Free Republic

I will start this with: Beltway pundits, especially so-called conservatives, are clueless. They have spent so much time in DC thinking all this stuff is a game that they could not recognize ideologues when it smacked them in the face.

WASHINGTON, March 19, 2010 – The Marja operation has served as proof of principle for operations in Afghanistan, and commanders are working to adopt the principles in other areas in the country, a senior military official said here today. The official, speaking on background, said that although much remains to be done, operations in Afghanistan’s Helmand province have proved that the counterinsurgency strategy does work. Still, actions in the region are in the early stages. Clear, hold, build and transfer are the steps in the strategy, the official said, and operations in the region are still in the hold and...

KABUL, March 8, 2010 – The Taliban flag no longer flies over Marja, and the operations in the central region of Helmand province have lessons for the rest of Afghanistan, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in the country said today. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and Ambassador Mark Sedwill – NATO’s senior civilian representative in Afghanistan – spoke with reporters traveling with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates at International Security Assistance Force headquarters here. The Marja operation is a tactical and operational effort to liberate 75,000 Afghans from Taliban tyranny, the general said. “There was a Taliban flag...

Return to the Article March 07, 2010What I Learned from Obama's PopBy Jack Cashill "Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle!"  - Alice in Wonderland A little more than a month ago, I began my first descent into the rabbit hole of Barack Obama's origins, a place known to swallow reputations whole. What prompted my inquiry was an e-mail from a correspondent asking my opinion of "Pop," a poem published under the 19-year-old Obama's name in the spring 1981 edition of Occidental College's literary magazine, Feast. Having no prior bias going in, here is what...

The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire by Edward N. Luttwak Belknap Harvard, 498 pp. Civilization in the city of Rome was extinguished by the year 476, but scholars today recognize that the Roman Empire continued to thrive in its eastern capital of Constantinople, in what we call the Byzantine Empire. As Edward Luttwak notes, the Byzantines did not use the word "Byzantine." They called themselves Romans, and their enemies called them Romans as well. The Byzantine Empire carried on Roman traditions of civilization, commerce, law, and education for nearly a thousand years until they met a heroic end...

Government Reinforced Building Codes After The Most Powerful Earthquake in Recorded History Shook Chile in 1960. Saturday's 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile is tied for fifth place on the list of most powerful quakes ever recorded, 500 times more powerful than the one that shook Haiti last month. Though the death toll is still rising, CBS News correspondent Elaine Quijano reports lessons learned decades ago will prevent the casualties in Chile from reaching anywhere near the estimated 220,000 killed in Haiti. Unlike in Haiti, the epicenter of Saturday's quake was 70 miles off Chile's coast, far from big cities. Also, the...

Even automotive history repeats itself. Let’s compare Toyota’s sudden acceleration… "A top Toyota official claimed that a negotiated agreement with U.S. government auto-safety regulators prevented a widespread vehicle recall and saved the Japanese auto giant more than $100 million, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post after it was turned over to congressional investigators." To the Ford Pinto… "Cost-Benefit Analysis One of the tools that Ford used to argue for the delay was a “cost-benefit analysis” of altering the fuel tanks. According to Ford’s estimates, the unsafe tanks would cause 180 burn deaths, 180 serious burn injuries, and...

Idaho's Democrat Senator Frank Church[i] was one of my heroes when I was in high school. Church wrote a letter of recommendation for me to Harvard and offered to nominate me to an appointment to any of the U.S. military academies. In the summer of 1971, he took me to lunch in the dining room of the United States Senate, where, for the first time in my life, I tasted French onion soup[ii]. He asked me if I would like to serve as an intern in his office in Washington, D.C. when I graduated from high school. (It was an...

Things can get awkward when protesters have to put down their placards and tackle the business of building an organization — networking online and recruiting reliable volunteers, precinct captains and even candidates. The transition is even more uncomfortable when undertaken in the glare of the national media spotlight, as the national tea-party movement attempted to do at its first convention, held in Tennessee over the weekend. As with any protest movement, consensus proved elusive in two days of debate, but they seemed to agree on five key points: 1. Don't Tread on Me The tea-party folks are innately suspicious of...

