Free Republic

But Obama was also worried about something else. He told Kellman that he feared community organizing would never allow him "to make major changes in poverty or discrimination." To do that, he said, "you either had to be an elected official or be influential with elected officials." In other words, Obama believed that his chosen profession was getting him nowhere, or at least not far enough. Personally, he might end up like his father; politically, he would fail to improve the lot of those he was trying to help. And so, Obama told Kellman, he had decided to leave community...

My son's fatalism amazes me, but he's not alone in worrying that time is running out. Recently, one of my friends told me that her son can't sleep because he is so anxious about global warming. Other friends try to shield their children from watching storms on the evening news. Was it so long ago that weather was the safe subject for conversations? For our children the forecast evokes the horsemen of the apocalypse: Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. It's not clear to me that global warming causes every natural disaster, but in a child's mind, climate change and horrific...

For those who came in late, moonbats are trust-funded, medicated, middle-aged, white-guilt-ridden blogging lefty losers who inflicted Deval Patrick upon the working people. The moonbats now yearn to elect Sen. Barack Obama, a Deval on steroids. If you are a guy with a ponytail, chances are you’re a moonbat - if you have a wide-brim leather hat too, the odds rise to 100 percent. If you’re a woman and you bring knitting to public meetings, consider yourself positively ID’ed. Like most people, I know ’em when I see ’em. But if you are wondering whether or not you are a...

If there's one thing Thomas Frank has, it's certitude. As a result, he has been singularly successful in getting his political views noticed, which, of course, is his goal. No self-doubt restrains his assaults; no nuance clutters his pages; his are books not of arguments but of pronouncements. Frank clearly holds his conclusions to be self-evident, his insights both noble and incontrovertible. Thus it follows quite naturally that disagreement, even skepticism, is proof of a substantial deficiency in either intellect, instruction, or character. This belief in the superiority of his understanding has led to two books, one building on the...

Parody of "One Night in Bangkok" by Murray Head. See Rush Limbaugh home page.

Satire, according to Jonathan Swift, is "a mirror wherein every man will commonly discern every face but his own". The New Yorker’s cartoon of Barack Obama and his lady wife, according to its editor David Remnick, "takes a lot of distortions, lies and misconceptions about the Obamas and puts a mirror up to them to show them for what they are." Swift’s satire on satire could hardly have been better, er, illustrated. The cartoon, by veteran satirist Barry Blitt, omitted no detail in showing the Obamas kitted out as a combo of Muslim and Black Panther, with a photo of...

CAMP LIBERTY, Iraq - US forces may be close to unlocking the mystery of who is behind a deadly innovation in Iraqi insurgents' weapons, a "lob bomb" now being used in Baghdad to target US and Iraqi combat outposts, a senior American general said yesterday. Major General Jeffery Hammond, commander of US forces in Baghdad, called the weapon "the greatest threat right now that we face," and he likened the shadowy group behind it to the American military's elite Delta Force. The weapon is particularly worrying because it is designed to cause catastrophic damage and cannot be stopped once it...

Two men and a juvenile are accused of digging up a corpse, decapitating the body and using the head to smoke marijuana, according to court documents. Matthew Gonzalez and Kevin Jones have been charged with the misdemeanor offense of abuse of a corpse, said Scott Durfee, a spokesman for the Harris County District Attorneys Office. According to documents filed in the case, Gonzalez, Jones and an unnamed juvenile on March 15 went to an Humble cemetery, dug up a man's grave, left with the head and turned it into a "bong." Gonzalez told authorities about the incident Wednesday, and showed...

Governor Deval Patrick isn't merely penning his memoirs. The book proposal he submitted to publishers reads like the roadmap for a self-help manual, one in which he will celebrate optimism, rail against cynicism, and seek to inspire a nation with his own life story. The 65-page pitch letter that led to his $1.35 million advance last week from a Random House imprint reveals, in its overflowing optimism and aggressive marketing plan, just how high the freshman governor is aiming when the book is published in 2010. It details a strategy to sell at least 150,000 copies through a "vigorous media...

Ninth Circuit En Banc Opinion in Fair Housing Council v. Roommates.com is here; Chief Judge Kozinski writes the opinion for an 8-3 en banc panel. About to read it now; hope to have comments soon. UPDATE: The en banc court reaches the same result that the panel below reached. Let me summarize the issue, and the holding, by borrowing from my earlier post. The Fair Housing Council sued Roommate.com, which runs roommates.com, under the Fair Housing Act. Roommates.com (I'll use the more familiar plural site name, rather than the less familiar singular company name) contains many expressions of people's preference...

