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PHOENIX — A Tennessee couple who lost their son in Iraq want an Arizona merchant to pay more than $40 billion in damages to survivors of soldiers whose names are on the anti-war shirts he is selling online.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before," the future Mrs. Obama wrote in her thesis introduction. "I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong. Regardless of the circumstances underwhich I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second."

Sometimes to understand one’s own era you have to immerse yourself in another. I pick up my copy of Paul Edmonds’ Peacocks and Pagodas as an example. This — though you’ve probably never heard of it — seems the best-regarded book ever written on the people and society of Burma. You may know it as Myanmar. What could be more esoteric, and yet profoundly revealing, about much broader issues? My copy is a first edition from 1924 and in its long life and travels it once belonged to T.N. Jayavelu, Antiquarian Bookseller of Choolai, Madras, India. But now it resides...

CHANCES are, if I had a gun when a burglar recently broke into our house, I would be facing criminal charges today. Because I am adamant about not having guns in the house, I will never know. But I do know the fear-suppressing adrenaline of chasing the robber who entered our home. I started after him. I wanted him. My office is in the back of the house. All of the house windows were cranked open a few inches to let the breeze in. About 1 p.m. I heard something fall in the front of the house. I figured the...

Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA's Web site and look at the "U.S. surface air temperature" rankings for the lower 48 states, you might notice that something has changed. snip

Some people used to refer to Ronald Reagan as the Teflon President because no matter how much mud his political foes threw at him, nothing stuck. That was because he was so much wiser, more principled, charming and charismatic, than his left-wing detractors. These days, those who seem to come equipped with Teflon are the world’s Islamics. What’s so mystifying about this is that they share none of Reagan’s finer qualities. Theirs is a religion which calls for the domination of all others, and yet the majority of Christians, Jews, atheists and agnostics, continue treating them with the utmost respect...

Screened Out: Gay Images in Films - Mondays & Wednesdays in JuneA 44-Movie Festival that examines gay sexuality in the cinema from the silent era up to the films that challenged Hollywood's rigid CodeAt a time when the rights of gays and lesbians are being hotly debated, TCM offers a look at the treatment of homosexuals in American movies as inspired by the Richard Barrios book Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall. Our festival covers roughly the same territory as the book, with the range marked by two TCM premieres: the silent comedy Algie, the Miner...

My Brush with the LeftistsCommentary by rochester_veteran I've been a freeper since that late 1990's. At first, I was a lurker and I started posting back in late 2001. I credit Free Republic, amongst others, to showing me the light and breaking the spell that liberalism and leftism had over me. Back in October, 2006, I joined the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reader Forum. One can comment on local topic, business, sports, editorials, etc. I've enjoyed participating in alot of the topics and it could be a lively place. Lately, I've been jumping in and defending President Bush and the...

A mere 1.6 percent of Americans observe it, and it's been criticized as separatist and contrived, but Kwanzaa may be the perfect holiday for all Americans to rally around. So "Habari Gani!" Today is the third day of Kwanzaa. If you just took a second glance at my picture and decided "she's playing," I assure you I am not. Maulana Karenga, the college professor who founded Kwanzaa 40 years ago to encourage black Americans to reconnect with their African heritage, says all are welcome at the table. And why not? Africa, scientists say, is the motherland of us all. Christmas...

If our cultural past isn't worth defending, why should our future be? ---------------------- Five years after the (a) all too predictable blowback to U.S. foreign policy born of decades of poverty and desperation or (b) controlled explosion by Bush-Cheney-Halliburton-Zionist agents (delete according to taste), I get a lot of mail on the lines of: C'mon, man, cut to the chase--are we gonna win or lose? Well, let me come at that in an evasive non-chase-cutting manner and circle around to it very gradually. I gave a speech in Sydney last month and among the audience was a lady called Pauline...

Whenever Israel uses military force, there is always a cadre of self-hating Jews who feel it is their duty to undermine the Israeli government. They begin arguments by claiming moral superiority through their Judaism. In criticizing Israel's defensive action in Lebanon last week, Fox News co-host Alan Colmes stated, "I'm Jewish. I don't think appeasement means peace, though. Or peace means appeasement. Peace would be the desire." British MP Gerald Kaufman asked in the July 23 edition of the Daily Mail, "As a Jew, I am grieved to ask the question, but I must: Will Israel never learn?" Then there's...

We've deluded ourselves into believing in the myth of the noble and peaceful primitive Nicholas Wade's Before The Dawn is one of those books full of eye-catching details. For example, did you know the Inuit have the largest brains of any modern humans? Something to do with the cold climate. Presumably, if this global warming hooey ever takes off, their brains will be shrinking with the ice caps. But the passage that really stopped me short was this: "Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of...

At the Washington Post, Richard Cohen agrees with Hamas and Hizballah that “Israel is a mistake.” And he’s open to the argument that Israel is a “crime.” "The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the...

When confronted with acts of stunning atrocity, such as the attacks of September 11th, the Madrid train bombings, the two attacks in Bali, or the synchronized bombings in the London underground, many navel-gazing Westerners are prompted to ask, "Why do they hate us?" Although there's something off-putting about the implicit blame-the-victim mentality in a question like that, it nonetheless is a legitimate question to ask. Some people ask that question rhetorically: to them, the answer to "Why do they hate us?" always leads one place: it's our fault. To these people, any horrific act anywhere in the world is a...

Borders!!! Language!!! Culture!!!

