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"Clark is a wonderful fellow. In a day when many are seeking a reward for what they contributed to the return of the Democrats to the White House, you don't hear Clark clamoring. All he asked in return was that we advertise his law firm on the backs of one-dollar bills." -- John F. Kennedy on Washington lobbyist and ex-Truman aide Clark Clifford What can one say? Is there any wonder Tea Party supporters think they are always in danger of being played? In a Republican Establishment shell game. Sunday's New York Times Magazine brought a long cud-chewer titled "Does...

This month's guest on C-Span2's In Depth, Sunday 6 February from noon to 3PM EST, is R. Emmett Tyrrell, founder and editor in chief of the American Spectator magazine. Tyrrell has written a number of books including the most recent "After the Hangover: the Conservatives' Road to Recovery", and will be taking calls and emails from viewers as well as discussing his philosophy and writing......

Our friend Pat Hickey has caught wind of some potentially interesting news on Chicago's soon to be roiling Mayoral election now that Richard "King" Daley has decided he no longer wants the big seat. Conservative publisher R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr. has reportedly said he might be interested in taking a run at City Hall. Pat reports that through the grapevine he heard of Tyrell's possible campaign: R. Emmett Tyrrell, the founder of The American Spectator is interested in running for Mayor of Chicago. Bob Tyrrell, like Governor Pat Quinn, is a proud Alumnus of Fenwick High School. It sure would...

Months ago, I predicted in this column that President Obama would so discredit himself in office that he wouldn't even be on the ballot in 2012, let alone have a prayer of being reelected. Like President Johnson in 1968, who had won a much bigger victory four years previously than Obama did in 2008, President Obama will be so politically defunct by 2012 that he won't even try to run for reelection. I am now ready to predict that President Obama will not even make it that far. I predict that he will resign in discredited disgrace before the fall...

A very long and very complementary piece, by Peter Ferrara, in The American Spectator gives rave reviews of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue and of her: Here Comes the Sun And speaking of grand vistas of opportunity, let me discuss Sarah Palin. Having just finished her book, Going Rogue, I am angry. I am angry that no one, not even conservatives, told me what a brilliant book this is, before I read it for myself. Brilliant in a quintessentially Sarah Palin way, showing through doing and being her genuine self, rather than through academic argument, exactly the way to communicate to...

Standup comedian Anita Dunn, who doubles as President Obama’s White House communications director, now claims she was only joking when praised Mao Zedong by calling him “one of the two people that I turn to most,” Glenn Beck revealed on his TV show today. Hilarious! There have to be 70 million murdered Chinese rolling in the aisles! What a knee-slapper. Beck revealed last week that Dunn idolizes Mao, the brutal Communist dictator of China responsible for the slaughter of tens of millions of innocent victims.

Knowing that many, many conservatives will absolutely dump on me for saying this, I can't help myself: Sarah Palin's resignation is an appalling dereliction of duty and a highly cynical move to set herself up for a presidental run for which she is manifestly unqualified.

... For conservative commentators Mr. Obama’s election and the turmoil of the opposition present a changed environment, not only from the past eight years when Republicans held the White House, but from the previous three decades, when conservative ideas dominated the national political agenda. Since the financial meltdown, though, many Americans have sought government action, prompting conservative magazines to refocus on first principles and refight battles they assumed had already been won. “We’re seeing free-market capitalism trampled in some new way every 12 hours,” said Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, the magazine William F. Buckley started in 1955, which...

Republicans will take their first shot at derailing a top Democratic priority — climate change legislation — by offering as many as 200 amendments when the House Energy and Commerce Committee begins marking up its bill this afternoon. The markup, which could stretch over several days, probably provides House Republicans with their best opportunity for offering changes to a bill that will likely see limited amendments on the floor. “Our folks are united against cap-and-trade,” Energy and Commerce member Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said of the carbon control policy being pushed by Democrats. Last week, Democrats agreed among themselves on a...

The Obama administration itself estimates that cap and trade will involve increased costs from 2012 to 2019 alone of $645 billion, and admits in its own budget that the actual costs could be much higher than that, depending on permit prices over those years. Indeed, other estimates put the costs three times higher. So the increased burden on each Ameri can over this period alone would be $2,100 to $6,300. For a family with two children, that would be $8,400 to $25,200, with much more to come after 2019. These increased costs are effectively a new tax on the American...

