Free Republic

TALK about sore losers. Just when you think the health care debate can't sink any lower, somebody manages to punch through the floor. The ink of President Obama's signature was hardly dry on his health care overhaul legislation before reports of vandalism and death threats against congressmen on both political sides threatened to upstage the bill that apparently sparked the anger.

Lib Reporter Says Protesters Were Asking For It When the Media Labeled Them “Teabaggers” Monday, December 28, 2009 Jim Hoft The corruption of the state-run media continues… Liberal Chicago Tribune reporter Clarence Page says old ladies carrying protest signs are “asking for it” when they are called “teabaggers“: NewsBusters reported: The bitterness toward the tea party movement continues to go on and on. Case in point – Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, who on the Dec. 27 broadcast of “The McLaughlin Group,” deemed it “The Most Defining Political Moment” of 2009, but refused to call it the “tea party.” Instead,...

Clarence Page: "Now they regret it."

The bitterness toward the tea party movement continues to go on and on. Case in point - Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, who on the Dec. 27 broadcast of "The McLaughlin Group," deemed it "The Most Defining Political Moment" of 2009, but refused to call it the "tea party." Instead, he granted the movement the preferred name by the left-leaning cable network MSNBC, the "teabaggers" and somehow devised the notion that the movement "asked for" the derogatory name. "The backlash movement known as the ‘teabaggers,' who kind of asked for that name and now they regret it," Page said. ...more...

To hear the right-wing crowd, you would think Bill Ayers and President Barack Obama were joined at the hip. Who could forget Sarah Palin's charge that Obama was "palin' around with terrorists"? Well, goodbye to all that. The 1960s Weather Underground radical-turned-University-of-Illinois professor sounds as steamed up against Obama as he used to feel about President Richard Nixon. The reason, once again, is a presidential escalation of a faraway war. SNIP Meanwhile, what are the Glenn Becks, Sean Hannitys and Sarah Palins of the world going to talk about now that Ayers says Obama's a conservative war hawk? Hint: I'm...

Surely President Barack Obama and his advisers don't really think that their feud with Fox News will do anything but enhance the cable network's viewership. A deeper problem is what the flap reveals about Team Obama, which seems to be more comfortable with campaigning than governing. I'm not happy about that. It does not fill me with glee to see Fox News star Sean Hannity joyfully replaying Obama's 2004 come-together speech about how we're "not red states or blues states" but "the United States of America" and asking where is Obama's promise now? I don't agree with Hannity on much....

Never underestimate the power of a 20-year-old woman in hot pants. Just hook her up with an apple-cheeked young man dressed as a sort of preppy pimp, add a video camera and send them off for a chat with some dimwitted neighborhood financial counselors for ACORN. Stir in enough chutzpah to make Borat look like a shrinking violet and you've got one heckuva scandal. Young conservative activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles hardened up their fresh-faced looks just enough to pose as a pimp and prostitute seeking advice at ACORN offices on setting up a brothel...

Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page softened the MSM’s portrayal of 9/12 protesters as vile racists Monday night to suggest another possibility: they may be ignoramuses. David Shuster, filling in for Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s Countdown, continually baited Page to quantify precisely how “bigotry was fueling this� protest. Clarence Page replied “it’s sad� that, while some of the protesters may be “nutcases�: A lot of these folks, though, are just plain workaday people, who, uh — I bet a poll would show half of them didn’t know what socialism was, but they know it’s not good and they’re afraid of...

Fight crazy talk with sanityBy Clarence Page Published: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 5:16 PM EDT What is it about President Obama that drives some people crazy? Take, for example, his former pastor. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is back in the news again. This time he’s apologizing. He really did not mean to blame “them Jews” in an earlier interview for keeping him away from the president, he says now. He had meant to refer to “Zionists” and not all Jews. The sound bite in question occurred a day earlier. In a walking interview with a reporter for Virginia’s Daily Press,...

