Free Republic

Please join John McCain and Cindy McCain at a Road to the Convention Rally on August 29th in Dayton, OH or August 30th in Washington, PA. As the Senator and Mrs. McCain make their way across the country, they would be delighted to have you join them at the rallies leading up to accepting the Republican Nomination in Minnesota on September 4th. Please come and show your support for John McCain. Please pick up a free ticket to join us. You can reserve a ticket to pick up at one of our ticket distribution centers by following this link or...

I'm a lifelong Republican - a supply-side conservative. I worked in the Reagan White House. I was the chief economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for five years. In 1994, I helped write the Republican Contract with America. I served on Bob Dole's presidential campaign team and was chief economist for Jack Kemp's Empower America. This November, I'm voting for Barack Obama. When I first made this decision, many colleagues were shocked. How could I support a candidate with a domestic policy platform that's antithetical to almost everything I believe in? The answer is simple: Unjustified war and unconstitutional...

A little girl, no older than 6-7, rang my doorbell tonight. I answered, and she asked me if I wanted to donate to her school. I asked if she was selling something, but he was not. Just getting donations. I was taken aback by the fact that she had no parent with her. Way too young to be out alone. I declined (I never carry cash with me), and she continued on down the street. With all the billions spent on public schools, and the absolute, complete failure of them to properly teach little skulls of mush, I started to...

Chelsea Clinton tells students about her mother's plans for the economy and mortgages. The former first daughter outlines Hillary Rodham Clinton's concern about Darfur and women's rights. She ticks through talking points on electability, health care and the environment. Oh, and she reveals her mother wants grandkids and her father builds their schedule around a popular TV drama, "Grey's Anatomy." Chelsea Clinton has emerged as a top surrogate for her mother as the former first lady has fallen behind Sen. Barack Obama in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Now dispatched to college campuses, the long-silent Chelsea Clinton has...

Debate threat. Last week, MSNBC suspended David Shuster for saying, “Doesn’t it seem as if Chelsea [Clinton] is sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?” A search through MSNBC’s archives quickly uncovered a glaring double standard: Last September, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann accused President Bush of “pimping General David Petraeus.” It’s the same analogy — these days, the word “pimping” is slang, meaning to use in an unseemly way. Olbermann wasn’t reprimanded, but Shuster was suspended for two weeks and forced to apologize. Why? The most logical answer is that Shuster’s words jeopardized a lucrative opportunity...

WASHINGTON — A prominent civil rights leader has told the Democratic National Committee that refusing to seat delegates from Florida and Michigan would disenfranchise both states' minority communities. In a Feb. 8 letter to DNC Chairman Howard Dean, NAACP chairman Julian Bond expressed "great concern at the prospect that million of voters in Michigan and Florida could ultimately have their votes completely discounted." Refusing to seat the states' delegations could remind voters of the "sordid history of racially discriminatory primaries," he said. The DNC penalized Michigan and Florida for moving their primaries to earlier dates in violation of party rules....

Police say she passed out cards that offered the teen girls for sex A 16-year-old girl endured being sold into prostitution by her mother but finally went to Houston police after seeing her younger sister also forced to perform sex acts, investigators said Wednesday. The teenager had complied with her mother — who even distributed business cards offering her daughters for sex — but feared that her 14-year-old sister would be hurt, officers said. Nelsi Yolanda Latuda and her boyfriend, Pedro Espinoza-Escama, both of the 5500 block of Antoine, are charged with two counts each of compelling prostitution of a...

By Pedro O. Vega As published today in the Johnstown Tribune DemocratThe situation in which we find ourselves in Iraq because of the war on terror defies my attempts at originality to describe. I find myself in need of laying hold of aphorisms and clichés said by the truly Great Ones, and some not-so-great. The first one that comes to mind is from Thomas Paine, an American Founding Father, written in 1776. It’s one I used in a previous column, one I keep returning too because of its sheer wisdom: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer...

Pope Benedict is starting to give me reasons to rejoin the Catholic Faith. If there is such a thing as speaking truth to power then he is fully committed to such a course. No namby pamby beating around the bushes, he goes straight for the central issue regarding Islam’s dealings with the West. The debate about whether Islam can be reformed enough must center around Mohammed himself, his life, his example, since Islam revolves around him. If Mohammed was a radical then exactly how is the religion to reform itself without losing its soul.

NEW DELHI — Some husbands in western India are renting out their wives to other men, cashing in on a shortage of single women available for marriage, according to a news report Monday. Atta Prajapati, a farm worker who lives in Gujarat state, leases out his wife Laxmi to a wealthy landowner for $175 US a month, the Times of India reported, citing unidentified police officials. A farm worker earns a monthly minimum wage of around $22. Laxmi is expected to live with the man, look after him and his house, and have sex with him, the report said. The...

This is the story of an American little girl. Let’s call her Jake. She was born deprived and poor like the majority of Americans and lived in a ghetto. She had evil, heterosexual Christian parents. But an amazing transformation took place when those wicked parents imposed a gender on little Jake by buying her a barbi doll. She was so severely traumatized by this untoward affront that she became a Pimping Gay Transexual Cowboy Suicide Bomber. This was no easy transformation, because she was poor. She had to move to California and commit a crime, pimping, so that she could...

Local labor leaders are fuming over Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's last-minute appearance at the annual Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast in San Francisco -- and a lot of their anger is directed at former Mayor Willie Brown. "We've spent a year and a half, and millions of dollars fighting this SOB,'' San Francisco Labor Council head Tim Paulson said of the governor. "For him to come to this breakfast was an absolute insult." Paulson also had a few words for Brown, the lawyer/lobbyist and talk-show pundit (he regularly appears on TV with this column's Phil Matier) who helped engineer Arnold's well-covered...

A 14-year-old Israeli was arrested by police on suspicion of working as a pimp, Israeli newspapers reported Thursday. "Instead of playing ball with his friends, he discovered there was lot of money to be made in the sex industry," the daily Maariv reported. According to the newspaper, the adolescent allegedly employed two teenagers, age 17 and 19, to sell favors to Palestinian workers. In the beginning, he split the profits with the girls, but later began pocketing the entire amount. The teen was apprehended Tuesday and faced a judge in a Jerusalem court, a police spokesman told AFP. "The investigation...

Pimp (pimp) n. One who provides means and opportunities for unlawful sexual intercourse; a panderer, v. to act as a pimp or pander; to pander, to scrounge off; to take advantage of. — Oxford English Dictionary ST. LOUIS — As Halloween revelers head into this weekend of festivities, they can expect to see lots of pimps, or at least people pretending to be pimps. Dressed in colorful, often-garish costumes will be teenage pimps, adult pimps, female pimps, even children dressed as pimps, thanks to a Los Angeles-based firm that has been selling thousands of the outfits for the past two...

AS marketing schemes go, the hip-hop music star Nelly risks sending a lot of mixed signals with the name of the new energy drink he's marketing. It's called "Pimp Juice." I could be wrong, but "Pimp Juice" does not sound to me like something that you want to put in your mouth. Either way, you won't get a chance to find out, if certain leaders of black community organizations have their way. In Los Angeles, three organizations called Project Islamic HOPE, the National Alliance for Positive Action, and the National Black Anti-Defamation League staged a press conference last Tuesday (Sept....

A familiar refrain of proponents of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is that US ratification of the controversial UN document would not result in significant changes in US law. Since the United States already recognizes the equal status of women, they say, US ratification is necessary solely to bolster the standing of the Convention in the rest of the world. For instance, Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), a CEDAW supporter, said at last week's Senate CEDAW hearing that it is "highly, highly, highly unlikely" that the Convention would have any important domestic...