Free Republic

Remember the vast rightwing conspiracy? It’s ba-a-a-ck, turning its considerable resources to ruining health care reform and wrecking legislation aimed at curbing climate change. Despite the insistence of Republican leaders that the tea-party crowd and the town-hall protestors are merely concerned individuals who have spontaneously made the decision to shout and yell threats at public meetings, the protests are, in fact, prodded by networks of conservative activists. Richard Mellon Scaife, a Pittsburg billionaire who is the financial lifeblood of ultra-conservative activism, is a contributor, according to The Washington Post. That’s not to deny the individual anger or anxiety on display...

Are you opposed to ObamaCare? Willing to attend a town hall to express your disapproval? Odds are good you're a racist. Just ask Cynthia Tucker . . . As Clay Waters has noted, Paul Krugman alleges that racist motives are at the heart of the town hall protests against ObamaCare. On this evening's Hardball, Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was willing to get specific, estimating that "45 to 65%" of the protesters are motivated by racism. View video here.

Today, modern Americans look back on ancestors who burned witches at the stake and who enslaved their brethren and shake their heads, unable to fully understand a culture that condoned such cruelty and harbored such lunacy. A hundred years from now, historians and social scientists will look back on our own crazed obsession with guns and wonder why the madness lasted so long. They’ll shake their heads over a time in which a church or nursing home or community center could suddenly fall prey to a gunman armed with a determination to murder indiscriminately. Yes, these mass shootings are a...

This is a reply to an article made by a leftist named Cynthia The article blasts tradition of all kinds as racist. Here's my response... I got done reading an article of yours in which you claim you do not mourn the loss of America's traditional values. You then use the liberal tactic of blasting those such as Ms Fields as racist supporters of Jim Crow and lynching. Typical and disgusting. You might mourn the loss of yester year but with the exception of racism, I do as do most people I know. 50 years ago if you wanted to...

Even though Barack Obama received less than 53 percent of the popular vote, his favorable rating stands at 67 percent. It appears that many conservatives who didn’t support him are nevertheless enthusiastic about his presidency and optimistic about his tenure. How could it be otherwise? Americans were hungry for change, as was the rest of the planet. Obama’s victory has generated excitement around the world — among Muslims, Christians and Buddhists, Scandinavians and South Africans, democrats and autocrats — and helped to restore the moral authority of the U.S. As The Economist put it recently, “All of Europe is on...

Just when it seemed the insults hurled at Barack Obama had reached the apex of absurdity, al-Qaida weighs in with a bit of retro name-calling of its own. In a video released last week, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the top deputy to Osama bin Laden, denounced Obama as a “house Negro” and compared him unfavorably to “honorable black Americans” such as the late Malcolm X, the black nationalist who practiced Islam. Zawahiri also showed a still photograph of Obama wearing a yarmulke while visiting Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall last summer. The implication was that Obama had become nothing more than a “tool of...

The politics of the Grand Old Party's ultra-conservative religionists produce the oddest cognitive dissonance. This campaign season has illuminated the jarring contrast between the public piety of conservative Christians — a significant faction in the Republican Party — and their intense anger toward illegal immigrants. That hostility is all the more jarring at Christmastime, when Christians around the world commemorate the birth of Christ. You'd think that the season would bring forth an outpouring of compassion, mercy and generosity. After all, the Bible, which conservative Christians hold out as the inerrant word of God, includes several admonitions to practice kindness...

For many sophisticated conservatives, Mitt Romney is an appealing presidential candidate. Before he served a respectable term as governor of Massachusetts, he rescued the scandal-plagued Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. He has also been very successful in business, making millions as the co-founder of a private equity investment firm. Though his hyperpandering to the narrow-minded in this campaign has cost him some honor, he's still smart, accomplished and photogenic. He's also a Mormon, a biographical note that has caused considerable consternation among the ultraconservative Christians who make up a sizable portion of the GOP's core constituency. Many of them reject...

