Free Republic

"Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom." We have heard that many times. What is also the price of freedom is the toleration of imperfections. If everything that is wrong with the world becomes a reason to turn more power over to some political savior, then freedom is going to erode away, while we are mindlessly repeating the catchwords of the hour, whether "change," "universal health care" or "social justice." If we can be so easily stampeded by rhetoric that neither the public nor the Congress can be bothered to read, much less analyze, bills making massive changes in medical...

Letter from Zimbabwe sent by John Winter I reckon that these are the last days of TKM and ZPF. The darkest hour is always before dawn. We are all terrified at what they are going to destroy next… I mean they are actually ploughing down brick and mortar houses and one white family with twin boys of 10 had no chance of salvaging anything when 100 riot police came in with AK47's and bulldozers and demolished their beautiful house - 5 bedrooms and pine ceilings - because it was "too close to the airport", so we are feeling extremely insecure...

Cultural MarxismBy Linda Kimball There are two misconceptions held by many Americans.  The first is that communism ceased to be a threat when the Soviet Union imploded.  The second is that the New Left of the Sixties collapsed and disappeared as well.  "The Sixties are dead," wrote columnist George Will ("Slamming the Doors," Newsweek, Mar. 25, 1991) Because the New Left lacked cohesion it fell apart as a political movement.  However, its revolutionaries reorganized themselves into a multitude of single issue groups.  Thus we now have for example, radical feminists, black extremists, anti-war ‘peace' activists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists,...

While senators gravely speak about the nation's fiscal health all day during the Senate budget debate, they're not above making purely political points aimed at embarrassing one another. To wit: Sen. Wayne Allard, a Republican from Colorado, has crafted a massive budget amendment that claims to fund every policy proposed by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on the presidential campaign trail. Allard's amendment — doomed to fail by a significant margin — includes $1.4 trillion in spending over five years by proposing Obama's universal health care program ($65 billion a year), expanding the Army ($6.6 billion a year) and eliminating income...

I was just watching a Discovery Channel program on the Three Gorges Dam Project in China. Predictable, the show lamented the loss of traditional culture among the 1,000,000 or so people in the future reservoir above the dam. In one segment, they discussed one village that would have to be moved 500 yards up-hill (to end up EXACTLY at the water's edge , as they currently are) and how they would lose their "village tree"...The loss of the slightest amount of "traditional culture" is abhorrent to all leftists, unless we are talking about "traditional American culture"; which they can't destroy...

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's inflation rate has leapt to a record high, official data showed on Wednesday, raising pressure on President Robert Mugabe to ease an economic crisis that foes hope will weaken the veteran leader. Zimbabwe's inflation -- already the highest in the world -- hit 7,634.8 percent in July, reminding Zimbabweans there is no relief in sight from daily hardships including chronic food, fuel and foreign currency shortages. Although the government says the inflation figure is correct, many analysts and critics say it is likely much higher. The International Monetary Fund said last month inflation may reach 100,000...

Fuel shortage brings Zimbabwe to halt By Byron Dziva in Harare Last Updated: 2:03am BST 10/07/2007 Zimbabwe's economy was approaching paralysis yesterday as petrol stations across the country ran dry. President Robert Mugabe's regime has ordered all retailers to cut fuel prices by 60 per cent, a move that forces them to sell petrol at a loss. As a result, filling stations across the country have stopped selling altogether and petrol is only available on the black market, at five times the official price. Without fuel, the entire economy is steadily shutting down. "It is certainly making a bad situation...

Business execs arrested for refusing to cut prices By Angus Shaw ASSOCIATED PRESS July 9, 2007 HARARE, Zimbabwe – Police arrested 16 more business leaders in a crackdown on those suspected of violating the government's order to slash prices by 50 percent, the official media reported yesterday. The mandated price cuts ordered more than two weeks ago are a desperate attempt to confront inflation that has spun out of control during Zimbabwe's economic crisis. The falling prices have caused stampedes, panic buying and near-riots. Among those arrested in the latest sweep were the directors of Edgars, a leading clothing and...

While the government prospers, most of the Zimbabwe survives on less than £1 per week and will do anything to survive STELLA SITHOLE is a high school teacher with neatly braided hair and a husband who works in a bank, yet in the twisted world of President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe she has to turn tricks to feed her children. Battling to survive the world’s highest inflation, estimated by local bankers to have reached 15,000%, the salary of Z$2.1m she has just received is six times what she got last month. But it is not even enough to cover her bus...

ZIMBABWE’S leading cleric has called on Britain to invade the country and topple President Robert Mugabe. Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of Bulawayo, warned that millions were facing death from famine, unable to survive amid inflation believed to have soared to 15,000%. Mugabe, 83, had proved intransigent despite the “massive risk to life”, said Ncube, the head of Zimbabwe’s 1m Catholics. “I think it is justified for Britain to raid Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe,” he said. “We should do it ourselves but there’s too much fear. I’m ready to lead the people, guns blazing, but the people are not ready.” Some...

