Free Republic

Note: I swear I am not making the following incident up. Ludicrous though it may sound, it actually happened.After a year at the University of Miami, I thought I'd seen everything. I had no idea. About a week or two ago, we at the College Republicans got together with the Young Democrats and the Council for Democracy to poll UM students for a "mock election" (which we miraculously won, but only because we got out the vote like crazy). It's a fun little exercise in democracy (gag me). At one point, a clearly homosexual young man stepped up to the...

"Turkey's European Union accession process has ceased to be an ambiguous process for the EU and has taken an irreversible direction," says Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey. The "post-Islamist" leader of his anything-but-post-Islamic country has ample reason to feel cocky: Some European leaders treat Turkey's EU membership as a fait accompli that should be supported if it cannot be resisted. Others are far more enthusiastic, and claim that Turkey's membership would be a blessing for the Old Continent. The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, thus declared earlier this month that Turkey had fulfilled the required democracy...

There is a bloc of voters that may easily decide the forthcoming election. A little over a million Serbian-Americans—their exact number is uncertain but this is a conservative estimate—are likely to vote this year in greater numbers than ever before. The significance of this group becomes obvious if we look at its geographic distribution. After Chicago, the main Serbian-American centers are Pittsburgh, PA; Cleveland, OH; and Milwaukee, WI. There are thousands of retirees in Florida and sizeable pockets in St. Louis (MO) and suburban New Jersey. In each of those states the size of the community exceeds the likely margin...

The ProjectUSA billboard at 499 Englewood in North Buffalo was defaced within days of going up. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page has denied responsibility. The billboards in Buffalo at 612 Sheridan Dr., 3684 Delaware, and 3670 River Rd have avoided any damage so far. The ProjectUSA voter awareness campaign in New York’s 26th congressional district was barely underway before someone ruined one of our billboards by scrawling the words "erase racism" across its face. The billboard carried the factual statement, “Congressman Tom Reynolds supports amnesty for illegal aliens,” and was one of four located in the northern and...

Switzerland has the toughest naturalization rules in Europe. If you want to become Swiss you must live in the country legally for at least 12 years—and pay taxes, and have no criminal record—before you can apply for citizenship. It still does not mean that your wish will be granted, however, and the fact that you were born in Zurich or Lugano does not make any difference. There are no "amnesties" and illegals are deported if caught. Even if an applicant satisfies all other conditions, the local community in which he resides has the final say: it can interview the applicant...

A little background: this week, our campus Advocates for Conservative Thought sponsored a "Conservative Awareness Week" (I personally thought we should stick with the original title, "Conservative Coming-Out Week," but since the gay/lesbian club at the University of Miami is extremely well-funded and possibly backed by the president herself, it's not really a good idea to invoke their wrath unless you have no choice"). Each day had a different theme (i.e., pro-life, family, guns, etc.) and a couple of days we had guest speakers on the various topics.(Tonight, incidently, we had Doug Bandow of the CATO Institute speak on "Free...

On September 19 the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune published an article entitled Struggle for the Soul of Islam: A rare look at secretive Brotherhood in America. This 5,000-word feature sought to reveal the existence, methods and ultimate goals of the American offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, "the world's most influential Islamic fundamentalist group." The Tribune story is important for revealing the magnitude of the threat America faces no less than for revealing the underlying misunderstanding of that threat by the American elite class in general and the media in particular.The Brotherhood's slogan, ever since it was founded in...

Myth # 1 "Canada is a nation of immigrants"Feeling guilty yet? Well, you should be, at least that's the idea that drives these cliches. Of course, it's true. Whether we arrived by way of the Bering Land Bridge or in steerage, we all came from somewhere else. According to that logic, aboriginals are immigrants too. As the oldest, best-established group on the continent, they presumably owe an enormous debt of gratitude, moral support, time and money to all subsequent arrivals. But somehow it doesn't work that way. It is Canadians of European descent who are expected to subsidize - in...

If 400,000 North Carolina Driver's Licenses Were Issued without Social Security Numbers, How Many Voters are Illegally Registered? FAIR Makes Formal Demand on North Carolina Election Board(Raleigh, NC—September 16, 2004) The North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles has issued as many as 400,000 driver's licenses to individuals without Social Security numbers (SSNs) by simply entering "999-99-9999" on the application. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is calling upon the state's Board of Elections to conduct a county by county review of voter rolls because most of these individuals must be assumed to be illegal aliens. Although the DMV began...

The media in the United States have been oddly fastidious in failing to report one aspect of last week’s horror in Beslan: that several Russian girls were raped by Muslim terrorists in front of their parents and classmates. The failure to report rapes in the Russian school was at odds with the eagerness of American journalists, a decade ago, to report ad nauseam on the entirely fictitious "rape camps" supposedly run by Bosnian Serbs in which Muslim women were allegedly subjected to similar degradation. That Muslim propagandists and their Western abettors should have resorted to this particular whopper is especially...

