Free Republic

Per Drudge

Turns out Harry Reid was only joking when he told a media exec last week that he hoped the biggest paper in his state would “go out of business.” Over the weekend, Sherman Frederick, a columnist with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, reported that Reid made the comment to another higher-up at the 175,000-circulation daily during a Chamber of Commerce event last Wednesday. “Such behavior cannot go unchallenged,” wrote Frederick, CEO of the paper’s parent company. After 24 hours of silence on the comment, a Reid spokesman got back to POLITICO on Monday to say it was all a misunderstanding blown...

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Winnie the Pooh share a dubious honor: Anyone who depicts either of them with a swastika can be punished under the law. The Justice Ministry published the latest — and biggest — update to its list of extremist materials on its web site this week, and many of the 414 new entries are so vague or controversial that analysts say they threaten to discredit the list all together. The list is important because police officers and other law enforcement officials use it in street checks, apartment searches and criminal cases. Among the new entries, extremist...

Obama-Man, Obama-Man, does whatever a spider can. Marvel Comics says it plans to print a second and third round of its latest "Spider-Man" comic book after the issue, which features President-elect Barack Obama, sold out in record numbers Wednesday -- just hours after hitting stands. The company expects it to be the industry's best-selling comic in over a decade.

Once among the most frightening epithets in American political culture, "socialized medicine" seems to have lost its juju. Today that phrase sounds awfully dated, like a song on a gramophone or a mother-in-law joke or a John Birch Society rant against fluoridated water. Yet despite that antique quality, the old buzzwords appear regularly in columns, press releases and speeches. Rudolph Giuliani, Mitt Romney and the rest of the Republican presidential pack run around squawking about socialism whenever anyone proposes health care reform. Syndicated columnist Robert Novak warns that the federally financed, state-run Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is essentially a...