Free Republic

by Mark Finkelstein March 7, 2006 Turns out the real culprit in the Colorado kerfluffle over the teacher who compared Pres. Bush to Hitler is . . . the student who complained about it. Just ask Matt Lauer. Interviewing teacher Jay Bennish this morning, Lauer laid out this sympathetic scenario: Lauer: "The family here, the student's family, didn't go to the school board with this tape." Bennish: "They never contacted me." Lauer: "They shopped it around to conservative media outlets and finally released it to one and created an uproar. On the tape you can hear Sean Allen [the student...

Student 'starting to get crucified,' his dad says By Julie Poppen, Rocky Mountain News March 4, 2006 Sean Allen's dad says he isn't handling this week's media attention and threats as well as his son. "Sean has handled this way better than his father," Jeff Allen, Sean's dad, said in an interview with Sean Hannity, syndicated talk show host with Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes. "To read some of these e-mails that are attacking Sean is just devastating," he said. "It looks like the tactic is to turn it around, to make it about Sean and not about the...

March 2, 2006 — A Colorado school is in upheaval following the suspension of a teacher who was recorded comparing President Bush's rhetoric to that of Adolf Hitler. More than 100 students at Overland High School in Aurora, Colo., walked out of class this morning to protest the decision to put geography teacher Jay Bennish on administrative leave. The school administration made the move after a student went public with a 20-minute recording of Bennish's comments to his class. In the tape, the teacher is heard saying there were similarities between remarks Bush made in his State of the Union...

SAN FRANCISCO - An owner of Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod music player filed a federal lawsuit against the computer maker, claiming the device causes hearing loss in people who use it. The portable music players are "inherently defective in design and are not sufficiently adorned with adequate warnings regarding the likelihood of hearing loss," according to the complaint, which seeks class action status. The suit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, seeks compensation for plaintiffs' hearing loss and upgrades that will make the iPods safer. Apple has sold more than 42 million of the devices since they...

  Columnist Barry Saunders A North Carolina columnist claimed today Dick Cheney's shooting of friend Harry Whittington was not an accident, but was meant to be a message to his former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, not to testify against the vice president in the Valerie Plame leak investigation. "Accident my eye. Or rather, Harry Whittington's eye," writes Barry Saunders in the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer. "If you believe it was just an accident that Vice President Dick Cheney shot his hunting companion last weekend, you obviously have never seen 'The Godfather' movies." Continued Saunders in his column: "Just...

BOSTON (AP) — Howard Dean raised the specter of Richard Nixon yesterday, calling the Bush White House "more corrupt" than Nixon's with even more dire consequences for the nation. "When Richard Nixon mislead the nation and obstructed justice he was harming the system of justice and the respect for the presidency," the Democratic National Committee chairman said. "But this administration has done more than that. They have leaked military secrets in a time of war in order to fulfill their political agenda."

Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens-Democrats and Republicans alike-to express our shared concern that America's Constitution is in grave danger. In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power. As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of...

US authorities are investigating claims that Michael Jackson deceived officials about his custody status in order to obtain passports for his three children. The mother of Prince Michael I and Paris, Debbie Rowe is currently suing Jackson for custody of the children and has claimed he abducted them in order to take them to his Bahrain hideaway. Rowe has allegedly filed a lawsuit that will mean a court order will force Jackson to return the children to the US. Yesterday it was reported in TMZ that Jackson could face abduction charges if he fails to return to the US with...

WASHINGTON – Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, never known to mince words, today told a San Antonio radio station the U.S. cannot win the war in Iraq. The "idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong," Dean predicted on WOIA.

It was a rainy day and a Monday that got one woman down. Five hours after she reported to work at her job in Des Plaines, she discovered her black 2004 Land Rover missing from a parking lot. That’s when she learned witnesses had reported seeing her vehicle sink to the bottom of the manmade lake outside the O’Hare Lake Office Plaza off I-294, about 15 minutes after she arrived to work in the rain. Investigators believe another vehicle rear-ended the Land Rover, sending it down a slope into the lake, Police Chief James Prandini said. Employees at the Federal...

