Free Republic

Pete Seeger sings songs of peace, hope and the working class. Bruce Springsteen's idea to reinterpret the Seeger songbook with broad strokes of street jazz and gospel is a noble thought. Unfortunately, Springsteen's Tuesday night "Seeger Sessions" concert was outsourced to the First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre in Tinley Park. Everything that was so right about the music was so wrong for the venue. Springsteen and his raucous 17-piece band failed to even fill the pavilion. Roughly 5,500 fans showed up, and the $92 ticket price knocked out the working-class audience that Springsteen and Seeger have championed. This is First Midwest...

No politician in America has a darker history with the waters off Martha's Vineyard than Senator Ted Kennedy. The Chappaquiddick Kid has been leading a three-year old battle to stop a windmill energy farm. A Boston company proposed building 130 wind turbines over a 24 square mile area off the Massachusetts coast. The wind turbines would provide three-quarters of Cape Cod's energy needs and nearly two percent for all of New England instead of relying on coal burning power plants. Greenpeace supported the idea. Yet big-time environmental liberals, the Chappaquiddick Kid, Robert Kennedy, Jr. and the befuddled Walter Cronkite oppose...

RELATED NEWS: Cardinal Rivera calls border wall an “error” Mexican cardinal criticized xenophobic attitude of US against immigrants Irish Church celebrates contribution of immigrants Arizona bishops release dramatic letter on immigration Archbishop Naumann: Scripture exhorts faithful to welcome the migrant, alienKansas City, Feb. 03, 2006 (CNA) - In his latest column, Kansas City, Kansas Archbishop Joseph Naumann weighed in on the volatile national immigration debate, saying that Scripture exhorts faithful to welcome the stranger and the alien, not as an option--but as a responsibility.The Archbishop wrote in regard to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishop’s Justice for Immigrants Campaign...

In trying to make sense of the Oscar nominations, it always helps to remember one thing: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences likes movies that are socially liberal but artistically conservative. And this has been the case from the beginning. So Terrence Malick ("The New World") shouldn't feel bad today, any more than King Vidor ("The Crowd") or Charlie Chaplin ("City Lights") or Spike Lee ("Do the Right Thing") should have in their respective years. If you want to be nominated for best picture, don't make the most artistically adventurous film of the year and don't push the...

A too-close-to-call federal election campaign in Canada has spurred the nation’s beleaguered Liberal leader to try and cling to power by attacking the nation’s oldest ally and largest trading partner. That Canada sells 83% of its world exports to the United States and some 50% of all Canadian jobs depend either directly or indirectly on those exports seems irrelevant right now. It’s a bizarre world Up North these days. Prime Minister Paul Martin is in the fight of his political life against Conservative leader Stephen Harper and that’s obviously why he’s been trying to whip up anti-American fervor in the...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Sunday, December 18, 2005 PRESS CONTACT: Jasmyne Cannick (Local Media) (323) 839-0216 jasmynecannick@hotmail.com LaNiece Jones (Int’l and Nat’l Media) (510) 568-5899 lajpr@aol.com Viewing to Take Place on Monday, Memorial Service Slated for Tuesday LOS ANGELES - There will be a public viewing of Stanley Tookie Williams on Monday, December 19, 2005 from 3 p.m. until 9 p.m. at the House of Winston Mortuary located at 9501 South Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles. The memorial service for peacemaker Stanley Tookie Williams will take place Tuesday, December 20, 2005 at 12 noon. The service will take place at Bethel...

Into the storm -- no pun intended -- that is Katrina and Rita's wake, comes no less an expert than Barbra Streisand. In an interview with ABC's Dianne Sawyer to promote her upcoming CD with Barry Gibb, she veered off course and declared a "global warming emergency". Maybe the waves are getting too close to her seaside estate, not sure. "For the United States not to be part of the Kyoto treaty is unforgivable" said the singer, ignoring for the moment that this was a pretty lopsided (i.e., 95-0) vote in the US Senate, including many recipients of her largess...

Even for Greenpeace, a group known for turning high-seas drama into political statement, the foray into the Nantucket Sound wind farm debate has played like perfect theater. Take, for instance, the picture-postcard morning of Aug. 17, when a pair of Greenpeace motorboats surrounded a schooner crammed with wind farm opponents, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It was a made-for-TV face-off that, indeed, was reported on the national news that night. But for Greenpeace, a $360 million organization that spends about $3.3 million each year on U.S. campaigns, ongoing efforts for the Cape Wind project transcend interrupting a Kennedy sail. Today,...

An extraordinary story has emerged involving former Lyndon Johnson aide and now PBS commentator Bill Moyers. The story was told in The Wall Street Journal by retired federal appeals judge Laurence Silberman, who reports that when he was acting attorney general under President Ford a memo written by Moyers to the FBI came to light in the press. The memo, which dated from the 1964 campaign between President Johnson and Barry Goldwater, directed FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover to investigate the Goldwater campaign for evidence of homosexual activity. It came after Johnson aide Walter Jenkins had been arrested in a...

