Free Republic

I thought Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert might be a little nervous to meet with me. I was the real news commentator, after all, and they were the mock. They threw spitballs at presidents; I interviewed presidents before throwing spitballs at them. I had crisscrossed the globe to cover news stories, while these guys just put on dark suits and threw up imported backgrounds on a green screen. No doubt they would try to impress me with some weighty discussion about world affairs or the midterm elections. But when I walked into Colbert's office at The Colbert Report, just off...

Something was wrong. It was a blistering June morning in 2005 when Marine Maj. Christopher Phelps led his team into the center of Saqlawiyah, a small Iraqi city ten miles from Fallujah. The place normally teemed with vendors hawking cucumbers, tomatoes and a hodgepodge of goods, but in front of the soldiers now stretched a chaotic pile of dusty rubble and thatched roofs. Fellow Marines, who thought the market a perfect place for insurgents to hide homemade bombs, had demolished it overnight at the request of the Saqlawiyah city council. Phelps noticed groups of Iraqis quietly glaring at them. He...

Unalloyed good news is rare, so rejoice: The foremost achievement of the political speech regulators -- aka campaign finance ``reformers'' -- is collapsing. Taxpayer financing of presidential campaigns, which was in parlous condition in 2004, will die in 2008. In 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush declined public funding -- and its accompanying restrictions on raising and spending money -- for the primaries, as did Howard Dean and John Kerry in 2004. In 2004, candidates accepting taxpayer funding were restricted to spending $45 million before the conventions. Bush and Kerry raised $269.6 million and $234.6 million respectively before the conventions....

For a couple of years now, Democrats have licked their chops at the prospect of taking back the House and Senate in the 2006 midterm elections. For much of that time it seemed the Democrats were well positioned to pull off the feat. Democrats have made some huge mistakes, though, and according to polls released this week, it appears they are paying for them. There are several issues that are playing prominently in the upcoming elections. Iraq, national security, immigration, and gas prices are a few of those ranking as top concerns of voters. On those and other issues, instead...

Perhaps Vice President Cheney should quit his current job and work within a political system more to his liking, the kind in which those in charge can protect national security by telling everyone what not to say and what not to think. Cheney seemed terribly impatient with democracy Sunday on "Meet the Press" when he suggested that those who oppose President Bush's Iraq policies are helping -- excuse me, validating -- the terrorists. Our allies in the war on terror, Cheney said, "want to know whether or not if they stick their heads up, the United States, in fact, is...

-snip- What to do now? How about this: Treat it as an opportunity. Use the change of facts to announce a change of course. Declare the old way over. Declare a new U.S.-Cuban relationship, blow open the doors of commerce and human interaction, allow American investment and tourism, mix it up, reach out one by one and person by person to the people of Cuba. "Flood the zone." Flood it with incipient prosperity and the insinuation of democratic values. Let Castroism drown in it. The American economic embargo of Cuba is 40 years old. It has been called ineffective--it did...

The New York Times may not withhold reporters' phone records from a federal grand jury investigating an alleged leak of a pending government raid on two Islamic charities suspected of supporting terrorism, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. A three-judge panel of the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled 2 to 1 that the Times has no First Amendment or other legal right to refuse a demand for the records from the grand jury in Chicago, which was empaneled by U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald. The government's interest in rooting out a possible crime outweighs...

How was your week? I spent mine with Randi Rhodes, Stephanie Miller, and Al Franken, and it was fabulous. No, really. I stumbled on the local “progressive talk” station last week, and the commentary left my jaw on the floorboard of my car so often, I couldn’t manage to turn the station. My jaw was actually in the way of the radio dial. Maybe that’s the business model. Pack the airwaves with enough crazy and listeners find themselves unable to escape. I learned many things this week. 1) Al Franken is sane. Hey, it’s a relative term. In comparison to...

It’s one of those things you “can’t not know.” The New York Times, Don of the Media Hit Squad, despises the Bush Administration and on a more stealth (but more longstanding) level, loathes the U.S. Armed Forces. The latest ugly example came July 7 in what is more accurately described as a press release for a far Left organization than a news story. The sole source for John Kifner’s piece, “Hate Groups Are Infiltrating the Military, Group Says,” is a sloppy document released by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The obnoxious report, the title of which is a gratuitous slap...

"Israel believes this threat is existential," explained a clearly dubious former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Richard Murphy. Well, how could they think that? (And by the way, all former ambassadors, especially those who served in Saudi Arabia and now serve as advisers to Saudi banks, should be taken with a large grain of salt.) Could it be because the nation of Iran has announced its intention to wipe Israel off the map and is hurtling toward building nuclear weapons? Could it be because Iran's agent, Hizbollah, welcomes "World War III"; is pledged to the destruction of Israel; and is...

