Free Republic

A seventh-grader organizes a protest outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Washington. A 15-year-old girl attempts to ban circus elephants in Denver. A rash of adolescent-driven, animal-rights-related vandalism hits California. A popular software company promotes a video game about "animal liberation" activists who destroy medical research labs, and in a new game “Clubby the Seal” takes revenge by collecting human skin hides. Is there any doubt that the animal rights movement is targeting your kids? In a newly updated report, "Your Kids, PETA's Pawns," the Center for Consumer Freedom explores how one group, the $31 million People for the Ethical...

Teachers’ unions are pro-choice on abortion, but not on education. They use their enormous political capital with the Democrat Party to block voucher initiatives in whatever state or municipality proposes them, including in California. Consequently, many parents home-school their children at their own expense, even though they still have to pay local property taxes which are spent mostly on public schools their children do not attend. Right now, about 166,000 California children are taught at home. But last week, an California appeals court declared that all children must be taught by a “credentialed” teacher. It means that most home-schooling parents...

Nobel Prize-winning German writer Guenter Grass, author of the great anti-Nazi novel The Tin Drum, has admitted serving in the Waffen-SS. He told a German newspaper he had been recruited at the age of 17 into an SS tank division and served in Dresden. Previously it was only known he had served as a soldier and was wounded and taken prisoner by US forces. Speaking before the publication of his war memoirs, he said his silence over the years had "weighed" upon him. "My silence over all these years is one of the reasons I wrote this book [Peeling Onions],"...

DANVERS — The brown SUV rolled to a stop in a Holten Street parking lot as two 17-year-old high school students in the back seat emptied their pockets of everything except their cell phones and a $20 bill. They wouldn't need much more to buy a pack of cigarettes in Danvers. The girl, wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, stepped into the pouring rain, approached a sales clerk at the Mobil gas station and returned moments later with a pack of Marlboro Reds. The two teens work undercover for the North Shore Tobacco Control Program, the...

Watching the ball drop, twirling a noisemaker, kissing your sweetheart, and making a resolution that rarely comes to pass -- everyone looks forward to the memory of a new year. But one group will be ringing in the New Year a little differently…through a children’s jihad retreat, with a guest speaker who exalts terrorists and another who is linked to al-Qaeda. The majority of Islamic organizations within the United States have, at one time or another, been cited for their connections to terrorism, whether by support of terror groups or through actual terrorist activity carried out by its members. Two...

You’d probably think there’s no connection between the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, “South Pacific” in 1949 and the murdering Muslims of the 21st century. If you thought that, you’d be wrong. That musical explains these events. The most obscure song from that musical is, “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught.” It’s low popularity is probably due to its dark subject, the injection of prejudice into the minds of children. Here are two of its verses, which make the point: You've got to be taught to hate and fear You've got to be taught from year to year It's got to...

Arrest made at Coulter speech Student arrested, charged with disorderly conduct after offensive question By Yashoda Sampath Incessant heckling and shouting culminated in an arrest Tuesday night during a speech by Ann Coulter, an extreme right-wing pundit, at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. Shouts became so pervasive during the question-and-answer session that Coulter informed the organizers she would no longer take questions if the hecklers were not silenced. For a time, the shouts were considerably lessened, until the issue of gay marriage was broached. Coulter said she supported the definition of marriage as between a man and a...

SACRAMENTO — Got a neighbor bragging about using the Nevada address of his weekend ski condo to avoid paying California taxes? State tax authorities want you to rat him out. And soon they may be able to make it worth your while. The Franchise Tax Board, California's version of the IRS, is proposing to offer snitches cash rewards for stepping forward. Under the plan, which is part of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed budget, tax officials would give confidential informants as much as 10% of the unpaid taxes collected from their neighbors, bosses, spouses or any other scofflaws they report. It...

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany has been elected as the next pope of the Roman Catholic Church and will take the name Benedict XVI. There are some who may criticize the election of Cardinal Ratzinger, since he joined the Hitler Youth at age 14 as a child growing up in Germany. I think any such criticism is unfounded. How can the decision to join the Hitler Youth corps be the responsibility of a child? The Nazis brilliantly exploited German children with the games and military outfits that most youngsters enjoy. Former New York Times Executive Editor Max Frankel, in the...

