Free Republic

New York Times's columnist David Brooks -- never a huge fan of Sarah Palin -- laced into the former vice presidential candidate on Sunday, calling her a "joke" and a "potential talk show host." Below Link Takes you to video

McCain standard bearer and “conservative” columnist David Brooks launched his own salvo at actual conservative Sarah Palin on ABC’s This Week, joining other bitter RINOs who have attacked the former Alaska governor in recent days. If I may channel Chandler Bing for a moment: “Can he be any more elitist?” Perhaps Brooks hasn’t seen the Amazon sales lists, the thousands attending her book signings, or, for that matter, the book sales list published by his own worthless rag. Remember, folks, this is the same guy who talked about how great John McCain was as a candidate and the very same...

[Excerpt discussing the media's initial reaction to Ft. Hood] A shroud of political correctness settled over the conversation. Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness. There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors. This response was understandable. It’s important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and...

Liberals and conservatives each have their own intellectual food chains. They have their own think tanks to provide arguments, politicians and pundits to amplify them, and news media outlets to deliver streams of prejudice-affirming stories. David Brooks Go to Columnist Page » The Conversation David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns. All Conversations » Readers' Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (316) » Independents, who are the largest group in the electorate, don’t have any of this. They don’t have institutional affiliations. They don’t look to certain activist lobbies for guidance. There aren’t many...

David Brooks, the NY Times’ left of center conservative (what?), tells Jim Lehrer (to Jim’s apparent dismay) that Obama’s Nobel is a joke and he should have declined the award. Wow! Even the left is coming clean on this bizarre event. Video Link

On CNBC's "Squawk Box," yesterday, Joe Kernen questioned New York Times' "token conservative," David Brooks true conservatism, and took aim at the liberal mainstream media's diminishment of the tea party movement, Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh.

Jim Sacco estimates that his son Josh has watched "Miracle," the film about the 1980 U.S. Olympic men's hockey team's legendary upset of Russia, nearly 150 times. Apparently, the movie has made quite an impression... Nicknamed "Rizzo" after the gold medal-winning team's captain Mike Eruzione, Josh sparked an Internet sensation this week when his hilarious, inspirational and eerily impeccable interpretation of actor Kurt Russell's locker room speech as Coach Herb Brooks went viral -- spreading everywhere from blogs to USA Today to the "Ellen" show. No professional coaching. No fancy editing. No script, because Rizzo hasn't learned to read yet...

From Mel Brooks' movie "History of the World, Part 1": The People are Revolting.

In today's "That's WAY Too Much Information" segment, New York Times columnist David Brooks claims that while he was dining with a Republican senator, the guy had his hand on Brooks's inner thigh the whole time.

... Obama inherited a $1.2 trillion deficit and has quickly pushed it up to $1.8 trillion, a whopping 13 percent of G.D.P. The new debt will continue to mount after the economy recovers. The national debt will nearly double over the next decade. Annual deficits will still hover around 5 percent or 6 percent of G.D.P. in 2019. By that year, interest payments alone on the debt are projected to be $806 billion annually, according to the Congressional Budget Office. ... Unlike just about every other Democrat on the planet, he emphasizes cost control as much as expanding health coverage....

The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center and you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results from the serious evaluations and you find that these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains. That’s why I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: “The attached study has changed my life as a scientist.” Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools...

In an op-ed yesterday, David Brooks — The New York Times’ alleged conservative columnist — claims Republicans’ downward trajectory is due to their devotion to rugged individualism and their neglect of community. ... It seems The New York Times’ conservative lapdog has found his ideal Republican — Barack Hussein Obama.

Every once in a while something happens so shocking, so inconceivable, that it threatens to remove the last bastions of confidence I have in the federal government. The appointment of Rosa Brooks, the radical left-wing Los Angeles Times columnist, as an advisor to Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michelle Fluornoy is one of those moments. And by advisor, I don’t mean someone who talks on an informal basis — I mean a full-time advisor so committed to helping formulate policy that she had to leave her position as a fire-breathing partisan columnist. It’s frighteningly unclear what caused Brooks to receive...

