Free Republic

February 06, 2009 ‘I Won,’ He Explained On the stimulus, when Obama says “I won,” he’s out of better arguments. By Rich Lowry Barack Obama, a reputed master of the persuasive art, has settled on his central argument for the stimulus bill: I won. That Obama is reduced to this crude appeal is a symptom of the intellectual collapse of the case for his stimulus bill, a congressional spendfest untethered from its stated goal of providing a rapid “jolt” to the economy. As far as political arguments go, “I won” has its power—provided it’s made on behalf of an agenda...

WHY NO THREADS ON THIS YET!!!!!! Drudge has just a snippet posted. I was LIVID when watching/listening to this live. Am I the only one who was offended????

Benediction at Obama 's inauguration, Rev. Joseph Lowery: 'Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen. Say Amen'...

While I admire his civil rights struggles early in his life Dr. Lowery shows once again that he has become nothing but a racist himself. Shame on you Dr. Lowery for talking me down because of my skin color.

Conservatives sworn to dinner secrecy By: Jonathan Martin January 14, 2009 12:40 PM EST Call it a charm offensive or a high-level “Listening Tour,” but Barack Obama is already signaling that he intends to break with the current president in one obvious way: hearing from his critics. Obama Tuesday night trekked to the Chevy Chase, Md., home of conservative columnist George F. Will to talk politics and get to know some of his fiercest intellectual adversaries: Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Larry Kudlow, David Brooks, Rich Lowry, Peggy Noonan, Michael Barone, and Paul Gigot. The two-and-half-hour dinner, which came at Will’s...

Tuesday's Republican debacle was, as the social scientists say, "over-determined." It had many causes. Was it brought on by congressional corruption, Bush administration incompetence, intellectual exhaustion or John McCain's failings as a candidate? All of the above -- and then some. In 2006, voters set out to punish Republicans for loose practices in Washington -- most spectacularly the scandal involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff -- and the mishandling of the Iraq war. This year, they decided that Republicans deserved another whipping, even before the September financial meltdown added yet another black mark against the Bush administration.

Republicans are consoling themselves by telling anyone who will listen that we still live in a "center-right country." They're right. That's the good news. The bad news is that they've lost the center. According to exit polls, Barack Obama won moderates by a whopping 21 points on Tuesday, 60-39 percent. That more than doubled John Kerry's nine-point margin over George W. Bush among moderates in 2004. The ideological composition of the electorate was remarkably unchanged from 2004. The percentage of self-identified conservatives and moderates -- the center-right -- held steady. Conservatives were 34 percent of voters and moderates 44 percent,...

A Word on Christopher Buckley [Rich Lowry] Chris is up with a post at The Daily Beast, "Sorry, Dad, I Was Fired." I’d like to clarify this “firing” business. Over the weekend, Chris wrote us a jaunty e-mail with the subject line "A Sincere Offer," in which he offered to resign his column on NR's back page and said that if we accepted, there "would be no hard feelings, only warmest regards and understanding." We took the offer sincerely. Chris had done us the favor of writing the column beginning seven issues ago on a "trial basis" (his words), while...

Barack Obama has already brought change: He's ended the "chilling effect." Any restrictions on speech - real or imagined - were once inevitably deemed to have a "chilling effect" on people who would otherwise exercise their First Amendment rights if they weren't so frightened by the possibility of running afoul of the law. Claims of a "chilling effect" were the most reliable weapon in the American Civil Liberties Union's absolutist campaign against, say, even the most common-sensical laws against obscenity. But the politics of free speech has been subtly shifting. Opponents of the ACLU on the right increasingly worry about...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Has Sarah Palin become a liability for John McCain? Since joining his ticket, the overnight political celebrity has seen the shine come off her poll standings and doubts surface among some conservatives once excited about her candidacy. The Alaska governor still draws huge crowds and energizes McCain's drive for the White House. Yet a whirlwind month after he made her his running mate, Palin is starting to seem very, very vulnerable. A stumbling interview with CBS's Katie Couric last week in which Palin equated her state's proximity to Russia with foreign policy experience may have been her...

JOHN BOLTON, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO U.N.: Glad to be here. LOWRY: Now, do you think it makes any sense to have dis-invited Sarah Palin to this event? Yes, Hillary Clinton had canceled, but there still would have been other Democrats there. And it's not as though the mere presence of Sarah Palin would have discredited this thing as a partisan event. BOLTON: Well, I think it was a mistake. But I know the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. It's a very important group. They have never done anything, in my view, that was partisan. So they must...