Samaira Nazir was brutally and needlessly murdered. The 25-year-old in Southall, England, was killed in April of last year by her 30-year-old businessman brother — all in the name of “honor.” He stabbed her, cutting her throat in front of his young children, ages 2 and 4. Samaira had turned down family arrangements for marriage and ultimately fell for another man, an Afghan her family said was from the wrong — lower — caste. As a prosecutor put it, “It would appear she lost her life for loving the wrong man.” Her brother, appropriately, has been found guilty of murder,...

There are exactly 316 benefits of marriage. I learned that from the decision of New York's highest court upholding the ban on same-sex marriage, which means that the often-wed Elizabeth Taylor has enjoyed these benefits 2,528 times, while a lesbian could not have any of them, despite having a stable relationship and a child or two. If it pleases the court, your decision is just plain idiotic. I choose Taylor because she is everything this very important court (New York, after all) did not take into account in upholding its touchingly Victorian version of marriage. The majority decision, written by...

Mexico is in a mess because voters in its presidential election were so closely divided between Andr?s Manuel L?pez Obrador, the candidate of the center-left, and Felipe Calder?n, the center-right candidate who was declared the narrow winner yesterday. As a result, there are charges of theft and miscounts, of "grave inconsistencies." L?pez Obrador has insisted that the authorities "help clear up any doubts" and "not allow the will of the citizens to be violated." Let's be clear: There's nothing wrong with Mexico's voters. Close elections happen. The test of a democracy is how a bitter dispute of this sort is...

These are vexing days for those who (a) want to press the war against terrorism, and (b) want to maintain the usual protections against unnecessary accretions of state power. The recent headliner in this carnival is the Supreme Court ruling on Osama bin Laden's bodyguard. What was challenged was the legality of the "military commission" that put him on trial at Guantanamo, denying him access to his accusers or to the evidence presented to the judges (military) by the prosecution. The first rule is to reason calmly about what happened. And best to begin by reflecting on the vote within...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Arizona's law on the insanity defense is not too restrictive in limiting evidence defendants can present at trial. By a 6-3 vote, justices affirmed the murder conviction of Eric Clark, who thought he was being pursued by space aliens when he killed an Arizona police officer. Clark, a paranoid schizophrenic who was a teenager at the time, is serving 25 years to life in prison. Under Arizona's law, defendants "may be found guilty except insane'' if they prove they were so mentally ill that they did not know what they did...

Once the New York Times was extremely important, and often destructive. Now it is less important, and often destructive. -snip- In a way the modern Times is playing to a base, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and the redoubts of the Upper West Side throughout America: affluent urban neighborhoods and suburbs. The paper plays not to a region but a class. But one senses the people who run the Times now are not so much living as re-enacting. They're lost on the big new playing field of American media, and they're reenacting their great moments--the Pentagon papers, the Watergate...

RICHMOND, June 28 -- The 2006 General Assembly gave final approval to the state budget and went home Wednesday, leaving behind a first-year governor who presided over the worst stalemate in the legislature's history while failing to make good on his promise to ease traffic congestion for Virginians. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) confronted an issue that has bedeviled state leaders for two decades: how to finance billions of dollars in road and transit construction. His plan for tax increases to finance those improvements, presented six days into his term, stalled after he misread the resolve of his adversaries and...

Russ Feingold and the Democrats’ Incoherence 06/26 02:39 PM Russ Feingold is everything George W. Bush is not. He is facile, articulate, quick on his feet, and deeply foolish. Appearing on Meet the Press yesterday, he said: "Our number one moral responsibility is to protect the American people, to focus on those who attacked us on 9/11, to not be distracted into a situation where even the administration did not have Iraq as one of the 45 countries that was connected with al-Qaeda. Our number one responsibility is to protect the American people from being killed by terrorists. Iraq has...

It was not so long ago -- only four years -- that a significant number of Democrats in the U.S. Congress evaluated the available evidence and voted to authorize war with Iraq. Eighty-one Democrats in the House, including a fair number of liberals like Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., endorsed a "Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq." It's instructive to glance at that document now -- particularly since so many Democrats are adopting the pose of Poor Misled Legislators. Here is some of what those Democrats signed on...

Who says you can’t cut taxes, increase spending, and reduce the federal budget deficit all at the same time? That’s what the Bush administration has managed to do. Two decades after then-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush characterized Ronald Reagan’s idea that tax cuts would spur revenue-generating economic growth as “voodoo economics,” the witch doctor is again at work. When President Bush pledged in 2004 to cut the deficit in half by 2009, critics guffawed. The Boston Globe headlined a story, “Bush’s plan to halve federal deficit seen as unlikely; higher spending, lower taxes don’t mix, analysts say.” “Fanciful,” “laughable” and...