Free Republic

Some Democrats participating in the House IRS hearings have used the opportunity to ask tough questions and promise to punish any government employees who unfairly singled out conservative non-profit applicants for unfair treatment. Not Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore...He even took the opportunity to trash 501 c(4) advocacy groups that advocate things he doesn’t like, such as the traditional legal definition of marriage:

Disgraced former attorney Aaron Biber, imprisoned for raping a 15-year-old friend of his son, has been ordered to pay $15 million to a trust in the teen's name for acts a judge deemed "utterly intolerable to the civilized community." Hennepin County District Judge Denise Reilly ordered Biber, 48, formerly of Shoreview, to pay $10 million in punitive damages and $5 million for assault, battery and emotional distress inflicted on the teen, leading up to and including the October 2009 assault. Attorney Michael Schwartz, trustee for the teen, said he and other attorneys will immediately work toward collecting on the civil...

On any American street, or in any airport or mall, you see the same sad tableau: A 10-year-old boy is walking with his father, whose development was evidently arrested when he was that age, judging by his clothes. Father and son are dressed identically -- running shoes, T-shirts. And jeans, always jeans. If mother is there, she, too, is draped in denim. Writer Daniel Akst has noticed and has had a constructive conniption. He should be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has earned it by identifying an obnoxious misuse of freedom. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he...

Thompson, contrary to his current memories, was deeply involved in expanding government restrictions on political speech generally and the ban on issue ads specifically. Yet he told Ingraham "I voted for all of it," meaning McCain-Feingold, but said "I don't support that" provision of it. Oh? Why, then, did he file his own brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold McCain-Feingold, stressing Congress' especially "compelling interest" in squelching issue ads that "influence" elections? Most lamely, Thompson takes credit for McCain-Feingold doubling the amount of "hard money" an individual can give to a candidate, which he says reduces the advantages of...

Fred Thompson's plunge into the presidential pool -- more belly-flop than swan dive -- was the strangest product launch since that of New Coke in 1985. Then the question was: Is this product necessary? A similar question stumped Thompson the day he plunged. Sean Hannity, who is no Torquemada conducting inquisitions of conservatives, asked Thompson: "When you look at the other current crop of candidates -- Republicans -- where is the distinction between your positions and what you view as theirs?" Thompson replied: "Well, to tell you the truth, I haven't spent a whole lot of time going into the...

The Reviews Keep Coming In: Unimpressed by Fred Thompson's Campaign Roll-out, Conservatives Are "Still Looking" It's been only one week since lobbyist turned Senator turned actor Fred Thompson announced his candidacy for president, but it's been plenty of time for conservative commentators to see what they need to and call him unimpressive. Today two prominent conservative columnists criticized Thompson and said Republicans were unenthusiastic about his presidential prospects and would keep on looking for a candidate to rally behind. According to the columnists, conservatives' worst fears have been realized. Fred Thompson is just not the candidate they've been waiting for....

Pontificating Columnist George Will, who holds himself out to be an expert on most things, has decreed that Fred Thompson's candidacy is unnecessary. Oh well, Fred, nice try but I guess you should just drop out. If George says it, it must be true! Right? Wrong! Fred Thompson is doing something George Will can never hope to do. He is connecting with the average person in America. Fred has that intangible quality of being able to communicate calmly yet forcefully and affect people. George Will does not understand the world most people live in. He has been a wordsmith for...

Fred Thompson's plunge into the presidential pool -- more belly-flop than swan dive -- was the strangest product launch since that of New Coke in 1985. Then the question was: Is this product necessary? A similar question stumped Thompson the day he plunged. Sean Hannity, who is no Torquemada conducting inquisitions of conservatives, asked Thompson: "When you look at the other current crop of candidates -- Republicans -- where is the distinction between your positions and what you view as theirs?" Thompson replied: "Well, to tell you the truth, I haven't spent a whole lot of time going into the...

Fred Thompson's plunge into the presidential pool -- more belly-flop than swan dive -- was the strangest product launch since that of New Coke in 1985. Then, the question was: Is this product necessary? A similar question stumped Thompson the day he plunged. Sean Hannity, who is no Torquemada conducting inquisitions of conservatives, asked Thompson: "When you look at the other current crop of candidates -- Republicans -- where is the distinction between your positions and what you view as theirs?" Thompson replied: "Well, to tell you the truth, I haven't spent a whole lot of time going into the...