... Barack Obama had pushed to completion one of the most impressive, if lopsided, legislative triumphs in the first three weeks of any president in history... his $787 billion economic stimulus package. Despite vigorous outreach that included a bipartisan Super Bowl party at the White House, no Republicans voted for it, just as none approved its earlier version that cleared the chamber in January. ... the Senate began a vote that would approve the package with support from only three Republican senators. ... And the Republican rebuke of his stimulus package, despite his energetic outreach efforts, may have taught him...

What happened to the Sen. John McCain we once knew? What happened to the jovial, optimistic war hero who promised a civil and elevating presidential campaign? Where's that campaign that would be based on real issues, not brainless emotions or partisan cheap shots? Ah, those were the days. That was long before the economy tanked and McCain's poll numbers went into a slide behind Sen. Barack Obama's like the Dow Jones industrial average. These are the days in which McCain's attacks against the Democratic nominee have grown sharper and angrier. He unleashed his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, like...

So you think the chorus of white hate groups is seething with rage that Barack Obama could become president? Think again. Members of the knuckle-dragging set are taking a rosier view, judging by their Internet posts. They say the possibility of a biracial president is helping their recruitment efforts.... Obama has a bigger immediate headache than [David] Duke and his allied dimwits. It's the rising chorus of anti-Obama attack books that don't always let truth get in the way of a good hatchet job. Leading the pack is "Obama Nation" by Jerome R. Corsi. It leads the New York Times...

After cutting ties with his controversial former pastor, Sen. Barack Obama received a word of sympathy from an unusual source: a Republican. Former presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee says that Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. wants to derail Obama's bid for the White House for a simple tactical reason: Wright does not want Obama to prove that America has made that much racial progress. "His campaign is not being derailed by his race," Huckabee told reporters following a fundraiser in Montana. "It's being derailed by a person who doesn't want him to prove that we have made great advances in this country."...

Democratic voters face two challenges heading into 2008. The first is deciding which Democratic candidate to support. The second is agreeing on which Republican candidate they'd most like to run against. It was hard to believe anybody could be easier to beat than one of the original three frontrunners, until the spotlight turned on Mike Huckabee and the media started swooning over a "Huckaboom." First, there's that messy matter of an Arkansas state pardon for convicted rapist Wayne Dumond - who went on to rape and murder another woman, maybe two, after his release from prison. In 1998, for example,...

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions," the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a scholarly New York Democrat, used to say, "but not their own facts." Sorry, "Pat." But, my e-mail box runneth over with misconceptions from readers who feel entitled to their own facts about President Bush's commutation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's jail sentence. The former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney had been sentenced to 30 months in jail and a $250,000 fine before President Bush commuted the prison term, calling it "excessive." However, Bush let the fine stand, along with probation.

WASHINGTON -- On the day before President Bush launched his new border security/guest worker proposal, he was almost upstaged by a timely and telling U.S. Border Patrol complaint: The labels on their uniforms read "Made in Mexico."

Mr. President, can we talk about the war too? Cindy Sheehan's vigil raises uncomfortable questions for Bush Published August 14, 2005 WASHINGTON -- I sympathize with Cindy Sheehan, the California woman who wants to talk to President Bush about her son Casey, who was killed in Iraq. I also sympathize with President Bush. It can't be easy to look as confident as he usually does while he's trying to get his country out of a bigger mess than he expected to get it into. It is August, normally a no-news time in which the president can roll up his shirtsleeves...

WASHINGTON -- Now we know why it is called "spin." Your head could spin around from all of the information and disinformation swirling around disclosures that Karl Rove did, indeed, leak the identity of a CIA agent to at least one reporter. As I boil it all down, there are three big questions:

I'm aware of Clarence Page initially via the generally conservative Jewish World Review political site. At first I thought this gentleman is probably a dissident libertarian like Larry Elder or Thomas Sowell. But the more I read the mroe he strikes me as being as from the left. I'm wondering: is Page a conservative or centre-left? Any answers would be greatly appreciated.

