Free Republic

If you want to know why ... John McCain came to pick a total unknown with a Down Syndrome baby as his replacement as war-president, you have to understand the immense importance of the Christianist base. McCain isn't one of them, however much he tries to re-tell his life-story to make it so. They know it, he knows it, and he needed a religious running mate. He might have succeeded with Pawlenty, who is a solid pick that a mature and responsible campaign would have selected in a heartbeat. Instead - partly out of insane cynicism (did he really believe...

I’ve voted a straight Republican ticket every year of my life since 1975, when I first came of voting age, but I was stunned and horrified by McCain’s choice of Palin. I simply cannot even consider voting for McCain after this choice, which speaks loudly of his own selfishness and fundamental frivolousness. So I was shocked when I turned to the conservative blogs looking for others who shared my dismay and found a celebration going on. They really honestly believe that Palin’s “inexperience” and Obama’s “inexperience” are equivalent. I have had no luck at all in the past 24 hours...

CONFER: Protecting property rights By Bob Confer The Tonawanda News When our founding fathers penned the Declaration of Independence they noted we are endowed with unalienable rights which include “…Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Happiness was used as an all-inclusive term, but it had its basis in the property rights of the individual. This focus was borrowed from the writings of British philosopher John Locke who emphasized life, health, liberty, and property rights in writings that appeared over a century before the Declaration. Recognizing Locke’s influence on our nation’s principles is the key to understanding just exactly what...

A quote from his site: “That’s a shame - because Obama clearly represents, whatever his faults, a different racial politics than that of Jackson, Sharpton and the past.” (that’s Andy’s quote. my response below) and what are those “faults” you speak of? I’d like to know, Andrew. Really, ‘cause I haven’t seen much about that from you. And now you’re giving Democrats advice on how to heal the divide by bringing HILLARY to the VP slot?! Wow, have your priorities changed. I mean, your style hasn’t, but your priorities have. Also, after basically writing off Hillary as the devil (one...

"One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them." -- Thomas Jefferson, to George Washington, June 19, 1796. "After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it." -- William S. Burroughs. Big Tim Sullivan was a notorious Irish gangster whose mob controlled New York City south of 14th Street around the turn of the 20th century. Throwing in his lot with the likes of Monk Eastman, Paul Kelly and Arnold Rothstein, Sullivan became an expert on that dark nexus where organized crime and politics consummate...

WHAT CONSERVATIVES SHOULD LEARN FROM 9/11. Right Turn by Andrew Sullivan These are heady times for conservatism. The last 20 years have seen a decisive shift in the West toward market economics and away from statist intervention. The welfare state as it has historically been understood is an endangered species. Culturally, the importance of family structure, religious faith, and personal responsibility is affirmed by a wider array of people than for a generation. And with September 11, the bedrock conservative insight that the world is an inherently dangerous place has been decisively proved once again. Even the democratic left has ...

WATERLOO --- The first installment of Ken Burns' long awaited seven-part World War II documentary, "The War," which aired on PBS Sunday night, captivated many but contained one error that caught the attention of some Cedar Valley residents. Local viewers noted that the show' first installment, "A Necessary War," mistakenly stated that the five Sullivan Brothers, who enlisted in 1941 and were killed Nov. 13, 1942, were from Fredericksburg, Iowa, and not Waterloo. The confusion probably arose because Bill Ball of Fredericksburg, a good friend of the Sullivans, was killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor. His death, according to...

State Sen. John Sullivan, a Rushville Democrat, won't run for the 18th District Congressional seat that U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood is vacating. Sullivan, who made the announcement this morning in a news release, said he would seek re-election to his 47th State Senate District seat next year. "Right now, I'm where I want and need to be, and I plan to continue working hard to serve the poeple of western Illinois," he said. If Sullivan, a member of the General Assembly since 2003, had opted to run for Congress, he could not also have sought to keep his state Senate...

