Free Republic

In drama – and in real life as well - players and events thrown together in improbable circumstances cause surprising or unanticipated outcomes ("situational irony"). When the drama is played out in Washington, D.C., there is always a Greek chorus of hypocrites who loudly criticize the players for infractions of which they, too, are guilty.With this in mind, isn’t it ironic that:† During the course ofan investigation to determine who identified Valerie Plame as a CIA employee, Richard Armitage - who admitted being the leaker - has not been indicted or prosecuted?† Rather than shutting down the investigation after the...

According to the BBC, eight people arrested in connection with failed car bombings in Glasgow and London are linked to the National Health Service (NHS), and seven of them are believed to be doctors or medical students; one used to be a lab tech.Which is how a medical syringe came to be used as part of the firing mechanism (ABC News reports that the car bomb outside the front door of London’s Tiger Tiger nightclub failed because the syringe caused a malfunction).Why are Muslim doctors flocking to England to work in the NHS? The Daily Telegraph (London) explains: [C]areers in...

New elected French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been a jogger for years. But for some reason, his fitness regimen - not to mention the NYPD T-shirt he often sports - has got people’s shorts in a knot on both sides of the English Channel, reports The Washington Post.Left-wing newspaper Libération calls Sarkozy’s choice of exercise "an un-French, right-wing conspiracy." For his part, Sarko says, "Of course it is right-wing … The very act of forcing yourself to go for a run, every morning, is a highly conservative business. There is the mental effort needed to overcome your laziness."But jogging is...

It’s been a month since James Taranto and his wannabe pundit joined together in Best of the Web Today (BOTWT) to gangbang Harvard University terrorism expert Jessica Stern with erroneous accounts in the New York Sun and BOTWT about her remarks on religious extremism at a conference organized by security think tank EastWest institute.As of yet, Taranto has not seen fit to:† Correct the shoddy reporting he cited from , on which his shoddy analysis was based;† Disclose* to BOTWT and OpinionJournal readers why he did not verify the facts in the Sun article himself, instead of relying upon the...

Nabi Sensoy, Turkey's ambassador to Washington, is complaining that Kurdish guerillas staging cross-border attacks into Turkey from Northern Iraq are armed with American weapons that were supplied to the Iraqi army. Sensoy also accused the U.S. of not applying enough pressure on Kurds in the Iraqi government to rein in the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been fighting for an independent Kurdistan since the 1980s.Turkish officials are promising retaliatory military strikes against the PKK in Iraq, which will further destabilize the country. Turkey's military chief, Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, is prodding the government to set political guidelines for an incursion...

King County Elections Director Sherril Huff has removed Duncan M. MacDonald, from the voter rolls. No, he is not a felon or been declared "non compos mentis" (second item). He is a Canine American. Jane Balogh, 66, had registered her dog to vote in April 2006 to protest a state voter-registration law passed the previous year that she contends makes it too easy for noncitizens to vote because the ID requirements are extremely lax.How lax are they? They are so lax that Balogh put her phone bill in Duncan's name, then used it as ID to register him as a...

Religious organizations are raising an unholy ruckus over proposed changes in religious worker visa regulations that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says would reduce rampant fraud in the program, reports The Washington Post: [R]eligious organizations that increasingly serve immigrant populations cite a need to bring in workers with the spiritual, cultural and linguistic expertise to serve them.Religious worker visas are used to bring in Catholic nuns, Hebrew teachers, Muslim imams and Baptist church administrators, among other workers. In 2006, more than 11,000 of the visas were issued, most to natives of Korea, Israel and India.Religious organizations say no other...

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-MA) called Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney a flip-flopper, telling the Boston Herald that, "He’s changed on abortion, he’s changed on gay rights and he’s changed on marriage. He’s changed on guns and he’s changed on the war. That’s pretty significant. I think people are asking the question out there, ‘Who is he, really?’ "Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom countered, "John Kerry is projecting his own undesirable traits onto other people. It’s a mild form of personality disorder. Usually, it’s not a cause for concern unless it shows up in a U.S. senator."Nyah nyah, na nyah nyah....

Elizabeth Edwards is dying and knows it. No one who has not battled a dread disease, only to see it recur with a vengeance, can know her emotional state or should presume to judge how she chooses to live the unknowable - but finite - number of days she has left.The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) describes how she’s been spending her "nights and days": Mrs. Edwards's world these days is jam-packed with incongruous experiences. In public, she says she's continuing to campaign for her husband's presidential bid because she doesn't want to let cancer win before it kills her....

The Washington Post reports on a federal lawsuit seeking to clarify a Clinton Administration animal cruelty law. At issue: Whether online transmissions of cockfights from countries where the "sport" is legal can be sold to viewers in the U.S.: One evening last week, two roosters in a ring surrounded by cheering spectators pecked and clawed one another in a fight to the death. With each lunge, feathers flew, then floated to the ground. Finally, one bloodied bird, its eyes plucked out, lurched and faltered."Red is blinded," shouted the announcer. "Red goes down. ... Now he's really hurt. ... A tremendous...

