Free Republic

It is with great sadness that we must report the loss of our dear friend Tony Blankley. Tony passed away Saturday after a long battle with stomach cancer. Tony was a longtime friend of our parent organization the Media Research Center, serving as one of MRC's DisHonors Awards judges in the past few years. Tony's syndicated column was also published on NewsBusters. Tony was a veteran warrior for the conservative movement having served as a speechwriter for the Reagan administration, as press secretary to Speaker Newt Gingrich, as editorial page editor for the Washington Times from 2002-2007, and as a...

Tony Blankely, a noted conservative author and commentator and former editorial page editor of The Washington Times, died Sunday morning, according to family sources. He was 63 and had been battling stomach cancer. Mr. Blankley was an executive vice president of the Edelman public-relations firm in Washington, a visiting senior fellow in national-security communications at the Heritage Foundation, a syndicated newspaper columnist and an on-air political commentator for CNN, NBC and NPR. He was also a regular weekly guest on “The McLaughlin Group.” Mr. Blankley was editorial page editor of The Times from 2002 to 2007, and from 1990 to...

Candidate has already proved his high office credentials as House speaker Almost all political commentators agree on one thing: The Republican presidential campaign is unlike any we have experienced. It is not a campaign of steady trends and continuities, but rather of emotional reversals and discontinuities. Perhaps this is so because the past three or four years have been a shocking time of discontinuities and reversals for America. Really, America has been bewildered, shocked and disoriented since Sept. 11, 2001. The economic collapse and the unprecedentedly statist policies of the past three years have just compounded the anxiety. The rise...

The GOP primary voters reflect this helter-skelter search for leadership. And I predict that when the general electorate is engaged in the general election campaign next year, the independents and some Democrats will reflect the same desperate confusion and search for the right kind of leadership for these treacherous times. But what kind of candidate is most likely to make sense of the terrible events and forces that weigh down our country; be capable of vividly describing our plight and what needs to be done; and convince the public that he or she has the intelligence, courage, experience and sheer...

Don't believe all the Washington talk that President Obama had a great lame duck session and goes into the new year and the new 112th congress with the whip hand. Utter nonsense. Let's review the lame duck session as it happened -- not as it has been instantly revised by the ever-obliging Washington press corps.

Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, Redux In America, socialism used to be confined within certain boundaries; that was before last Sunday’s vote.  We are now beginning to enter the Kansas-Nebraska Act stage of our republic’s socialist crisis. At our constitutional founding, the evil of slavery was crudely evaded. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited the abomination north of 36°30' north latitude (about the middle of Missouri), was enacted. But with the western push of the frontier, a new compromise was needed. So the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 decreed that the “popular sovereignty” of each territory should decide whether it would...

Palin Delivers Sparkle, Warmth Tony BlankleyWednesday, February 10, 2010"No new ideas." That was the most prominent of the criticisms of Sarah Palin's speech at MSNBC's too-cool-for-school "Morning Joe" on Monday. The more general critique of former Gov. Palin's future was that while she certainly had star power, she could never speak to more than a fraction of even Republicans. The proof of the latter point was made with the evidence that many important Washington Republicans could never support her for more than cheerleader to her marginal people. They also pointed out that she had kept out of races in Massachusetts...

As the town hall meetings on health care started in early August, the Democratic Party's talking points accused the attending citizens of being "demonstrators hired by K Street lobbyists." Then they started calling them a "mob." Getting into the spirit of his party, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called those who oppose Obamacare "evil." Then House Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer called the dissenters "un-American." For good measure, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused them of being Nazis. Former Democratic President Jimmy Carter followed with the assertion that "racism" motivates President Barack Obama's health care opponents. The culmination --...

Finally, Change We Can Believe Inby Tony Blankley (more by this author) Posted 08/19/2009 ETUpdated 08/19/2009 ET Those of us who are self-appointed advocates -- who expend our efforts trying to persuade a few more people to our political point of view -- must sit back in slack-jawed wonder when the great American public makes one of its great roars, as we all have been hearing in town hall meetings across the country.  In the animal kingdom, it is the lion that has the loudest roar. Scientists say it is made as a warning to advertise the animal's presence. Are...

Professional politicians and political journalists don't waste energy on political corpses. They reserve their energy -- positive or negative -- for viable politicians. Thus, an intriguing part of the Sarah Palin phenomenon is the intensity of response to her every word and move -- from both Republican Party and Democratic Party professionals and from the conventional media. The negative but sustained passion being expressed by the professional Washington political class against her tends to belie its almost unanimous assertion that she is washed up. I happened to be on CNN on July 3 just as the story was breaking of...