Many conservatives are absolutely perplexed by the question of what motivates liberals to take the patently wrong political positions they do. It’s difficult to explain it without believing such obviously wrong ideas like “liberals are just stupid”, or “they want to destroy our country”, but sometimes we resort to those explanations out of pure frustration. But what is the explanation? Why do seemingly good, intelligent people take positions that cause so much harm in the face of all the facts? I’ve finally stumbled upon the answer, and it’s so stunningly simple, yet profound in its implications, that it’s absolutely mind-boggling....

Address to: Summer Sounds Symposium Punga Cove, New Zealand February 11 2006 For the past three decades and more, many of the leading opinion makers in our universities, the media and the arts have regarded Western culture as, at best, something to be ashamed of, or at worst, something to be opposed. Before the 1960s, if Western intellectuals reflected on the long-term achievements of their culture, they explained it in terms of its own evolution: the inheritance of ancient Greece, Rome and Christianity, tempered by the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the scientific and industrial revolutions. Even a radical...

The bitter truth, as we feast on the bounty of the empire -Our myth of Thanksgiving warps a history of genocide ONE indication of moral and intellectual progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day with a National Day of Atonement. Indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas. But the thought of changing this white-supremacist holiday is hard to...

The cognoscenti and celebrities of Jerusalem have been extremely busy in anticipation of "Jerusalem Day," which falls next week. Producers, journalists, researchers, demogogues, rabbis and those who predict the messiah will come are all preparing for their great moment, the day on which the conquest of East Jerusalem in the 1967 war is marked. Once upon a time, when the idea was conceived to add this day to the calendar, already overloaded with patriotic memorial days, it was known as "Jerusalem Liberation Day." But it soon became clear that this name was false and cynical; the liberation meant subordination of...

Naomi Klein, writing in The Nation magazine asks the question, "Can Democracy Survive Bush's Embrace?" Klein writes, “It started off as a joke and has now become vaguely serious: the idea that Bono might be named president of the World Bank.” Bono talks to Republicans as they like to see themselves: not as administrators of a diminishing public sphere they despise but as CEOs of a powerful private corporation called America. "Brand USA is in trouble...it's a problem for business." The solution is "to re-describe ourselves to a world that is unsure of our values." Klein continues, “The Bush Administration...

The Maori Party is already driving a larger and considerably more dangerous wedge into the New Zealand Left than anything so far inserted by the National Party. As it grows in strength and consolidates its already powerful grip on the Maori imagination, the Maori Party has the potential to split Labour into two hostile camps, aggravate racial sensitivities within the trade union movement, and push the Greens below the all-important 5% MMP threshold. The Left's vulnerability to the Maori Party is entirely of its own making. From the early-1980s, the critical "sites of struggle" for most progressive political activists shifted...

GERMAINE Greer this week went on BBC television and appealed for help. "It's about time, I reckon, we resuscitated the Communist Party." No one on the panel with her blinked at this evil idea -- although whether because they agreed with it or thought Greer was crazy and best ignored, I can't tell. I'd understand if some thought the latter. On the same show, Greer, famed for leading the feminist revolution with her The Female Eunuch, offered a nutty excuse for Saudi Arabia's ban on women driving cars. "I get a bit worried about certain heavily veiled ladies driving because...

Post freep report from the Star City of the largest county east of the Missisippi- Presque Isle in Aroostook county ME!Who says Maine is stinking with liberals? Well, ok...southern Maine... but not Aroostook County! I set up at 0900 right before the Rt. 1 bridge where the "Peace at any price" self-loathing seed-eating submission donkeys spend an hour away from their compost heaps in order to irritate the locals every Sunday.Photo and more commentary follows....AV

Who ever imagined that the big prizewinners in the international film industry would be fat, hairy slobs? First, the New Zealander director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson, and second the American director of Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore. Of course, the great producers and directors in the past were never film star material themselves; it was always one of the defining features of Hollywood in the old days (and probably still is) that an essential element in the career path (a rung on the ladder to success, you might say) of any dewily innocent-looking ingenue was the...

The media industry has been infested by the rise of pseudo-journalists who go against journalism's long tradition to serve the public with accurate information, Los Angeles Times Editor John S. Carroll told a packed room in the Gerlinger Lounge on Thursday. Carroll delivered the annual Ruhl Lecture, titled "The Wolf in Reporter's Clothing: The Rise of Pseudo-Journalism in America." The lecture was sponsored by the School of Journalism and Communication. "All over the country there are offices that look like newsrooms and there are people in those offices that look for all the world just like journalists, but they are...

Following the arrest of eight British Muslims who were stockpiling ammonium nitrate with the apparent intent to blow up something of note, England's left-wing press has found the enemy and it is ... Britain. In a series of raids across Southern England last week, some 700 officers successfully stopped what might have been a disaster. In a self-storage warehouse in West London, police uncovered half a ton of the sort of fertilizer that, after being combined with fuel oil, has flattened targets ranging from the federal building in Oklahoma City to a nightclub in Bali. Eight men, all of them...

For connoisseurs of surrealism on the American right, it's hard to beat an exchange that appeared about a decade ago in the Heritage Foundation magazine Policy Review. It started when two associates of the Rev. Jerry Falwell wrote an article which criticized Christian Reconstructionism, the influential movement led by theologian Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, for advocating positions that even they as committed fundamentalists found "scary." Among Reconstructionism's highlights, the article cited support for laws "mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards." The Rev. Rushdoony fired off a letter to the editor complaining that the article had got his followers'...