Free Republic

Peace on earth, good will toward men. Fine sentiments. But as citizens of a republic, can we really assume we'll be held forever blameless for the actions of our government? Barack Obama, who if he were not in office would be applying for a Community Development Block Grant to stage anti-war rallies in Chicago, just authorized sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. But it's OK: He promises to pull them out in 18 months -- soon enough to guarantee they can't actually accomplish anything. A few hundred of these young American men will be sent home in coffins or with...

Only "two rogue scientists," as the oh-so-reassuring Climategate Deniers would have us believe? Walter Williams, esteemed economics professor at George Mason University, last week summarized Climategate, to date: "New evidence proves that climatologists and environmental policy advocates have not only fed us lies (and) engaged in scientific and academic fraud, but committed criminal acts as well. Last month, Russian computer hackers obtained thousands of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. CRU has the world's largest temperature data set. In collaboration with scientists around the world ... its research and mathematical models form...

By now, you doubtless know a dastardly hacker broke into the e-mail system at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain late last month, grabbing and making public more than 1,000 e-mails that expose how these "scientific experts," cited so often to confirm "man-made global warming," have been fudging their data, conspiring to remove global warming skeptics from the teams that "peer-review" their doctored data for publication, and advising each other to delete incriminating e-mails being sought under the public disclosure laws. Wow. I'm about as shocked as Claude Rains' character when he found out...

Retro clothes are not vintage clothes. Retro clothes are new-made garments designed to imitate or evoke the fashions of as bygone era -- often, the 1940s, '50s or '60s. Vintage fashion is the real thing: sturdy garments well made in America (usually by union labor, if that matters to you) that remind us of an era when all the best stuff, from movies to muscle-cars, was "made in the U.S.A." It's about nostalgia, yes, but in this unrelenting recession it's also about the "recessionistas" -- that's what Alison Houtte calls her growing new customer base -- realizing they can get...

I posted on Nov. 11 at www.lvrj.com/blogs/vin/ a response to a letter-writing government schoolmarm who contends she should not be held responsible for the failure of her young charges to learn anything, since it's all their parents' fault. I answered, in part: "Teachers from 1620 through 1950 didn't go home with their kids to tuck them in, either. Yet Americans with eighth grade educations through all those centuries could read, write, spell and do basic arithmetic well enough to run circles around your pathetic charges ... even if today's pathetic inmates sit through a full 12 years of your progressively...

Early in the morning of Dec. 5, 1999, off-duty Las Vegas police officer Dennis Devitte was one of the customers at Mr. D's Sportsbar & Grill, at Rainbow and Oakey boulevards, where he and some pals had gone to hear the band Pigs in a Blanket. A little after 1 a.m., three armed robbers charged through the back door with guns drawn and their faces covered with T-shirts or bandanas. "I'd only been in the bar a short time and was talking to friends," Mr. Devitte later told an interviewer for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. "I saw...

A "push in Congress for broader gun rights is threatening to derail Amtrak and stall a transportation spending bill," wrote Walter Alarkon on thehill.com on Oct. 25. "Gun-rights advocates in Congress are pressing appropriators to keep a provision that would let Amtrak passengers check in handguns with their baggage." The provision, which calls for withholding $1.5 billion in Amtrak funding if the policy isn't implemented before April, was inserted into the $68.8 billion Senate transportation and Housing and Urban Development spending bill as an amendment. All 40 Republicans, 27 Democrats and one admitted socialist voted for the amendment, sponsored by...

How gratifying to hear from so many veterans in response to my Oct. 25 column on Mitchell Paige and Guadalcanal. I heard from Clayton Fisher, 87, of Henderson, who served under Chesty Puller in the 1st of the 7th Marines, receiving his first purple heart at Guadalcanal (the night before the action I described in my column) and his second at Palau. I heard from Gordon Williams, now 92, who served on the destroyer Porter (DD356) in the Battle of Santa Cruz, which was being fought over the same two days -- Oct. 25 and 26, 1942 -- as the...

It's hard to envision -- or, for the dwindling few, to remember -- what the world looked like on Oct. 26, 1942, when a few thousand U.S. Marines stood essentially stranded on the God-forsaken jungle island of Guadalcanal, placed like a speed bump at the end of the long blue-water slot between New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, the most likely route for the Japanese Navy to take if they hoped to reach Australia. On Guadalcanal, the Marines struggled to complete an airfield. Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto knew what that meant. No effort would be spared to dislodge these upstart...

Unemployment continues to tick upward. Small businesses forgo profits on two-for-one deals just to keep the doors open. But we're in recovery. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the guy who couldn't get around to paying his own taxes, says so. After all, government is doing all it can to speed the recovery, isn't it? "Fed keeps key rate near zero," the Business page headline screamed on Sept. 24. Low interest rates should get things "stimulated," shouldn't they? Then, three days later, over a Washington dateline, "Jobless benefits extension backed: Lawmakers voted 331-83 to extend jobless benefits by 13 weeks in 27...

