Free Republic

From Greta’s interview with Jack Kelly…VIDEO LINK

SAMUEL Joseph Wurzelbacher, Rick Santelli, and Jim Cramer owe much of their 15 minutes of fame to Saul Alinsky, a Chicago Marxist who died in 1972. Mr. Alinsky is considered to be the father of "community organizing" as the path to social revolution. A year before his death he published a book, Rules for Radicals, which distilled what he had learned from his experiences, his reading of Marx and Lenin, and from his associations with crime boss Al Capone and labor leader John Lewis. Rule 11 is: "Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don't try to attack...

"You arrogant ass! You've killed us!" So said the executive officer of a Soviet submarine to his captain in Tom Clancy's novel "The Hunt for Red October" after the captain had recklessly fired a torpedo that homed in on his own sub.

Article published June 21, 2008 McCain in a landslide? Could be Jack Kelly SEN. Barack Obama has the lead for the time being. But three signposts point the way to a McCain landslide in November, in the unlikely event the Arizona senator has the wit to heed them. What figures to be by far the most important issue this fall is the skyrocketing price of energy and its deleterious effect on the broader economy and national security. Now that Sen. John McCain has flip-flopped on drilling off our coasts, there is a substantial difference between him and Mr. Obama on...

IN THE opening game of the baseball season between the Boston Red Sox and the Oakland Athletics in Japan, 11 runs were scored. That lead would be unsatisfying to most sports fans because it doesn't indicate which team won. But it is very like most of the reporting of battles in Iraq: "The deadliest clashes were in Basra, where at least 47 people were killed and 223 wounded in the two days of fighting," wrote the AP's Kim Gamel. Ms. Gamel was writing about the opening clashes of Operation Knight's Charge, the effort by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to...

Rampaging RINOS Conservatives should think twice about bolting the GOP Sunday, February 10, 2008 By Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette If you read the threads on conservative Web sites (which these days takes a strong stomach), you'll encounter frequently the acronym "RINO." It stands for "Republican In Name Only," an appellation that self-styled conservative purists apply to any Republican who disagrees with them about anything. That epithet has been applied most frequently to Arizona Sen. John McCain. But his former chief rival for the GOP nomination, former Massachussetts Gov. Mitt Romney, also has been derided as a RINO, as have former...

In his weekly radio address, President Bush gave thanks for American servicemen "who risk their own lives to keep us safe." Democrats chose retired Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez to deliver a rebuttal. "I saw firsthand the consequences of the administration's failure to devise a strategy for victory in Iraq that employed, in a coordinated manner, the political, economic, diplomatic and military power of the United States. That failure continues today," he said. LtGen. Sanchez endorsed the Democratic measure pending in Congress to condition continued funding for the war on a timetable for troop withdrawal. "Although we cannot withdraw precipitously...

THESE are good times for moonbats, hard times for wingnuts. This bodes ill for Democratic prospects in 2008. "Moonbat" is a term popularized by the Web logger Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) to describe people on the extreme left. "Wingnut" is a term coined by liberals to describe those on the extreme right. Most of us learn by the third grade the difference between addition and subtraction. But both moonbats and wingnuts think a majority can be built by driving away everyone who doesn't agree with them totally on everything. Little better illustrates the rising influence of moonbats than the on-again, off-again...

Medicare and Social Security will become insolvent sooner than estimated earlier, Medicare's trustees said in their annual report, issued May 1. Mexico has a presidential election on July 2. The leading candidates are Felipe Calderon, a conservative, and Andres Lopez Obrador, a leftist who has the backing of Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. What does this have to do with President Bush's plan for comprehensive immigration reform? Maybe lots. Medicare and Social Security are going broke chiefly because there aren't enough workers paying into the systems to support beneficiaries. Unless millions of new workers can be...

Soldiers who misbehave make the front page. Soldiers who perform nobly do not. When SFC Smith was awarded the Medal of Honor, the New York Times put the story on page A-13. I did a Nexis search on "New York Times and Abu Ghraib." It came back with more than 1,000 hits. The Times has run exactly one story that mentions Sgt. Peralta, and he had to share billing in it with SFC Smith and Sgt. Hester. "A nation that ignores, or, worse, attacks its heroes erodes and disparages its own ethos," warn Mr. Weinberger and Mr. Hall.