First, violent crime. Now, teen birth rates. After declining for more than a decade, births to unmarried teenagers suddenly increased 3 percent among 15- to 19-year-old girls between 2005 and 2006, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Like the uptick in violent crime, this could signal a worrisome trend —- another sign that undesirable social phenomena the nation struggled to curb in the 1990s have begun to ooze back up through the sewer grate. The one-year increase in births to teen moms could be an anomaly. Maybe the numbers for 2007 will show another decline, as adolescent girls...

No prison time for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Not a year, not a month, not a day. Unlike the unconnected, the unrich, the uncelebrated —who are shunted off to do their time unceremoniously — the former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney has been spared the indignity of a prison cell. President Bush says he commuted Libby's sentence because he considered it "excessive." So, while the president "respects the jury's verdict," he clearly disrespects the values of U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, who was first appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan. If 30 months in prison —...

Every once in a while I come across an op-ed that leaves me speechless – so utterly flabbergasted that I have to walk away for a day before I can come up with a cogent response. That was the case when I read Cynthia Tucker’s piece on our “worn military” committing “massacres” in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on May 11. Her complete and utter failure to grasp even simple facts still has me shaking my head. Tucker laughingly described Haditha and the Anbar province as “restive” in November 2005. She must have overlooked the Marines killed in an ambush less...

The black men I know best are all hard-working, accomplished professionals. They include my brother, a physician, and my buddies — lawyers, college professors, political consultants, journalists. I live in an insular world of middle-class affluence, rarely stumbling into the troubled universe of marginalized underachievers. Until recently. After a contractor walked off the job, I was assigned the task of helping my mother find laborers to help complete her new house in my hometown, Monroeville, Ala., a small place with a declining textiles industry. The assignment led me into an alternative universe of black men without jobs or prospects or...

If they really wanted to, your representatives in Washington could dry up illegal immigration almost before you could say, "Tom Tancredo is a tiresome demagogue." All they would have to do is require U.S. employers to check the legal status of all employees and impose stiff sanctions — including multimillion-dollar fines and prison time — on employers who flout the law. After a few executives had done the perp walk, others would get the message. Illegal hiring would drop precipitously. Since the vast majority of illegal immigrants come to this country to work, many of them would leave if they...

Now that public support for the war is sinking — and trust in President Bush right along with it — you'd think the White House might take the opportunity to admit some of the mistakes it has made. At the very least, the president could stop trying to link Saddam to the atrocities of Sept. 11. But no-o-o-o-o. This White House is nothing if not consistent. Bush and Vice President Darth, uh, Dick Cheney have taken to the hustings to repeat, with minor modifications, the same cascade of lies and distortions they gave before the invasion — including implicit attempts...

A week after Hurricane Katrina roiled the waters of the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain and flooded southeastern Louisiana, conservative commentator George Will compared the crisis with urban riots of the 1960s. On ABC's "This Week," Will voiced skepticism about the prospects for economic recovery in the region. "I hope New Orleans recovers," he said. "Newark hasn't from the '67 riots. Detroit hasn't from the '67 riots." At the time, it seemed an odd moment in an otherwise mundane discussion of the politics of natural disaster, since Katrina's devastation was fueled by nature, not social unrest. But Will's comments merely foreshadowed...

The critical question Roman Catholics around the world have about the new Pope Benedict XVI is whether he will continue the hard-line defense of church doctrine that marked his service under Pope John Paul II. Now that the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is out from under the shadow of his much beloved predecessor, many Catholics, especially in the United States, are prayerful that he will emerge as a more progressive figure on the key issue of collegiality — allowing local bishops a greater say in adapting church doctrine for their congregations. The views often attributed to Cardinal Ratzinger, as the...

Barack Obama - who just a year ago was a little-known state senator from the South Side of Chicago — is gaining the rock star status that envelops politicians who exude a certain charm and charisma. Like Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, he draws cheering, clapping throngs who want to share a photo, get an autograph, touch the hem of his garment. Having bested several opponents to win the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, he vaulted into the ranks of political superstars with an inspiring — occasionally soaring — speech at the Democratic National Convention. Now, coasting...

