Free Republic

On MSNBC Countdown last night, Mary Carey revealed just what went down at the National Republican Committee Senatorial dinner she attended this week.Carey: I think they can drink just as much. There were some really drunk guys by the end of the night. I was getting (joking) propositions for threesomes with mistresses. I was offered money from oil tycoons!It's pretty exciting, I didn't take any money or do any threesomes, but I was just suprised.I thought everyone would be stuck up and no one was going to like me. Instead, everyone loved me, got drunk and took pictures with me.So...

Leaving the left I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos. I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the...

I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity - Keith Thompson Sunday, May 22, 2005 Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos. I'm leaving the left...

THE MAKING OF A 9/11 REPUBLICAN Many of you were impressed with THE MAKING OF A 9/11 REPUBLICAN. It chronicled the transformation of writer Cinnamon Stillwell, who came from liberal Marin County and had her world changed forever on 9-11. Cinnamon will be my guest tomorrow on Rightalk Radio at 2pm Eastern. It will be a compelling hour of radio. The left is intolerant, not our side. RIGHTALK RADIO

February 24, 2005 The leader of the Lebanese opposition, a sharp critic of Washington foreign policy, says he's changed his view of the U.S. war in Iraq, seeing it now as a catalyst for democratic change across the Arab world. Walid Jumblatt Druze Muslim leader Walid Jumblatt, who is calling for an uprising against Lebanon's Syrian occupiers, is almost sounding like a neoconservative, says Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who interviewed him in Beirut Monday. "It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," Jumblatt told the Post...

But more than anything, it was the left's hypocrisy when it came to the war on terrorism that made me turn rightward after 9/11. I remember, back in my liberal days, being fiercely opposed to the Taliban and its brutal treatment of women. Even then, I felt that Afghanistan should immediately be liberated, as Malcolm X once said in another context, by any means necessary. But when it came time, it turned out that the left was mostly opposed to such liberation, whether of the Afghan people or of the Iraqis (especially if America and a Republican president were at...

Living with European socialism turned this Berkeley girl into a conservative. I became a Marxist out of sheer perversity. Well, perhaps that is unfair to my adolescent self: it was a mixture of conscientiousness and perversity. The official atmosphere in the California high school where I spent my junior and senior years was—hard as it may be to imagine this now—hysterically anti-communist. This was 1961, but the sixties as we know them had not yet begun. The doctrinal orthodoxy of the day was McCarthyism in its final, decaying phase. Accordingly, my senior civics class regularly showed us propaganda films, whose...

An MP who was a founder member of Labour Against the War has quit the group, saying that after last month’s elections in Iraq he now believed Allied troops should remain in the country, it emerged today. Harry Barnes’ defection will be welcomed by the Labour leadership, which fears that many of the party’s traditional supporters will stay at home in the forthcoming General Election because of anger over Iraq. The North-East Derbyshire MP, who is stepping down at the election, accused his former colleagues in the anti-war movement of retailing "simple-minded" claims about the extent of civilian casualties in...

As one of a handful of Bay Area conservative columnists, I'm no stranger to pushing buttons. Indeed, I welcome feedback from readers, whether positive or negative. I find the interplay stimulating, but I am often bemused by the stereotypical assumptions made by my critics on the left. It's not enough to simply disagree with my views; I have to be twisted into a conservative caricature that apparently makes opponents feel superior. They seem not to have considered that it's possible to put forward different approaches to various societal problems and not be the devil incarnate. But in some ways I...

RUSH: Here is Heather in Burbank. Hi, Heather. Welcome to the EIB Network. CALLER: Hi, Rush. I just want to let you know that I am the complete opposite of all those stories. You and my husband have inspired me to do two things. First off, I am a former liberal, daughter of a public schoolteacher, and family of feminazis and I was really laid off so what I've done last year is I converted to being a Republican and voted for Bush, whereas in 2000 I voted for Gore and I just recently started my own business so I'm...

The first step in any successful recovery program, such as Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, is to admit that there is a problem. For a leftist, then, stepping out of denial is the beginning of a journey toward clearer thinking and political sanity. I approach this topic with only a hint of humor, because I myself am a recovered leftist, with over 25 years of sobriety. Was I drunk on left-wing propaganda? Yes, and I became a user at a very tender age – as a child, in fact, in the home of my parents, who schooled me in the...