Putting her in the policy shop is like Lyndon Johnson making Jane Fonda a senior adviser on Vietnam.

Soros told Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes that he developed his character as Nazi collaborator in Hungry. He took that learning and became convicted Insider trader, a guy who made 10 billion dollar off the British people through currency speculation, terrorist supporter and Israel hater. After the last election George Soros, met with a group of Mega-rich liberals to ensure that they get to control the country after the 2008 Elections. What they ended up doing is giving $100 Million dollars to key liberal organizations in major battle ground states(see Obama's Liberal Shock Troops ). Here's the scary part--it worked....

She believes al-Qaida was an "obscure group" turned into a massive threat due to U.S. policies. She's referred to former President Bush as "our torturer in chief" and a "psychotic who need(s) treatment" while comparing Bush's arguments for waging a war on terrorism to Adolf Hitler's use of political propaganda. She's worked on behalf of George Soros' philanthropic foundation. Meet Rosa Brooks, the Obama administration's new adviser to Michelle Fluornoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, a position described as one of the most influential in the Pentagon. "I prefer to think of (my new position) as my personal government...

"David Brooks's Op-Ed column in The New York Times started in September 2003. He has been a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly, and he is currently a commentator on "The Newshour with Jim Lehrer." Source David Brooks, a self-described "moderate conservative," illustrates the intellectual schizophrenia that conflicts that breed of thinkers. Six months ago, on September 30, 2008, in a New York Times op-ed piece entitled "Revolt of the Nihilists," Mr. Brooks, mad at the 228 House members who voted down the first version of the bailout bill, wrote: "And...

With the rise to enduring power of president Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in 1933, a new type of Republican emerged in reaction to FDR's attractive and overawing power - the-me-too Republican. Until the election of president Reagan five decades later, these me-too Republicans supported, rather than opposed, Democratic Party policies, but claimed they would administer them better. Of course this led to a half-century of Democratic dominance of American government and politics.

As the seventh anniversary of the jihadist murder of nearly 3,000 American civilians passed last week, it is useful to recall an article that the Hyde Park Herald published on September 19, 2001 – written by a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama. Even all these years later, it is revealing of the mindset of the man who would be leader of the free world. Obama starts out well enough, saying: “We need to step up security at our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of...

Last night, Barack Obama’s exit music at the close of his historic Democratic convention acceptance speech was “Only in America,” a song by country’s foremost multiplatinum duo.

My first thought on the running mate question is that to balance his ticket, Barack Obama should pick a really old white general. Therefore, he should pick Dwight Eisenhower. John McCain, on the other hand, needs to pick someone younger than himself. Therefore, he also should pick Dwight Eisenhower. ...If John McCain is elected, he’ll face a political culture threatening to split at the seams. In defeat, Democrats will be enraged at everything and everybody. The Republican Party will still be exhausted and divided. McCain will find it hard to staff the administration since so many Republican advisers were exhausted...

You cannot have it both ways! Every year in America, this “both ways” mentality gets worse and worse. Somewhere along the line Americans started thinking that we could have all of our rights and freedoms and have expedient justice and results at the same time. Well, I have to tell you: YOU CANNOT. There is a blend of the two that must be championed if we are going to continue being a successful country. The mortgage crisis of late is one of the great disasters caused by this “have it both ways” mentality. The government was constantly pressured by citizens...

Is the U.S. Failing in Afghanistan? It was malice in wonderland at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday as Bush Administration envoys insisted things are getting better in Afghanistan, while angry lawmakers from both parties cited facts and figures showing just the opposite. Even the senior Republican on the panel, Senator Richard Lugar, found the Administration's claims wanting. "I'm not sure that we have a plan for Afghanistan," he said. Long seen as the "forgotten war" eclipsed by Iraq in U.S. priorities, Afghanistan is in the Washington spotlight this week with the release of three independent reports concluding...