The presidential candidates have sparred over the war on terror, jobs and tax cuts. Each man has run advertisements disparaging the other's fitness for office. But President Bush and Sen. John Kerry have barely begun to discuss what may be the most important issue of the campaign: the fate of the U.S. Supreme Court. While many voters may believe Iraq is the most important issue, Bush and Kerry don't hold out dramatically different plans for handling the U.S. occupation. But the two men do offer acutely different descriptions of the sort of justices they would appoint. And one of those...

Saddam Hussein made a mistake that few Americans would ever make: He gave Washington politicians more credit than they deserved. He thought any U.S. president would be able to see straight through his big bluff over weapons of mass destruction and know at once that he was aiming his fiery rhetoric not at us but at Iran. He thought we'd understand that he was pretending to have WMD in the same way that some homeowners pretend to have an electronic security system — they put a big sign in the front yard, but they don't actually wire the house. All...

As much as we Americans like to brag about our democracy, it's still a work in progress. Not until the 1960s did the nation begin to honor its promise of full equality for all. And we're still stuck with a vestige of the Founding Fathers' disdain for the wisdom of the average citizen — the Electoral College. Because of the college, not every vote counts in a presidential contest. If you're a Bush supporter in California or New York, your vote won't count. The same is true if you're a Kerry supporter in Georgia or Texas. That's because the majority...

The Bush administration is trying to quash a rumor that keeps cropping up in cyberspace. For several months now, e-mails from an unknown source have warned that President Bush plans to reinstitute the draft if he wins a second term. The rumor persists despite repeated denials from top-level administration figures. In Thursday's debate, Bush declared that the U.S. military will remain an all-volunteer force. Recently, Secretary of State Colin Powell told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that "President Bush has no plans for a draft, nor is a draft needed." And Congress would just as soon debate the revival of Prohibition, because...

Call it the Cosby Consensus. Across the country, middle-class black Americans are applauding comedian Bill Cosby's insistent campaign to draw attention to the bad habits and poor choices that limit black achievement. There has been little disagreement about his main points — that drug use, poor classroom performance and the embrace of outlaw culture have done nothing but cement the black underclass at the bottom of American society. An ethic that dismisses serious scholarship as "a white thing" has handicapped middle-class black kids, too. In early September, Cosby spoke at a Washington forum sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation,...

Zell Miller wants you to believe that he is dispensing a dose of discipline to his beloved Democratic Party — pointing out the foibles and foolishness that have led to its loss of the South. Miller claims he only wants the Democrats to regain their traditional values before it's too late. Miller is a hypocrite. As a historian, he knows exactly why the Democratic Party is teetering in the South: It's precisely because the Democrats set aside a century and a half of ugly traditions that it has lost so many rural white Southerners. Miller knows better than most; he...

Just suspend disbelief for a little while. If you can do that -- forget those annoying facts, ignore the complexities of world affairs and disregard chaos theory -- you can believe that President Bush will win the war on terror. You can believe. You can believe. But it requires selective amnesia. You have to forget that Osama bin Laden -- "We'll smoke him out of his cave," Bush declared three years ago -- is still at large and planning murderous attacks. You have to ignore the aggressive insurgency in Iraq, ordinary Iraqis' resentment of the U.S. occupation and the failure...

"I'm back!" said Cynthia McKinney. She's ba-a-a-ck, said the rest of us. McKinney, a controversial liberal Democrat who lost her seat in Congress two years ago, is on the verge of winning back her post. If she succeeds, she ought to stop off at the Oval Office to thank her unofficial political strategist, President Bush. She couldn't have won without him. McKinney was ousted after she made incendiary remarks suggesting that President Bush had known about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 but did nothing to stop them so that his friends could profit from the resulting war. And that...