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today welcomed the election of German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as the new pope, Benedict XVI. Under his leadership in Germany and Rome, the Catholic Church made important strides in improving Catholic-Jewish relations and atoning for the sin of anti-Semitism. Cardinal Ratzinger has been a leader in this effort and has made important statements in the spirit of sensitivity and reconciliation with the Jewish people. Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National director, issued the following statement: "We welcome the new Papacy of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. From the Jewish perspective, the fact that he comes from Europe is important,...

London's Sunday Times would have us believe that one of the leading contenders for the papacy is a closet Nazi. In if-only-they-knew tones, the newspaper informs readers that German-born Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was a member of the Hitler Youth during World War II and suggests that, because of this, the "panzer cardinal" would be quite a contrast to his predecessor, John Paul II. The article also classifies Ratzinger as a "theological anti-Semite" for believing in Jesus so strongly that – gasp! – he thinks that everyone, even Jews, should accept him as the messiah. To all this we should say,...

Notice: Whoever's posting stories written by Bob wallace please cease and desist at once! I have no idea who this guy is or who is posting his stories, but whoever is doing it, please stop. He's demanding it be stopped or he will call his lawyer. He's also prohibiting me from posting his email message to me (or, you guessed it, he will call his lawyer). So, rather than post his email message, I'm posting this message: Do not post stories written by BOB WALLACE! Thank you. That is all.

As American post-conflict combat deaths in Iraq overtook the wartime number, the administration counseled patience. "The war on terror is a test of our strength. It is a test of our perseverance, our patience, and our will," President Bush told an American Legion convention. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice embellished the message with what former White House speechwriters immediately recognize as a greatest-generation pander. "There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes," she told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 25. "But as some...

Nearly a century has passed since Lord Robert Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts in Great Britain. It has been a century filled with radical ideologies that recruited young men into Hitler Youth and the Communist Party, that populated the American youth cult with hippies and druggies, and that replaced fathers with fanaticisms and mores with MTV. Young men might have annihilated this world had it not been for the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts have always been a great threat to the utopian dreams of the ideologues. In the 1920s, the national secretary of the Young Communist League warned Lord...

A photo of several Grand Junction High School students protesting Colorado's mandatory Pledge of Allegiance law by greeting the Stars and Stripes with a Nazi salute has angered several members of the city's Jewish community who say the action is a form of ethnic intimidation. "This is not an expression of free speech," Aaron Long said in a letter to the high school principal. "Rather it is intimidation and a direct affront to individuals of certain ethnic groups. The behavior must not be tolerated in a public institution." Sophomore Had Stine, 15, said he did not intend to offend Jewish...

Just outside one of Baghdad's prisons, Olga Craig finds a former guard taking boys of the Saddam Youth through their drill. For them the war is far from over. Theia Kalid gazes bleakly at the defaced murals of Saddam Hussein that dominate the walls of the looted and bombed out Baghdad prison where, before the war, he was a guard. He shakes his head in despair as he traces the outline of the former President's face, now bullet riddled and scored with knives. Then, eyes blazing, he points to the two teenage boys who follow deferentially in his wake. "You...

Ban me, but have the courage to accept the truth. This War is wrong. Many innocent Iraqis have died. Many Americans have died. Iraq is in chaos. No food. No water. No power. I don't care if staged events involving a few criminals and looters make the people appear to be happy. Ask the ones who had their lives destroyed by American bombs. There are no WMDs. America will remain in Iraq long enough to: A) plunder its resouces B) ensure a Bush election victory in spite of massive deficits and a terrible economy. THIS WAR IS WRONG.

Reminiscent of the Hitler Youth of World War II, Saddam Hussein has trained an 8,000-strong army of children to face coalition forces in Baghdad. In a report by the New York Daily News, Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution explains the children are considered a junior Fedayeen Saddam – the paramilitary forces Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has dubbed "death squads" for the atrocities they commit. The child army is called Ashbal Saddam, or Saddam's Lion Cubs, according to the report. "Whatever the Fedayeen has been willing to do, you can extrapolate that these children will do the same," Singer...

Mark Wellstone chants 'We will win' during his speech about his late father during a public memorial service Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2002, in Minneapolis for U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, his wife Sheila, daughter Marcia and three staff members who died Oct. 25 in a plane crash in Eveleth, Minn. (AP Photo/Jerry Holt, Pool)