Free Republic

SMITH SAYS: ROMAN CATHOLICS.....TAKE BACK YOUR CHURCH The LA Times, west coast media puppet of the ACLU, carried, on 05/26/06, a news item which should be a clarion call as loud as Tom Paine’s "Common Sense." An RC church in Huntington Beach, Orange County (that's the wealthy county that went bankrupt rather than pays its bills) told a parishioner who knelt during part of the Mass (the Agnes Dei to be specific), he had committed a MORTAL SIN, and would no longer be welcome in the Church and could not receive Communion or other sacraments. The church in question is...

Under pressure from the Hill, the Securities and Exchange Commission is pushing the adoption of the so-called "Katie Couric" clause. The SEC wants publicly traded companies to give shareholders more information about multimillion-dollar salaries of their executives and employees. The name comes from the "Today Show” co-host, who is leaving NBC at the end of May to join CBS as anchor and managing editor of the to be retitled "CBS Evening News With Katie Couric. " It’s been widely reported that Couric is to receive $15 million over five years. The SEC proposal – primarily aimed at requiring the disclosure...

SMITH SAYS- The latest bogus debate between our Republican and Democratic leaders is over the supposed Freedom to Phone. This is not a phone debate, it’s a phony one. There is no phone privacy right written into our Constitution or any where else for that matter. And, more to the point, thanks to the wonders of electronics, it could never be. Simply stated, the Founding Fathers lacked access to a cell, satellite or any other derivative of Mr. Bell’s miraculous invention. Hence, they had no reason to incorporate Freedom to Phone in the Bill of Rights, or any other of...

In the letter, U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, the 83-year-old Republican, who left office in 2003 after five terms, worries that the former president has aspirations to lead the U.N. after Kofi Annan retires next year. ``I'm sure you might agree that putting a left-wing, undisciplined and ethically challenged former President of the United States into a position of such power would be a tragic mistake,'' Helms writes. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the letter Tuesday. It contains a petition that asks President Bush to ``rebuke all efforts by Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and every other liberal in Congress...

January 26, 2005 Johnny Carson's Long Symbiosis With New York By SAM ROBERTS If Jack Paar transformed his television studio into Everyman's living room, then his successor, Johnny Carson, transported viewers from their beds or couches to a hip New York nightclub where, with him as their unaffected host, they could be edified but feel perfectly at home even in their jammies. For the first decade of his 30-year reign at the "Tonight" show, Mr. Carson broadcast regularly from Rockefeller Center, which seemed only fitting since the New York he conveyed to the rest of the country was the swinging,...

TONY EASTLEY: With their numbers in radical decline, Australia's Catholic Priests are urging the Vatican to overturn its ban on married clergy. The National Council of Priests has written to Rome urging it to re-consider the rules on celibacy. There's concern that sex and marriage have become an obstacle to recruitment. Priests argue that their dwindling ranks could be boosted if they were allowed to marry and have families. Presently, only Priests who convert to Catholicism from other churches are allowed to be married. The parish priest of Melbourne St Simon's Church, Father Martin Dixon, sits on the executive committee...

Will The New York Times web site follow the competing Wall Street Journal behind the cyber wall? Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. suggests as much in an interview with Business Week. He says that the company would consider making nytimes.com a pay site, forcing readers to pay for content that they now receive for free after registration. Sulzberger did not give a time frame for the change or commit to it for certain, telling the magazine, “It gets to the issue of how comfortable are we training a generation of readers to get quality information for free. That is troubling.”...

Such a system exists only in the Pacific Ocean. A magnitude 9.0 earthquake in the Indian Ocean on Dec. 26 created the tsunami that devastated parts of southern Asia. "The death and destruction caused by the South Asian tsunami has exposed a glaring gap in our high-tech age of global connectedness," Lieberman said. "And that is the absence of a worldwide tsunami detection and warning system that existing technology can provide us at a relatively low cost." Lieberman's bill calls for expanding the Pacific system and adding similar ones in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, the Gulf of Mexico and...

Rep. John Linder, R-Ga., has authored H.R. 25 "To promote freedom, fairness and economic opportunity by repealing the income tax and other taxes, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, and enacting a national sales tax to be administered primarily by the States." Before we look at whether a national sales tax is a good idea, how about a little Economics 101 just to convince you that government spending, not government taxation, is the true measure of governmental impact on our lives? Keeping the numbers small, suppose the annual value of what Americans produce, our gross domestic product, is $100. If government...

US Treasury Secretary John Snow said all options remained open for a bipartisan panel that will examine potentially far-reaching reforms to the American tax code. "The president will ask the panel and ask me to give him the very best thinking across the board on how to produce broad-based reform of the tax system. So everything is on the table," Snow said. The panel, which President George W. Bush has yet to appoint, will make its recommendations as soon as possible in 2005, and proposals could go to lawmakers before the end of next year, Snow told the "Fox News...

