Free Republic

Last week I received the following e-mail, and I felt it would be best to share my response here on the blog. Dear Mr. White, For someone considering converting to Catholicism, what questions would you put to them in order to discern whether or not they have examined their situation sufficiently? Say, a Top 10 list. Thanks. When I posted this question in our chat channel a number of folks commented that it was in fact a great question, and we started to throw out some possible answers. Here is my "Top Ten List" in response to this fine inquiry....

CONTEMPLATING the Clinton-Obama racial war, some Republicans were so excited you’d have thought Ronald Reagan had risen from the dead to slap around a welfare deadbeat. Never mind that the G.O.P. is running on empty, with no ideas beyond the incessant repetition of Reagan’s name. A battle over race-and-gender identity politics among the Democrats, with its acrid scent from the 1960s, might be just the spark for a Republican comeback. (As long as the G.O.P.’s own identity politics, over religion, don’t flare up.) Alas, these hopes faded on Tuesday night. First, the debating Democrats declared a truce, however fragile, in...

American politics is usually a zero-sum game: When one side gains, the other loses. An exception is the current battle to overhaul immigration laws. The bipartisan effort is led by the unlikely duo of President George W. Bush and Senator Edward Kennedy. The fate of the legislation, which would grant a pathway for citizenship to 12 million illegal aliens and toughen enforcement of the borders, will be decided by the U.S. Senate this week. If it passes, there is plenty of credit to share; if it fails both Bush and the Republicans and the Democratic-controlled Congress will be big losers....

U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., told farm workers yesterday that the immigration reform bill will be brought back to the Senate floor for deliberation within days, and that the Senate is determined to vote on it, even if it means working weekends and during the July 4th weekend. Once the energy bill clears the Senate floor, the bipartisan but controversial immigration bill, written by Kennedy and Sen. Arlen J. Specter, R-Pa., will be back before the Senate, he said. "Dealing with immigration is central to the challenge of civil rights," Kennedy said. "We have come a long way." Kennedy,...

Along with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez has been the Bush administration’s voice in an immigration debate that has divided Republicans. Gutierrez, a Cuban immigrant who became chief executive of Kellogg’s, said this week in an interview that he’s not disappointed by Republican opposition to the immigration bill, and that he hasn’t seen evidence that Democrats want to withhold a victory for President Bush. Gutierrez repeatedly framed the debate as a national security issue, predicting victory in part because of the “inevitability” of immigration reform. Q: If the Senate doesn’t approve a comprehensive immigration reform bill...

Call it by its right name. It's not the "immigration bill" or the "attempted immigration bill" or the "failed immigration bill" or the "immigration bill in need of amendment." The American government tried to pull a coup against its people. It failed. It did, however, succeed in giving me a feeling I'd completely forgotten. I was 5 years old. My mother gave her younger sister Margie enough money to take me, Margie, and her friend Harvey to a special kids' show which was five cartoons end to end; no feature film which 5-year-olds find boring. On the way to the...

On his radio talk show last Friday, dittohead in chief Rush Limbaugh was working himself into quite a lather. The subject? Immigration reform, specifically the controversial immigration bill now before the Senate -- or, as Limbaugh dubbed it, the Comprehensive Destroy the Republican Party Act. Though Limbaugh pummeled his usual targets on the left, complaining that the current immigration reform proposal was yet another Ted Kennedy-led scheme to destroy America, Limbaugh was also unsparing toward national Republicans: At the end of the day here, what we're talking about is the marginalization, if not the destruction, of the Republican Party. Look,...

On May 25, I wrote a column entitled “Latino Fear and Loathing” that has provoked considerable anger and recriminations among my fellow conservatives. In the column I asserted that, “Some people just don’t like Mexicans — or anyone else from south of the border,” and described some of the fears shaping these sentiments: “They think Latinos are freeloaders and welfare cheats who are too lazy to learn English. They think Latinos have too many babies, and that Latino kids will dumb down our schools. They think Latinos are dirty, diseased, indolent, and more prone to criminal behavior. They think Latinos...

Mark Stine KOLD News 13 Reporter Posted: 5-15-05 "We're two and a half miles from the border everything you see down there is Mexico." Joe Scelso owns the Rockin JP Ranch in Cochise County. He's been dealing with illegal immigrants for nearly a decade. "I've picked up probably, in the last 8 years, a couple hundred backpacks." Scelso says the Minutemen Project in April must have left an ongoing effect on the border, because it's still pretty quiet around his ranch. "It wasn't until they did show up down here that we finally got the relief we've been hoping for,...