Free Republic

Those of you not from Illinois are not prepared for the fallout of today's bombshell news of the FBI arrest of the Govenor of Illinois - Rod Blagojevich. But I am from Illinois, and I know how deep this is going to go. Today is just the tip of the iceberg. Lots of people are going down, including - I predict (and you heard it here first) the highest profile product of Crook County Illinois - Senator Barack Hussein Obama. First, let me just say "it's about damn time" that our boy-criminal Governor was arrested. He's been corrupt and flagrant...

An open letter to President Bush and the Congress of the United States regarding the proposed "comprehensive immigration reform" bill, crafted in secret in a back-room collaboration of U.S. Senators and immigration proponents: Fool me once, shame on you Fool me twice, shame on me Fool me 12 million times, and I will openly mock and ridicule your pretense of seriousness and your ability to draft and enforce the laws of our country. Simple as that. All you need to know is the damning number of 12 million. That's the minimum number of people in this country illegally - in...

I fly every week on business. I board at least four flights every week if you consider a roundtrip with a connection each way. Sometimes more. I deal with all of the issues of business travel: early check-ins, getting through security without beeping and ocasionally getting the full patdown anyway, trying to get an aisle seat on each flight (I'm a big guy!), whether my seatmate(s) will want to chat or not, making tight connections by hurrying through concourses, trying to find a place to get online in an airport, etc. If you travel a lot you know the drill....

I won't be watching the Oscars this year. As hard as it is for a movie buff like myself, I will be undertaking a personal and insconsequential boycott. No one will care that I'm not watching the show. I won't make news or even cause a blip in the Nielsen ratings. Personal statements are what they are, personal. But they are worth making anyway. I am a movie buff. I have been since childhood when I grew to love the movies. So much so that I chose as my high school summer job to be a theater usher just so...

Today I'd like to point you to Mona Charen's excellent column on "Muslims and the Tsunami" on Townhall.com . Mona does an excellent job capturing the disgust and irritation I feel concerning the ingratitude of the Muslim world toward America's involvement in the relief effort. First it was the U.N. carping about America and the West being "stingy". Never mind the track record of America always being sacrifial and generous in disaster relief. The UN functionary had to poke his finger in our eye. Now, it's the governments of the disaster affected Muslim nations, with legions of suffering citizens, who...

I'd like to comment on the outrageous observations made by Maureen Dowd last week. Writing from "Murderer's Row" at the nation's leading liberal newspaper, The New York Times, Ms. Dowd flailed out in her post election despair: The president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule. He doesn't want to heal rifts; he wants to bring any riffraff who disagree to heel. W. ran a jihad in America (emphasis mine) so he can fight one in Iraq - drawing a devoted flock of evangelicals, or "values voters," as they call themselves,...

I heard some liberal pundits this week forecast that the elections scheduled for January in Iraq would surely not be held on time. They were gleeful in their dissection of President Bush's pronouncements on one day that "elections will be held" and on the next day that "elections are scheduled". To them that meant that their dire predictions of quagmire were true. There are at least two problems with their gloom and doom forecasts. First, events in Iraq won't stand still enough for there to be a quagmire. Every time they predict something won't happen on schedule it happens. Remember...

From where I sit this week, knowing what I know today about CBS and Dan Rather's "Memogate", I'd say it's entirely possible that the whole CBS News empire could instantly implode the way that Enron and Arthur Andersen did. A few years ago, in the roaring 90's stock market environment, Enron and Arthur Andersen were giants in their respective fields. Enron in the energy business, Arthure Anderson in the accounting realm. Both almost untouchable mega companies with thousands of employees. Today they are both gone. Zilch. Nada. Game over. see more at http://partisannewsjunkie.blogspot.com

Following up on my post last Friday about the press herd misquoting Vice President Dick Cheney as saying that if we elect Kerry we'll get attacked again: I was aggravated that USA Today repeated the misquote again today. Therefore I submitted the following Letter to the Editor: USA Today, along with other media outlets, continues to mischaracterize quotes made last week by Vice President Dick Cheney regarding the importance of the pending election on the War on Terror. The mischaracterization occurs by truncating Cheney's comments to in a manner that mistates his meaning. In the article in today's edition on...

I accidentally Freeped a Democratic party float in a parade today. Our city has a well attended festival every year at this time with a great parade on Saturday morning. Our family got dragged out the folding chair and got a good position along the parade route. I brought along a good book to read in the lull spots: my new copy of "Unfit for Command". I got in a chapter or so during the parade. The end of the parade always features political candidates and parties. I cheered robustly for the county Republican Party float. I was going to...

I have to admit I was stunned when I heard news stories about Vice President Cheney's remarks on the campaign trail. He was quoted in newspapers and on news shows as saying this: "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States." (AP) USA Today characterized that quote with a story by Jill Lawrence and Richard Bennetto titled: "Cheney...

After lurking for years, my first post. I've been puzzled by the mainstream media's reticence to link Al Qaeda with the Chechen "separatists" who committed the bloody atrocity this week in the Russian school. Why? As I noted on my blog (Partisan NewsJunkie) today, both Richard Clarke's book "Against All Enemies" and the "9/11 Commission Report" make the link between Al Qeada and Chechnya. In fact, I read yesterday in the Commission report that Mohammed Atta, leader of the 9/11 attacks, and his friends tried to enlist to fight in Chechnya! "...they had formed a close-knit group as students in...