Tax Cuts Can't Be GOP's Policy Centerpiece David Brooks, New York Times In 1974, a group of economists and journalists got together in a bar and launched supply-side economics. It was a superb political and economic package. It addressed a big problem: stagflation. It had a clear policy focus: marginal tax rates. It celebrated a certain sort of personality: the risk-taking entrepreneur. It made it clear that the new, growth-oriented Republican Party would be different from the old, green-eyeshade one. Supply-side economics had a good run, but continual tax cuts can no longer be the centerpiece of Republican economic policy....

David Brooks is a national treasure. He is perhaps our most gifted spotter of trends, and his pop-sociology seems moved by a genuine curiosity, and so is often blissfully immune from the draw of familiar categories and conventional wisdom. He has taught us more about the life of the contemporary middle class than anyone, and most weeks he is the only reason to read the New York Times. But as a spotter of trends, Brooks is also a generalizer, and tends to advance a simple, coherent, well packaged aphorism as an explanation for large events and ideas. It is the...

You better put down your drinks, and make sure there's nothing in your mouths, for the New York Times's David Brooks made a comment on Friday's News Hour that is guaranteed to evoke uncontrollable fits of laughter from those on the right side of the aisle. After introducing regular guests Brooks and Mark Shields, host Jim Lehrer asked their opinions concerning the just-released Osama bin Laden video.

Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson is turning up the rhetoric in a fight with Lansing over a proposal to reclassify 200 felonies as misdemeanors. If it happens, he says, "everybody should go out and buy a gun. I recommend an Uzi."

REVIEW OF: Who Really Cares: America’s Charity Divide—Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why It Matters by Arthur C. Brooks (Basic Books, 250 pp., $26.00) It’s tempting to say that Arthur Brooks, in his definitive new book on American charitable giving, has shown that there is nothing oxymoronic about the term “compassionate conservative.” That, at least, is the conclusion that critics have drawn from Brooks’s demonstration that conservatives, despite the myth that they lack compassion, give significantly more to charity than liberals do. But in fact Brooks has shown something even more significant: that “compassionate conservative” is not only overly defensive,...

If the Democrats don’t like the U.S. policy on Iraq over the next six months, they have themselves partly to blame. There were millions of disaffected Republicans and independents ready to coalesce around some alternative way forward, but the Democrats never came up with anything remotely serious. The liberals who favor quick exit never grappled with the consequences of that policy, which the Baker-Hamilton commission terrifyingly described. The centrists who believe in gradual withdrawal never explained why that wouldn’t be like pulling a tooth slowly. Joe Biden, who has the most intellectually serious framework for dealing with Iraq, was busy...

<p>I have a dream that Pelosi, who was chauffeured to school as a child and who, with her investor husband, owns minority shares in the Auberge du Soleil resort hotel and the CordeValle Golf Club, will look over her famous strand of South Sea Tahitian pearls and forge bonds of understanding with the zillionaire corporate barons in the opposing party.</p>

One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring. It is liberals who advocate "forgiveness" of loans to Third World countries, a "living wage" for the poor and a "safety net" for all. But these are all government policies -- not individual acts of compassion -- and the actual empirical consequences of such policies are of remarkably little interest to those who advocate them. ...snip... A new book, titled "Who Really Cares" by Arthur C. Brooks examines the actual behavior of liberals and conservatives when it comes...

  Philanthropy Expert Says Conservatives Are More Generous BY FRANK BRIEADDY SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks is about to become the darling of the religious right wing in America -- and it's making him nervous. The child of academics, raised in a liberal household and educated in the liberal arts, Brooks has written a book that concludes religious conservatives donate far more money than secular liberals to all sorts of charitable activities, irrespective of income. In the book, to be released later this month, he cites extensive data analysis to demonstrate that values advocated by...

ALAMEDA, Calif. -- Aaron Brooks will be sidelined two to four weeks with a strained pectoral muscle, giving the Raiders' starting quarterback job to second-year player Andrew Walter.--snip-- The Raiders have a much-needed bye this week after getting outscored 55-6 in their two losses to open the season. Walter will start Oct. 1 against Cleveland. After that, it will depend on Brooks' health, coach Art Shell said.