Jack Kelly: All bad news, all the time In covering Iraq, mainstream media give terrorists a boost Sunday, March 12, 2006 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette More than 8,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have deserted since the Iraq war began, USA Today reported Tuesday.           "Some lawyers who represent deserters say the war in Iraq is driving more soldiers to question their service and that the Pentagon is cracking down on deserters to discourage antiwar sentiment," wrote reporter Bill Nichols. " 'The last thing (Pentagon officials) want is for people to think ... that this is like Vietnam,'...

About those Iraqi WMDs: More signs are pointing to a neighborly transfer Sunday, February 05, 2006 Last week a man who had been deputy chief of Saddam Hussein's air force claimed Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war began....[snip] ....[snip] Last month Moshe Yaalon, who was Israel's top general at the time, said Iraq transported WMD to Syria six weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom began. Last March, John A. Shaw, a former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said Russian Spetsnaz units moved WMD to Syria and Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. "While in Iraq...

The Cartoon War began innocently enough. Kare Bluitgen, a Danish writer of childrens' books, complained he couldn't find anyone to illustrate the book he was writing about the Prophet Mohammed. The Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten invited cartoonists to offer their own interpretations. A dozen accepted. Jyllands Posten published their work last Sept. 30th. Extreme Muslim sects, such as the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, regard any depiction of Mohammed as blasphemy. (The Koran prohibits only "idolatry," and throughout the last millenium Muslim artists have painted likenesses of the Prophet.) Radical Muslims in Denmark issued death threats, and the cartoonists went into...

Rep. John Murtha probably wasn't on President Bush's Christmas card list, but Democratic political analyst Charles Cook thinks he should have been. Mr. Cook noted in the president's popularity started to rebound almost immediately after the Johnstown Democrat made a speech urging immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. "Prior to Murtha's well publicized speech advocating an early withdrawal, the spotlight had been on the Bush administration's use of intelligence that led to the decision to go to war," Mr. Cook said. "Murtha's speech changed the debate, away from whether we should have invaded Iraq and whether the use of...

Jack Kelly: Shooting the new messenger An article about blogger Bill Roggio shows mainstream media running scared Sunday, January 01, 2006 It was the journalistic equivalent of a drive-by shooting. The targets of Washington Post reporters Jonathan Finer and Doug Struck were two of journalism's favorites: Web loggers and the U.S. military.           "Bloggers, Money, Now Weapons in Information War," read the headline over their story, which appeared Monday. "U.S. Recruits Advocates to the Front, Pays Iraqi TV Stations for Coverage," the subhed said. "Retired soldier Bill Roggio was a computer technician living in New Jersey...

Finally, some good may come from the Valerie Plame kerfuffle -- if President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez have the stones to do what's right. A grave crime was exposed Dec. 16th when New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau published a story revealing President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to listen in on conversations between al Qaida suspects abroad and people in the United States without first obtaining a warrant. "We're seeing clearly now that (President) Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator," wrote Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. But the scandal was...

The first person to vote in Babylon in the Iraqi parliamentary election was 65-year-old Jasim Hameed, who is wheelchair-bound. "I'm here at this early hour because I want to challenge the terrorists who want to kill the democratic process in Iraq and I want to encourage the healthy people to vote," Mr. Hameed said. Because Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, threatened to kill those who cast ballots, Mr. Hamid was risking his life. In a communique issued on election eve, Zarqawi vowed to "ruin the democratic wedding of heresy and immorality." The threats were not...

On Aug. 2, Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post reported that "a major U.S. intelligence review has projected that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years." On Dec. 5, the Jerusalem Post reported that Mohammed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, "confirmed Israel's assessment that Iran is only a few months away from creating an atomic bomb. My, how time flies. It hasn't seemed as if 10 years have elapsed since last summer.

In his speech at the Naval Academy Wednesday outlining U.S. strategy in Iraq, President Bush paid tribute to Marine Cpl. Jeffrey Starr, killed in a fire fight in Ramadi on April 30. He was 22, on his third tour in Iraq. A letter to his girlfriend was found on Cpl. Starr's laptop computer: "If you're reading this, then I've died in Iraq," Cpl. Starr wrote. "I don't regret going. Everybody dies but a few get to do it for something as important as freedom. "It may seem confusing why we're in Iraq; it's not to me. I'm here helping these...