How many times have I told you? With Deval, it’s all about showing him the money. Originality is not his strong suit; he follows in the footsteps of others. Jesse Jackson makes a fortune in the racket Tom Wolfe called “steam control,” and Deval shakes down Coke and Texaco. But when you’re building a $7 million mansion in the Berkshires with a nut of maybe $30,000 a month, it doesn’t matter how big your “severance packages” were, you always need more dough. So now Deval mimics Barack Obama. He finds some new marks and scores a $1.35 million advance for...

BAGHDAD - Shi'ite militiamen in Basra openly controlled wide swaths of the city yesterday and staged increasingly bold raids on Iraqi government forces sent in five days ago to wrest control from the gunmen, witnesses said, as Iraqi political leaders grew increasingly critical of the stalled assault.

BigDog is a big hit on YouTube. A new video of BigDog - a robotic “pack mule” that Waltham-based Boston Dynamics is developing for the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - has attracted more than 2 million viewers since the clip went live on YouTube this week.

ALTON, Ill. - Banished to the basement, the 29-year-old mother with a childlike mind and another baby on the way had little more than a thin rug and a mattress to call her own on the chilly concrete floor, police say. Dixon ate what she could forage from the refrigerator upstairs, where housemates used her for target practice with BBs, burned her with a glue gun, and doused her with scalding liquid that peeled away her skin. They torched what few clothes she had, so she walked around naked. They often pummeled her with an aluminum bat or metal handle....

Retail Sales Post Worse-Than-Expected Showing in February, Raising More Recession Worries WASHINGTON (AP) -- Consumers, battered by plunging home prices and a credit crunch, stayed away from the malls in February, pushing retail sales down by a larger-than-expected amount. It was another worrisome sign that the country could be falling into a recession. The Commerce Department reported Thursday that retail sales fell by 0.6 percent last month, far worse than the 0.2 percent increase that analysts had been expecting. The weakness was widespread with sales of autos, furniture and appliances all down. It marked the second time in the past...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Helicopters carrying three senior U.S. senators made emergency landings Thursday in the mountains of Afghanistan because of a snowstorm. Sens. John Kerry, Joseph Biden and Chuck Hagel were aboard the aircraft. No one was injured, according a statement from Kerry's office. The senators and their delegation returned to Bagram Air Base in a motor convoy, and have left for Turkey. "After several hours, the senators were evacuated by American troops and returned overland to Bagram Air Base, and left for their next scheduled stop in Ankara, Turkey," the Kerry statement said. "Sen. Kerry thanks the American troops,...

Among Democrats and even many Republicans, it is by now accepted wisdom that the war in Iraq brought huge numbers of holy warriors to the anti-American cause. But is it true? I don't think so... It's way too soon to call Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda spiritual outcasts among Arab Muslims, but they have in fact sustained enormous damage throughout the region because of Iraq. The lack of holy-warrior manpower coming from the Muslim Brotherhood is surely, in part, a reflection of this discomfort with al-Qaeda's violence, the complexity of Iraqi politics and America's not entirely negative role inside the...

Imad Mughniyeh was killed in Damascus. I'm wondering whether Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) or Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) still believe that their private consultations with Syrian President Bashar al-Asad were successful, especially given that the Syrian president had, apparently, continued to give one of the world's most notorious terrorists free passage and haven inside Syria. 02/13 11:16 AM

FRAMINGHAM - Five policemen responded to U.S. Rep. Ed Markey's open forum the Memorial Building yesterday after the politically charged crowd got rowdy, discussing impeachment and whether President George W. Bush helped orchestrate the 9/11 attacks. No arrests were made, but tempers boiled and ``Shut ups!'' were shouted inside the Blumer Community Room with its standing-room only crowd. The audience nearly got hostile when David Pierce of Arlington brought up the Sept. 11 commission and the whether the Twin Towers were taken down in attacks ``perpetuated by government.'' He called for an impartial independent criminal investigation into 9/11 as audience...

SHANGHAI: As unusually heavy snowfall and cold weather continued over much of the country, the Chinese government stepped up emergency efforts Wednesday to handle a crisis that threatens to become as much a public relations disaster as it has been a logistical one. Continuing his tour of areas that have been heavily afflicted by the severe winter weather, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao flew to the southern city of Guangzhou, where more than 600,000 travelers had been stranded by the suspension of normal rail service after large numbers of trains that operate on heavily traveled north-south routes were paralyzed by power...