Free Republic

From Greta’s interview with Jack Kelly…VIDEO LINK

SAMUEL Joseph Wurzelbacher, Rick Santelli, and Jim Cramer owe much of their 15 minutes of fame to Saul Alinsky, a Chicago Marxist who died in 1972. Mr. Alinsky is considered to be the father of "community organizing" as the path to social revolution. A year before his death he published a book, Rules for Radicals, which distilled what he had learned from his experiences, his reading of Marx and Lenin, and from his associations with crime boss Al Capone and labor leader John Lewis. Rule 11 is: "Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don't try to attack...

"You arrogant ass! You've killed us!" So said the executive officer of a Soviet submarine to his captain in Tom Clancy's novel "The Hunt for Red October" after the captain had recklessly fired a torpedo that homed in on his own sub.

Article published June 21, 2008 McCain in a landslide? Could be Jack Kelly SEN. Barack Obama has the lead for the time being. But three signposts point the way to a McCain landslide in November, in the unlikely event the Arizona senator has the wit to heed them. What figures to be by far the most important issue this fall is the skyrocketing price of energy and its deleterious effect on the broader economy and national security. Now that Sen. John McCain has flip-flopped on drilling off our coasts, there is a substantial difference between him and Mr. Obama on...

IN THE opening game of the baseball season between the Boston Red Sox and the Oakland Athletics in Japan, 11 runs were scored. That lead would be unsatisfying to most sports fans because it doesn't indicate which team won. But it is very like most of the reporting of battles in Iraq: "The deadliest clashes were in Basra, where at least 47 people were killed and 223 wounded in the two days of fighting," wrote the AP's Kim Gamel. Ms. Gamel was writing about the opening clashes of Operation Knight's Charge, the effort by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to...

Rampaging RINOS Conservatives should think twice about bolting the GOP Sunday, February 10, 2008 By Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette If you read the threads on conservative Web sites (which these days takes a strong stomach), you'll encounter frequently the acronym "RINO." It stands for "Republican In Name Only," an appellation that self-styled conservative purists apply to any Republican who disagrees with them about anything. That epithet has been applied most frequently to Arizona Sen. John McCain. But his former chief rival for the GOP nomination, former Massachussetts Gov. Mitt Romney, also has been derided as a RINO, as have former...

In his weekly radio address, President Bush gave thanks for American servicemen "who risk their own lives to keep us safe." Democrats chose retired Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez to deliver a rebuttal. "I saw firsthand the consequences of the administration's failure to devise a strategy for victory in Iraq that employed, in a coordinated manner, the political, economic, diplomatic and military power of the United States. That failure continues today," he said. LtGen. Sanchez endorsed the Democratic measure pending in Congress to condition continued funding for the war on a timetable for troop withdrawal. "Although we cannot withdraw precipitously...

THESE are good times for moonbats, hard times for wingnuts. This bodes ill for Democratic prospects in 2008. "Moonbat" is a term popularized by the Web logger Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) to describe people on the extreme left. "Wingnut" is a term coined by liberals to describe those on the extreme right. Most of us learn by the third grade the difference between addition and subtraction. But both moonbats and wingnuts think a majority can be built by driving away everyone who doesn't agree with them totally on everything. Little better illustrates the rising influence of moonbats than the on-again, off-again...

Medicare and Social Security will become insolvent sooner than estimated earlier, Medicare's trustees said in their annual report, issued May 1. Mexico has a presidential election on July 2. The leading candidates are Felipe Calderon, a conservative, and Andres Lopez Obrador, a leftist who has the backing of Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. What does this have to do with President Bush's plan for comprehensive immigration reform? Maybe lots. Medicare and Social Security are going broke chiefly because there aren't enough workers paying into the systems to support beneficiaries. Unless millions of new workers can be...

Soldiers who misbehave make the front page. Soldiers who perform nobly do not. When SFC Smith was awarded the Medal of Honor, the New York Times put the story on page A-13. I did a Nexis search on "New York Times and Abu Ghraib." It came back with more than 1,000 hits. The Times has run exactly one story that mentions Sgt. Peralta, and he had to share billing in it with SFC Smith and Sgt. Hester. "A nation that ignores, or, worse, attacks its heroes erodes and disparages its own ethos," warn Mr. Weinberger and Mr. Hall.

Jack Kelly: All bad news, all the time In covering Iraq, mainstream media give terrorists a boost Sunday, March 12, 2006 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette More than 8,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have deserted since the Iraq war began, USA Today reported Tuesday.           "Some lawyers who represent deserters say the war in Iraq is driving more soldiers to question their service and that the Pentagon is cracking down on deserters to discourage antiwar sentiment," wrote reporter Bill Nichols. " 'The last thing (Pentagon officials) want is for people to think ... that this is like Vietnam,'...

