Free Republic

While, in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” Mark Antony said that the evil men do lives beyond their deaths, we now also see how quickly mean spirits can be exposed in the wake of the wickedness they have committed. The result is “Hell to tell the captain,” as they used to say down South. In jangled visions of entitlement, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, former Gov. Eliot Spitzer and those of President Obama’s Secret Service men who pulverized their careers in the Colombian prostitution scandal, all showed us something we need to know. They proved they were fools who were crushed for...

Chelsea Clinton did her second report for NBC's "Rock Center with Brian Williams" Wednesday night, and it was just as flawed as the first. The learning curve does not appear to have bent one degree in the direction of growth. This one-dimensional, under-reported, naive celebration of a charter school in Rhode Island was just as much of an empty-headed puff job as Clinton's first report on an after-school program in Little Rock. And before you take to your computer to send an email telling me how mean it is for me to criticize this 31-year-old woman who has been given...

Newt Gingrich isn't exactly chasing the gay vote. The Republican presidential candidate told a homosexual Iowa man at a campaign event on Tuesday to vote for President Obama. Scott Arnold, a Democrat and associate professor of writing at William Penn University, approached the ex-House speaker in Oskaloosa wanting to know how Gingrich would represent him as President, according to the Des Moines Register. "I asked him if he’s elected, how does he plan to engage gay Americans. How are we to support him? And he told me to support Obama," Arnold told the newspaper. The Gingrich campaign did not immediately...

MSNBC has a new addition to its staff — Sen. John McCain’s daughter, Meghan McCain. On his Wednesday program, MSNBC host Thomas Roberts introduced McCain and asked her to address her back-and-forth with presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. “Can you believe that?” McCain asked. “Former Speaker of the House I’m getting in fights with, I can’t believe it.” In a specific incident addressing some remarks McCain made about his presidential bid, Gingrich said, “How would she have a clue?” “I think he’s delusional,” McCain said. “And him calling me clueless I think is so sexist...

Manhattan and the Bronx would be uninhabitable if the accident-prone Indian Point nuke plant suffered a Chernobyl-like disaster, an environmental group charged Monday. A massive radiation release similar to the 1986 catastrophe in Ukraine could also contaminate Brooklyn and chunks of Queens and Staten Island, according to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The more you learn about Indian Point, the more you know it must close," said Robert Kennedy Jr., a senior attorney at NRDC. "It's too old, it's near too many people, and it's just too vulnerable to fire, earthquake and attack." The doomsday scenario comes...

Fresh on the heels of announcements by Chris Christie and Sarah Palin that they were not running for President, members of the media panicked while waiting for Rudy Giuliani to decide. Then it happened. Amanda Knox came to the microphone. She held a tearful press conference, where she did not announce that she was running for President. Given this late stage of the game, she would have said something if she was. She also failed to mention what she thought of Casey Anthony as a potential running mate, and if they would be willing to enjoy drug fueled sex orgies...

American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, as if they were corralling livestock. The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

Gaze up the Hudson River and hope, hope, hope our regulators are right. Hope they could not possibly be as wrong as the regulators in Japan who said their nuclear reactors could withstand any calamity. Hope we never, ever have an out-of-control reactor just 35 miles north - a Chernobyl-on-the-Hudson. We are assured the Indian Point nuclear plant, which has had its share of problems, is designed to shrug off an earthquake under a magnitude 6.1. That's a bit above the most powerful one on record in New York - a 5.25 way back in 1884. We are also told...

<p>They've been portrayed variously as angry fringe elements, often inarticulate, potentially violent and merely Republicans in sheep's clothing or disgruntled pockets of conservatives blindly lashing out at a left-handed President Obama and the same side of his Democratic Party finally getting its chance to drive home a liberal agenda after eight years of Republican rule and six under a centrist Bill Clinton.</p>

Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann are engaged in one of the most visible rivalries of the decade — a conflict that may be rooted more in their similarities than differences. Both talk show hosts are former straight news reporters who share not only a formula for talk-show success, but a mutual respect for Tom Snyder, whose 1970s talk show Tomorrow set the bar for thoughtful, entertaining talk. Olbermann and O'Reilly make our Players list for best epitomizing the transformation of news in the 2000s. While CNN ruled the '90s with an emphasis on breaking, opinion-free reports, The O'Reilly Factor helped...

Sept. 19 is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Courageous Captain Rescued by Navy Seals View SlideshowCaptain Richard Phillips, who has been held by Somali pirates since Wednesday in a small life boat off of Africa, has been freed. After this weekend, April 12 might become International Keelhaul A Pirate Day. With a rescue of captured Richard Phillips, captain of the Maersk Alabama -- and killing the Somali pirates holding him hostage -- the US Navy created a feel-good Easter story. Even more significantly in a political sense, President Barack Obama suddenly makes himself look rather different on the national...

The pressure's on for Barack Obama, orator. History wants something for the ages in his Jan. 20 inaugural speech. Not just pretty words that melt like gumdrops but something that will settle in the nation's soul and be worth making schoolchildren memorize 100 years from now. Americans want something for the dispiriting times they live in. They have their first extraordinary speaker in decades taking the oath of office. They know how good he's been. Time for great. How tall is the order? "The great task of Barack Obama is to be a John F. Kennedy or to be a...