Politics gets into everything these days, even "Star Wars." "George Lucas must be a Democrat," said our 15-year-old son as he arrived home from the opening day of the latest Star Wars movie, "Revenge of the Sith," a film with the unfortunate initials, "ROTS."Ah, The Force is strong in this one, I thought, echoing Darth Vader. For, without the benefit of any advance word or special Jedi abilities, our young Jedi easily detected the anti-Bush propaganda that some liberals, to their delight, and some conservatives, to their fuming outrage, allege is imbedded in Lucas' new flick. In keeping with today's...

Sometimes our efforts to stand up for the less fortunate actually can grease their slide backward into even less fortune. That's what I thought of the verbal sucker punch with which August Wilson, the distinguished black playwright, walloped Bill Cosby, the distinguished black comedian. When Time magazine asked Wilson what he thought of Cosby's controversial criticisms of black parenting, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright was dismissive: "A billionaire attacking poor people for being poor," he said. "Bill Cosby is a clown. What do you expect? I thought it was unfair of him." I, by contrast, think Wilson is being unfair...

A politician should have three hats, the poet Carl Sandburg once said: "One for throwing into the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if elected." Judging by the polls three months after President Bush's inauguration, he is keeping a happy face, but quietly looking for rabbits. As he celebrated his re-election in November, Bush told reporters that he earned political capital and he intended to spend it. But polls are showing that Bush's approval ratings and presumably his political capital have evaporated, almost as quickly as the budget surplus he inherited the beginning of...

I usually avoid commenting on the feuds that occasionally boil up between my fellow column writers and commentators. Most bar fights offer more substance, not to mention the visual excitement. But syndicated columnist Susan Estrich's verbal and e-mail assault against fellow pundit Michael Kinsley, editorial and opinion editor at the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Co. newspaper, actually raises some important questions about how well the media, and men in general, give a fair hearing to women. And, for the record, I felt that way even before my wife told me to. For years newspapers have wrestled with criticisms and...

Republican efforts to court black voters, helped along by black church leaders, "should be cause for alarm" among Democrats. That's not me talking. That's Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, Al Gore's campaign manager in 2000, writing in the Feb. 28 issue of Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper. Brazile, a Louisiana Catholic and the first black woman to manage a major presidential campaign, offers a message to her fellow Dems: Don't get caught nappin' while your competition is standing at your supporters' doors - tappin'! Black voters have turned away from the Republican party since Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. But...

Republican efforts to court black voters, helped along by black church leaders, "should be cause for alarm" among Democrats. That's not me talking. That's Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, Al Gore's campaign manager in 2000, writing in the Feb. 28 issue of Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper. Brazile, a Louisiana Catholic and the first black woman to manage a major presidential campaign, offers a message to her fellow Dems: Don't get caught nappin' while your competition is standing at your supporters' doors—tappin'! Black voters have turned away from the party of Abe Lincoln since Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. But...

WASHINGTON -- Sometimes the political right looks remarkably like the left--and vice versa. In President Bush's crusade to reform Social Security, we see the right-left switcheroo revealing itself in unexpected ways. The Republicans sound like the folks with bold, new ways for government to help people, while the Democrats sound like the side that wants to keep things just the way they are.

There are substantial revisions to our lineup and schedule of syndicated national columnists: Six columnists from our current lineup - Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, Maureen Dowd, Leonard Pitts, David Broder and Ellen Goodman - are continuing, but their work will appear on different days of the week. We're adding five new columnists to the page - three conservative, two liberal - with an eye toward freshening up the mix and upgrading the quality of the writing and advocacy. Conservative Michael Barone, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report and principal co-writer of the "Almanac of American Politics," has...

Thursday, December 02, 2004 - KWEISI Mfume's sudden departure after nine years as president and CEO of the NAACP signals a seismic quake that rattles far beyond the doors of the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization. In a year when Bill Cosby's fiery comments on black self- reliance have caused at least as much comment among black folks as anything said by the Revs. Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, sudden changes at the top of the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference reveal an important evolution, if not a revolution. Reports have leaked out for months that...