This week, American troops start leaving Iraqi cities in compliance with both former President George W. Bush's negotiated start date for withdrawal and President Barack Obama's campaign pledge. Given Bush's profound commitment to succeed in Iraq, if he were still in office and if he judged such a scheduled removal of troops to be dangerous, he doubtlessly would have postponed the action -- just as he changed his strategy and ordered the surge against the advice of most of his government and most of Washington in 2007. Yet it was that surge and the changed strategy designed and led by...

Last week, both David Broder, The Washington Post's venerable and authoritative political voice, and Chuck Todd, NBC's new important political voice, declared President Barack Obama's honeymoon over. Although almost every new American presidency is launched with renewed hope and optimism for both the president and the nation (Abraham Lincoln's being a conspicuous exception in 1861), a time comes when the public and the president's party begin to assess whether they made the right choice. Are the public's expectations of the new president being met? Are the many promises that every candidate for president makes -- and his apparent personal attributes...

To borrow Niall Ferguson's metaphor, if finance is an evolutionary process, then regulation is its intelligent design -- which, I would add, is a cognate of faith, not science. Or, to take the observation of former Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin, if "the financial system (is) the brain of the economy," then, I would suggest, heavy regulation is its lobotomy; while it removes the emotional highs and lows, it also dulls the perception, facility and adroitness. (Disclosure: In keeping with my long-held public view, I give professional advice to financial institutions seeking low regulation and taxation.) A century ago, medical...

Last Sunday's New York Times reported that “Mr. Obama will confront resentment over American-style capitalism and resistance to his economic prescriptions when he lands in London. ... [H]e will be tested in face-to-face meetings by the leaders of China and Russia, who have been pondering the degree to which the power of the United States to dominate global affairs may be ebbing. ... The American banking collapse, which precipitated the global meltdown, has led to a fundamental rethinking of the American way as a model for the rest of the world.” This may seem an odd beginning to a review...

Last Sunday's New York Times reported that “Mr. Obama will confront resentment over American-style capitalism and resistance to his economic prescriptions when he lands in London. ... [H]e will be tested in face-to-face meetings by the leaders of China and Russia, who have been pondering the degree to which the power of the United States to dominate global affairs may be ebbing. ... The American banking collapse, which precipitated the global meltdown, has led to a fundamental rethinking of the American way as a model for the rest of the world.” This may seem an odd beginning to a review...

In a world growing more dangerous by the week in this dark spring of 2009, Washington may be the most dangerous city in the world. The city is safe enough for its residents - it is the rest of the country and world that is endangered by what Washington is capable of doing. On a bipartisan, bicameral, bigovernmental (executive and legislative branches) basis, rarely has so much policymaking, world-economy-transforming power been in harness to such unsteady political and policy instincts. Whatever one thinks of the American International Group Inc.'s bonus actions, last week's performance by Washington's political class should give...

Many of the media are following the convention of assessing President Barack Obama's first 100 days in office. The term first was applied to new American presidents during Franklin Roosevelt's spring of 1933, when, between March and June, he proposed and Congress passed unprecedented federal programs: the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Securities Act, the Banking Act and others. But Obama may wish to note that the term "100 days" derives from Napoleon's escape from Elba in March 1815, his brilliant reforming of an army, his march through France, and his final defeat by the British...

Many of the media are following the convention of assessing President Barack Obama's first 100 days in office. The term first was applied to new American presidents during Franklin Roosevelt's spring of 1933, when, between March and June, he proposed and Congress passed unprecedented federal programs: the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Securities Act, the Banking Act and others. But Obama may wish to note that the term "100 days" derives from Napoleon's escape from Elba in March 1815, his brilliant reforming of an army, his march through France, and his final defeat by the British...

Obama Lied; the Economy Died I am trying to capture the spirit of bipartisanship as practiced by the Democratic Party over the past eight years. Thus, I have chosen as my lead this proposition: Obama lied; the economy died.Obviously, I am borrowing this from the Democratic theme of 2003-08: "Bush lied, people died." There are, of course, two differences between the slogans. Most importantly, I chose to separate the two clauses with a semicolon rather than a comma because the rule of grammar is that a semicolon (rather than a comma) should be used between closely related independent clauses...

...... George W. Bush didn't lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He was merely mistaken. Whereas President Obama told a whopper last week when he claimed he was not for bigger government ......... [Obama]: "We have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade." But, lamentably, a few days later, The Washington Post reported: "A senior administration official acknowledged yesterday that the budget does not contain $2 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade. Instead, the figure represents Obama's total efforts at deficit reduction, including tax hikes [of more than $1 trillion] on families making...