Terrorist strikes on four American cities. Russia rolling into Eastern Europe. Israel hit by a nuclear bomb. Gay marriage in every state. The end of the Boy Scouts. All are plausible scenarios if Democrat Barack Obama is elected president, according to a new addition to the campaign conversation called "Letter from 2012 in Obama's America," produced by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family Action. The imagined look into the future is part of an escalation in rhetoric from Christian right activists who are trying to paint Obama in the worst possible terms as the campaign heads into the...

Embarrassing revelations about her costly campaign wardrobe and bloopers about the vice president's job description are raising fresh fears that Sarah Palin is dragging down the Republican ticket. New polls showed Wednesday that seven weeks after John McCain plucked the Alaska governor from political obscurity to be his running mate in the November 4 elections, Palin is seen as an increasing liability for Republicans. The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that Americans are less and less convinced she is worthy to serve as the country's number-two leader. "Her numbers have plummeted in our poll ... what's more 55 percent...

The McCain campaign is attempting to do something unheard of in the modern political era. It is not just running against the mainstream media, it is running around it. This strategy is not so much expressed in McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt's declaration last week that the New York Times is "150 percent in the tank" for Democratic Sen. Barack Obama or the media-bashing by several speakers at this month's Republican National Convention. It's more about the GOP's continued sheltering of its vice presidential nominee, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. She has yet to hold a major press conference 32 days...

Dan Rather's $70 million lawsuit against CBS is getting whittled down like a redwood at an Alabama beaver party. A Manhattan judge yesterday threw out two more of Rather's claims against the network, including his charge that his former bosses committed fraud by falsely promising to help restore his reputation after he became a "scapegoat" for a discredited story about President Bush's military career. "We are extremely gratified that the court has now dismissed the vast majority of Mr. Rather's claims," CBS said in a statement. Rather's lawyer, Martin Gold, said that despite Judicial Hearing Officer Ira Gammerman's ruling striking...

A new Pentagon survey of troops in Iraq found that only 40 percent of Marines and 55 percent of Army soldiers would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian. In the first internal military study of battlefield ethics in Iraq, officials said Friday they also found that only a third of Marines and roughly half of soldiers said they believed that noncombatants should be treated with dignity. The study also found that long and repeated deployments were increasing troop mental health problems. And it showed that more than 40 percent of Marines and soldiers...

One half of the old "Boris and Bill Show" departed the world stage on Monday with the death of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, leaving former President Bill Clinton with some vivid memories. "Fate gave him a tough time in which to govern, but history will be kind to him because he was courageous and steadfast on the big issues -- peace, freedom, and progress," Clinton said in a statement. The two leaders, physically imposing and emotionally demonstrative, both rose from humble, small-town beginnings and immediately developed a close personal relationship. They held sway in the 1990s with a series...

A highway sign outside this small town calls it "a touch of Holland." A few windmills later, Bruxvoort's furniture store and Vander Ploeg's bakery attest to Pella's tight bonds with the Netherlands. But if Pella, abuzz in tulip festival preparations, stands out with its colorful display of Dutch heritage, its politics are typical of many towns in rural Iowa: Conservative Christian Republicans hold sway. So it comes as little surprise that appliance repairman Bernie Veenstra, 48, and many other evangelical Christians here cast a wary eye on Republican presidential hopeful Rudolph W. Giuliani, the combative former New York City mayor...

More than 1,000 journalists and their support staff have died in the past decade, with Iraq and Russia topping the list as the deadliest countries for the profession, according to a report released Tuesday. Most of those killed were men who died in their home countries. Nearly half were shot. Others were blown up, beaten to death, stabbed, tortured or decapitated. The vast majority of those killed were on staff — 91 percent versus 9 percent freelance, according to the report from the Brussels-based International News Safety Institute. Only one in eight deaths resulted in prosecution. "This report breaks new...

Raised in the projects in an old steel town, Edward "Willie" Carman saw the Army as a chance to build a new life. ADVERTISEMENT "I'm not doing it to you, I'm doing it for me," the then-18-year-old told his mother, Joanna Hawthorne, after coming home from high school one day and surprising her with the news. When Carman died in Iraq three years ago at age 27, he had money saved for college, a fiancee and two kids — including a baby son he'd never met. Neighbors in Hawthorne's mobile home park collected $400 and left it in an envelope...

Doubts are being raised about the story of Cesar Borja, the former New York City police officer who died of lung disease that was attributed to his work at Ground Zero. But how much he actually worked at Ground Zero is now in question. In death, Cesar Borja became the poster child for ailing 9/11 recovery workers. The police officer died while awaiting a lung transplant. He had rushed to Ground Zero, according to the Daily News, after the World Trade Center towers fell. He reportedly breathed in the toxic dust and did not wear protective gear because the federal...

