Free Republic

On a swing through Pennsylvania last month, John McCain visited a Manheim Central High School football practice — not to ingratiate himself with the players, who weren't even old enough to vote, but to identify himself with the gritty, down-home lunch bucket values of small-town football. "This is a blue-collar town," Manheim's coach said in his introduction of McCain. "We don't have a lot of flashy athletes. We don't come out with a lot of flash." But the coach explained that his team works hard, plays with discipline, and comes through in the end. "A lot like John McCain," he...

How out of touch is Barack Obama? He's so out of touch that he suggested that if all Americans inflated their tires properly and took their cars for regular tune-ups, they could save as much oil as new offshore drilling would produce. Gleeful Republicans have made this their daily talking point; Rush Limbaugh is having a field day; and the Republican National Committee is sending tire gauges labeled "Barack Obama's Energy Plan" to Washington reporters. But who's really out of touch? The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day by 2030....

There used to be an organization for people who believed in a truly limited government — limited taxes, limited spending, limited interference in individual lives and limited intervention in foreign affairs. That organization was known as the Republican Party. But the only one of those beliefs that still motivates the G.O.P. establishment is limited taxes. In 2008, people who still hold all of them joined the Ron Paul Revolution. But now the revolution is ebbing. Congressman Paul's new campaign finance report shows that he's raised nearly $35 million, including more than any other Republican candidate in the fourth quarter of...

Clinton's Spin Machine: Spun Dry Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008 By MICHAEL GRUNWALD Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton for the ninth and tenth straight time last night, with blowouts in Wisconsin and Hawaii. Needless to say, this means nothing. As Clinton strategist Mark Penn explained yesterday, Wisconsin has a lot of independent voters, so it doesn't really matter. And Hawaii is practically Obama's home state, so it obviously doesn't matter. Anyway, as Penn said recently, "winning Democratic primaries is not a qualification or a sign of who can win the general election." It's apparently not even a sign of who can...

I was recently reminded of Mandy Grunwald's close ties as an advisor to the Clintons and in particular Hillary Clinton. Going back to the initial unearthing of the Whitewater Scandal, I remember watching a talking head show

Time magazine, November 26, 2007 (Michael Grunwald): [Georgia's] drought was a natural event transformed into a natural disaster by human folly. And while it's still hard to say whether global warming caused any particular drought or flood or fire, it's going to cause more of all of them. Time magazine, June 24, 1974: In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims... Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

In the pantheon of dumb Army Corps of Engineers boondoggles, a $112 million flood-control scheme in Missouri's southeast bootheel ranks among the dumbest. It would drain more wetlands than all American developers drained last year, and the Corps has admitted that the town it's supposed to protect will flood just as often (once every 10 years) if and when it's completed. The Corps also admitted that its original economic rationale depended on a math error. In private e-mails, even the agency's top lobbyist described it as "an economic dud with huge environmental consequences." Now a federal judge has made it...

The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn't a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2. The city's defenses should have withstood its surges, and if they had we never would have seen the squalor in the Superdome, the desperation on the rooftops, the shocking tableau of the Mardi Gras city underwater...

The “Cooper Counts” are heard in court. Two of the five felony counts in the perjury and obstruction of justice case against Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, are based entirely on a single phone conversation Libby had with Matthew Cooper, then a White House correspondent for Time magazine, on July 12, 2003. In federal court in Washington Wednesday, CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald revealed his documentary evidence to support those charges — one count of perjury and one count of making false statements — and the evidence was this: had somethine and about...

TIME MAGAZINE FEATURES HILLARY It is just beginning, folks. The mainstream media is going to sell foolish people on Hillary Clinton. She is in position to march into our White House. TIME MAGAZINE steps up to the plate with a Hillary story to set the stage. How many people know that Hillary's top advisor, the lovely Mandy Grunwald, is the daughter of the former TIME editor-in-chief, Henry Grunwald? How many know that her husband, Matt Cooper, works for TIME? This is incestuous and it is how the MSM is going to carry her into the White House. Wait for...

1410 Grunwald Battle re-enacted 15.07.2006 The Battle of Grunwald of 15 July 1410, one of the biggest armed clashes of Medieval Europe, is being re-enacted in mid-northern Poland this afternoon. The event began with a holy mass and the Grunwald roll call. Taking part are 1,500 amateur troops from Poland and abroad, who will recreate the battle in which allied Polish and Lithuanian troops defeated the forces of the Teutonic Knights, thus sparking off the collapse of that medieval military order.

The height restriction is a prime example of one of that industry's most notorious products, the unfunded federal mandate. In 1899, Congress passed the Heights of Buildings Act in response to the 14-story Cairo apartment tower, which at the time was reviled as a monstrosity overshadowing its Dupont Circle neighborhood. (It is now admired as one of Washington's most beautiful residential buildings.) The original law limited buildings to the height of the Capitol, but was amended in 1910 to the width of the adjacent street plus 20 feet, so a building facing a 90-foot-wide street could be only 110 feet...

O n Wednesday, Democratic leaders unveiled their new security strategy at an event in Union Station, surrounded by American flags, "REAL SECURITY" banners and other campaign-style props. The Republican National Committee quickly dismissed the new platform as "No New Ideas." The New York Times agreed: "Most of the proposals are not new." Indeed, the Democrats rehashed their usual litany of security cliches, declaring their opposition to terrorism, proclaiming their support for the troops. And instead of offering voters a positive new agenda, they mostly complained about the Bush administration -- its approach to Iraq, its response to Hurricane Katrina, its...

Now I read that Matt Cooper’s (the journalist who received Rove’s so-called ‘leak’) wife is Mandy Grunwald; media consultant and campaign advisor to both Bill and Hillary Clinton......

MIDI - MANDY (Barry Manilow) Last week while we were in bed "Let's get Karl Rove," you said We can pull it off...the press will play What we start, I know, won't go away Together we'd be helping Hillary We'd set it up easily Wilson will comply...and so will his wife For the RNC, we'd cause so much strife Oh, Mandy...you must put on that leather pink burqa It's not my fault, you know Oh, Mandy...even with Viagra, it won't work-a If you let your face show...oh, Mandy True believers, that we are We'll be following her star We'll...

Updated: 7:29 a.m. ET Feb. 27, 2005 During tenure, he led magazine's shift to centrist view. NEW YORK - Henry A. Grunwald, a Time magazine editor who led the publication’s shift from conservatism to a more centrist view, then later became a United States ambassador to Vienna, has died. He was 82. Grunwald died of heart failure Saturday at his Manhattan home, according to his daughter, Mandy....

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) -- Democratic presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, trailing his major rivals in New Hampshire, takes a few soft swipes at front-runner Howard Dean in a new television ad that began airing Friday.</p> <p>"I don't think it's right to have raised a divisive symbol like the confederate flag. Or to give up on principles like limiting the amount of money in campaigns," Lieberman says in the commercial.</p>