Free Republic

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Miss California Carrie Prejean received a swell of support at the Gospel Music Association's Dove Awards with the crowd giving her a standing ovation when she came out to introduce a performance. Prejean has drawn attention for her comments against gay marriage at the Miss USA pageant, where she was first runner-up last weekend. In response to a question from celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, the beauty queen said she believes marriage should be between a man and a woman. During the awards show Thursday, she introduced a performance by Mercy Me of their hit "I Can Only...

SHOOTING TAKES HIT: Public shooting opportunities in national forests are disappearing, and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill Ritter proposes to do something about it. Ritter says several previously isolated forest shooting ranges have been shut down because of homebuilding nearby, and shooters have been forced into dispersed shooting activities. Now the Forest Service is considering closing down some dispersed-shooting areas because of development and increased non-shooting recreational use. Ritter says he would make recreational shooting improvements a priority if he is elected governor. He wants Colorado to take the lead in establishing more shooting ranges, beginning with a pilot program he...

amazing video:Dove Video - Campaign for Real Beauty

Cynthia McKinney’s reaction to the obvious and blatant favoritism enjoyed by Patrick Kennedy is likely to be something to savor. She is already on the record about the indignities she received at the hand of a white cop. But now she sees that for the white boy, supervisors stepped in, relieving the officers at the scene and driving the staggering Kennedy home. She faces potential legal jeopardy, and now a rich white boy walks away without so much as a breathalyzer test from circumstances that would ordinarily demand a drunk driving investigation. At least one cop reportedly says he smelled...

WASHINGTON -U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy insisted yesterday that he had consumed “no alcohol” before he slammed his Mustang convertible into a concrete barrier near his office, but a hostess at a popular Capitol Hill watering hole told the Herald she saw him drinking in the hours before the crash. “He was drinking a little bit,” said the woman, who works at the Hawk & Dove and would not give her name. Leaving his office late last night, Kennedy refused to say whether he’d been to the Hawk & Dove the night before. Earlier in the evening, Kennedy issued a statement...

In foreign affairs, a "dove" refers to someone who opposes war and a "hawk" refers to someone who supports war.

by Fr. Paul Scalia Other Articles by Fr. Paul Scalia Heaven, a Dove, a Voice 01/08/05 At your Baptism, did you notice the heavens opening? The Spirit of God descending like a dove? Perhaps a voice coming from the heavens? No, you probably did not. Even if you were old enough to know what was going on, you would not have noticed these things. Because they happened spiritually. But they happened nonetheless. At our Lord’s Baptism these things happened visibly and audibly: "The heavens were opened for Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming...

So we have studied Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism in Europe. What was happening in America? At first, as we saw earlier, the American Ash Can School thought they were the most modern school. They sponsored the Armory Show in 1913 and brought over the Europeans from Cezanne through Kandinsky, and as a result the American works looked a bit backward. Robert Henri Snow in NY 1902 and Kandinsky Improvisation 28 1912 But some Americans were intrigued by the Armory show, and a few knew about European modernism before 1913. In fact, the famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz pioneered more than just...

The conventional Hollywood wisdom has long held that religious and family-friendly movies are not high earners. But this wisdom is beginning to wane in the face of recent theater trends. The five top-grossing movies so far this year are rated either PG or PG-13, and all of them have surpassed the $100 million mark. Two of last year’s top 5, Shrek 2 and The Incredibles, were PG-rated animated films. This kind of success is causing executives to rethink their standard fare. Family-friendly movies, especially animated ones, have brought people to the movies who haven’t gone in years. And they will...

This is a prayer thread for Terri Schiavo. Please let it remain a peaceful place and not an arena for arguments. God has released her from her earthly bonds. She is at His side. Please express blessings and sentiments of sympathy for her family, and wishes for Terri's peace in heaven.

Suddenly, the presidential race has devolved into a debate about young John Kerry's actions in Vietnam. First, Kerry made his military service the central theme of the Democratic convention. Now some anti-Kerry veterans have issued a book and television ads that impugn that record. Kerry's strategy was not hard to understand. In normal times, the Democrats' strong suit — domestic policy — counterbalances the GOP's advantage on national security issues. With the country at war, however, national security trumps. So Kerry promised a "more effective war on terror," and he labored to make the case, as columnist E.J. Dionne put...

The VP candidate once called Saddam Hussein's Iraq an "imminent threat." What will he say tonight?According to previews of John Edwards's much-anticipated speech tonight, the junior senator from North Carolina will attempt to establish his foreign policy bona fides. At the center of the address, naturally, will be Iraq. The issue will be a tricky one for Edwards. Along with Senator Joseph Lieberman, Edwards was an unapologetic defender of the war throughout the Democratic primaries, even as John Kerry began his efforts to distance himself from his support of the war-efforts that culminated in Kerry's embrace of the "antiwar" label....

An editorial in the New York Sun details the dismal national security legacy of the Clinton Administration as Sandy Berger misses four separate opportunities to get Bin Ladin... opportunities for all the world to read about in the 9/11 Commission’s Report.Excerpt from editorial: "... his background as a trade lawyer and his dovish, legalistic and political instincts made him, in retrospect,the tragically wrong man to be making national security decisions for America in wartime. That Senator Kerry had Mr. Berger as a campaign foreign policy adviser even before the archives scandal is enough to raise doubts about the senator’s judgment."CLICK...

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In his interview with the Monitor, Howard Dean repeated his contention that Saddam Hussein's recent capture had made America no safer. "My opponents spent the week criticizing me for that, which I think was to their detriment" since the federal government had just increased the terror alert level to orange, indicating an elevated risk of an attack. But he said two other recent events had benefited national security: the capture of a ship loaded with drugs in the Persian Gulf - "which is almost certainly how al-Qaida is partly financing their operations," Dean said - and Libya's decision to declare...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin Powell stepped up the Bush administration's attack on the Iranian government on Monday, saying that "hidebound clerics" had dragged Islam into "the political gutter." Powell, following up on President Bush's speech on democracy in the Middle East last Thursday, mixed criticism of Iran with encouragement for conservative Arab monarchies that cooperate with U.S. policy. "The Iranian people want their freedom back," he told an audience at his alma mater, City College of New York. "They do not want to banish Islam from their lives. Far from it. They want to be free...

There is scarcely a calamity, an injustice, or an act of outright barbarism occurring anywhere on earth, that Leftists cannot somehow trace to the doorstep of the United States. In their view, all attacks against our country are understandable, if not laudable, retaliatory strikes against an aggressive, arrogant nation that has too often tried to bully the rest of the world. Conversely, any American response – be it with military or law-enforcement measures – is seen as a form of aggression that will only provoke further anti-Americanism and thereby perpetuate "the cycle of violence." A leading proponent of this view...

What’s worse than a hawk? A dove Mick Hume says that the arguments against a war with Iraq are even more pathetic than those for it Exactly which planet is Donald Rumsfeld on? The question occurred to me after I was sent a tape of a little-publicised broadcast from the American radio station NPR News. It records the US defense secretary replying to questions on Iraq by hypothesising about a pre-emptive strike against ...the Man in the Moon. ‘And of course,’ says Washington’s military hard man, ‘the advantage of not acting against the Moon would be that no one could...