Free Republic

IS BUSH SURRENDERING? Dreadful news today that the president may be wavering in his intent to destroy the Iraqi regime. If true, then those of us who have supported the war on terror need to revise our assessment of this president. He told the German press yesterday that there is no plan to invade on his desk. He said it almost proudly. His military leaders, in a sign of their determination to risk nothing and achieve nothing, are now leaking to the Washington Post that they have all but scotched a serious military option in Iraq. The arguments they are...

What a flop. The Medical Savings Accounts authorized by Congress in 1996 have attracted, at last count, a grand total of 85,000 participants. A subtype of the MSAs designed to supplement Medicare has exactly 0 participants. What's the matter with these things? Certainly not the concept, which is that medicine should be less socialized than it is now. With socialized medicine--which we have courtesy of (a) Medicare and (b) a tax code that favors compensation taking the form of rich health insurance coverage--costs go through the roof. If you economize, by postponing a trip to the eye doctor or opting...

Current EventsTen Reasons For Identifying With AmericaPaul Johnson, 05.13.02 These days, when young people come to me for advice, I always say to them: "If you're ambitious, make your life in the U.S.A." I do this for ten reasons: • America is the freest country in the world. If you wish to unleash your individual energies and personality, whether in business, the professions or the creative arts, the U.S. is where the fewest barriers are raised, by law or custom, to your success. • This freedom under the law is supported by a democratic system that has been working effectively...

France: Reaping the Whirlwind of Multiculturalism FrontPageMagazine.com | April 26, 2002 By Bruce S. Thornton I HAVE TO CONFESS to a certain amount of glee at the French elite's weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth over Jean-Marie Le Pen's recent electoral victory. After endless lectures on U.S. racism, provincialism, and xenophobia, the French have now got themselves a candidate whose anti-immigrant rhetoric makes our home-grown xenophobes sound like Kofi Annan.No one should be surprised, either at the victory or the reaction. Like our own information elites, the French pundits and professors are out of touch with the sentiments and anxieties...

Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half. - Gore Vidal Most people consider their views their own. But every now or then, circumstances arise to uncover that the public is presented with a viewpoint that seems to be universally accepted. Surely, it must be correct - the whole world is speaking with the same voice! But do the facts reflect the message?If Americans wish to truly understand world opinion, they need to delve into the realm of the foreign press. Images move emotions, while the written word shapes the prejudices. Current events...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) will meet Palestinian President Yasser Arafat (news - web sites) in the West Bank Sunday following a statement by the Palestinian leader condemning terrorism, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in a statement on Saturday. "Secretary Powell will meet with Chairman Arafat tomorrow (Sunday, April 14) in Ramallah," Boucher said. "The statement issued earlier by Chairman Arafat and the Palestinian leadership contains a number of interesting and positive elements."

U.S. and Arafat: Telling it like it isn't Posted: April 13, 20021:00 a.m. Eastern © 2002 WorldNetDaily.com In the past few weeks, we have seen the escalation in the Middle East of Israeli retaliation. With Arafat contained to the second-story in his office building, Israel is beefing up action against Arafat's groups and starting their own Operation Enduring Freedom – with much criticism from U.S. coalition forces. Additionally, the United States is playing moderator now more than ever, attempting to create stability by sending Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Mideast. Powell called for an end to violence and an end...

From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine by Joan Peters, JKAP Publications, Chicago, IL review by John Gellner, editor of Canadian Defence Quarterly This book, scholarly in the truest sense of the word, is a study of the basic reasons for the Arab-Jewish feud - no fewer than 189 pages are taken up by appendices, notes, bibliography and index. Together with 412 pages of text, they amply support the author's thesis that the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who had lived in what became Israel in 1948 is not the reason for the conflict...

Why Are They Committing Suicide? By Moshe Feiglin When I walked between the pools of blood in the Karnei Shomron shopping mall a few weeks ago I couldn't understand why the terrorist committed suicide. After all, there were no armed guards there, and he could have simply left a bag full of explosives, and returned home safely. This has happened in all kinds of other incidents. These scums are attacking old people, women, and children, but are not attempting to penetrate the commandbunker of the State of Israel, where perhaps they would need real courage, where it would be...

Nothing is to be preferred before justice.   - Socrates The Republican Party has its most success at the polls when it advocates the traditional values of conservative principles. But support has been soft at best, with the adoption of the New World Order value ethos. The heritage of past purpose and political will has been substituted with a jelly spine backbone, seeking popular appeal. So what is the solution to resurrect the mantel of design that seeks to serve the interests of the American people?Well, the GOP needs to take its lead from the most successful strategy that the...

