Free Republic

Hamill fell at his Brooklyn home Saturday after returning from dialysis, his brother, writer Denis Hamill, told The Post. He was in intensive care at Methodist Hospital — the same place he was born — when “his kidneys and heart failed him,” the brother said. In 1960, the high school dropout began working as a reporter for the Post where he “began to learn his craft,” according to his online biography. He penned columns for the Post for 12 years and worked as a columnist for Newsday, Village Voice and the New York Daily News. He also wrote for Esquire,...

Remember the “harmonic convergence”? It was the alignment of the planets that took place in 1987 some said was going to bring about major changes in the world. And then there was Y2K, when people hoarded canned goods and caused at least one person to take a homemade concoction that turned his skin permanently blue. Those were stupid times. But they have nothing on today. What a clown show we’ve become. The year is a week old today and already dumb enough to make me yearn for 2017. The big story this week was a book written by a guy...

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama says he is prepared to listen to all voices as he tries to rescue the U.S. economy from deep recession. He has also sought to portray himself as a unifier after the deeply divisive presidency of his soon-to-be predecessor George W. Bush. So, in that context, his attendance at a dinner party on Tuesday night at the home of George Will, one of the United States’ best-known conservative columnists, is probably not too surprising.

"The New York State Legislature needs to Raise the Age of criminal responsibility, and they need to do it this year," demands the subheadline on MSNBC.com's landing page this afternoon for a story headlined, "Stop charging kids as adults." The column, co-authored by former NAACP president Ben Jealous and actress Rosario Dawson, promotes a push by the Citizens Committee for Children of New York [CCCNY] to change Empire State law so that minors aged 16 years old cannot be charged as adults. Jealous and Dawson don't disclose to what age they believe the age of criminal responsibility should be raised,...

This is Week 12 of Season 3 in my 13 Weeks of Wild Man Writing and Radical Reading Series . Every week day I try to blog about compelling writers, their ideas, and the news cycle’s most interesting headlines. This Top 10 list is the series’ climax for this year, a project I’ve been planning since first asking the question December 5, 2012 . What is the future of conservatism? Which voices should define the priorities of the movement in the coming decades? Who are its most skilled proponents today? How should the movement evolve to face the threats...

Who Are the Best Conservative Columnists?Posted By Dave Swindle On December 5, 2012 @ 11:00 am In Conservatism,Ideology,Writing | 92 Comments This week my friend John Hawkins released his annual ranking of the 50 best conservative columnists. A very generous guy, John included me on the list. And ahead of George Will too!I wonder, though: what does it mean to be a columnist today?I’m a traditionalist on the definition. Merriam-Webster claims that it’s “one who writes a newspaper or magazine column.”Well, what qualifies as a column? The defining characteristics, which I invite others to dispute or refine in the comments:...

Falsity is the heart of immorality. And the Diocese of Worcester, Massachusetts has been crippled for years by the spirit of falsity. In a previous post, I said that: "Any priest who convinces those entrusted to his care to rationalize sin is no lover of souls but is instead an enemy of souls. When a person is encouraged to rationalize what is known to be wicked in the sight of the Lord, that person opens a chasm between themselves and God which continues to grow wider and wider until they can no longer hear His call and discern the word...

The Miami Herald finally has added not one, but two, conservative columnists, and in the second month of the change I judge it a resounding success. This doesn't mean that I agree with Jackie Bueno Sousa and Glenn Garvin, but that they have brought interesting, lively points of view that represent the sensibilities of large parts of South Florida's readership -- and challenge the rest. ''A true conservative is not afraid of the reaction to the truth,'' wrote reader Jaime Basagoitia in welcoming them. But no opinion would be appropriate without an opposing one. Reader Scott J. Siegel wrote, in...

I know I shouldn’t be, but sometimes I am just struck with breadth and depth of the stupidity of the MSM. Al Gore as Secretary of State? Because global warming is the number one issue? What in G-d’s name is this dude smoking?

In some ways, Barack Obama's speech on race last week was as brilliant as it was nuanced. But for all its rhetorical beauty, it was also an enormous step backward and, in the end, a rather self-serving call for more discussion about racial grievance in a country that has already done way too much talking. Until last week, so much of Obama's appeal lay in the fact that he was not asking us to talk about the racial divide. Instead, he offered himself as a living and breathing symbol of racial reconciliation; his very origins pointed to the goal of...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Barack Obama's speech last week, hastily prepared to extinguish the firestorm over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, won critical praise for style and substance but failed politically. By elevating the question of race in America, the front-running Democratic presidential candidate has deepened the dilemma created by his campaign's success against the party establishment's anointed choice, Hillary Clinton. In rejecting the racist views of his longtime spiritual mentor but not disowning him, Obama has unwittingly enhanced his image as the African-American candidate -- not just a remarkable candidate who happens to be black. That poses a racial dilemma for...

