Free Republic

A Good Book About Bad Books by Logan Gage 8/23/08 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn't Help Benjamin Wiker, Regnery, 260 pages, $27.95 If ever there were a book designed specifically for the enjoyment of InsideCatholic readers, surely it is Benjamin Wiker's new 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn't Help. Wiker should be renowned (if he is not already) for Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists -- a book that at once exposes both the ancient philosophical antecedents and modern cultural consequences of Darwinism. In the present book,...

Abstract: Holocaust denial has appeared in Russia only recently and has attracted almost no attention in the academic sphere, and relatively little from monitoring organizations. The research for this article - examining the place of Holocaust denial in contemporary Russia - was conducted over three months in Russia and on the Internet. The results indicate that the phenomenon remains of marginal significance and that the majority of material is of western origin. While there are several factors that make the development of Holocaust denial probable - the comparatively high level of antisemitism in Russia, post-Soviet suspicion of historiography and lack...

This text is written in response to God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 by David Levering Lewis, an American historian and two-time winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. In my opinion the book is largely a waste of money. This essay is not made to review the book as much as it is to refute it. It overlaps to some extent with the text The Truth About Islam in Europe, which I have published at the Brussels Journal before. Briefly summed up, God's Crucible laments the fact that Charles Martel, "the Hammer," halted the advancing Islamic Jihad...

If you believe Mr. Edward Said and his numerous supporters, Sir William Jones was actually a racist pig who invented comparative linguistics in order to establish his dominance over "the Other." It's strange that Muslims didn't think of this when they ruled other peoples for centuries. After all, Persian, which they knew, is an Indo-European language, as is Sanskrit, as well as Greek, Armenian and the tongues of many of their subjects. Muslim scholars had access to a number of Semitic languages, from Arabic and Hebrew to Aramaic, in addition to languages of other Afro-Asiatic branches in North and East...

James Cuno, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, posits in his new book Who Owns Antiquity? (Princeton University Press, $24.95) that the UNESCO treaty and laws enacted around the world aimed at applying its principles have done nothing to stop looting and have succeeded only in inhibiting the global movement of art. UNESCO, he argues, has impoverished our understanding of one another and contributed to a stale, narrowly nationalistic view of culture. More specifically, these laws have prevented museums like his from acquiring antiquities as they have in the past. He calls them "nationalist retentionist cultural property...

Some updates: I have left the United States and am heading back to the war. Heavy promotion of Moment of Truth in Iraq is over. I conducted approximately 100 radio, television, magazine and newspaper interviews, therefore was unable to do much more than track the war from afar. There are more radio interviews scheduled, but I’ll be talking from downrange. Moment of Truth in Iraq hit #6 on the Amazon bestseller list, and #2 on Barnes and Noble, which greatly surprised me. Michael Moore has stopped the copyright infringement on my work, but his attorney has not responded to my...

Order of BattleWar and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism by Douglas FeithHarper. 688 pp. $27.95 "The stupidest f—ing guy on the planet� is how General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, summed up Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Pentagon from July 2001 until his resignation in August 2005. Franks was cruder than most, but Feith was under almost continuously hostile scrutiny and controversy throughout his tenure. As the third-highest ranking civilian official in Donald Rumsfeld’s wartime Pentagon, he oversaw the Defense Department’s relations with foreign governments at...

You don't have to agree with everything in this monumental account of politics in the 1960s and 1970s to find Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland" (Scribner, 896 pages, $37.50) interesting and even engrossing. The book is a masterful retelling of the turbulent period between the crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and the equally stunning loss by George McGovern to Richard Nixon in 1972. Mr. Perlstein's use of the elections of 1964 and 1972 as ideological goalposts may be arbitrary, but it is easy to see why he selected them. Could two such different countries really be...

Teenaged congressional pages performed oral sex in front of their colleagues for weeks before they were caught and expelled from the program, according to a new report in Roll Call newspaper. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has pledged to reform the page program, which brings dozens of 15- and 16-year-old students to live and study in Washington, D.C., while working as aides in congressional offices. "As a mother and a grandmother, nothing is more important to me than the safety and security of our House pages," Pelosi said in a statement. The page program has been reportedly reformed at least...

WASHINGTON — Justice Department investigators have absolved former Arizona Rep. Jim Kolbe of wrongdoing in his relationships with House pages, Kolbe says. In a statement Wednesday, Kolbe and his Washington lawyers said they received notice Tuesday that investigators had completed their work on the preliminary inquiry opened by federal prosecutors last fall, and saw no reason to pursue it further. Prosecutors began looking into Kolbe's relationships with House pages after hearing reports that he took a Fourth of July camping trip to the Grand Canyon with two former pages and others in 1996. The inquiry was launched amid a separate...

