Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) — A House committee voted Wednesday to eliminate some $50 million that President Barack Obama requested for the U.N. organization that helps women and children in developing countries with reproductive health and family planning, a reflection of growing Republican anger with both the world body and its work in China. The GOP-led Foreign Affairs Committee approved legislation that targets the yearly U.S. contribution to the U.N. Population Fund, an organization the United States helped found in the late 1960s. Republican administrations typically have withheld funds from the group, but Obama restored the money. The party-line vote was 23-17....

Blurring the line between humor and cynicism, Groucho Marx famously declared: "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them ... well, I have others." Indeed, Groucho's quip reflects what many Americans have come to expect from their political leaders. But even when America's leaders try to act according to principle, decades of political spin and "Washington-speak" make doing so difficult. Consider the problem facing House Republicans. With the federal government bumping up against its debt limit, Republicans are demanding that any increase in the limit be paired with equally large spending cuts. As a matter of principle, they...

How’s that for a headline? You’d think we’d know something about geopolitics, tossing around the twenty dollar word like that. But we don’t -- not too much, anyway. We do, however, know more than we’d like to about half-heartedness, as most probably do. And one doesn’t need any specialized education to know what sort of trouble half-heartedness gets everyone into. A little experience in the business of everyday life is sufficient to impart the lessons. We all know what half-heartedness is – we’ve seen it in ourselves and in those we’d relied upon for something at one time or another....

In the past, I've repeatedly written about the various epithets the PC Mainstream Media utilizes to avoid pointing to the real identity of the participants in riots, murders, and hijackings. "Somali Pirates" is one of my fave Al-Qaeda terrorist euphemisms, for example. But, now, there's the 2007 resurgence of the annual Muslim riots in France. Muslims torch and maim and slash and murder. And yet, no-one--at least no-one working for FOXNEWSMSNBCCNNABCNBCCBSAPREUTERSWASHPOSTNYTIMESDETROITNEWSISTAN--can bring themselves to call a spade a spade--a barbaric Muslim a Muslim. Paris Riot 2007 Islamic Crescent Paris Riots 2007 As I've written, FOX News once did this, but...

anchor baby: a derogatory term for a child born in the United States to an immigrant. Since these children automatically qualify as American citizens, they can later act as a sponsor for other family members. frequent flier: a repeat offender; a recidivist; generally, a person who regularly or habitually uses or takes advantage of a service. From the airline industry term but now widely used in hospitals and by police officials. Fox lips: lips colored and lined with makeup to seem more prominent, said of female anchors on Fox News. God wink: something taken as evidence that a higher power...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The government's annual accounting of hunger in the United States reported no hunger in its last outing. Instead, it found "food insecurity." Likewise, no one is even considering retreating from Iraq. "Redeploying" the heck out of there is, however, an option. In Washington, words are a moving target that conceal at least as much as they reveal. Doublespeak runs through the discourse on Iraq, terrorism and domestic matters to a point where it's hard to tell what is going on. The libertarian Cato Institute recently took on the rising tide of fuzzy words in the fight against...

ANNAPOLIS -- Democratic lawmakers have changed the word "embryo" to "material" in a bill for embryonic stem-cell research to secure the votes of Catholic senators who did not want to be viewed as supporting abortion-related legislation. "They didn't want to vote for a bill that had the language embryo in it," said Sen. Paula C. Hollinger, Baltimore County Democrat and the bill's sponsor. The bill, which appears certain of passage as early as today, calls for the state to spend $10 million for research on cells extracted from human embryos to create treatments for degenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's disease....

White people, especially white males, were depicted as something close to the plague, to be avoided or at least isolated. That is why the promotion of Philip Bennett, "who is white," to the position of the paper's number 2 editor was so controversial. But listen to this: National reporter Darryl Fears, "who is black," was quoted as saying that Bennett's promotion over Eugene Robinson, "who is black," confirmed his "worst suspicions" about "the ability of African Americans and other minorities to rise to the highest level of the best papers in the world."

Do the media give aid and comfort to terrorists by giving their violence maximum exposure and impact at times while sanitizing the perpetrators and tainting their victims at others? It is standard procedure for many media outlets to describe the perpetrators of terrorist acts - the premeditated slaughter of civilians - with a range of euphemisms, "militants" being the most common. Thus, The New York Times can headline a report on the killing of a hostage as "Iraq Militants Said to Behead a Truck Driver From Bulgaria." Similarly, terrorists killed in a military strike can be described in another as...

"I know it when I see it" was the famous response by a U.S. Supreme Court justice to the vexed problem of defining pornography. Terrorism may be no less difficult to define, but the wanton killing of schoolchildren, of mourners at a funeral, or workers at their desks in skyscrapers surely fits the know-it-when-I-see-it definition.The press, however, generally shies away from the word terrorist, preferring euphemisms. Take the assault that led to the deaths of some 400 people, many of them children, in Beslan, Russia, on September 3. Journalists have delved deep into their thesauruses, finding at least twenty euphemisms...