Free Republic

The latest Fox poll offered Republican voters a menu of 11 candidates and found...not only were voters scattered across the conservative landscape, but 1/4 of the Tea Party adherents sampled were still “not impressed” with anyone. It’s hard to impress a movement that only knows what it is against. Now, barring some wild twist of fate, there are two men standing: Mitt Romney, the methodical, thrill-free, ideologically elastic technocrat from Massachusetts, who has made himself the default nominee; and the last hope of the hard core, the Not Mitt: Rick Perry. snip ...whatever you think of his deviations from Tea...

The New York Times have just pissed its neuroscientific pants in public and is now running round the streets announcing the fact in an op-ed that could as easily been titled 'Smell my wee!' The piece is written by Martin Lindström, famous for writing the 'neuromarketing' best-seller Buyology, but infamous for not making any of his data or studies public. In fact, despite constantly mentioning the astounding conclusions from numerous brain imaging studies he was run, not one has appeared in the scientific literature. But even without knowing about the reliability data or the quality of the analysis, it's easy...

TULSA, Okla. — Master Sgt. Anthony Henry, a top Marine recruiting trainer for the southwestern United States, pulled up to Tulsa’s biggest gay community center on Tuesday morning and left his Chevy where he could make a fast getaway. “I have an exit strategy,” he said. “I know where my choke points are, I’ve strategically parked my car right on the curbside, I have an out.” But as it happened, one of the strangest days in the history of the United States Marine Corps unfolded without the protests and insults that Sergeant Henry had feared. Sergeant Henry, who had been...

Sunday’s NY Times opens a subject being whispered in the halls of Democratic power. Will a second run by a severely weakened President Obama destroy the party as it did for the 12 years following Jimmy Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan? Is the war of 2008 now lost? Blame is put on his lack of resolve for liberal ideas, namely killing the EPA’s new ozone dictates, his lack of aggressiveness and of course the economy. In English spoken west of the Hudson, it’s called panic. "Democrats are expressing growing alarm about President Obama’s re-election prospects and, in interviews, are openly...

Princeton Professor Paul Krugman's ugly New York Times blog on the post 9/11 environment stopped short of accusing Pres. Bush of masterminding the attacks, but it did accuse Bush and his associates of cashing in on the tragedy, of being "fake heroes." If nothing else, the timing was hateful – the very week when the former President was called on to emerge from relative obscurity to lend gravity to the memorial ceremonies. Krugman's hate cannot hold a candle to retired MIT professor, and radical anti-American, Noam Chomsky's article in Al Jazeera. Chomsky goes a step further to condemn the US...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman upset a lot of people with his Sunday blog post in which he claimed “the memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned” by the likes of George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expressed his outrage by canceling his subscription to the publication. “The Five” co-host and “Red Eye” host Greg Gutfeld condemned Krugman’s article on Monday’s broadcast of “The Five.” “So, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman delivered the odious piece of drivel on the attack,” Gutfeld said. “The headline is ‘Years of...

The man was on fire! President Obama was champing at the bit during Thursday night’s speech to a joint session of Congress. He’d had it with those do-nothings. He was going to show everyone that he could be tough — and he did. So why does it feel as if we’ve been here before? Why does it feel as if we’ve heard him “give it to them” before only to have him lighten up and give in later? Because we have, that’s why. Yes, Thursday’s speech was an encouraging shift in tone with a meaty jobs plan of the president’s...

In its September 11 edition, the New York Times runs a front-page article by Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner, which, instead of blaming fanatical Egyptian rioters, assigns the biggest share of blame to Israel for the violent attack on its Cairo Embassy and the forced departure of its diplomatic staff ("Beyond Cairo, Israel Sensing A Wider Siege -- Embassy Assault a Sign of a Mideast in Flux") In full gloom-and-doom mode, Bronner paints a dark picture of an "increasingly isolated" Israel with "limited and poor options" amid rising anti-Israel sentiment in neighboring countries. Pouring more salt on the wound, Bronner...

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Let us begin by confessing that, if Sarah Palin surfaced to say something intelligent and wise and fresh about the present American condition, many of us would fail to hear it. That is not how we’re primed to see Ms. Palin. A pugnacious Tea Partyer? Sure. A woman of the people? Yup. A Mama Grizzly? You betcha. But something curious happened when Ms. Palin strode onto the stage last weekend at a Tea Party event in Indianola, Iowa. Along with her familiar and predictable swipes at President Barack Obama and the “far left,” she delivered a devastating...