Just 28% of Americans say it is ethical for reporters to publish news stories based upon anonymous sources. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone poll of 1,000 adults found that 45% disagree and say the use of unnamed sources is unethical. Americans under 40 are more likely to find this journalistic practice acceptable than their elders, but a plurality of younger adults still finds the use of anonymous sources unethical. The public judgment is even harsher for reporters who publish classified information obtained from an anonymous source. By a three-to-one margin (63% to 21%) American adults believe that publishing such information...

The grieving son of a dead city cop is waiting to hear from you, Mr. President. His message: Please help the ailing heroes of 9/11 so that no more have to die. "I just want the President to look in my face and see how important it is that we get help," 21-year-old Ceasar Borja Jr. told the Daily News yesterday, a day after his cop father succumbed to lung disease after spending 16-hour days atop the smoldering wreckage of Ground Zero. "I want him to hear how my father died a hero," added Borja, "and how there are many...

Temperatures in rugged Tibet have hit record highs in recent days, China's state press has reported, as a scientific survey warned of the impact of global warming in the Himalayan region. Friday's temperature in the Qamdo area of eastern Tibet was 21.8 degrees Celsius (71 degrees Fahrenheit), 1.7 degrees higher than the previous record set for the same day in 1996, Xinhua news agency reported. In Dengqen county, also in eastern Tibet, the mercury reached 16.6 degrees Celsius on Thursday, 2.5 degrees higher than the previous record for the same day set in 2001, it said. Eight other places across...

A 12-year Republican lock on Congress came to an abrupt end in 2006, as voters punished US President George W. Bush for the quagmire in Iraq. Democrats rode the US leader's perceived mishandling of Iraq to take control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives from Bush's Republican party in elections held last month. A Democrat-controlled Congress, which takes power next month, is expected to make the president's last two years in the White House tough ones, ending the virtual rubber stamp Bush has enjoyed since coming into office in January 2001. During the six years of the...

After a five-year Republican lock on power, the quagmire in Iraq handed US President George W. Bush a Democrat-controlled Congress in late 2006, which is likely to make his last two years in the White House tough ones. Democrats rode public perceptions of Bush's mishandling of the fight in Iraq to take control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives for the first time in 12 years in November 7 elections. Since Bush came into office in January 2001, Democrats have had little impact on his policies, only able to raise questions of his policies in limited hearings...

Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the Earth, more than half the American population believes that the entire cosmos was created 6,000 years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue. Those with the power to elect presidents and congressmen?and many who themselves get elected?believe that dinosaurs lived two by two upon Noah's Ark, that light from distant galaxies was created en route to the Earth and that the first members of our species were fashioned out of dirt and divine breath, in...

Dialogue with America's enemies, improved ties with other countries and more aggressive scrutiny of Bush administration decision-making are all high on the foreign policy agenda if Democrats score big in next week's U.S. elections. ADVERTISEMENT Under the U.S. Constitution, presidents have the lead on foreign policy and that will continue no matter which party controls Congress after November 7. But if Democrats take the House of Representatives, and maybe the Senate, as some polls predict, they could influence international relations -- through committee chairmanships and budget authority -- in ways they have not since 2001, when President Bill Clinton left...

Despite politicians' complaints about judges having too much power, two-thirds of Americans do not believe elected officials should have more control over federal judges, according to a new CNN poll released Saturday. Sixty-seven percent of 1,013 people surveyed by Opinion Research Corp. on behalf of CNN said federal judges -- and the decisions they make -- should not be subject to more control. Only 30 percent said they should. (See the poll results) Both a current and former Supreme Court justice told CNN they are not unaware of the criticism aimed at them, but they said such criticism is an...

Former President Bill Clinton urged Democrats on Wednesday to strive for an inclusive politics of "common good" and fight back against the divisive approach of Republican leaders. Less than three weeks before November 7 elections to decide control of Congress, Clinton said U.S. political debate had been degraded by "ideological, right-wing" Republicans who demonized opponents and concentrated power in the hands of a privileged few. Clinton said he longed for a politics that celebrated differences and disagreements without condemnation, and worked toward equal opportunity, shared responsibility and a sense of community. "Ideological, divisive, demonizing, distracting politics, they may be very...

US President George W. Bush has for the first time acknowledged a possible parallel between the raging violence in Iraq and the Vietnam War. But the White House also affirmed that it has no plan to reassess its strategy in the war-ravaged country, despite a surge in US casualties there and unrelenting sectarian bloodshed. Bush was asked in an ABC News interview late Wednesday if he agreed with a New York Times columnist's comparison of the strife in Iraq with the Tet Offensive, which is considered a key turning point in the US war in Vietnam. "He could be right,"...

Gas prices are down, the stock market is at a record high and 60 percent of Americans say the economy is in good shape. So why are Republicans in so much trouble? I've been asked this in the past week by several (mostly rich) Democrats and Republicans, so I picked the brains of a number of pollsters. Kathy Frankovic, director of surveys for CBS News, pointed to the finding in the CBS News/New York Times poll conducted Oct. 5 to 8, which said that despite the increase in the number of people saying the economy was in good shape, they...