The liberal mind is infected... Diseased. The disease places the victim in a persistent vegetative state, with no cerebral centers of judgment or restraint and presents as a chronic inability to visualize the long-term consequences of one's actions. Although I am a political independent, the main reasons that I never trust a liberal, are their moral bankruptcy and licentiousness, their complete absence of logic, and their tendency to willingly contribute to their own demise, if it will bring their utopian ideals of social justice and the redistribution of American wealth to fruition. In support of that utopia, liberals twist and...

Artifact: A Chilling Tale of Global Warming Katherine Mangu-Ward | February 2007 Print Edition The United Nations has ventured into children’s publishing with a scary story about a small boy who loses a dogsled race because of global warming. In November the odd little picture book cum policy brief, Tore and the Town on Thin Ice, made the rounds at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Kenya.The night after he loses the race by falling through a weak place in the ice, Tore has a dream in which he sees the Inuit goddess Sedna, who warns him that “rich...

Wives and mothers of Cuban political prisoners urged U.S. peace activist Cindy Sheehan on Monday to visit the island's state-run jails during her weeklong trip to Cuba to call for the closure of the U.S.-operated Guantanamo prison. The Ladies in White, a group of women demanding the release of their loved ones, described what they called "inhumane" conditions at Cuba's prisons in a letter for Sheehan that was sent to international reporters. The group said it was trying to get a copy to Sheehan as well. "At the same time you and your noble followers fight for the closure of...

With "Children of Men," Alfonso Cuaron, who directed the last Harry Potter movie, has liberated himself from the demands of children's fiction, serving up a forbidding futuristic drama that offers only the faintest glimmer of hope.

France to create 'legal right' to housing 03/01/2007 18h42 Homeless stand in front of their tents in Lyon ©AFP - Jeff Pachoud PARIS (AFP) - The French government announced plans to create a "legal right" to housing in response to a snowballing campaign that has seen a tent city for the homeless spring up in the heart of Paris.Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin told a press conference a bill would be presented to the cabinet on January 17 and hopefully adopted before parliament breaks up ahead of April's presidential election.The law, if passed, would make France the second European...

Leonardo DiCaprio is helping to develop a reality TV series focusing on the environment. "E-topia" will chronicle the eco-friendly reconstruction of an American town as it is transformed into a "'green' utopia of tomorrow." The project, being shopped to broadcast networks, will document the monthslong endeavor in a town yet to be determined as teams of construction workers and laborers unaccustomed to the demands of a "green" lifestyle work with passionate eco-idealists, planners and architects. Executive producers Craig Piligian (CBS' "Survivor") and Tom Mazza (NBC's "Treasure Hunters") brought the idea to DiCaprio, a high-profile environmental advocate, who signed on as...

Gunter Grass’s journey from the Nazi frontlines to the vanguard of anti-Americanism. In his voluminous political writings throughout the years, Gunter Grass always insisted that his role, as an artist and an intellectual of note, was to remind Germany of its profound national shame -- the Nazi era -- and “keep the wound open.” But earlier this month it emerged that for over sixty years the Nobel Prize-winning novelist had been concealing just such a wound from public view. Grass stirred worldwide controversy when he admitted that he had been a member of Hitler's notorious Waffen SS in the final...

'A SPINELESS retard with the character of pond scum." A "whacko," "greedy un-American idiot," "fascist," "whining liberal" and "nasty little gun grabber." Those are just some of the names I've been called since I published an Op-Ed article in the Washington Post to commemorate the fifth anniversary of my brother's death. After briefly stating that David and his fiancee were shot and killed by the fiancee's mother, who was angry that she had to move out of their L.A. apartment, I went on to argue for a national ban on handguns. The gun control lobby, led by the Brady Campaign,...

An Aberporth man has been charged with racial aggravation by displaying words that caused harassment. Gary John Mathewson is alleged to have draped a white bed sheet over his garden fence containing the words Death to all Muslims who threaten us. Enoch Powell was right." Mathewson, aged 35, of 79 Brynglas, Aberporth, was charged with causing racially aggravated harassment or alarm on February 7 this year, the charge brought under the Crime and Disorder Act. continued... The defendant, who was represented by Colin Taylor, was not in court when his case was called, and after an application by Crown prosecutor...

I remember when I first drove through Collin County several years ago and thought, "Why do all these people live so far away?" It took me a while to realize that these crazy people out in the sticks didn't live far away – not far away from the things that mattered to them: their churches, their shopping centers, their favorite restaurants and even their jobs. Now that I live in East Dallas and work downtown, I run into the very kind of naïve, shallow thinking I was guilty of when I first experienced Collin County. Can you believe they are...