Tea Party USA Watch: Taxpayers coming together By Michelle Malkin  •  February 23, 2009 02:56 PM (Photoshop credit: Leo Alberti)Tons of groups and individuals are stepping up to the plate in the wake of last week’s anti-stimulus/anti-entitlement protests and the call for a nationwide Tea Party.PJTV’s clearinghouse for protests is here.The New American Tea Party page from “a coalition of citizens and organizations concerned about the recent trend of fiscal recklessness in government…dedicated to the Washington, D.C. effort specifically sponsored by the American Spectator, the Heartland Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, the National Taxpayers Union, Americans for Prosperity, and the Young Conservatives...

Yes, I know you guys and gals don't like vanities, but I need advice, and I don't who else to ask. Anyway, does anyone here subscribe to Human Events? How is it different from the online version? Is a subscription worth it? Which one is better: Human Events, National Review, or American Spectator? Those are the only ones I know.

One night in 1973, I was sitting in an old armchair my parents had cast off in a little tiny house I was renting in Georgetown, D.C. Maybe I shouldn't say "cast off." They generously gave it to me. I lived in that little house with my girlfriend Pat. We had very little money and lived very modestly. But Pat had gone to bed and I was up reading John Gregory Dunne's great novel, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season. Or maybe it's a memoir and not a novel, but I think it's a novel.But anyway, the phone rang....

Now even the partisan-resistant public must acknowledge what conservatives have known for a long time: that Newsweek is driven by a leftist agenda, even if they won't acknowledge it themselves. That can't be illustrated more clearly than by the magazine's cover story this week, titled "Global Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine." Science writer Sharon Begley writes proudly and passionately in what she obviously thinks is an eye-opening expose' about the conspiring entities who "deny the science of climate change." Her Woodward and Bernstein-like prose tracks money passages from big energy producers to intellectual skeptics, who exist to undermine what she...

And why not? John Wayne was born Marion Morrison 100 years ago last month in the dreaded Midwest, before his family moved to a California that had yet to see the "golden days" of left-wing infiltration. He played football at USC before a surfing injury caused him to lose his scholarship and he soon found work as a Hollywood stuntman before stardom found him. He was incredibly handsome in youth and despite his large and rangy frame, had a lithesome quality to his bearing, even late in life. It is a cliche used in reference to many actors that women...

If it’s campaign season, that means one thing: Let the mudslinging begin. The latest book by American Spectator founder and Editor in Chief R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., “The Clinton Crack-Up,” hits book shelves next week, and our sneak peek into the tome suggests it’s certain to cause a stir. Tyrrell, you’ll recall, is no fan of the Clintons. His last book, “Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House,” compared Sen. Hillary Clinton’s time in the White House to that of a pre-revolutionary French monarch. And his American Spectator magazine cried “Scandal!” throughout the Clinton administration. With his new...

If you are disgusted that every few days there is another article warning of the catastrophe we face from global warming - followed immediately by another article saying that the alarmists are all wrong, this piece should really please you. Since it is the first article I have seen that substantially agrees with what I have been saying all along, of course it pleases me. I know that discussions of global warming turn a lot of you off, but give this one a chance. The Global Warming Two-Step By William Tucker The American Spectator Published 1/23/2007 12:08:03 AM I'm in...

For more than 26 years, Congressman John P. "Jack" Murtha (D-Penn.) has not been truthful about his involvement in Abscam, court records and the complete video of his meeting with the FBI show. In recent years, only a 13-second video of Murtha's videotaped meeting with the FBI agents was publicly available. TAS has obtained a copy of the full, original video from a source close to the Abscam investigation on the condition of anonymity. The court transcript is publicly available at the National Archives. (Too see the full video, click here. For a transcript of the meeting, click here.)

For all its many virtues, (including once publishing a book review of mine), The American Spectator magazine can occasionally make mistakes. In the April issue, Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board (another fine institution) complains that, “In every year Bush has advanced a new expensive silver-plated government agency or initiative… the multi-billion dollar manned mission to Mars…” To lump in the Bush Administration’s Vision for Space Exploration with the farm bill and the Medicare prescription drug benefit as massive new federal spending programs is not just to confuse apples and oranges, but to mistake an apple for...

Now for a few humble thoughts about the Oscars. I did not see every second of it, but my wife did, and she joins me in noting that there was not one word of tribute, not one breath, to our fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan or to their families or their widows or orphans. There were pitifully dishonest calls for peace -- as if the people we are fighting were interested in any peace for us but the peace of the grave. But not one word for the hundreds of thousands who have served and are serving,...