Free Republic

This year we have decided to give our kids an early Christmas gift. We will be taking $25 of the amount we have set aside for each of them for Christmas gifts and giving it to them on Thanksgiving Day. Along with the money will be a list of different charities. They will get to select a charity to donate the money to. Our kids have big hearts already, but we think this will be a good reminder to them of all they have to be thankful for while giving them an opportunity to bless the lives of others. There...

Hello everyone, Not sure if this is allowed on FR, but here I go. With all of the news lately, I just can't keep quiet anymore. On September 16, over 500 families joined together with Families United For Our Troops in DC. We were joined by, and honored by the Veterans For Freedom. All of us, not just one individual as posted on some blogs were invited as a group, to the White House for breakfast. It was arranged in advance that the Gold Star families would meet the President. After wading through the masses, we did! Some of us...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10, 2007 – During the eighth annual Newman’s Own Awards Ceremony at the Pentagon today, 10 groups that support troops and their families received a total of $75,000 in grants to continue their work. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, right, congratulates Mike Conklin, who represented Sentinels of Freedom, for receiving a $15,000 grant on behalf of his organization during the Newman's Own Awards at the Pentagon, Aug. 10, 2007, as general's wife, Lynne, looks on. Defense Dept. photo by D. Myles Cullen  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Marine Gen. Peter...

Political Report: Pro-Gun Lip Service POLITICAL REPORT CHRIS COX, NRA-ILA Executive Director More and more anti-gun candidates have realized that they must give lip service to the Second Amendment, camouflaging their real anti-freedom agendas until they are safely in office. You and I are members of a proud and very large community. It is estimated that America’s sport shooting and hunting community is home to 47 million voters. Our size translates into a simple political truth: Candidates for office at all levels--federal, state and local--know they can’t afford to ignore us at election time. Consequently, we have seen anti-gun groups...

WASHINGTON - The pitches from AMVETS are practiced and smooth: Help America's veterans get treatment for their disabilities or monthly checks to compensate for their injuries. Give them the means to avoid homelessness. AMVETS tells potential donors that it's chartered by Congress, which creates the misleading impression that the U.S. government vouches for the organization and is overseeing it. AMVETS spent $8.5 million in 2004, but according to its tax record only 22 percent of it went for programs that helped veterans, much less than the 60 to 65 percent that experts on philanthropy consider the minimum. Far from watching...

MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, Ala. (AFPN) -- Air Force Officer Accession and Training School officials here are assessing the damage to Air Force ROTC detachments and Junior ROTC units affected by Hurricane Katrina. Twenty-five Air Force Junior ROTC units located in high schools in Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida and Alabama are potentially affected. Of the 70 instructors assigned to those units, only 25 have been accounted for. Reports have confirmed that at least 13 of the 25 high schools were destroyed. "We are assessing what it is going to take to re-establish those units in terms of uniforms, textbooks and supplies,...

The Center for Security Policy today released an open letter to President Bush commending him for his nomination of John R. Bolton to become the next U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations - and urging a recess appointment be made to ensure Mr. Bolton is in place before the UN tries in September to impose international taxes on American citizens. The letter states, in part: In our judgment the Nation can ill-afford further delay of action on the Bolton nomination. As you know, the United Nations has a very full agenda this Fall. Given the momentous nature of that agenda...

i noticed that whenever osama bin laden and other terrorists leaders talk, they never once say anything against their own organization. They are always blaming somebody else's foreign policy

For years, it has been my position that the threat of radical Islam implies an imperative to focus security measures on Muslims. If searching for rapists, one looks only at the male population. Similarly, if searching for Islamists (adherents of radical Islam), one looks at the Muslim population.And so, I was encouraged by a just-released Cornell University opinion survey that finds nearly half the U.S. population agreeing with this proposition. Specifically, 44 percent of Americans believe that government authorities should direct special attention toward Muslims living in America, either by registering their whereabouts, profiling them, monitoring their mosques, or infiltrating...