Former US military leaders have called on the Bush administration to make major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. In a report, they say global warming poses a serious threat to national security, as the US could be drawn into wars over water and other conflicts. They appear to criticise President George W Bush's refusal to join an international treaty to cut emissions. Among the 11 authors are ex-Army chief of staff Gordon Sullivan and Mr Bush's ex-Mid-East peace envoy Anthony Zinni. The report says the US "must become a more constructive partner" with other nations to fight global warming and...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Global warming poses a "serious threat to America's national security" and the U.S. likely will be dragged into fights over water and other shortages, top retired military leaders warn in a new report. The report says that in the next 30 to 40 years there will be wars over water, increased hunger instability from worsening disease and rising sea levels and global warming-induced refugees. "The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide and the growth of terrorism," the 35-page report predicts. "Climate change exacerbates already unstable situations," former U.S. Army chief of staff...

American conservatism is in crisis. ... A Giuliani or Romney candidacy [versus Clinton], could well eke out a victory in 2008. ... The strains are there, all right, and they have been made much more acute in the Bush years under the weight of massive spending increases, evangelical overreach, abuse of executive power, conventional corruption, and (most disastrously) a mismanaged war. ... The crisis, rather, is of a different kind. It is intellectual, and it is deeper than anything captured by the conventional categories. The sole merit of Dinesh D'Souza's new book is that it acknowledges this intellectual collapse, even...

Among my many guilty pleasures — bad reality television, solitary nose excavation, the Fox News Channel — hating Hillary Clinton was once near the top of the list. The senator from New York somehow managed to arouse every one of my love-to-hate zones. She was a self-righteous feminist (boo) who married her way to power (double-plus-boo). She wanted to turn American medicine into the National Health Service (grrr) and all her friends were wealthy lawyers (triple eye-roll). She was Lady Macbeth when she wasn’t some goo-goo liberal ideologue. There were as many ways to despise her as she had hairstyles....

The Christianist Candidate In case you were unaware, it's Mitt Romney. As with most Christianists, the idea of allowing different states to try different solutions to the same problem is dispensable when moral absolutes are involved. In other words, the fundamentalists have no interest in federalism. If federalism means that California can have marriage equality and medical marijuana, today's GOP base wants none of it. Here's Romney's discussion of John McCain's approach: Romney was less charitable to McCain, who on Sunday told ABC News: 'I believe that the issue of gay marriage should be decided by the states.' McCain also...

NEW YORK In a move that no doubt sent a shiver through several candidates in his own party, President Bush, in a special interview with wire service reporters in the White House, today guaranteed a job for his Pentagon chief for two more years, adding that both Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney "are doing fantastic jobs and I strongly support them." But it wasn't only endangered Republicans who have been calling for Rumsfeld's ouster who may have blanched. Andrew Sullivan, the conservative writer who was once a key media supporter for the Iraq war, denounced the latest Bush statement...

MADISON, Wis. -- Sex! The Green Bay Packers! Sex with the Green Bay Packers! The usually ho-hum race for Wisconsin secretary of state is being spiced up by one candidate's naughty tell-all book about her bed-hopping exploits with Green Bay football legends during the team's glory days under Vince Lombardi in the 1960s. Sandy Sullivan, a 65-year-old Republican with no political experience, self-published a gushing memoir in 2004 titled "Green Bay Love Stories and Other Affairs" in which she claims she was the girlfriend of Packers Paul Hornung and Dan Currie, deflected a pass from Hall of Famer Don Hutson...

Powell leads the right in a Bush-whack Andrew Sullivan In my first year in America, as a budding young conservative, my old friend, the writer John O’Sullivan, invited me out to dinner. The dinner, it turned out, was with none other than William F Buckley, a man who remains the undisputed titan of American conservatism. Buckley became famous in America in the 1950s and 1960s for being a conservative intellectual when such a thing was regarded as axiomatically oxymoronic. He founded the National Review, the indispensable magazine for the burgeoning American conservative movement. He was one of the inspirations for...

MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Fifty years ago, as Elvis Presley was about to make his first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Helen Kreis was staring at the TV screen, barely able to contain her teenage excitement. Then her father pulled the plug. “He was just joking, but before he could get it plugged back in, I was next door at the neighbor’s house. They were watching Elvis, of course, and I wasn’t taking any chances,” said the now-65-year-old Kreis, of Olney, Md. “Everybody was watching Elvis.” Well, maybe not everybody, but nearly everyone in America who had a TV had...

What does the term "Christianist" mean and why is Time peddling it? Time columnist Andrew Sullivan uses the term to describe evangelicals with whom he disagrees. He says his goal is to "take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist." He explains further, "Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state...

If you could save the victims of one of the following four events, which group would you save? 1. The victims of Fidel Castro's "revolution?" 2. The victims of Hezbollah's ambushes, rockets and missiles over the past three weeks? 3. The victims of the Seattle attack on the Jewish federation? 4. The victims of Mel Gibson's repulsive outburst of anti-Semitic venom? If all human life is valued equally, you'd have to save Castro's millions of victims, the Hezbollah's thousands, then the one dead and many injured in Seattle, and then Gibson's offended. As an extraordinary week draws to a close,...

This is response ad from the Ernest Istook campaign to a negative ad made by the Bob Sullivan campaign. Here is the link again: http://www.istook.com/?sectionid=52&sectiontree=20,52 Here is the Istook campaign website: http://www.istook.com/

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- A jury on Friday convicted a millionaire of murder for hiring a hit man to kill his socialite wife 19 years ago to escape a costly divorce. The jury of three men and nine women took a little over four hours to find James Sullivan guilty of arranging the shooting death of Lita Sullivan, his 35-year-old second wife. Except for blinking several times, Sullivan, 64, showed no reaction to the verdict. The victim's mother, state Rep. Jo Ann McClinton, wept. "I'm just happy and elated that finally after 19 years, the person we knew was guilty,...

If the ancient political wisdom is correct that a charge unanswered is a charge agreed to, the Bush White House pleaded guilty yesterday at the Cato Institute to some extraordinary allegations. "We did ask a few members of the Bush economic team to come," explained David Boaz, the think tank's executive vice president, as he moderated a discussion between two prominent conservatives about President Bush. "We didn't get that." Now why would the administration pass up such an invitation? Well, it could have been because of the first speaker, former Reagan aide Bruce Bartlett. Author of the new book "Impostor:...

Rome paid tribute to the barbarians clamoring at her gates. It didn't do any good. Paying ransom only postponed the inevitable sacking, burning, and looting of the empire's capital. The UK's Neville Chamberlain sought to pacify Hitler, only to see Brits hiding in basements from the blitzkrieg a few years later. Instead of remembering history's lessons, the Washington Post today indulges in feel-good, intellectual rationalization of Muslim intolerance and hatred. In a 5-page manifesto entitled, "Anatomy of the Cartoon Protest Movement," authors Anthony Shadid and Kevin Sullivan exercise unlimited poetic license, calling Islamist hooliganism "a rare moment of empowerment among...

SYRACUSE — Ithaca attorney William P. Sullivan, Jr., 62, of 417 North Aurora St., pleaded guilty Thursday to four counts of failing to file his federal income tax returns for the years 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001, federal officials said. Sullivan's guilty pleas were entered in U.S. District Court, Syracuse, before U.S. Magistrate Judge George H. Lowe. By his plea, Sullivan admitted that he failed to file his federal income tax returns for those four years. By his plea, he also admitted that the total taxes owed to the IRS for those four years was $34,691. Sullivan faces up to...

Washington is a strange city because, unlike New York, money doesn’t confer status and, unlike Los Angeles, neither does celebrity. The elusive element that structures life and work here is power or the appearance of power. Like electricity, this substance cannot easily be seen. But when it emerges decisively, you feel the atmosphere change in the city. And last week something shifted. Fourteen senators made a deal. All the president of the United States could do was look on. In a finely balanced Senate, a centrist faction of seven Republicans and seven Democrats shelved the notion of abolishing the judicial...

