Free Republic

In many ways, Newt is the perfect man. He knows how to buy good jewelry. He puts his wife ahead of his campaign. He’s so in touch with his feelings that he would rather close the entire federal government than keep his emotions bottled up. He’s confident enough to include a steamy sex scene in a novel. He understands that Paul Revere was warning about the British. Mitt Romney is a phony with gobs of hair gel. Newt Gingrich is a phony with gobs of historical grandiosity. The 68-year-old has compared himself to Charles de Gaulle. He has noted nonchalantly:...

Woe to you, oh modern card-carrying homophobe. For it can't be easy to be you right now, what with all the terrifying changes taking place, all the dramatic sexual upheavals and flagrant displays of "unnatural" love being hurled like exotic sushi in your plain hamburger face these days. Oh, you poor dear. I see you there, glumly sipping your Starbucks gingerbread latte while Googling Swedish fetish porn in between checking the latest news on NASCAR.com in your lightly stained Dockers and beat-up Nikes, Cartoon Network blaring in the background, tattered copy of Shooters Monthly on the bedside. I see you...

...it's becoming ever more apparent that real power within the GOP rests with the ranting talk-show hosts. ...Suddenly, the takeover of the Republican Party by right-wing extremists has become a story (although many reporters seem determined to pretend that something equivalent is happening to the Democrats. It isn't.)... The right's answer, of course, is that it's about outrage over President Barack Obama's “socialist” policies — like his health care plan, which is, um, more or less identical to the plan Mitt Romney enacted... Many on the left argue... that it's about race, the shock of having a black man in...

The Democratic Party got a resounding wake-up call from the voters of Massachusetts on Tuesday. But it's long been clear that 2010 would be a challenging election year for our party. With few exceptions, the first off-year election in a new president's term has led to big gains for the minority party -- this was true for Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. After two election cycles in which Democrats won most of the close races and almost all of the big ones, Democrats have much more fragile turf to defend this year than usual. Add to...

I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested in the e-mails recently stolen from a climate research unit at a British university. But the messages do not undermine the scientific case that human-caused climate change is real. The hacked e-mails have been mined for words and phrases that can be distorted to misrepresent what the scientists were discussing. In a Dec. 9 op-ed, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin argued that "The e-mails reveal that leading climate 'experts' . . . manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures." Yet the e-mail she cites was written...

Nothing to fear—yet Gene Lyons Nobody should be surprised to see the nation’s esteemed celebrity news media align with FOX News against the White House, although even a cynical observer like me found the unanimity mildly shocking. Don’t they remember what journalism was supposed to be? Supposedly, the press regulates its own behavior. In reality, that’s been a joke for two decades. “Claiming the moral authority of a code of professional ethics it idealizes in the abstract but repudiates in practice,” I wrote in 2003, “today’s Washington press corps has grown as decadent and self-protective as any politician or interest...

My guess is that she really doesn't know what she wants, or who she really is. It's probably dangerous to admit to a moment of empathy. I'll either get disqualified from ever becoming being a Supreme Court justice or asked to turn in my press card. But after watching reruns of Gov. Sarah Palin's resignation from the governorship, after hearing every grammatically challenged sentence and inconsistent paragraph dissected by some talk show host, I started to (blush) feel her pain. There was the frozen smile, the vulnerability, the odd grab bag of unfiltered, unedited, unintelligible un-reasons scattered across the lawn....

The Final Frontier I dreamed that Spock saved our planet, The Daily Planet of journalism. Instead of swooping in to figure out the dimensionality and logarithms to rescue the world from red matter, as Spock does in J. J. Abrams’s dazzling new “Star Trek,” I imagined Spock rescuing read matter for the world. Newspapers are an “endangered species,” as John Kerry called us in a Senate hearing last week, just as the Vulcans are in the new prequel. I know Barack Spock likes newspapers. An aide told me during the campaign that Mr. Obama would get cranky if he didn’t...

<p>Mark Morford: Is Obama an enlightened being?</p> <p>Spiritual wise ones say: This sure ain't no ordinary politician. You buying it?</p> <p>I find I'm having this discussion, this weird little debate, more and more, with colleagues, with readers, with liberals and moderates and miserable, deeply depressed Republicans and spiritually amped persons of all shapes and stripes and I'm having it in particular with those who seem confused, angry, unsure, thoroughly nonplussed, as they all ask me the same thing: What the hell's the big deal about Obama?</p>

You think a $100K salary is a lot? $500K? Please. The truly wealthy scoff at your paltry breadcrumbs. Then it came to pass that I stumbled across this story from Forbes magazine, which is officially called "Forbes" but is actually called "Forbes oh my God we worship ruthless CEOs like shiny meth in the summertime," and among the glittering ads for luxury intergalactic travel and sleek private jets and $50K Rolexes and big phallic yachts and surreal 20-page ad inserts for Abu Dhabi megadevelopments, there was an article about the new home being built in Mumbai right now for Mukesh...