You can’t throw a rock in the blogosphere without hitting a postmortem on Scott Brown’s decisive defeat of Martha Coakley for the Massachusetts Senate seat formerly infested by Ted Kennedy and, before him, JFK himself. I may as well add my own. Here are seven lessons to be drawn:

Frum sees him as an antidote to the Tea Party madness: Strong on defense and school choice, opposed to the Obama administration’s signature initiatives, Brown voted in favor of Mitt Romney’s health plan in Massachusetts. He describes himself as pro-choice (subject to reasonable limitations), accepts gay marriage in Massachusetts as a settled fact, and told the Boston Herald editorial board he would have voted to confirm Sonia Sotomayor.

This is one of those rare moments when the conventional wisdom in Washington is right. The Democrats are poised to have a bad year; the only argument is over how bad it will be. And that question rests on whether or not the Republican Party crafts an agenda voters will support So far the GOP has shrewdly been the "party of no." Since I disagree with so much of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda, I happen to think that "no" is the correct position on the merits. But that's not the point. Saying "no" has worked because that's what most Americans say,...

In terms of loss of life, the bombing of the CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, may be the costliest mistake in the agency's history. So it's important to look carefully for clues about how it happened, and lessons for the future. CIA veterans cite a series of warning signs that the agency wasn't paying enough attention to the counterintelligence threat posed by al-Qaida. These danger signals weren't addressed because the agency underestimated its adversary and overestimated its own skills and those of its allies. The time to fix these problems is now — not with a spasm of second-guessing that...

Recent headlines seem lifted directly out of an Ayn Rand novel. President Obama decries the “fat cat bankers on Wall Street”. Harry Reid attacks insurance companies for making too much profit. House Democrat leaders call Tea Partiers “Racist, Nazi, Gun Nuts”. How about this nauseating statement made by Army General George Casey after the Muslim terrorist attack on Ft. Hood? "As great a tragedy as this was, it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well"Each of these headlines might well have been uttered by an Ayn Rand character.(snip)An epic demonstration of the inverted morality that...

Coming on the heels of the killing spree by Maj. Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood, the latest terrorist "incident," involving Abdul Mutallab on Northwest Flight 253, is yet another isolated but tell-tale sign that we must learn from: 1) If solidly middle-class Westernized Muslims mouth the al-Qaeda line of radical Islamic, anti-American boilerplate, please take them seriously — i.e., worry less about their feelings and more about the lives of innocents they may in the future seek to annihilate. The more upscale and the more the Western exposure, the more there is to worry about. 2) For the last eight...

Turns out there are real questions about the accuracy of that recent Quinnipiac poll showing President Obama’s approval rating at just 52 percent among Jewish voters. As the JTA’s Eric Fingerhut pointed out, the Jewish sampling “was derived from a sample of just 71 respondents, for a margin of error of plus or minus 11.6 percent — a sample size that pollsters generally say makes such surveys unreliable.” Actually, common sense and some knowledge of Jewish voting habits should be enough to render any such poll findings suspect at best. Obama enjoys two important advantages that make him almost a...

President Obama's complete lack of concern for the fraudulent science associated with global warming is contrasted with the common sense of Sarah Palin. The gutsy Alaskan suggested that Obama ought to hold his horses on the whole climate change thing until The real verdict is in. Of course, the smartest man in the world will have none of that. With the outrageous news of deceit, fraud and suppression of opposing evidence by top climate change "scientists," many conservatives had expected to see the story unfold a little differently (with actual reporting and investigating). Global warming, aka, climate change has been...

ABC’s Jordyn Phelps reports: President Obama may have a thing or two to learn from Tiger Woods’ golf game, according to an upcoming article in the January edition of Golf Digest. But In light of the recent controversy surrounding Tiger Woods’ car crash, there are likely more ways in which the President may wish to distinguish himself from the golf star. The article lists ten things that the President could learn from the ultra-successful golf star in improving his performance as president, and vice versa, from the perspective of several prominent writers and players. The magazine cover is a photoshopped...

The lesson from an unsuccessful pirate attack in the Gulf of Aden this week was simple: Guns talk. The Maersk Alabama, the American-flagged ship infamously attacked by pirates in April, was attacked again Monday when Somali pirates opened fire on the ship in an attempt to board it. But the pirates didn't get far this time, after a four-man security team aboard the ship fired back, thwarting the attack. It's the first time a large cargo ship with an armed security team aboard is known to have repelled an attack, says Vice Adm. William Gortney, who commands the Pacific region...

<p>As many people know by now, or are waking up to this morning, yesterday 39-year-old Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, went on a shooting spree at the Fort Hood Army post in Texas killing 13 and injuring at least 30. While Hasan is in critical condition and unconscious, some are speculating that the motive for the shooting was concern over his upcoming deployment to Afghanistan.</p>