WASHINGTON - Federal prosecutors in Arizona have opened a preliminary investigation of a camping trip Congressman Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., took 10 years ago that included two teenage congressional pages, a Justice Department spokesman told NBC News. NBC News first reported on the camping and rafting trip on Tuesday. A spokesman for the Justice Department in Washington said that the U.S. attorney in Arizona has started a "preliminary assessment" of the trip, after an unidentified source made allegations about the congressman's behavior on the expedition.

It is now becoming increasingly apparent that the true scandal concerning a certain homosexual congressman's dirty instant messages and emails to teenage pages is just beginning to be heard. The Democrats, now wringing their hands, crying for the children and scaring us all with visions of pedophiles roaming the halls of congress, in fact not only knew the content of the various Foley e-mails and instant messages long before the Republican leadership of the house did, but did absolutely nothing about it for a very long time. The crocodile tears have been shown to be just that. There was absolutely...

WASHINGTON - House Speaker Dennis Hastert said Tuesday he'll dismiss anyone on his staff found to have covered up concerns about ex-Rep. Mark Foley's approaches to former pages. Hastert said he huddled with his staff members last week and he believes they acted appropriately in handling information on Foley's conduct. But he also issued them a stern warning: "If they did cover something up, then they should not continue to have their jobs." The FBI is conducting a criminal investigation and the House ethics committee is investigating any potential violations of standards of conduct. Timeline pushed back Meanwhile, Rep. Jim...

WASHINGTON - Lawmakers, following a request from the House ethics committee, , , )‘s inappropriate conduct toward male pages. Aides for other House members reported similar results Monday. The ethics panel, formally known as the Committee on Standards and Official Conduct, also directed lawmakers to cast a wide net and ask aides what they might have heard about improper approaches by Foley or others to pages before revelations about his sexually explicit Internet messages surfaced last month. Foley resigned Sept. 29. Meanwhile, the lawyer for Kirk Fordham, Foley‘s former chief of staff, said Monday his client could testify before the...

They wouldn't win any beauty contests, but naked mole-rats would take home the crown for longevity. And research into human aging might draw from knowledge of the wrinkly subterranean creatures. No bigger than a stick of butter, mole-rats [image] long outlive similar-sized rodents. They're known to approach age 30. Now scientists have gained some insight into this longevity: Mole-rats simply deal with the kind of cellular damage that life normally brings about. "The naked mole-rat, with its surprisingly long life span and remarkably delayed aging, seems like the perfect model to provide answers about how we age and how to...

A former congressional page said he had sex with disgraced former US lawmaker Mark Foley, according to a newspaper report, as an explosive Washington political scandal continued to unfold. The unidentified former page told the Los Angeles Times Sunday that he was 21 when he and the Florida Republican congressman had sex... [emphasis mine -VA] Rest of article

"When a 16-year-old boy is not safe from sexual solicitation from an elected representative of the people, we should question the moral direction of our nation," a conservative advocacy group said on Monday. The group also said Foley's behavior raises the "real issue" of homosexuality and child abuse. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins noted that so many people -- Republicans and Democrats -- are "shocked" by former Rep. Mark Foley's sexually explicit instant messages to a teenage boy -- a House page at the time. But we shouldn't be shocked, Perkins said: "This is the end result of a...

CNN: PAGE LAWYER DOES NOT RULE 'IN OR OUT' PRANK CLAIM... DEVELOPING... Former congressional page Jordan Edmund's lawyer Stephen Jones... BLITZER: He will join us live in the next hour. What are you hearing, Brian, about some of these Internet suggestions, some Republicans suggesting this whole thing is a prank, a hoax and there is no there, there. CNN REPORTER: "We asked him about that item in the DRUDGE REPORT. He said very clearly he cannot rule that in, he cannot rule that out. He says he is not saying it was not a prank but later in the interview,...

I worked in the Istook Campaign in Oklahoma City. One of my co-workers was Jordan Edmund. I actually didn't get to know him all that well, but everything I saw and heard about him indicated that he was not gay. He basically behaved like your standard frat boy. His facebook account no longer exist. If he was part of some prank, I didn't know about it. Jordan came from CA long before I arrived and was there when I left. Jordan was a hard worker and didn't loose his temper or anything like that. He mainly talked about Berkley and...