THE WASHINGTON TIMES "New Testament": It's a mighty name for a 70-ton battle tank.     The biblical words are neatly printed on the main gun of an M1A1 Abrams tank rolling along somewhere near Haditha, Iraq. To the Marines of the 4th Tank Battalion, "New Testament" is a fierce beacon and impervious to insurgent mortar fire.     But some critics grumble that an official photo of the tank accompanies a Marine Corps press release about the company's mission with a caption that reads, "The 'New Testament' ... prepares to lead the way during a recent mission." The name of the tank is...

Tin SoldierAn American Vigilante In Afghanistan, Using the Press for Profit and Glory By Mariah Blake In April 2004, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier named Jonathan Keith Idema started shopping a sizzling story to the media. He claimed terrorists in Afghanistan planned to use bomb-laden taxicabs to kill key U.S. and Afghan officials, and that he himself intended to thwart the attack. Shortly thereafter, he headed to Afghanistan, where he spent the next two months conducting a series of raids with his team, which he called Task Force Saber 7. By late June, he claimed to have captured the...

I wonder what Pope Benedict XVI would have thought of John F Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the United States. Kennedy was a proud defender of the West against Soviet communism, while the new pope has equated the godless materialism of western freedom with Nazi and communist dictatorship. Kennedy’s domestic politics, moreover, were based on a simple, remarkable assertion: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act … I believe in an America that is officially neither...

The Case for Eliminating Abortions – Mr. Sullivan Take Note          If you have not already read Andrew Sullivan’s article published in the Time Magazine Essay on March 7, 2005 and posted on March 3, 2005 by upchuck, here is the link: The Case for Compromise on Abortion           Let me be clear about my stand on abortion. It is not only immoral but an abomination, and Roe v. Wade must be overturned, and it will be if President Bush is able to appoint three conservative pro-life Justices.  Mr. Sullivan says he is pro-life, but then praises Hillary Clinton for moderating...

Andrew Sullivan has now weighed in on my debate with Ryan Sager. What all of us are grappling with is the expansion of the federal government under President Bush. How should those of us who want a much smaller federal government respond when Bush, for example, imposes steel tariffs? We should denounce the tariffs and bash Bush for imposing them. On this much, I take it, all three of us agree. But Sullivan and Sager write as though the problem were simply that Bush is for big government — as though the problem would go away if Bush would simply...

MY REVIEW of C.A. Tripp's The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln for THE WEEKLY STANDARD has caught the attention of several bloggers--but Andrew Sullivan seems to have been the most irritated. Indeed, his website contains half a dozen angry references to my essay--and that's not counting the drive-by blast he fired off in a column for the New Republic.Perhaps Sullivan deserves some answer, for he insists THE WEEKLY STANDARD must apologize for my calling Tripp's book a hoax and a fraud--although one would have more confidence in Sullivan's complaints if he gave a stronger sense of having actually read my...

IN scandals, chronology can be everything. The facts you find out first, the images that are initially imprinted on your consciousness, the details that then follow: these make the difference between a culture-changing tipping point and a weatherable media flurry. With the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the photographs, which have become iconic, created the context and the meaning of what took place. We think we know the contours of that story: a few soldiers on the night shift violated established military rules and subjected prisoners to humiliating abuse and terror. Chaos in the line of command, an overstretched military,...

Self-proclaimed "neoconservative" Andrew Sullivan thanks "neoconservative" Weekly Standard for running another anti-Rumsfeld article; (didn't the neocons - including WStandard - used to love Rumsfeld, when he first launched their war? Why must he be blamed because he bought their bad idea?): """WHY RUMSFELD MUST GO: Fred Kagan sums it up eloquently. Kudos to the Weekly Standard for keeping up the pressure: ""With more troops in Iraq during and immediately after the war, we would have been able to do the following things that we did not do: * Capture or kill thousands of Iraqi soldiers who were at that time...

