than square. Yet rolls of the dice got the same score whether the dice ended up on a...

If the terrible Midwest floods have a silver lining, it is the grit and self-reliance that residents have shown in coping with the disaster. Iowans in particular haven't blamed everyone else for their version of Katrina. They've been following orders on when to evacuate, volunteering to lay sandbags to protect still-dry areas, and are already planning how they'll clean up the mess when the floodwaters subside. The worst floods in 15 years have done enormous damage, especially in the industrial city of Cedar Rapids. The Cedar River crested at some 31 feet on Friday, compared to 19 feet during the...

The Supreme Court ruled last Thursday that the writ of habeas corpus should apply to non-American terrorist detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. The Taliban delivered its own commentary on the ruling the very next day, when it busted into a prison in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar and freed 1,150 prisoners, of whom 400 are Taliban members and the other 750 easy potential conscripts. Call it habeas corpus, Taliban-style. The connection between these events is not merely their timing. The point of keeping enemy combatants at a remote location like Guantanamo is that it offers some assurance that they...

Irish voters struck a blow for democracy in Europe this week, stopping a power play by the Continent's political elites. On the ballot was the Lisbon Treaty, which European Union grandees in Brussels pitched as a tidying-up exercise to make the bloc's institutions work better. Most everyone else saw Lisbon for what it really was: An attempt to sneak through a dolled-up version of the failed "EU Constitution." That constitution was hailed as Europe's entrée to a U.S.-size presence on the world stage, complete with a nonelected president and a beefier defense and foreign policy. It was rejected by French...