Counterterrorism efforts got a major boost last week when an American district court found three Muslim organizations and one individual, mostly based in the Chicago area, guilty of funding Hamas and fined them an astonishing US$156 million.The four were found liable for their roles in the murder of an American teenager, David Boim, on May 13, 1996, when he was shot by Hamas operatives as he waited for a bus near Jerusalem. This case is important in itself, providing some measure of justice and relief for the Boim family. Beyond that, it helps fight terrorism in four ways.First, it validates...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Two weeks ago, the National Post and I were served with a notice of libel by the Canadian branch of the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR. The Post and I are not alone. Over the past year, CAIR's Canadian and U.S. branches have served similar libel notices on half a dozen other individuals and organizations in the United States and Canada. Each case has its own particular facts, yet they are linked by a common theme: That we defendants have accused CAIR (in the words of the notice served on me) of being "an unscrupulous, Islamist, extremist sympathetic...

U.S. authorities are seeking to extradite from Britain a 30-year-old British computer specialist accused of running Web sites in this country to promote jihad and funnel cash to terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda. Babar Ahmad was named in a federal grand jury indictment in August in Bridgeport, Conn., on charges of conspiring to support terrorists, providing material support to terrorist organizations, conspiring to kill, kidnap or injure U.S. citizens, and money laundering. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesman Dean Boyd said Mr. Ahmad is scheduled for an extradition hearing Thursday in London. Extradition papers said Mr. Ahmad, arrested Aug....

Do the media give aid and comfort to terrorists by giving their violence maximum exposure and impact at times while sanitizing the perpetrators and tainting their victims at others? It is standard procedure for many media outlets to describe the perpetrators of terrorist acts - the premeditated slaughter of civilians - with a range of euphemisms, "militants" being the most common. Thus, The New York Times can headline a report on the killing of a hostage as "Iraq Militants Said to Behead a Truck Driver From Bulgaria." Similarly, terrorists killed in a military strike can be described in another as...

Editor's note: Readers may be interested in two related stories: "Invested in Terrorism" and "BBC: U.S. Damned if it does and damned if it doesn't". -ALJ Douglas Farah uncovered the story of al-Qaeda's involvement in West Africa's diamond smuggling while reporting on Africa for the Washington Post, which he described in Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror (New York: Broadway, 2004). Mr. Farah, now a consultant, freelance writer on terror finance and national security matters, and a senior fellow at the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, addressed the Middle East Forum in New York City on...

The horrors of the Holocaust and the outrage over the failure of Allied powers to intervene provided the impetus for the creation of today's international human rights system, anchored in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[1] The United Nations (U.N.) and individual governments were the primary actors in establishing new international norms, but in time, a network of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) essentially privatized this international regime. The most powerful of them— Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW), the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), and others—exert a tremendous influence in the U.N., the European Union (EU), and Western capitals. The...

Progressives recognize that it's time for America to resume its glorious journey. Time to look out upon the world for friends, not enemies. Time to tell the world that we wish to be their partner in peace, not their leader in war. Time to recognize that winning hearts and minds comes from dialogue and mutual respect--not from a gun. Time for the greatest military power in the history of this world to act with humility and restraint--not to arrogantly and illegally impose its system and values upon others. Time to recognize that war must truly be the last desperate measure...

Unrecognized tribe appeals to U.N. Sends delegation to international conference An Indiana-based tribe that has yet to be recognized by the federal government is sending a delegation to a United Nations convention. The Miami Indians from Indiana will is dispatching a contingent, including Chief Brian Buchanan, to the U.N. Geneva Convention in Switzerland. The goal is to seek international support for the tribe’s bid for federal recognition, Buchanan said. The Oklahoma-based Miami Nation, headquartered in Ottawa County is recognized, but Buchanan said most members of the tribe live in Indiana. The Hoosier Miami, based in Peru, saw the U.S. Supreme...

http://www.dailyvanguard.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/05/21/40adb1d10f795?in_archive=1 Traditionally, college campuses have been a hub of liberal activity, busy with protest rallies, poetry readings and film screenings on topics ranging from the evils of the Coca-Cola Corporation, to the danger of beauty ideals within mass media. Despite all the politically correct language and efforts to maintain diversity of opinion in the classroom, there is one group on university campuses whose members are claiming they remain unheard: young conservatives.

The world's socialists and other misfits will be coming to Brunswick Ga in June...