As nominees go, Alberto Gonzales, the man George W Bush has chosen as his prospective attorney-general, is an appealing figure. A boyish-looking 49-year-old, he’s a Latino from humble beginnings who is poised to become America’s chief law enforcement officer. In his Senate confirmation hearings last week, he was poised, calm, even beguiling when evasive. But his nomination has raised issues a little deeper than mere biography or charm. You know things have become somewhat dark in Washington when one of the first questions Gonzales was asked — by the Republican chairman of the judiciary committee no less — was: “Do...

PHILADELPHIA -- Third-year medical student Lea Sullivan walked out of a grocery store Sunday afternoon onto a busy sidewalk in one of the city's most vibrant neighborhoods, and met a savage, inexplicable end. A burly man in a ski mask attacked the former homecoming queen from behind, clubbing her in the head with a baseball bat and continuing to beat her after she fell. The attack lasted seconds -- a minute, tops. Although South Street was crowded with shoppers, no one tried to stop the attack.

The sun set, the moon rose, the unchilled milk attained room temp, the dog had to pee, the match was struck and guttered out, the earth moved along its prescribed orbit, and Andrew Sullivan endorsed John Kerry. Some notable rationales: Kerry has said again and again that he will not hesitate to defend this country and go on the offensive against Al Qaeda. I see no reason whatsoever why he shouldn't. This would be a reasonable statement if Sen. Kerry had just popped fully-formed from Zeus’ brow, howling for justice, but there’s the inconvenient matter of three decades of public...

Kerry? I cannot know for sure. But in a democracy, you sometimes have to have faith that a new leader will be able to absorb the achievements of his predecessor and help mend his failures. Kerry has actually been much more impressive in the latter stages of this campaign than I expected. He has exuded a calm and a steadiness that reassures. He is right about our need for more allies, more prudence, and more tactical discrimination in the war we are waging. I cannot say I have perfect confidence in him, or that I support him without reservations. But...

For his weekly CNBC interview program this weekend Tim Russert got together with Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens for what was a most interesting hour (probably - I caught only the last forty-five minutes). Most of the conversation covered the war on terrorism, and both Sullivan and Hitchens were supportive of the President's actions in the war and emphatic that we must stay in Iraq until we finish what we started there (Sullivan: "saying he'd pull out of Iraq in six months is alone enough to mean Kerry shouldn't be president"). Hitchens was quite positive in talking about the progress...

Bob Dole Slams Kerry By Andrew L. Jaffee, August 23, 2004 Home   Search   Forum   Terms Nothing has really changed for Democratic hopeful John Kerry, except that real war veterans, like Bob Dole, are questioning the “superficial wounds” and resulting “medals” he received during four (4) months service in Vietnam. Kerry is still flailing, trying to cover up a career punctuated by extreme left-wing politics and flip-flopping by talking to voters about his military service. He squandered his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention by trying to convince Americans that his tour of duty in Vietnam will make him a great commander...

So John F Kennedy really is John Forbes Kerry’s role model after all. What did Kennedy do to sneak a razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon in 1960? He outflanked Nixon on the right on national security. What did this 2004 Boston convention signal to the American people? That the Democrats are once again a war party, that winning the war on terror is not something they will cede to the Republicans, that 9/11 was their tragedy too and that America is their country to fight for as well. Good for them. And about time. The first scene broadcast by the...

Here's from Andrew Sullivan's blog this morning (in which he calls himself a "pro-war neocon" - go figure): Edwards gave an immensely tough, hawkish pro-war speech. They really are pulling a Kennedy in 1960. One passage stood out, resplendent: ""We will lead strong alliances. We will safeguard and secure our weapons of mass destruction. We will strengthen our homeland security, protect our ports, protect our chemical plants, and support our firefighters, police officers, EMTs. We will always... We will always use our military might to keep the American people safe. And we, John and I, we will have one clear...

The old Nixon saw had it that all campaigns had an arc. They tilted to the true believers during the primary season and then they tacked to the centre in the summer and autumn. You shored up your political base — and then you made a pitch to the middle. Hyper-liberal or hyper-conservative positions in the winter were finessed by the summer convention, where the candidate had a chance to win over all those undecided voters. There is one thing, however, that this scenario didn’t quite take into account: what if there are decreasing numbers of genuine swing voters in...