As a political junkie who was born and raised in conservative southern Ohio, I was acutely interested in a post-election study by the liberal group America Coming Together of why President Bush beat Sen. John Kerry in the Buckeye State. The answer, according to their poll, sends a message that is conveniently flattering to grassroots organizing groups like America Coming Together as Democrats prepare to choose a new party chairman and assess where they go from here.

WASHINGTON -- Could this be the beginning of the end for "The Hammer"? House Republicans have rewritten their ethics rules so Majority Leader Tom DeLay won't have to resign if he is indicted by a Texas grand jury. This big favor to the ethically challenged Texas Republican gives new meaning to Mark Twain's description of Congress as a "distinctly native American criminal class." Somehow I don't think this is what most of the Republican voters had in mind when they told exit pollsters that "moral values" was their most important issue. Republicans passed their indictment rule back in 1993, modeling...

In a black vote that surged upward about 25 percent from 2000 to 13.2 million voters, 11 percent of it went to Bush, compared to a paltry 8 percent in 2000. But the real cost to Sen. John Kerry appeared in key battleground states like Ohio, where Bush received an impressive 16 percent of the black vote, 7 points more than he received in 2000. And in Florida, where 13 percent of the black vote went to Bush, almost twice the 7 percent he received there four years ago. And in Pennsylvania, which Kerry won, Bush nevertheless took 16 percent...

A surprising black `bump' for Bush Published October 20, 2004 WASHINGTON -- Could President Bush receive a surprisingly large black turnout on Election Day? Considering recent history, the idea sounds about as likely as pop star Michael Jackson receiving a Man of the Year Award from the Children's Defense Fund. But elections can produce unexpected results. That's why we hold them. This week I found myself blinking my eyes in disbelief over two major polls that showed a big bump for Bush among likely black voters. A New York Times poll released Tuesday showed that among likely voters, 47 percent...

It's really getting wacky in Washington these days, folks. New York Times reporter Judith Miller has been sentenced to jail in connection with a story that she reported and researched but, for whatever reason, never got around to publishing.[...snip...] On Friday, U.S. District Chief Judge Thomas Hogan sentenced Miller, a New York Times bioterrorism expert, to be held in contempt of court for refusing to divulge her confidential sources to prosecutors investigating the leak of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity to syndicated columnist Robert Novak. Hogan, who ordered Miller jailed for up to 18 months unless she agrees to...

WASHINGTON -- Amid occasional outbursts of political correctness, I have consistently held that straight (as in non-gay) white males (sometimes known as SWMs) deserve respect too. After all, we may have come here on different ships but we're all in the same boat now, as Whitney Young, the late, great civil rights leader, used to say. With that in mind, I registered no small amount of alarm to hear that a young SWM at the University of North Carolina has been illegally subjected to "intentional discrimination and harassment," according to a ruling by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for...

What if both sides are right? That thought comes to mind repeatedly as I try to hash out the battle between veterans who attack John Kerry's Vietnam combat record and those who defend it. Out of the fog of war, politics and old memories, long ago events have become the focus of an ugly election year mud fight as a group of swift boat veterans and others contend that Kerry didn't deserve the Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts he was awarded for various actions. Watching and reading the various conflicting accounts of what happened or didn't happen,...

Clarence Page questions reasoning of observers who say the Illinois Senate candidate is less black because of intercontinental roots. CHICAGO — Some people, particularly those who are tone deaf to the ironies of life, have a problem with Barack Obama's race. They have a hard time deciding what it is. Ever since the front-running candidate for the U.S. Senate from Illinois burst onto the national stage with a riveting keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, I've been hearing from readers who question why the media, including me, insist on referring to Obama as "black" or "African-American" when he is...

If you blinked, you might have missed the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Everybody was so busily getting ready for the 4th of July weekend, I suppose, that not many had time to commemorate it. Yet young folks should know how much this piece of legislation profoundly changed the daily life of this country. One of my favorite examples is offered by a black man, a young infantry captain who was in leadership training at Ft. Benning, Ga., that summer. He was taking a break with some of his white classmates when the subject of that...