In his speech at the Naval Academy Wednesday outlining U.S. strategy in Iraq, President Bush paid tribute to Marine Corporal Jeffrey Starr, killed in a fire fight in Ar Ramadi April 30th. He was 22, on his third tour in Iraq. A letter to his girlfriend was found on Starr's laptop computer: "If you're reading this, then I've died in Iraq," Cpl. Starr wrote. "I don't regret going. Everybody dies but a few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we're in Iraq; it's not to me. I'm here helping these people...

ABU Musab al Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda chieftain in Iraq, had a bad week this month. It would have been a really, really bad week if Zarqawi had been among the seven al-Qaeda leaders killed in Mosul Nov. 19. But even though he got away again, he had a rotten week. That was also a bad week for anti-war Democrats, who had their bluff called in the House of Representatives. Zarqawi's bad week was a product of the suicide bombings he orchestrated Nov. 9 against three hotels in Amman, Jordan. The bombings resulted in 62 deaths, mostly of Arabs attending a...

David Frum said Tuesday the nomination was sinking. Opinion polls don't support the notion of a sinking nomination. A Gallup poll for CNN and USA Today released Wednesday showed 44 percent of respondents described the Miers pick as excellent or good, with 41 percent saying it was fair or poor, and 15 percent offering no opinion. Among self-described conservatives, 58 percent said the pick was excellent or good; 29 percent thought it fair or poor. In an Opinion Dynamics poll conducted for Fox News released Thursday, 37 percent of respondents (57 percent of Republicans) said they would vote for Miers,...

It saddens me to write these words, because I respect and admire him so. But it's time for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to move on.

WE MIGHT have had a faster response to Katrina, and prevented the 9/11 attacks altogether, if only we'd followed the advice of Dick the Butcher. Dick the Butcher is the character in Shakespeare's play Henry VI who says: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." Dick is a repulsive character. Shakespeare's point is that lawyers are vital to the functioning of civilized society. They are the oil in the gears of commerce, the engine of democracy. But when we have too many lawyers, and we pay them too much deference, that oil can turn into sand.

Sometimes a bum gets a bum rap. The hapless Michael Brown has resigned as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a move which reinforced the view of his many critics that the federal response to Katrina was unconscionably slow.

Colonel Thomas Spoehr is annoyed with New York Times reporter Michael Moss, for what I think is a good reason. Spoehr is the director of materiel for the Army staff. He had a good news story to tell Moss, which Moss converted into a bad news story. Here is the story as Spoehr tells it: Last year, senior leaders of the Army became aware of technological developments which make it possible to improve the "Interceptor" body armor worn by our troops.` The "Interceptor" consists of a vest, two SAPI (small arms protective insert) plates worn in the front and the...

The report of the 9/11 Commission, once a best seller and hailed by the news media as the definitive word on the subject, must now be moved to the fiction shelves. The commission concluded, you'll recall, that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon couldn't have been prevented, and that if there was negligence, it was as much the fault of the Bush administration (for moving slowly on the recommendations of Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke) than of the Clinton administration. Able Danger has changed all of that.

Jack Kelly: Able Danger -- now they tell us The 9/11 commission report, once much lauded, now has an awfully big hole Sunday, August 14, 2005 The report of the 9/11 commission, once a best seller and hailed by the news media as the definitive word on the subject, must now be moved to the fiction shelves.           The commission concluded, you'll recall, that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon couldn't have been prevented, and that if there was negligence, it was as much the fault of the Bush administration (for moving...

THE report of the 9/11 commission, once a best seller and hailed by the news media as the definitive word on the subject, must now be moved to the fiction shelves. The commission concluded, you'll recall, that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon couldn't have been prevented, and that if there was negligence, it was as much the fault of the Bush Administration (for moving slowly on the recommendations of Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke) as of the Clinton administration. Able Danger has changed all of that. The 9/11 commission wrote history as it wanted it...

IN A speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, the assistant Democratic leader likened the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to Nazi, Soviet, and Cambodian concentration camps. What's giving America a black eye is the slander of our troops by Mr. Durbin, Amnesty, and others. Americans should be outraged, but not by the conduct of our soldiers

As distrust of the press grows, news articles are relentlessly scrutinized for bias, but almost no one is focusing on stories that are simply ignored. For instance, a May 18 report in the Afghan newspaper Kabul Weekly said the riots that killed 17 people were not about disrespect for the Koran in American detainment camps--they were a show of force by the Taliban and another fundamentalist group, Hezb-e Eslami. "These demonstrations were organized by the Taliban and their supporters, and only some naive people joined the protesters," the newspaper said. The BBC picked up the story on May 22, but...