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. - Robert Brooks, the chairman of Hooters of America, Inc. who made his fortune selling chicken wings served by scantily clad waitresses, was found dead at his home Sunday, officials said. He was 69. It was unclear how Brooks died, but the Horry County coroner's office told The (Myrtle Beach) Sun News that an autopsy would be performed Monday. Several calls to the coroner's office by The Associated Press were unanswered. Chris Hardwick, owner of Hardwick Funeral Home of Loris, told the AP he was handling Brooks' funeral arrangements. Since opening its first store in Clearwater, Florida,...

We spent Saturday at the Ice Grottos. After a week in Aspen, we're finally acclimated to breathing at 8,000+ feet, so this was a glorious day, the best so far --- we read for hours on the shore of a mountain stream as our daughter played with dolls in the sand. So it wasn't until after dinner that I logged on and saw the David Brooks column that makes Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, proprietor of DailyKos.com, look as smarmy as Karl Rove. My wife, Karen Collins, is a devoted Kossack and a frequent poster on the site's message boards, so I...

Authorities in Oklahoma are continuing the investigation into Monday night's kidnapping of Garth Brooks' ex-wife Sandy Brooks. Police near her home in Owasso, Oklahoma, say a bail bondsman showed up at her ranch to arrest a worker Quintine Cornelius Harper who failed to appear in court on an embezzlement case is Tulsa County. Brooks did not know Harper was a wanted criminal. He had been working on the property and was staying in an apartment located in the barn.

Rosa Brooks: The happiness gap IT'S BEEN A rough couple of weeks. Hamas won the Palestinian elections; protests over cartoons representing the prophet Muhammad raged around the world; more Americans and Iraqis were killed by suicide bombers; new Abu Ghraib photos were released; and, here at home, the vice president got violent. But despite the trying times, we Americans are managing to keep our spirits up. This week, the Pew Research Center released a report on happiness in the United States. Of the Americans surveyed, 34% informed researchers that they were "very happy," while another 50% reported that they were...

Big news over the weekend, when "Long Island defense contractor David H. Brooks booked two floors of the Rainbow Room, hauled in concert-ready equipment, built a stage, installed special carpeting, outfitted the space with Jumbotrons and arranged command performances by everyone from 50 Cent to Don Henley to Stevie Nicks to Aerosmith..." Brooks got better talent than the NBC Katrina relief benefit.

For those of you who haven’t seen this morning’s “Meet the Press,” I highly recommend that you do so that you can see William Safire at his best, as well as some great incites from David Brooks. What follows are key statements from the two of them concerning Plamegate, and the events of the week. Though chronological in order, the numbered quotes are separate ideas that did not immediately follow one another: 1. MR. WILLIAM SAFIRE: I think that was an excellent rundown and time line of a complicated series of accusations of a cover-up, but the most important single...

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald did not find evidence to prove that there was a "broad conspiracy to out a covert agent for political gain. He did not find evidence of wide-ranging criminal behavior. He did not even indict the media's ordained villain, Karl Rove," writes David Brooks in Sunday's NY TIMES. "Leading Democratic politicians filled the air with grand conspiracy theories that would be at home in the John Birch Society." "Why are these people so compulsively overheated?.. Why do they have to slather on wild, unsupported charges that do little more than make them look unhinged? Brooks quotes from...

Specter As I was saying, Senator Biden, you have the floor. Joseph Biden Jr. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thought this might be a good moment to give the committee a complete history of my heroic sponsorship of the Violence Against Women Act, but before I do that I'd like to interrupt myself by mentioning that I ride the train every day, often speaking with regular Americans, but before I do that I'd like to interrupt my interruption of myself by asking the chairman to restrain the nominee. During my first round of questioning, the nominee continually interrupted my questions...