Never mind Howard University. The administration of the Washington institution is apparently in a bit of a huff because Bill Cosby used its podium to criticize the failings of black America -- especially its underclass. Howard's leaders, who won't release a transcript of Cosby's speech, are still not prepared to have a public discussion of self-inflicted wounds. But much of black America, especially its middle class, is ready to have that conversation. In that sense, Cosby's speech was a watershed event -- a sign that black America is now comfortable enough with its accomplishments to discuss its shortcomings. "Perhaps Bill...

President Bush wants you to know he's upset with Donald Rumsfeld. Though the president is standing by his man, he had his press aides put out the word that he called the defense secretary on the carpet last week over the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal. Rumsfeld, it turns out, never told the president about the pictures. And that has Bush pretty doggone mad. The photographs, after all, made the difference. Without them, the Bushites could still go around the country blithely declaring that things are going just fine in Iraq, despite some "rough patches" brought on by a "violent few."...

WASHINGTON -- For the past week, the inside-the-Beltway grapevine has been buzzing about Bob Woodward's latest book, "Plan of Attack," and its portrayal of Secretary of State Colin Powell as the Bush administration's reluctant warrior. With apparent cooperation from Powell, Woodward offers up the secretary's many misgivings about toppling Saddam Hussein: "[Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage had been pushing hard for Powell to request private time with the president. . . . [Powell] achieved a breakthrough of sorts on Aug. 5, 2002, when Bush invited Powell and Condoleezza Rice to the residence. . . . "Powell's notes filled three...

Reading biographical profiles of dead American soldiers, I am struck, always, by their ages -- 22 or 19 or 24. For most, childhood is all they get; their lives end even as their adulthood begins. Usually, they come from families of modest means, strivers looking to serve their country but also to gain technical training or college scholarships. In this group, graduates of Harvard or Yale or Duke are rare. Rare, too, are children of those policy-makers who decided this war was necessary. President Bush's twin daughters are not enrolled in ROTC. When the U.S. Senate voted to give the...

Martin Luther King Jr. might be pleasantly surprised by many of the changes in the nation's social fabric since his death. The civil rights movement accomplished an astonishing transformation. But King would no doubt be quite disappointed in one area of black life that has only deteriorated since his assassination: the percentage of black men in prison. In 1954, black inmates accounted for 30 percent of the nation's prison population, according to The Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group that advocates alternative sentencing. By the time King died, in 1968, the figure had edged up to between 35 percent and 40...

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 11/23/03 Thank God for democracy It's no wonder we're having a hard time teaching Jeffersonian democracy to the Iraqis. It's still controversial in America. Take the precincts where Roy Moore holds sway. Moore, recently ousted as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, has become the standard bearer for Christian conservatives who believe that the United States is a "Christian nation." He has inspired hundreds of thousands of followers. Never mind that Moore insisted on placing a 2 1/2-ton Ten Commandments monument in the courthouse rotunda. Never mind that he argued that he's above civil law and...

Perhaps nothing was more pathetic in the last Democratic debate (and much about it was pathetic) than the diminished status of John Kerry. The Massachusetts senator was left on the sidelines as other Dems aimed potshots at Howard Dean, who, according to his rivals, either impugned rural Southerners or cozied up to them, depending on which of his critics was speaking. (Though Dean later ended up apologizing, his comments about Southerners should not have been considered controversial. His statement -- "I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks" -- was simply an...

Is this how the Bush White House hopes to win hearts and minds in the Islamic world? By supporting a small-minded general with a schoolboy's view that his God can beat up their God? The Bush administration's hatchet men (and women) have been quick to browbeat critics of the reckless invasion of Iraq -- questioning their patriotism and even accusing them of treason. But there has been no reprimand of Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, a high-ranking Pentagon official who has ridiculed Islam as "Satan" and dismissed Muslims as idol worshippers. Instead, defense chief Donald Rumsfeld is conducting a low-profile...

Claiming that Arnold Schwarzenegger's broad appeal gives a fresh edge to the GOP, Republican politicians across the country are celebrating the action hero's strong win in California. The state is a Democratic stronghold, but Schwarzenegger drew many Democratic voters -- including substantial numbers of Latinos -- into his muscular fold. These days, the GOP needs a little good news. President Bush's poll ratings are sinking like a stone as voters gripe about the jobless recovery and recoil at the $87 billion bill the president has submitted for Iraq. Then there's that pesky investigation of a serious national security leak, which...