THE headline on Thursday's front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Blade's sister newspaper, was: "FBI told of Qur'an abuses." The headline's wording and the display's prominence gave the casual reader the impression the story - written by Neil Lewis of the New York Times - was new, and that the story was true. Neither is so. Mr. Lewis' story was based on FBI reports of prisoner interrogations at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and 2003. He noted in his third paragraph that "they are accounts of unsubstantiated allegations made by the prisoners under interrogation." Mr. Lewis didn't mention that these...

People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, Democrats in Congress are beginning to find out. Rep. Norman Dicks (D-Wash) has reimbursed the Spectrum Group, a defense lobbying firm, $571 for food and lodging in Fort Lauderdale in February, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported Tuesday. It is against House rules for a lawmaker or staffer to accept gratuities from lobbyists, though non-profit groups may pay for their travel expenses.

The Army fell far short of its recruiting goal for February, giving journalists a welcome respite from the avalanche of good news from the Middle East.The Army signed up 1,823 fewer recruits than its goal of 7,050 for the month. A falloff in enlistments by blacks and women appears to be the chief reason for the decline. In the 2000 fiscal year, 23.5 percent of Army recruits were African American, 22.1 percent were female. So far this year, only 14.5 percent of recruits are black, just 17.1 percent are female.The Marine Corps made its goal, but by the skin of...

<p>Lt. Col. Jim Stockmoe, chief intelligence officer for the First Infantry Division, roared with laughter as he recalled the increasing missteps of the resistance in Iraq in an interview earlier this month with British journalist Toby Harnden, writing for The Spectator.</p>

he assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri reminds us that the Global War on Terror is a global war, and indicates its central front is shifting from Iraq.

Liberals were thrilled when Howard Dean was elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee. They think the former Vermont governor will lead Democrats out of the political wilderness. Conservative Republicans were thrilled, too. They think he will plunge Democrats further into it. Only rarely has a party chair had much impact. Dean will have more than most, because there are few elected Democrats to share the spotlight with him. And Dean is energetic and a good quote, something few would say about Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev), the Democratic leader in the Senate, or Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal), the Democratic leader in...

When the Web logger Laer ("Cheat Seeking Missiles") called to cancel his 25-year subscription to the Los Angeles Times last Monday, he was made an extraordinary offer. The circulation service rep, detecting that he was fed up with the paper's liberal bias, offered to sell him the newspaper without the news sections. Laer was thunderstruck. ...Journalists who got their panties twisted over Mattis apparently see nothing newsworthy about having the executive vice president and head of news for CNN accuse the U.S. military of deliberately killing journalists. ...Washington Post media analyst Howard Kurtz finally wrote something on Feb. 7. Kurtz...

For those of us in the information business, this is truly an earth-shaking time. Who would have imagined that the downfall of one of the world's most powerful news executives would be precipitated by an ordinary citizen blogging his eyewitness report at Davos in the wee hours of the morning on Jan. 27? It's simply stunning. The courage of Rony Abovitz cannot be overstated. This ordinary American citizen raised his voice at an international forum of media and political heavyweights--also attended by Europe's most influential America-haters--and demanded that Eason Jordan back up his poisonous assertion about the American military targeting...

Conservative blacks are given no respect Chief Justice William Rehnquist's health is so poor he likely soon will be called to the Great Appellate Bench in the Sky. On NBC's "Meet the Press" program last month, the new Senate Democratic leader, Sen. Harry Reid, said he could support the elevation of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia to chief justice, but not Thomas. "I think that [Thomas] has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court," Reid said. "I think his opinions are poorly written." Prodded by CNN to cite an example, the Democratic leader replied: "That's easy to do. You take the...

[I am so glad Jack Kelly wrote this defense of Donald Rumsfeld – and I am so disgusted at the sudden torrent of Republican criticism of him. Donald Rumsfeld is one of the most heroic figures in the world today, and America is fortunate in the extreme to have him as Secretary of Defense. The temerity of Clueless Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard, professional jerk Senator John McCain, and Senator Trent “Vacant” Lott, calling for him to resign is squalid and shameful. Secretary Rumsfeld deserves our deepest appreciation, admiration, and support. He certainly has that from the vast majority...