Democratic Glass Houses: Top Ten Things NY Dems Should Do to Show They Actually Condemn Sexual Predation 10. Demand explanation from Chuck Schumer as to why he did not support expulsion of his then House Caucus-mate Gerry Studds after the Democrat proudly admitted to having sex with a 17-year old male page. 9. Demand explanation from Shelly Silver as to why he didn't fire his Counsel Michael Boxley after the first charge surfaced of Boxley sexually violating a much younger woman, and demand that the Assembly Ethics Committee release a full report on the repeated sexual scandals involving Shelly Silver's...

The Mark Foley Saga A gay Congressman named Mark Foley Sent out some Emails unholy : Sent suggestions outrageous To handsome young Pages – His motives, it seems Were quite lowly. With Elections just short weeks away Leading Democrats shouted : “Hooray !” They grew almost violent, But Barney Frank remained silent: For a change he had Nothing to say ! House Republicans all sang the blues: As the Media tightened the screws: CNN was restrained – (The reporters looked pained) ABC was as bad As Fox News !

Ok, I am just as outraged at the whole Foley mess as all of you are. I am GLAAD that another Bugger is gone. But WHY just HIM?? WHY are the conservatives allowing this to build to a boil-over pont, WITHOUT reminding the news pundits of Studds, and the fact that HE actually DID HAVE HOMOSEX with a minor of 17??, And tha that whol thing was COVERED UP?? WHY is this allowed to be just a "republican scandal??" I understand that the drive-bys will keep this under wraps. But what about our side?? WHY won't we all shine the...

Pelosi needs to resign for… Wm Jefferson, D-LA, taking bribes ($90k in his freezer?!?) Barney Frank, D-NY, Involved with running a male escort service…and being a perv Cynthia McKinney, D-GA, Battery on Capital Hill Police…and a crappy hairstyle Former Rep Gerry Studds, D-MA, liquoring up a 17-yr old page and havin sex with him…and being a perv I am sure that the Great Ones on this site could ask more…but her demanding the resignation of the entire Republican leadership is absolutely rediculous. Can she really be that stupid? Yes, she can. And how about her “criminal” activities? Something about illegal...

Last week, we learned that Rep. Mark Foley, a Republican from Palm Beach, Fla., is a disgusting old chicken hawk possessed of such good sense that he aspired to seduce a 16-year-old male congressional page in writing—as if a Republican could possibly get away with that. About 15 seconds after that, Democrats began trying to figure out how to frame one man’s nauseating and criminal personal conduct as a national campaign issue. Hey, who says the Democrats aren’t the party of ideas anymore? Not only is “elect us because there is a child molester” a compelling national policy argument suggesting...

In the hierarchy of Congress, the high school students who serve as Congressional pages fall somewhere near the bottom, seemingly invisible as they scurry through the hallways of the Capitol ferrying messages to powerful lawmakers who often fail to give them a second glance. In that rarefied world, Representative Mark Foley, the silver-haired Republican from Florida, stood out. He took pains to befriend the 16- and 17-year-old aides, several former pages said in interviews on Sunday. He chatted with them on the House floor, they said, sent handwritten notes and urged them to keep in touch when they left Washington...

I didn’t hear the beginning of the Mark Foley debacle, as I was out of town communing with nature (and my wife, and the kids, and the cat). But I thought it was interesting to see the reactions on this. From the right, there seem to be two schools of thought. One of them is the “why did the Republicans shoot themselves in the foot again? This is typified by commentators such as Captain Ed of Captains Quarters blog, who said: “I cannot tell CQ readers how disgusted I am with Speaker Hastert. Reynolds is no fringe nutcase; he's the...

With increasing regularity, leaders of the National Democratic Party are seeking support for their economic agenda in, of all places, the Bible. Failed presidential candidate John Kerry, for example, persists in appealing to the New Testament book of James. "Faith without works is dead," he intones, suggesting that "works" here includes the works of lawmakers as they spend other people's money. In like manner, Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, is wont to quote the teaching of Jesus that "[i]nasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."...

Ancient Easter pages return to Canterbury Stephen Bates, religious affairs correspondent Saturday March 26, 2005 The Guardian (UK) A 1,000-year-old manuscript outlining readings for Holy Week has been returned to Canterbury Cathedral after five centuries, just in time for Easter. The double-page spread, called a bifolium, which was part of a devotional book owned by the cathedral in the middle ages, was recently bought for £7,000 from a London bookseller who had found it in Germany. The cathedral has two further pages from the same book, which may be all that survives. Its travels over the last 500 years are...

Yes, this will save you all the time of reading Bill's mega-page memoir...It's Bill Clinton: My Life, cliff notes!click here or on cartoon to super-size it!

wayback machine visits old FR