Some 50 delegates were reportedly poised to unite behind Barack Obama if he had won by even 1 point in Texas. He lost the popular vote by 100,000 ballots, and now we learn that 100,000 Republicans voted for Hillary Clinton, probably not because of some change in party allegiance but because they thought she would be the easier candidate to beat. This kind of strategic voting often backfires (think Ralph Nader). The Texas crossovers are winners. By helping to prolong the Democratic race, they can claim credit for weakening the eventual nominee, whoever it turns out to be. Obama has...

If race is not an issue in this presidential contest (and I believe it is and will be), then how come virtually every mainstream black columnist has been effusively and unabashedly supporting Sen. Barack Obama, and highly critical of and even caustic towards Sen. Hillary Clinton? ...Of course, many prominent white columnists, including liberals, have joined in the adulation of Obama and the nasty criticism of whatever Clinton says, how she looks, what she wears. Her most vigorous attackers have included the New York Time duo, Maureen Dowd, who compared Clinton to Dick Cheney, and Frank Rich, who said Sen....

CONTEMPLATING the Clinton-Obama racial war, some Republicans were so excited you’d have thought Ronald Reagan had risen from the dead to slap around a welfare deadbeat. Never mind that the G.O.P. is running on empty, with no ideas beyond the incessant repetition of Reagan’s name. A battle over race-and-gender identity politics among the Democrats, with its acrid scent from the 1960s, might be just the spark for a Republican comeback. (As long as the G.O.P.’s own identity politics, over religion, don’t flare up.) Alas, these hopes faded on Tuesday night. First, the debating Democrats declared a truce, however fragile, in...

IN 1972, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, was looking for a conservative columnist for his left-leaning Op-Ed page. At a charity dinner, he wound up sitting next to William Safire, the Nixon White House speechwriter who coined Spiro Agnew’s famous denunciation of the press as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” They soon had a deal. But, as described in “The Trust,” the authoritative history of the family that has controlled The Times for more than a century, Sulzberger neglected to involve John Oakes, his cousin and the editor of the editorial page, in the decision. Oakes...

The New York Times decided to bring another conservative commentator aboard their flailing op-ed pages, still recovering from their years-long cloister of TimesSelect. They chose Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard, whose run at Time Magazine recently came to an end. Did liberals celebrate the balancing of opinion at the Gray Lady? Not exactly, as The Politico points out: The New York Times’ hiring of Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol to write for its op-ed page caused a frenzy in the liberal blogosphere Friday night, with threats of canceling subscriptions and claims that the Gray Lady had been hijacked by...

According to The Politico, New York Post columnist and FOX News contributor Dick Morris has been secretly advising former client Mike Huckabee on his Presidential campaign. Morris claims he is acting in an entirely voluntary capacity by simply offering free advice. Keep in mind that nationally syndicated columnist George Will was pilloried by the media when it became public that he had secretly and voluntarily helped Ronald Reagan prepare for his Presidential debates in 1980. A prominent national GOP insider tells Politics1 that he believes Morris -- despite his claims to the contrary -- is paid for his services through...

With no real issues to promote, Democrats are putting all their eggs into the basket of corruption to restore their political fortunes. They and their friends in the mainstream media are working overtime to connect everyone and everything on the right side of the political spectrum to disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to multiple felonies. One channel that Democrats and liberals are working is tying conservative think tanks to the Abramoff scandal. They know that these think tanks have been one of the most effective forces in Washington over the last 30 years in advancing a...

Of all the stories leading America’s annual greatest-hits list, the one that subsumes the rest is the evolution of information in the Age of Blogging. Not since the birth of the printing press have our lives been so dramatically affected by the way we create and consume information. What is wonderful and miraculous about the Internet needs little elaboration. We all marvel at the ease with which we can access information, whether reading government documents previously available only to a few, or tracking down old friends and new enemies. It is this latter – our new enemies – that interests...

Here's John Hawkins' current faves for best opinion columnists, in descending order. Do you agree or disagree? 30) Fred Barnes 29) Bill O'Reilly 28) Ralph Reiland 27) Heather Mac Donald 26) Larry Kudlow 25) Linda Chavez 24) Robert Novak 23) Mona Charen 22) Ralph Peters 21) Larry Elder 20) Brendan Miniter 19) Tony Blankley 18) James Lileks 17) Kathleen Parker 16) Michael Barone 15) Rich Lowry 14) John Podhoretz 13) John Tierney 12) Jeff Jacoby 11) Jack Kelly 10) Michelle Malkin 9) Walter Williams 8) Jonah Goldberg 7) David Limbaugh 6) Charles Krauthammer 5) John Leo 4) Victor Davis Hanson...