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's prickly self-confidence and faith in the moral imperative of American leadership have earned him detractors around the globe - while also making him one of President Bush's closest advisers on national security. This may also explain why the scrappiest cabinet member has survived one flap after another: He embodies many core Bush administration values. "Rumsfeld has been pivotal to this administration," says Loren Thompson, a defense expert here. "The president agrees with most of what Rumsfeld believes about the world, and he's much more dependent on Rumsfeld for advice" than on other cabinet members. Yet with...

The directors of Fannie Mae, the big mortgage finance company, will meet Sunday to consider the fate of two senior executives who signed off on financial statements that violated accounting rules, people close to the company said Friday. The two executives, Franklin D. Raines, the chairman and chief executive, and J. Timothy Howard, the chief financial officer, certified financial statements that the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday ordered to be restated because of significant violations in accounting rules over their treatment of derivatives and prepaid loans. Fannie Mae said in November that a restatement would force it to recognize...

Gov. Jeb Bush, a devout Catholic, credited the Virgin of Guadaloupe with interceding on his brother George's behalf during the 2000 presidential election. TALLAHASSEE - Exactly 469 years after the Virgin of Guadalupe was said to have appeared in Mexico, Gov. Jeb Bush was marveling at another act of higher intervention: The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to make his brother president. That happened four years ago. Monday, Bush, a devout Catholic who met his wife in Mexico, recalled the Dec. 12 manifestation date when a body of unelected officials -- Florida's presidential electors -- certified his brother's recent win by...

As Notre Dame continued to search for a football coach yesterday, the former agent for the fired coach Tyrone Willingham applauded the criticism of the firing by the university's president, the Rev. Edward A. Malloy. The former agent, Ray Anderson, who is now an executive with the Atlanta Falcons, said yesterday that among Notre Dame's administrators, Malloy and the athletic director Kevin White, who also opposed Willingham's firing, knew the coach the best. Malloy, who will step down as president July 1, made his comments Wednesday at a sports forum in New York. "In my 18 years, there have been...

IF Democrats want to run around like fools trying to persuade voters in red America that they are kissing cousins to Billy Graham, Minnie Pearl and Li'l Abner, that's their problem. Pandering, after all, is what politicians do, especially politicians as desperate as the Democrats. But when TV news organizations start repositioning themselves to pander to Nascar dads and "moral values" voters, it's a problem for everyone. There's a war on. TV remains by far the most prevalent source of news for Americans. We need honest information to help us navigate, not bunkum skewed to flatter one segment of the...

Mr. Schaffer, 57, is trying to abolish yet another blind spot. In short, he has devised a way to make home TV reception portable - with high-quality pictures to be watched, and channels to be changed, from anywhere in the world that the Internet can reach. So far, he has put his PC-based innovation into the hands of a few dozen others willing to pay several thousand dollars. But he aims to reduce the price to less than $1,000 within a year. Mr. Schaffer at a desk in the apartment in New York had spread before him computer monitors. On...

A South Korean woman paralyzed for 20 years is walking again after scientists say they repaired her damaged spine using stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood. US researcher holds a box containing vials of human embryonic stem cell cultures. A South Korean woman paralyzed for 20 years is walking again after scientists say they repaired her damaged spine using stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood. [AFP/file] US researcher holds a box containing vials of human embryonic stem cell cultures. A South Korean woman paralyzed for 20 years is walking again after scientists say they repaired her damaged spine...

OH, the poor, suffering little children. If we are to believe the outcry of the past two weeks, America's youth have been defiled en masse - again. This time the dirty deed was done by the actress Nicollette Sheridan, who dropped her towel in the cheesy promotional spot for the runaway hit "Desperate Housewives" that kicked off "Monday Night Football" on ABC. "I wonder if Walt Disney would be proud," said Michael Powell, the Federal Communications Commission chairman who increasingly fashions himself a commissar of all things cultural, from nipple rings to "Son of Flubber." It's beginning to look a...

LONDON The dollar went for a see-saw ride Friday, plunging after a comment from a Chinese policy maker appeared to undermine already fragile market sentiment toward the U.S. currency, but rebounding after the official retracted the remark. The dollar, which has been falling against the yen for two months, and for much longer against the euro, went into a steeper skid after reports that Yu Yongding, a Chinese central bank official, had confirmed one of the biggest fear in the currency market: that China would slow its purchases of U.S. Treasury securities, which have kept the dollar from falling even...

Beijing -- The brand names in neon lights in Beijing's swanky Wangfujing shopping district may mean little to Western shoppers now, but not for long. The anonymous "Made in China" label is fast giving way to a new generation of distinctively designed, manufactured and marketed "Made by China" brands that are on the verge of exploding into global markets -- including the United States. Chinese brand-name products poised to enter U.S. markets include Lenovo Computers -- the world's third-largest desktop PC maker -- and Changhong, China's largest consumer electronics manufacturer. Also on their way, according to a company spokesperson, are...