A MUSLIM cleric who has defended suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq is to be allowed into Britain next month for an international conference. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, 79, who has a visa to come to Britian but is banned from entering the United States, has been asked to attend the conference in Manchester. The invitation will be seen as the first test of the Government’s promise after the London bombings to clamp down on hardline Islamic preachers and other extremist clerics. Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, is expected to let Dr Qaradawi enter Britain despite having the power to ban him...

Queen Guitarist Brian May Asks For Reasoning Why Terrorists Hate West Douglas Maher All Headline News Staff Reporter July 12,2005 12:04 PM EST London,UK (AHN)-Brian May,the guitarist for the legendary rock group Queen has made a comment regarding the recent terrorist attacks in London. "I sense there is a mood of quiet resolve among the people I speak to. We are feeling that we must not go any further down the road of escalation...this is old stuff, but I personally feel that in the wake of 9/11 an opportunity was missed...to seek understanding rather than revenge." May told Launch Radio...

Sen. Edward Kennedy will be the Democrat's point man in their all out attack on President Bush's nominee to the high court. Though Kennedy no longer holds the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a role he played from 1979 to 1981, he is the most senior ranking Democrat on the august committee. He is also the most virulent among his Democratic colleagues in his opposition to the Bush administration. The stage has once again been set for him to become the salient force in the looming battle over who will replace a retiring Justice - Sandra Day O'Connor. Kennedy,...

Robert McNamara says he did not realise during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 just how close the US and the Soviet Union came to nuclear war. Forty-three years later, the controversial former US defence secretary is more concerned than ever about the dangers of nuclear weapons. Sitting in his Washington office, the subject of The Fog of War - the Oscar-winning documentary about his views on the Vietnam war - cautions, in a rare interview, that he does not want to talk about Iraq. The 89-year-old Mr McNamara - who served under Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson...

The share of immigrants - legal and illegal - of the Bay State work force has nearly doubled in the past quarter-century, skyrocketing to 17 percent from 9 percent, a new report says. Indeed, the state's total labor force would have shrunk during that period if not for that astonishing influx of immigrants, the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth and Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies found. ``Immigrants have become our key source of labor,'' said MassINC research director Dana Ansel, one of the study's authors. ``To the extent that our economy builds and grows, looking for skilled...

I am old enough to be nostalgic about radio, having grown up when it was a stately medium and we listened to Journeys in Musicland with Professor E.B. "Pop" Gordon teaching us the musical scale, and the guest on The Poetry Corner was Anna Hempstead Branch, who read her sonnet cycle, "Ere the Golden Bowl Is Broken," and the gospel station brought us Gleanings From the Word, with the whispery Reverend Riley trudging patiently through the second chapter of Leviticus, and at night there were Fibber and Molly and Amos and Andy and the Sunset Valley Barn Dance with Pop...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States should remove visa limits to allow more skilled foreign citizens to work at U.S. companies if it wants to remain a leader in technology, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Wednesday. Microsoft (Research) is having a hard time finding skilled workers within the United States, and the lack of H-1B visas for skilled workers is only making the situation worse, Gates said in a panel discussion at the Library of Congress. "The whole idea of the H-1B visa thing is, don't let too many smart people come into the country. The whole thing doesn't make...

Howard Dean, who promised to change the way Democrats speak about the issues, has accused Republicans of being "evil," "corrupt" and "brain dead," attacks that are reminiscent of the angry language he used against the Republican Party in the 2004 campaign. The fiery former presidential candidate and Vermont governor was elected to run the Democratic National Committee after promising to reach out to voters, especially in Republican states, with a new and more positive outreach message aimed at expanding his party's shrinking base. But a review of his speeches on the stump in the past month or more shows that...

Ohio Town Trying To Raise $20,000 LOVELAND, Ohio -- Sheriff Department Web sites let Ohioans pinpoint exact locations where sexual offenders are living in relation to their homes. One Ohio community is taking a unique approach to making their neighborhood safer, NBC 4 reported. Residents in Loveland said they wanted safer streets and were willing to take matters into their own hands to get a sexual offender out of their neighborhood. They were willing to pay to make him go away. Residents in the upscale Cincinnati suburb are pooling their money to pay a sex offender nearly $20,000 to move...

Door slams on foreign landscape workers April 21, 2005 BY ART GOLAB Staff Reporter Hundreds of Mexican workers who used to come legally to the Chicago area every spring to do landscaping work have been denied seasonal work visas, leaving landscapers scrambling to find employees to mow and maintain lawns. One Lake Bluff company applied for more than 150 visas and got none. Those slots make up half the company's seasonal work force, many of them regulars who have come up in the spring for several years. "They are family members and friends of our current workers who count on...

The death of John Paul II has triggered calls for his successor to allow greater local church autonomy and adopt more flexible attitudes on issues of contraception, women in the church and married priests. As 117 cardinals gathered in Rome for the ancient ritual of choosing a successor, the less conservative elements of the Australian Catholic Church were hoping the next pope would usher in a more inclusive era. The papal election presented an opportunity to rethink the ban on married priests, said Pat Power, the Catholic Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn. It was not just a matter of the...