Commission makes San Antonio's sweet deal even sweeter By T.A. BADGER Associated Press Writer SAN ANTONIO — Things looked sweet for San Antonio under the Pentagon's proposed base-closure plan. This week's voting made it even sweeter. While the nine-member Base Closure and Realignment Commission voted Thursday to end the military's presence at Brooks City-Base, it overrode the Defense Department's recommendations by keeping one of Brooks' key medical research missions and some 300 jobs in San Antonio. That vote came a day after the commission opted to keep the 800-job Cryptologic Systems Group, which services communications equipment for federal intelligence agencies,...

E-mail Author Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version May 06, 2005, 8:06 a.m. Filibuster FallacyDavid Brooks distorts the debate. By Peter Augustine Lawler David Brooks, the most conservative columnist for the New York Times, increasingly styles himself a statesmanlike referee between the claims of our evangelicals and our secular humanists. He can't be accused of aiming low: He models his statesmanship on Lincoln's. In his May 5 column, he presents our greatest president as "our guide and navigator. Lincoln had enough firm conviction to lead a great moral crusade, but his zeal was tempered by...

The rink where (Herb) Brooks coached the U.S. Olympic hockey team to its stunning gold-medal victory 25 years ago now bears his name. It was renamed Wednesday night in his honor: 1980 Rink, Herb Brooks Arena. The announcement came 18 months after Brooks was killed in a car accident, which made the moment so very poignant.

Herb Brooks never really grasped the magnitude of what he and a collection of college boys accomplished 25 years ago, Patti Brooks said last week, and he most likely never would have wanted to have the arena where it took place named for him. When the 1980 Olympic hockey team's Miracle on Ice gold-medal performance was selected the sports event of the 20th century, Herb "was almost incredulous," she recalled. "He just kept repeating that he could not believe that. He was really humble about most things, but I remember he was just so shocked at that one. I don't...

The coup d'etat was executed with the precision of a military drill. At 11 o'clock on the morning of April 15, 1874, Pulaski County Circuit Court Judge Whytock took Brooks' petition filed in protest of the 1872 election, knocked off the dust and without notice to either Baxter or his lawyers, ruled that Brooks was the legal governor. Chief Justice Poker Jack McClure swore Brooks in on the spot, presumably with the same sincerity with which he had performed, the service for Baxter the year before. Within minutes, Brooks, backed by Gen. R.F. Catterson, former commander of the state militia,...

OP-ED COLUMNIST If you want to understand America, I hope you were in Washington on Thursday. I hope you heard the high ideals of President Bush's inaugural address, and also saw the stretch Hummer limos heading to the balls in the evening. I hope you heard the president talk about freedom as "the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul," and also saw the drunken, loud and privileged twentysomethings carrying each other piggyback down K Street after midnight. What you saw in Washington that day is what you see in America so often...

here is a little-known movement sweeping across the United States. The movement is "natalism."All across the industrialized world, birthrates are falling - in Western Europe, in Canada and in many regions of the United States. People are marrying later and having fewer kids. But spread around this country, and concentrated in certain areas, the natalists defy these trends.They are having three, four or more kids. Their personal identity is defined by parenthood. They are more spiritually, emotionally and physically invested in their homes than in any other sphere of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating...

...Ms. Roy has just been awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.... Ms. Roy made an appeal to people to "become the Iraqi resistance," adding that activists "need to understand that Iraq is engaging in the frontlines of empire and we have to throw our weight behind the Iraqi resistance." Now it cannot have escaped Ms. Roy's attention that the "resistance" of which she speaks -- and which she exhorts the world to "become" -- kills innocent Iraqis daily, by bomb, by gun and by cutlass. Beheading people -- Iraqi and Western, Muslim and infidel -- is the macabre signature of this...

Kerry's Cast of Thousands By DAVID BROOKS Across the wine-dark sea they come, honing Kerry's message. They come from Harvard, K Street and the studios of CNN. "Once more into the breach!" they cry, as they join the conference call of thousands. Look at them, these great, unhuddled masses, yearning to wear White House badges. They are consultants, flacks, spinners, strategists, Knights of the Palm lunch table. And yet they come as one, from all corners of the Democratic world, to figure out what John Kerry, age 60, should believe and say. Into the valley of hope ride the 600,...