Random question (with a little background first). I began college last year as a film major. I hated it with a passion. I knew I would never want to be around the nihilists that inhabit UnHollywood. I dropped it within one semester and thereafter had a nasty taste in my mouth for film, knowing who made it and where my money would be going. But, as I've come to realize, there are plenty of motion pictures that portray the struggles, tragedies, and triumphs of the 20th century (and before) in a feel-good, patriotic light, among them most things Mel Gibson,...

Last week an important Christian philosopher took the nations of the European Union to task for failing to contribute .7% of their national incomes to the Third World. Scandinavians are holding up their end, but other countries have complained that the burden is too great to bear. This Irish philosopher, described as a "committed Christian," accuses the Europeans of "renegotiating your deal with God downward." Of course no one listens to real philosophers today, and the complaint was actually made by the over-the-hill rockstar-turned-conscience-of-Europe known as Bono. He could, of course, arrange another Liveaid concert, but celebrity fund-raisers give the...

In the immediate wake of the September 11 attacks, Americans found themselves faced with an unexpected choice between radically different perspectives on the proper place of religion in modern Western society. The alternative perspectives were not new. But the urgency with which they were felt, and the intensity with which they were articulated, marked a dramatic departure. Coming at a moment when Americans had been gradually rethinking many settled precedents regarding religion and public life, it seemed to give a sharper edge to the questions being asked. For many observers, there was only one logical conclusion to be drawn from...

THE religious scene in America today is a picture of confusion. And it might not be too Platonic to suggest that the soul of the typical individual harbors this confusion as well. Religion has been reduced to an option, and there are just so many of them nowadays. We can begin with the unprecedented variety of religious life in America today. It reflects the influx of adherents of non-Christian faiths as well as of Christians from non-Western lands. (Among my students in Toronto, the non-Western Christians seem decisively to outnumber those of European descent.) It’s said that 200 languages are...

Even with former leader Saddam Hussein detained, Iraq's Baath Party is back in business, staging attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops and recruiting disenchanted Sunni Muslims.BAGHDAD - By day, Iraqis loyal to Saddam's Hussein's much-feared Baath Party recite their oath in clandestine meetings, solicit donations from former members and talk politics over sugary tea at a Baghdad cafe known as simply ``The Party.'' By night, cells of these same men stage attacks on American and Iraqi forces, host soirees for Hussein's birthday and other former regime holidays and debrief informants still dressed in suits and ties from their jobs in...

By "common heritage" we mean the underlying unity of the Eastern and Western wings of the Christian civilization—long split by the tragedy of the Great Schism, and now threatened by the rot of disbelief, Christophobic norms and functional nihilism rampant throughout the Western world, but still one. This beautiful part of the world is an especially apt spot from which to contemplate such unity. Here in Northern California the expansion of the West, the Latin Church—embodied in the conquistadors and missionaries from Spain—achieved its maximum geographic outreach some 250 years ago near San Francisco. Not long thereafter, the eastward expansion...

LITTLE ROCK - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. acknowledged Friday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it is discussing a possible civil settlement with federal prosecutors that would resolve allegations that it used illegal workers to clean its stores. A federal grand jury has been meeting in Pennsylvania since December of 2003 to investigate charges that the world's largest retailer, based at Springdale, knew that some of the janitorial companies it used to clean its floors employed illegal immigrants. Federal agents arrested about 250 alleged illegal workers last October during a sweep of Wal-Mart stores in 21 states....

It's hard to believe, but an actual report on the costs of undocumented immigration has finally been released. For those who have railed against previous columns about undocumented immigrants and cited their drain on taxpayers, your ammunition has arrived via a study conducted by the Center for Immigration Studies. Released last month, "The High Cost of Cheap Labor: Illegal Immigration and the Federal Budget" shows that undocumented immigrants used $26.3 billion in government services in 2002 but paid only $16 billion in taxes. That, concludes the study, resulted in a $10 billion cost to taxpayers. This study is about as...

“The generals must be having nightmares.” So observed a Turkish analyst after his country’s parliament passed laws last week dramatically reducing the political role of the country’s armed forces. Those laws will “revolutionize the conduct of Turkish politics,” observes London’s Daily Telegraph. What might seem like bureaucratic wrangling has such potentially profound importance because the Turkish armed forces have long been Turkey’s main bastion for political moderation and close relations with the United States and Israel; how will the country fare absent this steady hand? The question is the more urgent because last week’s overhaul was carried out by the...

A number of analysts believe that Iran will reach a critical stage in its pursuit of nuclear capability sometime within the next few months. This is a terrifying new development, far more worrisome than the wars and uprisings that have plagued the Middle East to date. Indeed, as Ray Takeyh, director of studies at the Near East and South Asia Center at the National Defense University, said at a recent Washington conference, Iran may have already passed the point of “political no return” in its bid for nuclear competence. If the Islamic republic has already passed that political landmark, then...