Imagine you've offered to help a teenager prepare a report on American politics of the 1970s. You start reading the 36-year-old reports of the scandal that began when some very unusual burglars were caught breaking into the Democratic campaign headquarters at Washington's Watergate Hotel. But something strikes you odd. In all the discussions of who financed these undercover operations, who ordered them, who stood to benefit from them, one name is curiously missing. In none of the stories can you find any mention of one "Richard Nixon." Wow! What kind of a time warp have you entered? Has someone been...

Dozens of times a week now, we receive e-mailed letters very similar to the following, which arrived at the newspaper Wednesday, signed by one Mary White on Russell Road, Las Vegas: "I am disappointed in the media and the RJ for not reporting on all the undercover journal reporting done on Acorn by ordinary citizens," Ms. White opines. "You guys are only interesting in making Obama president and turning our country into communists. I am look thru Sundays paper for any real news like what is reported on Fox News and Glenn Beck and am hugely disappointed. I cannot buy...

Touring the country to peddle his collectivist schemes, President Barack Obama made stops in New Hampshire and then in Phoenix during the month of August. At several of these events, a handful of those who gathered outside the halls to protest wore firearms. No one got arrested, since no one brandished their firearms in a threatening manner. They just wore them, safely slung or holstered, which is still perfectly legal in both New Hampshire and Arizona. The fact that many Americans need to be re-acclimatized to the normalcy of an armed citizenry was quickly revealed by the nearly hysterical rantings...

The main point that probably deserves further mention about last week's Dead Kennedy Funeral Parade was the behavior of the press, which wept and moaned and gnashed its collective teeth with hardly a dissenting soul to say, "Enough, already," as though the corpse of a pharaoh was headed for its final hoedown with the sun god. I'm surprised they didn't decide to embalm the guy so people could troop past and touch the yellowed cadaver like they've been doing with Vlad "The Impaler" Lenin in Moscow for the past 70 years. It was all further evidence that statism has now...

The most revealing moment in Edward "Ted" Kennedy's political life came Nov. 4, 1979, just three days before he would officially launch his challenge to a sitting president of his own party, Jimmy Carter. In a televised interview, CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd asked the already stout Massachusetts senator a "giveaway" question, a question about as tough as a quiz show host trying to help break the ice with a nervous contestant by asking, "What color is grass?" Roger Mudd asked: "Why do you want to be president?" Ted Kennedy, 47, was about to challenge an incumbent president of his...

There are thrift shops in town with signs up, seeking to buy Michael Jackson LPs and other "related material." They do this because people have been coming in since the "King of Pop's" untimely demise, asking to buy Michael Jackson stuff. I understand. But are Michael Jackson LPs a good investment? Unless they're signed and you have some reason to believe the autograph is legitimate, no. LPs by an artist as popular as Mr. Jackson got pressed out by the hundreds of thousands. There were a couple of Jackson Five singles (45s) released on the "Steel Town" label in 1968...

Our hummingbird has returned.She's a black-chinned, I believe, not the world's most colorful model. But she has a distinctive habit of hovering down to look us right in the face, one at a time, as we sit out in the back yard to watch the sunset. "Checking in," we call it. Perhaps she, too, wants to make sure we're still the same strange creatures who always maintain the feeder full of sugar water. (Never use honey.) Last year she raised a couple of pipsqueaks in the cherry tree, in a nest perilously low given the area's cat population. So...

Taking away their surplus at gunpoint is 'only fair' Posted by Vin Suprynowicz Wednesday, Jul. 22, 2009 at 05:27 PM WASHINGTON (AP) - Obama to tell nation that health reform is key to economic recovery, controlling deficit," said today's 3:06 p.m. news flash. No, actually, the key to economic recovery and controlling the deficit is giving me 10,000 ounces of gold, a nice bungalow on Maui, and all the unblended Scotch whisky I can drink. This is hilarious. This guy is convinced they'll believe ANYTHING. If having government pay for just the health care of the poor and the elderly...

A recent column on the euphemisms used by proponents of illegal-immigrant amnesty brought some irate buzzing from all seven members of the Young Anarchists' League. As near as I can figure, I'm "not allowed" to call for the enforcement of current immigration laws -- or possibly of any laws, even those few (like the immigration laws) enacted within the powers delegated to Congress under the Constitution -- because any such enforcement of the law amounts to some kind of "collectivist police state fascism" against people who have "not initiated force or fraud." I'm not sure how you cut through a...

There is one good thing about the lunatic "global warming" catechism now taught our youth in the mandatory government youth propaganda camps : When they are finally forced to admit that the globe has been cooling again, not warming, for the past decade, yet proceed to demand precisely the same remedies for "global cooling" (which they will cleverly dub "climate change") as they did for "global warming" -- that is to say higher electric bills, more government controls, taxes sufficient to cripple our industrial economy and generally lower our standard of living in keeping with the world socialist doctrine that...