Free Republic

David Brooks spoke frankly about the presidential and vice presidential candidates Monday afternoon, calling Sarah Palin a "fatal cancer to the Republican party" but describing John McCain and Barack Obama as "the two best candidates we've had in a long time." In an interview with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg at New York's Le Cirque restaurant to unveil that magazine's redesign, Brooks decried Palin's anti-intellectualism and compared her to President Bush in that regard: [Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley...

WASHINGTON, July 28 — They were high school friends from Park Ridge, Ill., both high achievers headed East to college. John Peavoy was a bookish film buff bound for Princeton, Hillary Rodham a driven, civic-minded Republican going off to Wellesley. They were not especially close, but they found each other smart and “interesting” and said they would try to keep in touch. Which they did, prodigiously, exchanging dozens of letters between the late summer of 1965 and the spring of 1969. Ms. Rodham’s 30 dispatches are by turns angst-ridden and prosaic, glib and brooding, anguished and ebullient — a rare...

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- President Hugo Chavez urged Venezuelan parents not to dress their children in costumes for Halloween, calling it a U.S. custom that has no place in the South American country's cultural traditions. Speaking during his weekly radio and television show Sunday, Chavez called Halloween a "gringa," or North American, custom. "Families go and begin to disguise their children as witches," Chavez said. "That is contrary to our ways." Chavez said he was urging Venezuelans to reflect on the subject. In recent years it has become common to see Venezuelan parents holding parties for children dressed as ghouls,...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hip-swiveling Elvis, womanizer Mick Jagger and "Material Girl" Madonna may be some of rock 'n' roll's greatest musical icons but as positive role models, they've yet to win many fans. Think again, argues rock critic Tim Riley. Far from being pilloried as a destructive influence on American youth, Riley says the best rock 'n' roll music celebrated sexual openness, honored tolerance, individualism and social responsibility in a way that helped baby boomers become better partners and better parents. "Rock actually helped lead the culture toward a healthier, happier paradigm of male-female relations," Riley writes in his...

Column: Greying the Societal Zebra Everyday life losing clear distinctions, constantly gaining contradictions Published on Thursday, April 3, 2003 Illustration by Adam Hayes/Collegian Zach Hauser Kansas State Collegian If you commit a crime, there is a set punishment. When you read a book in English, you read from left to right. It is as straightforward and as black and white as the pages and ink with which it is printed. But that is where the buck stops, consistency vanishes and common sense becomes quite uncommon. In a society where our foundation is built on black and white, where according to...