<p>Some people say old unsolved civil rights-era murder cases should be left alone. The quest for long-delayed justice, they say, is not worth reopening those old social wounds. For others among us, those wounds never healed.</p> <p>Forty years have passed, for example, since "freedom summer," but I still vividly remember the massive project to register black voters in the South. The Constitution had granted African-Americans the right to vote almost 100 years earlier, but that radical notion had not taken hold in the South.</p>

In our long, hard slog through America's racial confusions, there are lessons to be found deep in the heart of Texas' current dilemma over diversity on campus. A "10 percent solution" that Texans devised to replace race-based admissions policies has worked much better for the University of Texas than anyone had a right to expect. Unfortunately, that's the problem.State senators begin holding committee hearings this month to investigate possible modifications to the plan they approved after a federal court outlawed the use of race in the admissions policies of the state's public universities in 1996.The law guarantees admission to the top...

WASHINGTON -- Maybe gay people aren't as bad for our military as some of our military leaders would have us believe.     Remember the big deal that Pentagon leaders made a dozen years ago about how their world was going to end if they did not keep gays and lesbians out of their ranks? Well, as they say in Tony Soprano's neighborhood, fuh-gedda-boudit!     The latest tally of homosexuals booted out of the military for being homosexuals shows a startling trend: After climbing for the past decade, gay-related discharges suddenly declined during the past two years, the years of wars...

WASHINGTON -- It was during her musings on the sources of terrorism before the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that Condoleezza Rice had her high-drama, "You go, girlfriend!" moment. A "You go!" moment is the hip-hop generation's version of a big applause line, a red-hot zinger that causes black audiences to bob their heads up and down and erupt with some verbal punctuation like, "That's right! That's right ...!" National Security Adviser Rice's moment came when former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) asked her how America might best deal with the deeply seated discontent and dislocation that generates...

<p>Black teen girls don't get much respect, not even from each other. That's just one of the startling findings of a recent study of the sex and gender attitudes of low-income black teenagers. It offers new evidence, as if we needed it, to me and to other parents of black teenagers that the standards of "black authenticity" promulgated in hip-hop culture are not only too narrow but downright dangerous. With funding from the Ford Foundation and the California Endowment, MEE (Motivational Educational Entertainment) Productions Inc., a marketing firm that specializes in the buying patterns of urban youths, conducted a 10-city research study of teens aged 16 to 20 years old. The study found black urban youth from households earning under $25,000 a year to be remarkably untouched by positive messages from schools, parents, the media and health-care providers about responsible sexual behavior. But the teens did display attitudes consistent with the cool macho pose of hip-hop rappers. Their mottoes: "Use or be used," among others, and "Get it while you can." And, consistent with a culture that uses "bitches" and "ho's" as labels for every woman but one's mama, the study reveals, "Black females are dissed by almost everyone," including other black females. Compare, for example the half-dozen slang nouns in the study's glossary that are used to describe males ("Dog... homeboy... playa... lame... sugar daddy... payload") with some of the words used by both teen boys and teen girls in the survey to describe women: "skeezer... 'hood rat... 'ho... trick... freak... bitch... gold digger... hoochie mama." The study of the "hip-hop generation" fails to pin down the big question: Does rap music and other hip-hop culture influence teens or merely mirror the culture that teens already have created? The answer is probably both. Born since the mid-1980s, today's teens grew up awash in hip-hop and so did their parents. The sad consequences have been a narrow and distorted view among many black youngsters, among others, of what it means to be black. It was back in the 1960s, I painfully recall, that "authenticity" began to replace the more generalized "cool" as the standard for acceptable tastes and behavior among black youths. It was a period marked by big Afros, dashikis, bib overalls, jungle combat boots and a propensity for greeting each other with defiantly raised fists. Ah, youth. Such was the "authentic" look among black college students, of which I was fortunate enough to be one in the late '60s. The "authentic black" came to define a person who did not "sell out" to bourgeois middle-class standards, the same values that enabled our families to prepare us for college in the first place. Even if we aging black Baby Boomers no longer buy that narrow notion of blackness, a lot of our kids and grandkids do. In 1986, Signithia Fordham and the late John Ogbu shocked many with a landmark study of "oppositional cultural identity" in black teens who derogate academic achievement by their peers as "acting white." Still, there are signs of hope. Among those who expressed some pretty raunchy attitudes in the MEE study, some also praised certain hip-hop artists as more "positive" and called for more "message" in pop music. And in another section headlined, "Wish I woulda waited: The secret allure of virgins," many sexually active youths said sex wasn't all they had hoped and that they wish they had waited until they were married or at least older. And many of the young men, in a reflection of times past, in the study still showed significant respect for virginity they would not express outside the group. Girls who don't "give it up" are males' top choices for long-term partners. What is to be done? Pardon my dangling prepositions, but like other generations, today's youths probably are just looking for someone to look up to and something to believe in. We, their elders need to provide it. We need not only to reach out and show the world a broader vision of what black culture is all about, but also to reach back and mentor our least-privileged youngsters. They're not going to learn life's valuable lessons from CDs alone.</p>

