Free Republic

In my last piece for Crisis, I emphasized the importance of casting doubts on Islamic beliefs just as we cast doubts on Soviet Communist ideology during the Cold War. With that in mind, let’s talk about the Koran. It’s the fountain from which the ideology flows. It is quoted incessantly by terrorist leaders and imams alike, and it provides the motivation for both armed jihadists in combat fatigues, and cultural jihadists in business suits.So it would seem logical for those threatened by Islam to cast doubts on the Koran. If the Koran came to be seem as a man-made fabrication...

The awful launch week for the over-hyped, expected bestseller The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, by controversial author Joe McGinniss, just got worse. Much worse. After a week of universally scathing pans from the reflexively anti-Palin establishment media, McGinniss now faces the fight of his literary life: the accusation that he seems to have knowingly submitted a book to his publisher, Crown/Random House, that was filled with unproved “tawdry gossip” and rumors that lacked “factual evidence.”

Police reports are often rich with jargon — phrases like "victim succumbed to his injuries," or "victim advised that defendant did knowingly and willingly enter his home without permission." Not so for a report filed by Tampa police Officer Terry Ashe, who wrote a colorful narrative about an alligator that attacked his city-owned Ford Taurus in Pasco County on Oct. 27. "As I was driving down the single lane, dirt road, adjacent to an old cemetery, I observed a large, menacing, dark object lying in the road obstructing my right of way," Ashe wrote. "With rain pouring down, mist and...

From bullets, to poison and even swords, over the years writers have taken their own lives in an atonishing number of ways. Gary Lachman, a founding member of the rock group Blondie and now a full-time writer, explains ten fatal characters ‘So many, I had not thought death had undone so many.’’ T.S.Eliot’s The Wasteland 1. Empedocles – jumping into a volcano Legend says that Empedocles, one of the earliest Greek philosophers, killed himself by secretly jumping into Mt. Etna in Sicily; his idea was that the volcano would destroy his corpse and people would think he had been transformed...

Well, it's time again for my quarterly inquiry for "What Are You Reading Now?". It can be anything. A classic novel. A technical journal. A trashy pulp novel. A best-seller. Please DO NOT defile this thread with a unfunny reply such as "I'm Reading This Thread". I'll start. I'm reading "Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal" by Robert Shogan. A interesting and easy read about how Roosevelt's court-packing scheme as well as labor union troubles helped to derail his plans for explanding the New Deal. Well, what are you reading right now?

1. HOW THE WWW IS ENABLING THE CONSERVATIVE LITERARY REVOLUTION: by Elliot McGucken The WWW is allowing us to liberate literature from the liberals' vise-like death grip by fostering a free marketplace of ideas where only words that mean things will survive. Only by entertaining and exalting the peoples' spirits, echoing their beliefs and ideals, does literature exist. When it is used as a political prop, "literature" withers into bureaucracy, which is of course the way the liberals want it. The citizens' role in the liberal literary arena is not to be entertained and exalted by the literature, but it...