Behold the bemusing readiness to betray the very best of the West in order to placate the very worst in Islam. In recent years the New York Times has published more than its share of slippery apologias for Islam, but the op-ed it ran on September 2 in defense of sharia law was not only slippery but curiously feeble as well. Eliyahu Stern, an assistant professor of religious studies and history at Yale, harshly criticized the attempts currently underway in over a dozen U.S. states to pass legislation prohibiting the introduction in those jurisdictions of sharia courts. “Some of these...

What?! Below is an excerpt from the New York Times. No wonder they are losing readers. With thinking like this, we might as well hand the United States of America over to the Middle East. Letting Muslims and people of other cults practice voluntary ecclesiastical law within their communities is one thing. Muslims wants Shariah law to be the law of the land. State governments are getting smart and shoring up their laws to prevent the courts from forcing Sharia law on American citizens. The New York Times should implement Sharia law upon its employees before letting them write articles...

The war in Libya may be one of those quietly telling moments in the history of more important nations. For the first time, the United States has taken a secondary role... in a war prosecuted by the NATO alliance and driven by Britain and France, the two strongest military powers in Europe... More than six budget-busting months against one of the weakest militaries in the world, with shortages of planes, weapons and ammunition that were patched over by the pretense that NATO was acting simply to "protect civilians," when it was clear to everyone that the alliance was intervening on...

In an op-ed article in the New York Times, Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, and David E. Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame, say they have collected data indicating that the tea party is "less popular than much maligned groups like 'atheists' and 'Muslims.'" But Campbell says the tea party was really an afterthought in their research. "We didn't go into this study to look at the tea party," Campbell said in an interview with The Ticket. The professors were following up on research they conducted in 2006 and 2007 for their book "American...

GIVEN how much sway the Tea Party has among Republicans in Congress and those seeking the Republican presidential nomination, one might think the Tea Party is redefining mainstream American politics. But in fact the Tea Party is increasingly swimming against the tide of public opinion: among most Americans, even before the furor over the debt limit, its brand was becoming toxic. To embrace the Tea Party carries great political risk for Republicans, but perhaps not for the reason you might think. Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News survey...

Little more than a year ago, most Americans did not know enough about the Tea Party to have an opinion. Now, more people have opinions, and they are hardly positive. The percentage of people with an unfavorable view of the Tea Party in a New York Times/CBS News Poll this week was higher than it has been since the first time the question was asked, in April 2010. Forty percent of those polled this week characterized their view as “not favorable,” compared with 18 percent in the first poll. In the first poll, a plurality, 46 percent, said they had...

Disapproval Rate for Congress at Record 82% After Debt Talks (Teaparty 40% Unfavorably) NYT Slimefest The debate over raising the debt ceiling, which brought the nation to the brink of default, has sent disapproval of Congress to its highest level on record and left most Americans saying that creating jobs should now take priority over cutting spending, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll. A record 82 percent of Americans now disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job — the most since The Times first began asking the question in 1977, and even more than after...

Latest dispatch from the Department of Dissent Is No Longer Patriotic: because they won't raise taxes, Republicans are more dangerous to US national security than al Qaeda. That is the view of Nicholas Kristof in his column, "Republicans, Zealots and Our Security", in today's New York Times. View excerpts here.

The latest edition of the New York Times’s Sunday magazine gave conservatives a rare opportunity to repurpose Times Executive Editor Bill Keller as a pinata, though the paper’s intent may have been to make its conservative critics look irrational. Readers responded bluntly to Keller’s trashing of Sarah Palin in his column for the June 19 issue, in which he claimed “most journalists would recoil in horror from the idea” of a Palin presidency. The Times printed a full page of letters, a dozen in all, from insulting Keller critics and Palin sympathizers. A few were incisive: You write that only...

If you thought the do-it-yourself anti-immigrant schemes couldn’t get any more repellent, you were wrong. New laws in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina are following — and in some ways outdoing — Arizona’s attempt to engineer the mass expulsion of the undocumented, no matter the damage to the Constitution, public safety, local economies and immigrant families. The laws vary in their details but share a common strategy: to make it impossible for people without papers to live without fear. They give new powers to local police untrained in immigration law. They force businesses to purge workforces and schools to check...

Andrew Breitbart wasn’t supposed to be sitting here in a television studio makeup chair. But when he heard that Anthony Weiner was about to announce his resignation, he dropped everything. Mr. Breitbart, the conservative author and blogger who first published Mr. Weiner’s suggestive self-portraits, had ditched his book-signing in central Illinois and hopped on a flight earlier than planned to the Twin Cities, where he was booked as a marquee attraction at RightOnline, a conservative bloggers conference. “To put myself in Decatur, Ill., without a satellite connection would have put me in a bad situation,” he explained as a woman...