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF PAPER by MALCOLM GLADWELL Looking for method in the mess. Issue of 2002-03-25Posted 2002-03-18 On a busy day, a typical air-traffic controller might be in charge of as many as twenty-five airplanes at a time—some ascending, some descending, each at a different altitude and travelling at a different speed. He peers at a large, monochromatic radar console, tracking the movement of tiny tagged blips moving slowly across the screen. He talks to the sector where a plane is headed, and talks to the pilots passing through his sector, and talks to the other controllers about...

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, Peter Collier and I assembled a group of disillusioned New Leftists for a conference in Washington we called "Second Thoughts." These second thoughts had been provoked by many factors and events, but most instrumental among them was the wholesale slaughter of innocents in "liberated" Cambodia and Vietnam by political forces that had been supported by the left. It was not the first sprouting of such radical second thoughts. Generations of leftists before us had been repelled by the similar crimes of Stalin and Mao and Castro, and had shed their progressive worldviews for more sober and conservative...

An Apology to Hussein IbishFrontPageMagazine.com | March 18, 2002 ON MARCH 15 we posted a feature called “A Disturbing Letter From A Saudi.” Among other claims, the writer of this letter alleged, “I was with Hussein Ibish and Hamid Faraoui [on 9/11], watching them cheering and singing, then denouncing the attacks on TV later that day.” I am now persuaded that the particular claim about Hussein Ibish is false, at least insofar as the Hussein Ibish who is the Communications Director of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee is concerned. I say this because on March 16, I received an apologetic...

Winding Down We have several books of the month. First, Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong, a masterly analysis of Islamic culture, which does a pretty good job of explaining how things in the Middle East have come to this pass. Lewis is generally considered to be the antidote to the pernicious "postmodernist" Edward Said — between Lewis's new book and David Pryce-Jones's The Closed Circle, one can get a pretty good idea of where we've been in regards to the Arab world, and possibly some insight into where things may be going.

Prologue        Socialism was the faith in which I was raised. It was my father's faith and his father's before him.        My grandfather, Avraham Chaim Muravchik, grew up in a small shtetl outside Kiev in what was then the Russian empire. Born in 1878, he received the orthodox religious training of every boy of his time and place. But like many others of that generation he turned away from formal Judaism by the time he entered high school, or gymnasium, as it was called.        It was in the radical student circle at gymnasium that he met my grandmother, Rachel. She...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For nearly two decades, National Geographic (news - web sites) has been flooded with requests for information about a beautiful Afghan teen-ager with piercing green eyes whose cover image became one of its most recognized photographs. Photos Reuters Photo But the woman's identity has only just been uncovered after the National Geographic photographer who first saw her in a refugee camp in Pakistan 18 years ago, finally tracked down the woman in a remote village south of Jalalabad, Afghanistan (news - web sites). quot;Every time I went there (to Afghanistan or Pakistan), I asked about her, but...

The only method by which people can be supported is out of the effort of those who are earning their own way. We must not create a deterrent to hard work. nbsp; nbsp;- Robert A. Taft We have spent the better part of the last half century forgetting the reasons that Republicans are part of an American First tradition and the real meaning of the GOP. Just what are the principles and policies that separate the platform of Republicans from that of the Socialists that wear the Democratic label? Sorry to say, not much of a difference presently exists;...

SITE INDEX TV Schedule | LIVE TV/Radio | Community | Classroom | Shop C-SPAN | About C-SPAN StatementSeptember 11 Anniversary Ceremony White House, South Lawn Washington, District of Columbia (United States) ID: 169063 - 03/11/2002 - 1:00 - No Sale Bush, George W., President, United States (2001-) President Bush outlines the war on terrorism during a ceremony marking the six-month anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

Paul Johnson, 03.18.02 PUTTING TOO MANY EGGS IN THE CHINA BASKET Enron may be getting the headlines--it's a juicy tale-- but it's of no real significance to the American economy, which is beginning to revive. Of much greater geopolitical importance is Xuebing's getting sacked by the China Construction Bank. Mr. Wang was the former president of the Bank of China and a big shot in the quot;Chinese economic miracle.quot; China appears to have made this move at the behest of U.S. regulatory authorities investigating the bank's American activities for loan fraud. The world's biggest mystery today is the Chinese economy....

In My Opinion Enron's Off-The-Book Casualty: Freedom Gary Hull, 03.06.02, 2:45 PM ET Suppose the U.S. government treated minorities as it has businessmen since the Enron bankruptcy. A minority is caught robbing a store; to prevent this from happening in the future, politicians propose the creation of a new government bureaucracy: the Federal Minorities Agency. The FMA will control when, where and with whom minorities can shop--and will demand that they pass a battery of psychological tests to ensure that they are not potential shoplifters. The new regulations are necessary, claims the government, on the grounds that since one minority ...