<p>It's not easy to be black. Just ask John Kerry. He recently expressed an unusual ambition. He wants to be the nation's second black president.</p> <p>"President Clinton was often known as the first black president," Kerry told the American Urban Radio Network.. "I wouldn't be upset if I could earn the right to be the second."</p>

<p>At last the highly charged issue of reparations for the descendants of slaves has had its day in court — and the court threw it back out again.</p> <p>No big surprise there. Not if you understand how courts work.</p> <p>Nor should you expect that judgment to be the end of the reparations issue. Not if you understand how soul-deep passions run on both sides of this endless argument.</p>

As Americans prepare once again to take a day off to honor the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., I wonder whether America would be as eager to honor him if he were still around. I'm not alone in my wondering.

WASHINGTON - Sometimes I receive letters or e-mails that begin something like this: "I can't understand why blacks - or African-Americans or whatever it is you want to call yourselves these days - stay so loyal to the Democratic Party. After all, President Bush appointed Colin Powell as his secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice as his foreign policy adviser." And he showed good taste by doing so, didn't he? However, as groundbreaking as their appointments were, most black people I know still are waiting for the Bush

While cattle farmers fret about mad cow disease, Democratic Party leaders wrestle with another sort of malady. Call it the "Angry Howard Syndrome." Its symptoms include a tendency by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, the front-runner in the Democratic presidential polls and fundraising, to insult members and factions of his own party whose help he may very well need, if he wins the party's presidential nomination. Dean's not the only one afflicted. Angry Howard Syndrome is contagious. It unleashes reactions in some of his rivals, particularly Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, that President Bush's campaign could easily and gleefully use...

<p>With his endorsement of Howard Dean, the former vice president moved from political Siberia to the Democratic Party's power center.</p> <p>He has made several "major" addresses, as his staff has called them, over the past couple of years, but none rattled the political establishment as much or raised as many startling questions, such as: Why now? Why Dean? Why not his former running mate, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut? Does Mr. Gore really think Mr. Dean has a prayer? Has "Call Me Al" Gore gone completely nuts?</p>

<p>Things in life that you should not do: (1) Eat too much fattening food.</p> <p>We don't know everything yet about Nathaniel Jones and his violent and ultimately fatal confrontation with Cincinnati police in the early morning hours of Nov. 30. The matter is under investigation, as it should be.</p>

Page: All of a sudden the Patriot Act isn't just about terrorists anymore By Clarence Page Chicago Tribune WASHINGTON -- In our latest episode of continuing adventures with the USA Patriot Act, FBI agents say they have used the new anti-terrorism law to prosecute a political bribery case centered on the owner of some Las Vegas strip clubs. What do topless dancers in Vegas have to do with terrorism, you may ask? Nothing, everyone agrees, unless perhaps you count the violence that some of the ladies inflict on the wallets of their mostly male clientele. Nevertheless, the FBI now confirms...