Tom Oliphant: NY Times' Trouble Like Ford's Longtime Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant announced Tuesday morning that he was accepting a buyout package from the Globe's parent company, the New York Times - explaining that newspaper industry layoffs are not unlike what's happening at the embattled Ford Motor Company. "The Ford situation is not unlike the newspaper situation," Oliphant told radio host Don Imus. "The problem, apparently, is not that these companies aren't making money. They make a lot of money. It's that in the view of Wall Street they don't make enough money." Ford shocked the business world on...

IF PRESIDENT BUSH had been awake at the switch earlier this year -- instead of, for example, obsessing about Social Security privatization schemes -- the United States would probably not find itself near the end of an international line for influenza medicine. As it is, his sudden realization that the potential of a public health disaster looms has set of an unseemly governmental scramble that mostly misses the point. Even now, the Bush response to repeated wakeup calls betrays a weird fixation on one of the less central questions that would be raised by the outbreak of a significant epidemic...

[...] It's progressive politicians who should be paying more attention. More than a hundred years ago, Charles Dickens's cockeyed optimist, Wilkins Micawber, explained to David Copperfield that the difference between happiness and misery involves the positive or negative difference between income and expenses. [...] As the government confirmed once again last week, rising costs have outpaced stagnant wages in ten of the last 12 months. [...] The Bush administration is in an ideological straitjacket. But progressive politicians have several issues they should raise, particularly long overdue increases in the minimum wage and the earned income tax credit -- kitchen table...

WASHINGTON THE BIGGEST threat to the new legitimately elected political leadership in Iraq is the very force that did so much to make it possible -- the American military. The biggest threat is not an Iran-style theocracy ruthlessly imposed by the majority Shi'ites and triggering civil war. US officials who are involved in the grunt work of trying to help a democratic Iraq emerge confided over the weekend that they have had more than enough dealings with people from the majority community to be positive on that score. It will take hard work, but officials note that too many Iraqi...

THE REAL political clash here last week did not involve Republicans and Democrats. It pitted Bush Bromides against Rice Realities. During the mildly contentious hearings for her confirmation as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice could not avoid grubby details of foreign policy that belied President Bush's focus on freedom as convincingly as they demonstrated what a diversion from the war on terror the mess in Iraq has become. The press's fixation on alleged fireworks during her Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony missed a more troubling review of specifics. Take, for example, Africa.

PHOENIX THIS FASCINATING state is like the rest of the country politically -- except that it's about two weeks behind the trend. On the day of last week's final presidential debate, both campaigns agreed that John Kerry had been closing on President Bush and was probably sitting just outside the margin for polling error. The one publicly available survey, by Northern Arizona University, showed the President with just half his September lead, up 5 points.

Bush's dodge and duck By Thomas Oliphant, Globe Columnist  |  October 14, 2004 Bush had appeared to object to Kerry's citation of studies by two news organizations that questioned the accuracy of many of the president's statements on the issue. He said he wasn't sure whether citing news organizations was an effective way to make a point, but then he stopped and said, "Oh, never mind." After a bit too much silence he then renewed his relentless attacks on Kerry's allegedly profligate liberalism -- Bush's only consistent theme of his last evening of truly mass exposure before the election. In...

Cheney's fading credibility By Thomas Oliphant, Globe Columnist  |  October 7, 2004 THE BIG moment, like so many Dick Cheney moments in recent years, turned out to be a flat-out falsehood. From the audience, I could sense that after a poor, defensive start, the once-steady and reassuring vice president, who threw his credibility into the trash can during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, was building to a memorized zinger from his Wyoming practice sessions because he was using uncharacteristically political language and completely dodging the issue presented in the debate's ninth question - about the endless Palestinian-Israeli conflict....

THE COUNTRY doesn't need Dick Cheney any more. After his 90 minutes on the stage last night, it is clear he is no longer an essential person in politics and government. What he brings to the table are liabilities. In debate against an opponent with the dangerously attractive attribute of freshness, Cheney paled -- literally. He's not special, it turns out. He doesn't know anything special, he hasn't done anything special, and for the future he doesn't offer anything special. Cheney is now just another vice president who has had his hour on the stage without really mattering or making...