The Bush years will be remembered for the cruel triumph of realism over illusion. One of the era's great illusions was spun by President Bush -- that the force of freedom was so irresistible, it would prevail in a place like Iraq even in the absence of law and order. Bush himself eventually realized his mistake. The second illusion -- fed by anyone who possibly could get rich from it -- is bursting now. Wall Street is experiencing one of its most wrenching periods since traders began gathering around a tree there in the 1790s, beset by a terrible reckoning:...

Has some fascinating stuff. One, age appears to be a much bigger drag for McCain than race is for Obama (25% say their friends or neighbors are uncomfortable voting for a 72-year old; 6% say they are uncomfortable voting for an African-American). I'm interested in how McCain has fared in some of the personal attribute questions. He's closed the gap in "fights for people like me" from 53% to 33% in May, to 48% to 42% now; closed the gap on "will unite the country" from 53% to 33% in May to 47% to 39% now; and tied Obama...

Seems we are witnessing the coming next installment of the dismemberment of a well-intentioned, God-centered conservative, ala George Bush. He will be off the scene soon...the ravenous vultures have picked his bones unmercifully ( Everything wrong in every life on earth is Bush's fault) in an 8 year temper tanrum over the 2000 Florida vote. Can you IMAGINE, if Obama loses, how they will behave toward Vice President Sarah Palin as the iconic representation in snatching the presidency away from the first black?? The left--and the media-- will give her no berth of acceptance, no willingness to listen, they will...

My take (and I didn't see the bits that aired on 20/20 or Nightline last night, although I read the transcript) was that she survived. That's all she had to do. Politically, everyone was grading her on a pass/fail, and she passed. No gaffes, not that much to fuel damaging follow-on conversation. She's likable even when she's at her least authoritative. Most people, I believe, are rooting for her, and she was helped in the post-game by the incredible scorn directed at her by Charlie Gibson. But this was a merely adequate performance. The foreign-policy session was a white-knuckle affair....

Perhaps nothing Sarah Palin said in her boffo address at the Republican Convention had as much resonance as her statement that “sometimes even the greatest joys bring challenge.” That truism was redeemed from mere Hallmark-card sentimentality because everyone knew that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant and that Palin herself gave birth to a boy, Trig, with Down syndrome in April. The joys in the Palin household lately have been particularly leavened with challenges. Palin’s choice to give birth to Trig after she learned of his condition 13 weeks into her pregnancy endeared her to pro-lifers and contributed to the...

Last night, the question about Sarah Palin wasn't if she's risen too fast, but where she's been for so long. She may have given the best speech of either political convention. She delivered a brilliantly written text flawlessly. Politicians who've been on the national stage for decades could do no better, and usually do worse. Newsrooms across America must be in abject despair. The unlikely VP nominee the media hoped to crush out of the gate is unaffected by their condescension and scorn - and is bent on giving better than she takes. Miss Congeniality isn't afraid to administer an...

Palin-hatred is an artifact of who she is rather than anything she's done. Joe Biden famously rose from the workng class to the Senate. Palin became governor of Alaska, but never left the working class - with her beehive hairdo and librarian glasses, with a husband who is a commercial fisherman and works on a North Shore oil field, and with her hobbies of hunting and fishing. If there's ever been an exemplar of rural America that, in Barack Obama's telling, "bitterly" clings to its guns and religion, it's Sarah Palin. It's her misfortune to be a pioneer with the...

IF it were the plot of a political movie, it'd be too cheesy to watch. An obscure governor of a small state, a working mom of five, is secretly spirited to a political rally four months after giving birth to her latest child and named the running mate on a national ticket as the country watches, agog. But there she was, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, trailing four of her kids (the other is in the Army and about to deploy to Iraq) and her husband - a young, attractive mother hen about to stand next to war hero and elder...

Republicans are sending onto the field a presidential candidate who perhaps has the least to offer middle-class voters on taxes since the first George Bush in 1992. Of course, Bush lost that year to a Democrat promising only to raise taxes on “the rich” and to cut them for the middle class — exactly Obama’s position now. In his primary campaign, McCain had to endorse the extension of the Bush tax cuts he voted against in the Senate. But they have turned into a trap. Because Obama also wants to extend the middle-class aspects of the Bush cuts, McCain is...