Free Republic

® An American Cyber-Column The Community Organizer-in-Chief Rich Galen Friday March 6, 2009 * I finally figured this out. Barack Obama is the Community Organizer-in-Chief. He is taking the inequities, the slights, the unfairness, the spread between wealth and poverty, the choices the rich have but which the poor do not … and he wants to fix that. For everyone. * Sounds good, actually. Who doesn't want to take "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" and lift them up? * It is not an issue of taking from someone who has a lot and giving...

Sometime during the Autumn of 1986 I found myself sitting at the kitchen table of a member of the Illinois House of Representatives who was running for Congress. The reason for being at that table with candidate Dennis Hastert was to rehearse for a debate with his Democratic opponent. Hastert won the debate and won the seat. Shift forward 12 years. On December 19, 1998 I was sitting in a hotel room in Jakarta, Indonesia. In 1998 the GOP, then led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, was supposed to pick up seats in that mid-term election, but ended up losing five...

The Government Reform Committee of the US House stepped up to the plate yesterday and held a day-long hearing on the issue of steroid use in American sports. There were four panels including the parents of two high school athletes who took steroids and then committed suicide in the aftermath of their drug use. The meat of the order, though, was the three current and two former major league players including Jose Conseco - who has written an autobiography naming several other panel members as steroid users; as well as Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmiero, and Curt Schilling. I'm...

From Washington, DC The race for '08 has begun. Assuming Vice President Cheney doesn't declare his candidacy, 2006 will be, by my reckoning, the first time since 1952 (Dwight Eisenhower v. Adlai Stevenson) that there hasn't been in sitting President or Vice President on the ballot on either side. A poll by Quinnipiac College has Hillary Rodham Clinton Rodham running just behind both Rudy Giuliani (43-44) and John McCain (41-43). Headlines proclaimed Rodham Clinton Rodham "competitive" against both Giuliani and McCain because she was a statistically insignificant distance behind. We can't help but wonder what the headlines would have been...

I think we can agree on this: 2004 was not the best year that ever was. There was precious little to recommend 2004 as "my favorite year." Election results - In the US, Afghanistan and the Ukraine - pretty much cover the positive news. In January, when I was in Baghdad, a huge explosion killed dozens of people just outside one of the main gates leading into the Green Zone. As the year ended a wave of Biblical proportions killed so many people that - that it defies comprehension. In between it was like the 1959 Kingston Trio song, "The...

Mullings - An American Cyber-Column This is Diplomacy? Rich Galen Wednesday December 29, 2004 · The United States was deemed “stingy” in its immediate promise of $15 million in aid to the post-tsunami relief effort in Southeast Asia by the United Nations Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, Jan Egeland. · I have two words for the U-G for HA & ER Egeland: Get Out. · In fact, I have the same two words for the whole United Nations: Get Out. · The United States – the “stingy” United States – contributes 20 percent of the entire budget to...

The big news out of Iraq over the weekend was the business of the soldier from the 278th Regimental Combat Team, a National Guard unit largely out of Tennessee, asking Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about armored vehicles. According to the Knoxville News-Sentinel, this is the first rotation into Iraq for many of the Tennessee soldiers which, having heard the reaction of the soldiers to the question, did not surprise me. They reacted the way they did because they are frightened and nervous. The most frightened I was during the entirety of my six-month Iraq adventure, was the few days I...

The members of the electoral college met Monday for the first time in four years and they (or their successors) will not meet again for another four years. Each state gets the number of electors which totals the number of members of the US House of Representatives plus two US Senators. As there are 435 Members of the House and 100 Members of the Senate you might think that the total number of electors is 535. But wait! It's 538. That's because the 23rd Amendment to the US Constitution grants the District of Columbia three electors (more precisely the number...

Another 16 Words Rich Galen Monday, July 21, 2003 On April 19, 1775 someone fired a musket across North Concord Bridge in Massachusetts. That round was captured by poet Ralph Waldo Emerson in the lines; By the rude bridge that arched the flood; Their flag to April's breeze unfurled; Here once the embattled farmers stood; And fired the shot heard 'round the world. In 2003 - 228 years later - few American service members are actual farmers, they're more likely to be called "cowboys" - even though they are likely to be young men and women from the streets of...

Mullings An American Fifth-Column A Scamp Abroad Rich Galen Wednesday December 11, 2002 From Villa Tatiana Geneva, Switzerland One of the things about writing from Europe is you read European newspapers – not just on the web as you can from Mullings Central in Alexandria, Virginia – but really read the International Herald Tribune as a newspaper.As an example on page 4-II in yesterday’s IHT a piece by John Vinocur has this lede:“Scratch an anti-American in Europe and very often all he wants is a guest professorship at Harvard or to have an article published in the New York Times.”The...

In Your Nation’s Capital there is a syndrome known as "The August Story." This is a story which will sustain journalists, politicians, cable news anchors, talking heads, and – dare we say it – political columnists, through the dog days of August when the Congress is on vacation, the President is out of the city, and France is shut down. To review the bidding, last summer’s August Story was the Gary Condit/Chandra Levy business. The summer before that (2000) the August Story was the Dueling Republican and Democratic National Conventions. By the way, I went back to the Mullings Archives...