Reporting on the fatalism – or aplomb, depending on your point of view - of New Yorkers in the vicinity of last week’s steam pipe explosion near Grand Central Station, The Washington Post offers this vignette: Malcolm Pollack … heard the blast and thought it sounded like Zeus had declared war on the planet. On the street he comforted a woman who was crying and who kept sobbing "I hate it, I hate it.""You hate what?" Pollack asked."I hate … Muslims," she finally burst out."You mean, you hate yourself for hating Muslims," he said."That's right," she said.Pollack recalled that jump...

On the one hand, the Bush administration can cite numerous instances of Saudi Arabia sabotaging our success in prosecuting the Iraq war and leaving behind an orderly, functioning society, including: Undermining prime minister Nuri al-Maliki by giving financial assistance to his political opponents, as well as to Sunni tribes; waging a months-long campaign to recruit other Persian Gulf countries to give financial aid to Sunni tribal groups; and looking the other way as some 60 to 80 foreign insurgents from Saudi Arabia enter the fray in Iraq each month.On the other hand, the Bush administration plans to reward the duplicitous...

Last week’s elections in Turkey prompted New York Sun contributing editor Hillel Halkin to recall an article he wrote for the Forward a dozen years ago about evidence he uncovered that Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, was half Jewish (his father being Doenmeh): Who but a member of a religious minority would want so badly to eliminate religion from the identity of a Muslim majority that, after the genocide of Turkey's Christian Armenians in World War I and the expulsion of nearly all of its Christian Greeks in the early 1920s, was 99% of Turkey's population? … Halkin...

The Stiletto doesn’t understand how anyone ever got away with the dodge, "Not tonight, dear, I have a headache," considering that nookie is better than naproxen at curing a throbbing head. It’s a scientific fact.Two psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin catalogued 237 reasons people have sex, based on a survey of 2,000 people and "to get rid of a headache" is No. 173 on the list, reports New York Times columnist John Tierney.Researchers, Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, who published the list in the August issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, organized the reasons into...

Are some people simply too stupid, uninformed or mentally incompetent (second item) to vote? Though the very idea seems "un-American," Jonah Goldberg, suggests that "[m]aybe the people who don't know the first thing about how our system works aren't the folks who should be driving our politics, just as people who don't know how to drive shouldn't have a driver's license." Goldberg notes: A very high percentage of the U.S. electorate isn't very well qualified to vote, if by "qualified" you mean having a basic understanding of our government, its functions and its challenges. Almost half of the American public...

A study by the Coma Science Group of the University of Liège, Belgium, finds that up to half of patients in an acute vegetative state regain some level of consciousness.In the study, which analyzed data collected over a five-year period, researchers assessed and classified comatose patients according to the Coma Recovery Scale. The researchers determined that some 40 percent had been incorrectly diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state, when they were in fact in a minimally conscious state. And 10 percent of those diagnosed as being minimally conscious were communicating functionally.A patient who is minimally conscious shows periodic...

The fallout from Armenian Genocide denier James Taranto’s July 26th column, "It Didn’t Happen," continues over these charges of countenancing genocide against Barack Obama and of genocide denial against John Kerry: Barack Obama's latest pronouncement on Iraq should have shocked the conscience. In an interview with the Associated Press last week, the freshman Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate opined that even preventing genocide is not a sufficient reason to keep American troops in Iraq. …One may take the position that genocide would not be the likely result of an American retreat from Iraq. That is the view of Mr....

Google News announced an "experimental" feature that will revolutionize Journalism As We Know It: Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we'll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as "comments" so readers know it's the individual's perspective, rather than part of a journalist's report.[W]e're hoping that by adding this feature, we can help enhance the news experience for readers, testing the hypothesis that - whether they're penguin researchers or presidential candidates - a personal view can sometimes...

Two unidentified men tossed a soda bottle filled with acid at the Albanian American Islamic Center of Arizona, a Phoenix area mosque. The bottle broke 20-25 feet away from imam Didmar Faja and another man; neither was injured.Faja is one of six "Flying imams" who filed a discrimination suit against US Airways for kicking them off a Minneapolis to Phoenix flight last November after crewmembers and passengers became alarmed at what they perceived to be terroristic behavior.Predictably, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is claiming that the imams and their attorney received death threats, and pressured Glendale police to treat...

In the wake of the execution-style murders of three promising students – a fourth is fighting for her life in the ICU - Newark mayor Cory Booker tells New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, "There is something going on in our country that people are not, for some reason, awake to." Herbert asks what the solution is to this problem – violent crime – and Booker answers, "It’s not law enforcement."Herbert notes, "the biggest mistake one could make … is to view it as a problem peculiar to Newark." As usual, his focus is so narrow (gun violence) he fails...