The question, in its many variations a staple of Manhattan dinner parties, is invariably posed with bitter bewilderment: "How could anyone with a shred of decency call himself a conservative?" Alas, it is a question the book business has done a singularly poor job of answering. While publishers have fattened their bottom lines offering up red meat to true believers, the steady stream of invective from both left ("Liars!") and right ("Traitors!") has served only to widen the nation's yawning ideological divide. This is what makes Michael Medved's provocative memoir, "Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life," so welcome....

As I read the letter you posted today ("One more" February 3) I decided that I, too, must tell you about the difference your writing has made in my life. I hope I'm not too late--I've been thinking about writing to you for over a year, but I always talked myself out of it. Today I find myself compelled to tell you my own humble story. While I was raised in a fairly conservative family, I came of age during the '60s. I met my husband while we were both campaigning for Eugene McCarthy for president. We were married the...

I just watched a fascinating, but all too brief, interview with Rev. Ken Joseph Jr., an Assyrian Christian whose parents escaped Iraq in 1917, and later answered the call to help rebuild Japan. During the process that led up to the war in Iraq, Rev. Joseph was very vocal against the war on his radio program, and participated in demonstrations against it in Japan. He saw it as an unjust war against the people of Iraq, which were after all HIS people. He was so adamant in this position that he in fact became a human shield, in the hopes...

1962 Missal Mass Readings/Propers for the Second Sunday After the Epiphany Colors:  Green   INTROIT  Psalm 65:4 Let all the earth adore Thee, O God, and sing to Thee: let it sing a psalm to Thy Name, O Most High. -- (Ps.65. 1, 2). Shout with joy to God, all the earth, sing ye a psalm to His Name: give glory to His praise. V.: Glory be to the Father . . . -- Let all the earth adore Thee . . .   COLLECT - O almighty and everlasting God, who dost govern all things both in heaven...

Photo by: MARK GUSS Andrew McAdams, a junior at Berkeley Prep, emerges from Spring Bayou with the coveted white cross. "This means everything,'' he said. Tarpon Springs Welcomes Thousands To 99th Epiphany Celebration By ADAM EMERSON aemerson@tampatrib.com Published: Jan 8, 2005 TARPON SPRINGS - Standing outside St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral on Thursday morning, Andrew McAdams III showed no anxiety. He milled around with family and friends, preparing for the dive into Spring Bayou. Thousands of onlookers stood a quarter-mile away, waiting for McAdams and 42 other teenage boys to dive for the coveted white cross of the Epiphany. Cheering...

The Feast of the Epiphany occurs in the calendar of Tradition as it has from time immemorial, January 6. This is really the day on which we should be giving gifts to our family members and friends. The Church has long taught us that the Feast of the Epiphany symbolizes three distinct manifestations of Our Lord to the world. The first centers around the homage paid the Christ-child by the wise men from the East, the Magi. Our Lord's manifestation to them was His unfolding to the Gentile world, the world of unbelievers, that He was the true light of...

EPIPHANY - THREE KINGS Lovers of carols and Christmas parties know that this season has 12 days, packed with golden rings, calling birds and various kinds of gentry, musicians and domestic workers. December 25 is Christmas - and 25 minus 12 does equal 13. Do the math and you will see why shopping malls, newspapers, television networks, and other cultural fortresses annually deliver some kind of "Twelve Days of Christmas" blitz, beginning on December 13. Problem is that for centuries church calendars in the East and the West have agreed that there are twelve days of Christmas and they begin...

             Rev. Fr. Leonard Goffine'sThe Church's Year VIGIL OF EPIPHANY [The INTROIT, the COLLECT, and the EPISTLE, are the same as on the Sunday after Christmas.]GOSPEL (Mt. 2:19-23). At that time: when Herod was dead, be­hold an Angel of the Lord appeared in sleep to Joseph in Egypt, saying: Arise, and take the child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel: for they are dead that sought the life of the child. Who arose, and took the child and his mother, and came into the land of Israel. But hearing that Archelaus reigned in Judea in...

The feast of the Epiphany, the adoration of Our Lord in Bethlehem by the “Magi from the East” (Matthew 7), shows us the value of representation and symbolism in the plans of Divine Providence. The Three Kings represented the Gentile peoples who would come to worship Christ. It is generally said that the Three Magi came to adore Our Lord as representatives of the Gentile peoples. It is also common to say that they were magi because they represented the ancient wisdom of the East paying homage to Our Lord Jesus Christ. Magus, a word derived from the Greek, means...