Tom Cruise has already claimed to know the history of psychiatry. Now he's working on getting acquainted with OB/GYN. The couch-jumping thesp has acquired a sonogram machine with which to personally track the progress of the fetus currently incased in his fiancee Katie Holmes' womb. Cruise revealed the purchase during an interview with Barbara Walters taped Oct. 30 for the veteran newswoman's upcoming special, Barbara Walters Presents: The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2005, scheduled to air Tuesday on ABC. "I bought a sonogram machine," Cruise told Walters. "I am going to donate it to a hospital when we are...

The recent South Park TV episode in which South Park educates the global community through humor on the dangers of the destructive, mind control cult Scientology has done a great service to societies and families everywhere their show airs around the world.

"We can't be breeding right now," says Les Knight. "It's obvious that the intentional creation of another [human being] by anyone anywhere can't be justified today." Knight is the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, an informal network of people dedicated to phasing out the human race in the interest of the health of the Earth. Knight, whose convictions led him to get a vasectomy in the 1970s, when he was 25, believes that the human race is inherently dangerous to the planet and inevitably creates an unsustainable situation. "As long as there's one breeding couple," he says cheerfully,...

Katie Holmes is quitting acting, to become a full time wife to Tom Cruise. The 'Batman Begins' beauty is one of Hollywoods most promising up and coming young stars. But at age 26 she wants to ditch her blossoming film career and devote herself to bringing up the baby they are expecting next year. A pal tells me 'Katie has decided to give up acting altogether. She's been telling friends that she and Tom have decided it is best that she stays at home and brings up their new baby.' 'Her decision is raising a lot of eyebrows in Hollywood....

A visiting professor at North Carolina State University says the solution to the problems faced by many blacks is the extermination of "white people off the face of the planet." Kamau Kambon, who taught Africana Studies at the Raleigh school last spring, told a panel at Howard University Law School Oct. 14 this action must be taken "because white people want to kill us," the Carolina Journal reported. Kambon, a Raleigh activist and bookstore owner, was addressing a panel on "Hurricane Katrina Media Coverage," broadcast on C-SPAN. Excerpts of the speech can be heard here and the entire event is...

Mike Adams blows the whistle on a murder-minded liberal racist in academia. His name is Dr. Kamau Kambon, an affiliated faculty instructor at NC State University.

Peter Daniel Young, an animal rights activist who faces federal prison for freeing thousands of mink from Midwestern fur farms, says he'd do it again, and doing time will be nothing compared to what caged animals suffer. Young said in an interview from jail he believes he saved the minks from slavery. "I would do it all over again," he said. "As bad as it could get (in prison), it will never be as bad as it was for those mink." Federal prosecutors believe Young and an accomplice were acting on behalf of the Animal Liberation Front when they broke...

On CNN just now. New Orleans Mayor Nagin, apparantly stressed out, in interview segment, said he has been yelling at the President and the Governor, and for all he knows, the "CIA could wipe me out". (Paraphrase) Just now. Turning into a strange, macabre show now. Blame continues, spiraling out of control. Sad. It even raised CNN's eyebrows a bit.(5:57 p.m. Eastern/4:57 p.m. Central)

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- A mother is behind bars after St. Petersburg police say she and her five children were seen on the street naked and carrying Bibles. Police have arrested the woman and charged her with child abuse and exposure of sexual organs. The children range in age from 5 to 15 years old. Police say they will be turned over to relatives. The woman says that God told her that she and her children should walk down the street naked. Police haven't released her identity.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Two key states have agreed to start the first stage of a $200 billion plan to link India's rivers, a scheme critics condemn as a recipe for ecological disaster and violence from those it will force from their homes. The deal between Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh is a major step toward a project first mooted by the British a century ago becoming a reality, but many details remain to be worked out before work on even the first canal and dams can start. "It would be wrong to promise early results," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh...