Free Republic

One of the highlights of the 2000 presidential campaign was Winifred Skinner. You may remember her—she was the can-collecting 79-year-old woman who used the money from her foraging for tin and aluminum to finance her prescription drugs. She was interviewed on Good Morning America about her plight, and Al Gore highlighted her story in his campaign speeches. Chosen by Gore to be one of his 13 "citizen advisers" before the first presidential debate in Boston, she even traveled there in a Winnebago to do her part in bringing about change. At some point in the saga, it came out that...

Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online, reveals research. The annual report into web habits by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows people are becoming much less patient when they go online. Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave. Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention. Search rules Instead, many are "hot potato" driven and just want to get a specific task completed. (snip) This makes them very resistant to highlighted promotions or other...

A new book is causing a storm of controversy by labelling children as annoying and pointless - a charge made all the more inflammatory by the fact that its author is a mother. Entitled No Kid: 40 Reasons Not To Have Children, Corinne Maier's book has sparked fury in France, where it was published. Here, Corinne argues her "no kid" case while another mum, Ursula Hirschkorn, stands firm for parenthood. Corinne Maier, 43, a writer, who lives with her boyfriend Yves, 45, a psychiatrist, daughter Laure, 13, and son Cyrille, 10, in Brussels, argues her case. Children are just too...

So many times prophets warn about the dangers of selfishness—the inordinate and excessive concern with self. The distance between constant self-pleasing and self-worship is shorter than we think. Stubborn selfishness is actually rebellion against God, because, warned Samuel, “stubbornness is as … idolatry.” (1 Sam. 15:23.)Selfishness is much more than an ordinary problem because it activates all the cardinal sins! It is the detonator in the breaking of the Ten Commandments.By focusing on oneself, it is naturally easier to bear false witness if it serves one’s purpose. It is easier to ignore one’s parents instead of honoring them. It is...

LARGO, Fla. — Steve Stanton professed his love for the city and asked the people of Largo to support his decision to undergo a sex change and allow him to keep his $140,000-a-year job as city manager. To his sorrow, the answer came back no. Almost 500 people packed City Hall on Tuesday night for a special meeting to decide if they would accept someone named Susan instead of Steve as their top official. And while many spoke eloquently in his defense, more called for his ouster. "If Jesus was here tonight, I can guarantee you he'd want him terminated,"...

Right brain area linked to fairness Bruce Bower The ability to control selfish impulses in order to reject an unfair deal depends on a specific right brain area, a new study finds. A team led by Daria Knoch of the University of Zurich focused on a game in which one person makes an offer to another person on how to split a pot of money. The second person can either accept the offer and pocket the offered portion, or refuse it, leaving both players with nothing. Responders typically reject offers of less than 25 percent of the pot, preferring zilch...

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Callous wealthy nations are indifferent to the plight of the poor as they pursue selfish policies which enrich the few at the expense of the many, South African President Thabo Mbeki said on Tuesday. "These billions of poor people are increasingly becoming impatient because every year they hear us adopt declaration after declaration and yet nothing practical is done to assuage the hunger pains that keep them awake at night," he told the United Nations General Assembly. At the Millennium Summit in September 2000, world leaders at the United Nations agreed a series of goals to...

This morning, I renewed my driver's license. Of course, on the application they asked me if I wanted to donate my organs in the eventuality of my death. Being an altruist by nature, my first reaction was, why not, it could help somebody. But then a fear crept into my head - what if I was seriously ill, and "they" decided to hasten my as of yet not-inevitable death to harvest my organs? While my first reaction was that is absurd, I decided to chose "no" given the well grounded fear that in today's society, where life is given no...

Hatin’ on Hillary: N.H. Dems lambaste Clinton By Brett Arends Boston Herald Business Columnist Monday, August 7, 2006 - Updated: 02:56 AM EST MANCHESTER, N.H. - Dick Bennett has been polling New Hampshire voters for 30 years. And he’s never seen anything like it. “Lying b**** . . . shrew . . . Machiavellian . . . evil, power-mad witch . . . the ultimate self-serving politician.” No prizes for guessing which presidential front-runner drew these remarks in focus groups. But these weren’t Republicans talking about Hillary Clinton. They weren’t even independents. These were ordinary, grass-roots Democrats. People who identified...

Sorry, but my children bore me to death!by HELEN KIRWAN-TAYLOLR, Daily Mail 08:00am 26th July 2006It's the start of the summer holidays, when millions of mothers despair at how to entertain their children for the next six weeks. What none of them dare say is that they would rather their children were still at school or, frankly, anywhere else. Helen Kirwan-Taylor, a 42-year-old writer, lives in Notting Hill, West London, with her businessman husband Charles and their sons Constantin, 12, and Ivan, ten. Here, she argues provocatively that modern women must not be enslaved by their children. The lies started...

Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., has a new ally in his effort to torpedo an environmentally friendly "wind farm” off the coast from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis – the Pentagon. The Defense Department has begun a study to find out if wind turbine projects designed to produce energy could interfere with military radar – even though wind farms are already operating in military radar areas. The study is threatening not only the Cape Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, but other wind farm projects around the country as well. The study was inserted in the 2006 Defense Authorization Act...

For weeks, French university students rioted over a set of labor law changes that were to make it legally possible to fire some workers under the age of 26. Nearly one in four young French workers cannot currently find any job — and the government understood that lowering the risk in hiring untested, younger employees would result in more being hired in the first place. Far from celebrating this reform, French students reacted by attacking police, destroying storefronts, and burning cars. The demonstrations metastasized into a general strike, which predictably, became a platform for catch-all left-wing protests against capitalism, America,...

One of the most persistent themes in Noam Chomsky's work has been class warfare. The iconic MIT linguist and left-wing activist frequently has lashed out against the "massive use of tax havens to shift the burden to the general population and away from the rich," and criticized the concentration of wealth in "trusts" by the wealthiest 1%. He says the U.S. tax code is rigged with "complicated devices for ensuring that the poor -- like 80% of the population -- pay off the rich." But trusts can't be all bad. After all, Chomsky, with a net worth north of US$2-million,...

Missouri lawmaker wants umps to pay state tax JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- A state lawmaker and St. Louis baseball fan says umpires should pay -- literally -- for what he sees as bad calls made during the playoff series in which the Cardinals lost to the Houston Astros. Rep. Jeff Roorda, D-Barnhart, wants to expand the state athlete and entertainer tax to also cover officials such as umpires and referees. The tax is charged to out-of-state residents who earn money in Missouri while performing in such events as baseball games and concerts. Revenues are supposed to go to the arts,...

Seniors are on their own this fall at College Park High School. After more than a year of contentious contract negotiations, teachers at the Pleasant Hill high school are refusing to write letters of recommendation for college-bound students. "I am very sad, very concerned and yes, very angry," said parent Susan Wood, her voice shaking with emotion as she addressed the school board Tuesday night. "The teachers at College Park have now resolved to write no letters of recommendation and do no club advising, after-school tutoring, chaperone dances, athletic functions. All of this is very negatively impacting my daughter and...

When will the "caring" activists of the left ever learn? Never have so few individuals with so many good intentions created so much misery for so many people whom they wanted to help. As the social-engineering debacles of the last half century in the United States have demonstrated, carelessness in "caring" for the disadvantaged in our society only leads to a glaringly uncaring result.....

As radical environmentalists continue to blame the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina's devastation on President Bush's ecological policies, a mainstream Louisiana media outlet inadvertently disclosed a shocking fact: Environmentalist activists were responsible for spiking a plan that may have saved New Orleans. Decades ago, the Green Left - pursuing its agenda of valuing wetlands and topographical "diversity" over human life - sued to prevent the Army Corps of Engineers from building floodgates that would have prevented significant flooding that resulted from Hurricane Katrina......

When Anne-Marie,* the president and CEO of a start-up medical device company in Philadelphia, first began thinking of having a child on her own, she was 37 and her biological clock was ticking loudly. As much as she wanted to be in a great, loving relationship with a partner, she wanted a baby even more. “If I turned 50 and didn't have children," she says, "I'd be pretty devastated."

Sorry for the vanity but I could not resist speaking to this irony: 1) NARAL's web site comes up with a "tell your senator to oppose this three-eyed, twenty-foot-high firebreathing tentacled dragon monster Roberts", calling him "anti-choice". Yet NARAL's page offers no "choice" to change the message one sends to the senator. Pro-choice, eh? 2) The two top words are "Choose Justice". Justice... From NARAL - executing the most innocent of us in the most brutal manner imagineable. Justice. That word coming from them, unbelievable.

LONDON, May 19 (UPI) -- A terminally ill British man's request to be kept alive indefinitely has sparked legal debate over the economic impact on the National Healthcare System. Leslie Burke, 45, suffers from a degenerative brain condition and won a landmark case last year granting him the right to stop doctors from withholding food and water until he dies from his ailment. The General Medical Council has appealed the ruling to the High Court, saying it created confusion between the roles of doctor and patient. Decisions on treatment should be made by doctors, not patients, it contended. The council's...