The rule of thumb for the last century or so has been that for a guerrilla force to remain viable, it must inflict seven casualties on the forces of the government it is fighting for each casualty it sustains, says former Canadian army officer John Thompson, managing director of the Mackenzie Institute, a think tank that studies global conflicts. By that measure, the resistance in Iraq has had a bad week. American and Iraqi government troops have killed at least 1,200 fighters in Fallujah, and captured 1,100 more. Those numbers will grow as mop-up operations continue. These casualties were inflicted...

Generals think of urban combat the way vampires view garlic. But in Fallujah, Iraq, U.S. forces have rewritten the book on urban military operations, producing what have been, so far, better-than-average results with lower-than-average casualties... As of Friday, the re-taking of Fallujah was achieved at a cost of 51 Americans and five Iraqi dead, and about 425 wounded, of whom about a quarter have been returned to duty. Some 15,000 Marines, soldiers and Iraqi troops were involved in the attack... "That kill ratio would be phenomenal for any battle, but in an urban environment, it's revolutionary," said retired Army Lt....

Iraq's Iwo Jima gets scant media respect The rule of thumb for the last century or so has been that for a guerrilla force to remain viable, it must inflict seven casualties on the forces of the government it is fighting for each casualty it sustains, says former Canadian army officer John Thompson, managing director of the Mackenzie Institute, a think tank that studies global conflicts. By that measure, the resistance in Iraq has had a bad week. American and Iraqi government troops have killed at least 1,200 fighters in Fallujah, and captured 1,100 more. Those numbers will grow as...

The ambush was supposed to have been sprung by CBS, on "Sixty Minutes" the Sunday before the election. If things had gone according to plan, there wouldn't have been time before election day for the truth to catch up. But the New York Times ran with the story it concocted with CBS about explosives missing from the Al QaQaa munitions storage facility south of Baghdad on Oct. 25th, eight days before the election. That vitiated its impact, and increased the likelihood of blowback on the intended beneficiary of this "October Surprise," John Kerry. Some 380 tons of the high explosives...

In Iraq, as on Guadalcanal in WWII, we are grinding the enemy down John Kerry has changed positions on Iraq more often than some of his supporters have changed their underwear. But if he sticks with his current position for the rest of the campaign, Americans will have the debate on Iraq policy we deserve to have. For Kerry and most of his fellow Democrats, every war is like Vietnam, an (in their view) American overreach that begins in hubris and ends in tragedy.

John Kerry has changed positions on Iraq more often than some of his supporters have changed their underwear. But if he sticks with his current position for the rest of the campaign, Americans will have the debate on Iraq policy we deserve to have. For Kerry and most of his fellow Democrats, every war is like Vietnam, an (in their view) American overreach that begins in hubris and ends in tragedy. U.S. Army Lt. Col. Powl Smith, a counterterrorism expert on the staff of the MultiNational Forces in Baghdad, thinks Iraq is more like Guadalcanal. Guadalcanal is an island in...

Two recent polls indicate the presidential race has tightened again to within the margin of error. John Kerry made it clear that this isn't true in a speech in Florida Sept. 22. In response to a question after a speech in West Palm Beach, Kerry said President Bush might bring back the military draft if he is re-elected. This has become a meme among Democrats. "There will be no draft when John Kerry is president," said vice presidential candidate John Edwards. "America will reinstate the military draft" if Bush is re-elected, said former Sen. Max Cleland, a Kerry surrogate, in...

CBS sticks to its guns when out of ammunition Dan Rather made his bones as a White House correspondent hounding President Nixon on the Watergate scandal. He is ending his career as Nixon ended his, stonewalling the indefensible. On "60 Minutes II" last week, Rather broadcast a report alleging President Bush received special treatment in the Texas Air National Guard, and disobeyed a direct order to take a flight physical. The report was based on memoranda purportedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who commanded the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron in which then Lt. Bush served. Killian died in 1984....

Uniontown, York factories tear them down, build them up UNIONTOWN -- The employee parking lot at the United Defense plant in Uniontown has been taken over by banged-up Bradley fighting vehicles recently returned from Iraq. Several show the unmistakable signs of a hit from rocket-propelled grenades, but most seem in remarkably good condition, considering the ordeal they've been through. These Bradleys, employed by the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, were driven about 1,000 miles a month, more than a Bradley typically gets driven during a year in peacetime. "We've gotten Bradleys in worse shape from National Guard units that only drove...