About those Iraqi WMDs: More signs are pointing to a neighborly transfer Sunday, February 05, 2006 Last week a man who had been deputy chief of Saddam Hussein's air force claimed Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war began....[snip] ....[snip] Last month Moshe Yaalon, who was Israel's top general at the time, said Iraq transported WMD to Syria six weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom began. Last March, John A. Shaw, a former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said Russian Spetsnaz units moved WMD to Syria and Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. "While in Iraq...

The Cartoon War began innocently enough. Kare Bluitgen, a Danish writer of childrens' books, complained he couldn't find anyone to illustrate the book he was writing about the Prophet Mohammed. The Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten invited cartoonists to offer their own interpretations. A dozen accepted. Jyllands Posten published their work last Sept. 30th. Extreme Muslim sects, such as the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, regard any depiction of Mohammed as blasphemy. (The Koran prohibits only "idolatry," and throughout the last millenium Muslim artists have painted likenesses of the Prophet.) Radical Muslims in Denmark issued death threats, and the cartoonists went into...

Rep. John Murtha probably wasn't on President Bush's Christmas card list, but Democratic political analyst Charles Cook thinks he should have been. Mr. Cook noted in the president's popularity started to rebound almost immediately after the Johnstown Democrat made a speech urging immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. "Prior to Murtha's well publicized speech advocating an early withdrawal, the spotlight had been on the Bush administration's use of intelligence that led to the decision to go to war," Mr. Cook said. "Murtha's speech changed the debate, away from whether we should have invaded Iraq and whether the use of...

Jack Kelly: Shooting the new messenger An article about blogger Bill Roggio shows mainstream media running scared Sunday, January 01, 2006 It was the journalistic equivalent of a drive-by shooting. The targets of Washington Post reporters Jonathan Finer and Doug Struck were two of journalism's favorites: Web loggers and the U.S. military.           "Bloggers, Money, Now Weapons in Information War," read the headline over their story, which appeared Monday. "U.S. Recruits Advocates to the Front, Pays Iraqi TV Stations for Coverage," the subhed said. "Retired soldier Bill Roggio was a computer technician living in New Jersey...

Finally, some good may come from the Valerie Plame kerfuffle -- if President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez have the stones to do what's right. A grave crime was exposed Dec. 16th when New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau published a story revealing President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to listen in on conversations between al Qaida suspects abroad and people in the United States without first obtaining a warrant. "We're seeing clearly now that (President) Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator," wrote Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. But the scandal was...

The first person to vote in Babylon in the Iraqi parliamentary election was 65-year-old Jasim Hameed, who is wheelchair-bound. "I'm here at this early hour because I want to challenge the terrorists who want to kill the democratic process in Iraq and I want to encourage the healthy people to vote," Mr. Hameed said. Because Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, threatened to kill those who cast ballots, Mr. Hamid was risking his life. In a communique issued on election eve, Zarqawi vowed to "ruin the democratic wedding of heresy and immorality." The threats were not...

On Aug. 2, Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post reported that "a major U.S. intelligence review has projected that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years." On Dec. 5, the Jerusalem Post reported that Mohammed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, "confirmed Israel's assessment that Iran is only a few months away from creating an atomic bomb. My, how time flies. It hasn't seemed as if 10 years have elapsed since last summer.

In his speech at the Naval Academy Wednesday outlining U.S. strategy in Iraq, President Bush paid tribute to Marine Cpl. Jeffrey Starr, killed in a fire fight in Ramadi on April 30. He was 22, on his third tour in Iraq. A letter to his girlfriend was found on Cpl. Starr's laptop computer: "If you're reading this, then I've died in Iraq," Cpl. Starr wrote. "I don't regret going. Everybody dies but a few get to do it for something as important as freedom. "It may seem confusing why we're in Iraq; it's not to me. I'm here helping these...

In his speech at the Naval Academy Wednesday outlining U.S. strategy in Iraq, President Bush paid tribute to Marine Corporal Jeffrey Starr, killed in a fire fight in Ar Ramadi April 30th. He was 22, on his third tour in Iraq. A letter to his girlfriend was found on Starr's laptop computer: "If you're reading this, then I've died in Iraq," Cpl. Starr wrote. "I don't regret going. Everybody dies but a few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we're in Iraq; it's not to me. I'm here helping these people...