Claiming that Arnold Schwarzenegger's broad appeal gives a fresh edge to the GOP, Republican politicians across the country are celebrating the action hero's strong win in California. The state is a Democratic stronghold, but Schwarzenegger drew many Democratic voters -- including substantial numbers of Latinos -- into his muscular fold. These days, the GOP needs a little good news. President Bush's poll ratings are sinking like a stone as voters gripe about the jobless recovery and recoil at the $87 billion bill the president has submitted for Iraq. Then there's that pesky investigation of a serious national security leak, which...

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president . . . right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Teddy Roosevelt, 1918 Ever have one of those foreign military adventures when your own foot becomes a better target than the enemy? If the tough-guy act is wearing thin, you can always whine. Faced with well-deserved criticism of their adventure in Iraq, Bush administration officials have started to point fingers -- blaming, variously, the French, the United Nations, al-Qaida, Syria and Saddam Hussein. (Who knew Saddam might...

Powell a party to deception Colin Powell has escaped the controversy that has engulfed President Bush and the intelligence services over the president's use of discredited information in his State of the Union speech. Powell didn't use those now-infamous 16 words about an alleged Iraqi attempt to purchase uranium in Africa when he addressed the U.N. Security Council in February. But he isn't off the hook. The intelligence Powell did use was equally dubious while arguably more persuasive. In his Feb. 5 brief making the case for war, the secretary of state repeated the canard that Saddam Hussein had forged...

Build it, and they will come. That adage worked in "Field of Dreams," drawing dead baseball players, and it applies as well to the homeless, who have an amazing network that conveys news of the location of soup kitchens, shelters and ministries that cater to their needs. So it is that downtown Atlanta is practically overrun by vagrants, who come to the city for its services (and, of course, to panhandle office workers). If downtown Atlanta builds any more of those services, it will attract even more of the downtrodden seeking sustenance. Mayor Shirley Franklin is doing the right thing...

For the needy, a poor excuse It is unfashionable to be poor in America. Even workers just a paycheck away from being poverty-stricken themselves -- an illness, a layoff, a car accident away from having the electricity turned off -- are contemptuous of those just beneath them on the socioeconomic ladder. The Horatio Alger myth is so powerful that one's fortune is either in the bank or in the near future. Hard times are just a temporary condition -- or so people believe. A Time-CNN poll during the 2000 presidential elections asked voters whether they were in the top 1...

In the nearly four decades since passage of the Voting Rights Act, the pallid face of Southern politics has taken on a pleasant tan. In 1970, there were only 565 African-Americans holding office in the 11 Southern states of the Old Confederacy. By 2000, there were almost 10 times that many: 5,579. Most are mayors, city council members or state legislators, but a handful have risen to statewide elective office. Georgia has seven African-American officials who have been elected statewide, including the attorney general, Thurbert Baker. That is astonishing political progress in a relatively short period of time. While racism...

Remember Afghanistan? It's the wretched Central Asian country that became a haven for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, which attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a year and a half ago. When U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan to drive out the Taliban, al-Qaida's hosts, President Bush promised that Americans would make a sustained commitment to helping the country rebuild. And then he forgot about it. The United States said it would promote stability, foster economic growth and encourage a progressive indigenous government that would not shelter terrorists. At least that was the game plan the Bush administration offered for...

Every legislative body in America has a few idiots, dolts, nincompoops -- elected officials who would hardly draw any notice at all were it not for their incompetence, bigotry or venality. You can find them in City Halls, state legislatures and even the hallowed halls of Congress. So it hardly qualifies as front-page news that U.S. Rep. Barbara Cubin (R-Wyo.) recently made blatantly racist statements in which, in essence, she tarred all black Americans as drug users. Cubin's remarks punctuated a debate over a bill to limit lawsuits against gun manufacturers -- a debate that was already offensive since it...