Ken Lay of Enron Indicted and Arrested By Andrew L. Jaffee, July 8, 2004 Home   Search   Forum   Terms Enron’s ex-Chairman of the Board has been indicted and arrested on charges connected with his former company’s implosion in 2001. Corporate executives at Enron engaged in all sorts of financial manipulations to pump up the company’s stock price. They created complex “partnerships” to hide company debt from shareholders. In 1998, Enron’s share price was at about $20. By 2000, it hit $90. By 2001, the company’s stock was worthless. Enron’s collapse wiped out billions in shareholder value and employee pensions. Democratic Presidential hopeful John...

Archive E-mail Comments Send to a Friend Print Version Wednesday, June 16, 2004 WHO KNEW? [Jonah Goldberg ] I read Andrew Sullivan's site fairly regularly, as do lots of people I know. In fact, I get some grief from some readers -- and Cornerites -- for paying as much attention to Sullivan as I do. That doesn't bother me. I respect Andrew, consider him a friend and I respect his influence which is an objective fact regardless of my personal attitudes. As even moderate readers of Sullivan's site can attest, his positions of late have been something of a moving...

WHAT THEY SAID: In honor of president Reagan's funeral, here's a useful corrective to the notion that his legacy was always celebrated. Today, almost everyone concedes his historical significance. But that wasn't what was said at the time. Here's a smattering of commentary from the 1980s. "A few years from now, I believe, Reaganism will seem a weird and improbable memory, a strange interlude of national hallucination, rather as the McCarthyism of the early 1950s and the youth rebellion of the late 1960s appear to us today." - Arthur "Always Wrong" Schlesinger, Washington Post, May 1, 1988. "I wonder how...

<p>Sen. John Kerry boasts how he "sounded the alarm on terrorism years before 9/ 11," referring to his 1997 book "The New War." Too bad he didn't blast it when it really counted - four months before the hijackings, when he was hand-delivered evidence of serious security breaches at Logan International Airport, with specific warnings that terrorists could exploit them.</p>

3/11 Europe's Second Munich? March 11, 2004, was easily the greatest victory for terrorism since 9/11 itself. It was a victory not simply because so many innocents were murdered in cold blood - going about their business in a free and democratic society. We know how thrilled the Jihadist terrorists are when they can murder in large numbers - as they have now done in Iraq and Morocco and Bali and New York. It was a victory because it also succeeded in provoking the one response terrorists long for and feed upon. Faced with mass murder, the Spanish electorate voted...

Official: Kerry failed to act on pre-9/11 tip 3rd agent to say he warned security lapses made Boston airport ripe for 'jihad' attack WASHINGTON - A third federal aviation-security agent, one still with the government, has stepped forward to say he also warned Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry about security lapses at Boston's Logan International Airport before the 9/11 hijackings there. Earlier this week, two former FAA agents said the Democratic presidential hopeful failed to take effective action after they gave him a prophetic warning that his home airport was vulnerable to multiple hijackings. Brian Sullivan, a retired special agent from...

<p>SEN. John Kerry boasts how he "sounded the alarm on terrorism years before 9/ 11," referring to his 1997 book "The New War." Too bad he didn't blast it when it really counted - four months before the hijackings, when he was hand-delivered evidence of serious security breaches at Logan International Airport, with specific warnings that terrorists could exploit them.</p>

W&M to host "Affirmative Action and American Values: 50 Years after Brown vs. Board of Education" Author: Staff Date: Mar 10, 2004 Christopher Edley, Jr. and Maria Eschaveste, both former members of President Bill Clinton’s staff, will visit the College of William and Mary March 18, 2004 to present “Affirmative Action and American Values: 50 Years after Brown vs. Board of Education.” The event, sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Affairs, will be held at 7 p.m. in the Commonwealth Auditorium of the University Center. It is free and open to the public. Edley is co-director of the university think-tank...