Who, pray who, is still sucked in by grotesque fast-food ads? Shouldn't there be a law? I admit scattershot naivete. I admit to a strain of blind optimism, a sort of sporadic myopia, a weirdly sanguine tunnel vision that makes me somehow think that we as a species and a culture and as a mad gaggle of individual human souls who are coupled with functioning hunks of semi-rational gray matter, we must, at least occasionally, be learning something, ever-so-slightly advancing our awareness of those things on this planet that want to harm us and sicken us and even kill us,...

How horrifying is it when Bush's unwinnable disaster becomes so dreary and forgettable? I think it was Keith Olbermann who said it first, who said yes wow that Virginia Tech shooting rampage was horrible and shocking and brutal and oh my God we lost a lot of really good, honest American kids and Something Should Be Done. And maybe let's start with the wide-eyed gun-rights maniacs and the conservative pseudo-cowboys and those twitchy Second Amendment paranoids who somehow still think that we all must cling to our nasty little Glocks 'cuz gosh, what might happen if our own government turns...

It's bad form to speak ill of the dead. Good thing this man's own vile words speak for themselves - You can eulogize. You can mourn and ponder and do a lengthy retrospective, a political analysis, a sociocultural examination of a career and a legacy and a rather remarkable life. When remembering the dead, the journalistic options are legion. But in the case of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, the grandfather of the fundamentalist religious right and the foremost champion of the creation of a brutally homophobic, mysogynistic Christian theocracy in America, perhaps it's better to let the man's most...

BARACK OBAMA looked as if he needed a smoke and he needed it bad. Everyone knows you're not supposed to make two big changes at once. But Michelle Obama's price for letting her husband run was that he quit. So there he was, trying to meet the deep, inexhaustible needs of both Iowa activists and the global press behemoth on his first swing across the state, while giving up cigarettes. He was a tad testy. Traipsing around desolate stretches of snowy — and extremely white — Iowa to go into living rooms and high school gyms and take questions like...

The Defiant Ones came striding from the Pentagon yesterday, the troika of warriors marching abreast in their dark suits and power ties.W, Rummy and Dick Cheney were so full of quick draw confidence that they might have been sauntering down the main drag of Deadwood.Far from being run out of town, the defense czar has been on a victory lap in Baghdad, Mosul and Washington. Yesterday's tribute had full military honors, a color guard, a 19 gun salute, and Old Guard performance in Revolutionary War costumes, & John Phillip Souza music. Even Joyce Rumsfeld got a Distinguished Public Service Medal...

Maureen Dowd: Good gracious - It's the truth Staff Report Article Launched:12/06/2006 10:16:33 PM PST FIRST, JUNIOR TOOK over the house with big plans to remodel it and make it the envy of the neighborhood. But then he played with matches and set the house on fire. So now he's frantically trying to stop the flames from torching the whole block. The Bush administration has gone from a breathless plan to change the Middle East to a breathless plan to preserve it, from democracy promotion to conflagration avoidance. That was the cold shower offered Tuesday by Robert Gates, the former...

After 9/11, Americans had responded to bellicosity, drawn to the image, as old as the Western frontier myth, of the strong father protecting the home from invaders. The macho poses and tough talk of the cowboy president were undercut when he seemed flaccid in the face of the vicious Katrina. Even former members of the administration conceded they were tired of the muscle-bound style, longing for a more maternal approach to the globe. ?We were exporting our anger and our fear, hatred for what had happened,? said former Deputy SoS Richard Armitage. He said America needed ?to turn another face...

THINGS have become so dire for the Republicans that now even Bush is distancing himself from Bush. The president is cutting and running from the president. In a momentous event at the White House on Monday, Tony Snow made a major announcement about an important new strategy for Iraq. The president will no longer stay the course on the rallying cry "stay the course." A presidency built on message discipline (Message: "Stay the course") is trying to salvage itself with some last-minute un-messaging. Of course, the administration has never really said what "the course" is, so it was never really...

"...How will we ever persuade him to give up his modeling gigs in Men’s Vogue, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair and Washington Life? How can we lure the lanky young senator from Illinois out of the glossy celebrity pages and back to gritty substance, away from Annie Leibovitz’s camera and back to Abraham Lincoln’s tradition? He may not want to come back, now that he has mastered that J.F.K. casual glamour pose in shirt sleeves and tie, suit jacket slung over his shoulder, elegant wife and pretty children accessorizing. The Washington Post’s fashion reporter, Robin Givhan, analyzed the Men’s Vogue spread,...

As I said during my most recent radio spot, "listening to my arguments rarely involves having to have bail money ready." Think about it...." Whether it's gather all-the-facts ignorant students to engage in street protests while their protester-professors are usually curiously absent, liberals use kids to perpetuate their causes, just daring the authorities to do their jobs. If the kids get busted, it's considered a necessary evil, as more kids come along to fill any voids. Thus we now have (again) Cindy Sheehan in her latest quest for attention and relevance -- goading kids who've fully digested the anti-war diatribe...