America's newest hero is the petite Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who was rescued from behind enemy lines on April 2. Lynch, who may have engaged Iraqi troops in a deadly firefight before being captured, is one of the valiant women warriors helping to erode the strictures against allowing women in combat. But Lynch's heroics mean nothing to the imperious William "Hootie" Johnson, who runs his own little tyranny in the conservative east Georgia city of Augusta. His exclusive golf club, Augusta National, will not abide incursions by women members -- no matter their courage, honor, stature or wealth. While the Army,...

When President Bush visited Atlanta in mid-February, Cobb County homemaker Sally Rountree decided to take the opportunity to show her opposition to the probable invasion of Iraq. So she scribbled a homemade sign -- "No War for Oil" -- and found a place along the route of the presidential motorcade, hoping Bush would see her protest. As she tells it, she was never rude. She didn't shout. She didn't elbow other onlookers or jostle toward the front of the crowd. She merely stood holding her sign. Nevertheless, for the offense of exercising her rights as a citizen of one of...

Sometimes your friends are more trouble than your enemies. Just ask Augusta National emperor William "Hootie" Johnson, who finds among his newest allies J.J. Harper, imperial wizard of the Cordele-based American White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Harper has announced plans to march in support of Augusta National's men-only membership policy during the Masters tournament in April. "We are going to stand up for the rights of the Augusta National to choose whomever they want to choose as a member of their club," Harper said last week. Talk about your public relations nightmare! As you might expect, Johnson and...

In family snapshots, Jesica Santillan looks cheerful, upbeat, even healthy, underlining the tragedy of her death. The 17-year-old suffered from "restrictive cardiomyopathy," which enlarges the heart and weakens the lungs. Jesica's one fragile hope for recovery --- a heart-lung transplant --- was doomed by an extraordinary mistake in the operating room at Duke University Medical Center. Surgeons performed a second transplant, but it was too late to save her. What must those days have been like for Jesica's family? Yet, Jesica's tortured final days may have an unexpected legacy: The blood-type mix-up that hastened her death seems to have slowed...

President Bush has sent Congress a budget with a conspicuous omission. He declined to count the staggering costs of his war with Iraq and the occupation -- possibly a decade long -- that will follow. It's not surprising, really, that Bush is reluctant to face up to the costs of his nation-building project in Iraq. That yawning abyss could easily suck up the hopes and dreams Americans hold for the future. By the time the United States finishes paying for the president's imperial ambitions in the Middle East, there will be little money left for schools or health care or...

The spectacle of conservatives scurrying to denounce Trent Lott has provided comic relief in a Capitol otherwise obsessed with a dubious war. But it's hard to take Lott's GOP critics seriously. After all, he is not the only reactionary in their ranks. The simple fact is that the modern Republican Party has built a Southern power base by accommodating racists. Lott may become a sacrificial goat --- forced to give up his assumed position as the next Senate majority leader --- but that won't change the dirty little secret that fuels the GOP's Southern juggernaut: Whenever it is politically expedient,...

If a historian should ever decide to record the deeds of Georgia's minor-league dictators and petty potentates, state Sen. Charles Walker (D-Augusta) would deserve a chapter of his own. He ran his fiefdom with an iron fist, rewarding friends and vanquishing enemies, dispensing patronage and meting out punishments to those who dared oppose him. Finally, though, Walker went too far. The chapter ends when he tried to build a dynasty. As Senate majority leader, Walker used his considerable power to draw a congressional district supposedly tailor-made for his son, Charles "Champ" Walker. With the younger Walker in Congress, and his...

The dead felled by the snipers' three-week rampage deserved a dignified pursuit of justice, but they will not get it. The prospect of headlines and political advantage have proved too seductive for Washington-area prosecutors, who are practically trampling one another for the right to execute the accused. Their conduct is one more stain on the already mottled image of American jurisprudence. It isn't supposed to be this way. In the history books and civic lessons -- the stories we teach our children about who we ought to be as a people -- those who carry out American justice are supposed...