Free Republic

As you may know, Jeb Bush made some comments recently that suggested that Republicans needed to stop being nostalgic about the past (ie, Ronald Reagan) and move forward. This teed off many conservatives, who believe that our party's failures are the direct result of ignoring everything that Reagan stood for. I couldn't agree more. Yet, Bush has had his defenders the past couple days, who say that he meant no such thing. Mike Devine is having none of this talk, and rips that idea to pieces. You can (and should) read it here. Jeb says of the 2008 campaign: "I...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has had a bad week. Caught between her own involvement in the CIA interrogations now condemned as torture and her party’s inquisitions, Pelosi floundered. Her fear and frustration have apparently given way to panic after word reached her of the CIA’s reaction to the damage she, President Obama and other Democrats have done to the spy agency in the last three months. Pelosi -- as I wrote earlier in the week -- was one of the few members of Congress briefed in detail on the harsh interrogation methods and who could have stopped them but didn’t....

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- then the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence -- was briefed on CIA interrogation techniques including waterboarding when they were begun in 2002. She was among the “Big Eight” present at the briefings -- the Senate and House leaders and chairmen and ranking members on both intelligence committees. Condemning the disclosure of the Justice Department legal opinions that detail the interrogation methods and the reasons they were legal at the time, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mi) wrote in the Wall Street Journal that, “It was not necessary to release details of the...

Mark Sanford doesn’t want his state to be tangled up in the strings attached to the money President Obama’s so-called “stimulus” bill is bringing to his state. His objections are grounded in conservative principle, so it’s natural that the Washington Post is attacking him. The problem -- as Sanford explained in my interview with him last week -- is that a large portion of the “stimulus” money requires increases in state payments such as unemployment benefits, and those increases have to continue even after the initial federal funding runs out. In state terms, this “annualizes” -- i.e., permanently grafts onto...

If President Obama achieves his agenda, his successor will not be president of the same nation Obama inherited. Like Madame Defarge in Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”, Obama is a revolutionary, slowly knitting together his plans to change America into something it has never been, to overthrow our economic system and weaken our defenses. Monsieur Obama envisions a new America: a European welfare state, its government the overseer of every phase of domestic life, unwilling and unable to defend its allies and interests abroad. Let’s hear no more about “partisan warfare,” about how Republicans are the “party of ‘no’,”...

Obama’s Failing Leadershipby Jed Babbin (more by this author) Posted 02/23/2009 ET President Obama has invited Republican leaders to the White House today for an “economic summit.” But it won’t be a “summit” at all: Obama plans to lay out his ideas for huge tax increases, massive reductions in defense spending -- including in Iraq and possibly Afghanistan -- and won’t seek Republican input to change his agenda. Obama’s leadership failed its first two important tests, and is about to fail again. Last October, then running mate Joe Biden prophesied that Obama would be tested by a foreign crisis...

Contact: Gregg Jackson, www.greggjackson.com; John Haskins, 818-397-7714 MEDIA ADVISORY, Jan. 27 /Christian Newswire/ -- Radio host and bestselling author Gregg Jackson and a growing list of other conservative leaders, lawyers and activists are calling on Eagle Publishing to dismiss editor Jed Babbin and take immediate and decisive steps to restore the credibility of Human Events. Among the names widely known in social conservative and pro-life circles are Dr. Ted Baehr, President of Movieguide; Ambassador Alan Keyes, former Reagan appointee and presidential candidate; Dr. William Greene of RightMarch.com; Coach Dave Daubenmire, talk show host and author; and Brian Rohrbough, President of...

President Obama’s new executive orders on closing the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and limiting the permissible methods for interrogating terrorist detainees are the legal equivalent of a running back’s head fake: they mislead, and only the runner’s next move reveals his intent. So far, the White House's intentions aren't clear. One member who attended the pre-release White House briefing on the executive orders characterized the orders as confusing. On the closing of the Guantanamo Bay facility, he said the White House was more confused than the members being briefed.

Has ever a president begun his administration with more fanfare and anticipation? If you listen to the media, Obama’s inauguration is the crowning of the new Sun King. Parties abound and, according to one news report, the beautiful people prepping for the inaugural have caused a run on Botox in the Washington area. Obama’s economic stimulus apparently begins unofficially with his inaugural festivities today which will reportedly cost about $170 million. The Washington, DC party catering industry will surely survive. Barack Obama takes the oath of office with a soaring approval rating -- according to the RealClearPolitics average -- of...

Sen. John McCain (?-Ariz.), joining with liberal Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), issued a report last week on the abuse of terrorist detainees. The report accuses former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Defense Department General Counsel Jim Haynes, and David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, of causing the torture of terrorist detainees. But the report is a clumsy calumny, contradicting the factual conclusions of earlier, far more credible investigations. Predictably, it was enough for the New York Times to call for the appointment of a prosecutor to consider criminal charges against Rumsfeld and the others....

President Bush is now as bankrupt politically as GM is financially. He spent the last week lobbying Senate Republicans to bail out GM, Chrysler and Ford and succeeded only in alienating the people he needed most. Among the senators and Republican staff I spoke to, none agreed with the president and most resented the White House’s strong-arm tactics.

The most liberal U.S. Senator, Barack Obama of Illinois, won a huge victory yesterday over John McCain. It wasn’t over until 11 pm when Obama went over the minimum 270 electoral votes by winning California, but the early results -- Pennsylvania going for Obama at 8:30 pm EST and Ohio an hour later -- were really all that Obama needed to win to make it impossible for McCain to eke out a narrow victory. Pennsylvania -- along with Florida, Ohio, and Virginia were crucial to McCain’s chances. No Republican ever won the White House without winning Ohio, and John McCain...

Black Dog Republicans by Jed Babbin 10/23/2008 Print This We’ve always had Yellow Dog Democrats from the South and some of Pelosi's puppies say they're Blue Dog Democrats. But now we have Black Dog Republicans. Their constant companions are depression and melancholy, the moods that often descended on Winston Churchill. He labeled them his “black dog.” There are two reasons the Black Dog Republicans fell prey to a depression equal to Churchill's. First is the constant chatter of the media, the Republican elite, and the Cassandra Republicans who are just as sure that John McCain will lose the election as...

Oopsby Jed Babbin (more by this author) Posted 10/13/2008 ET Panic on Wall Street -- and in every foreign financial market -- was supposed to be calmed by the Bush/Paulson $700 billion bailout of the financial industry.  Confidence among investors and bankers would be restored, we were told, if only this huge chunk of our free market were nationalized.   That was two weeks ago, and over the principled objections we and many House conservatives (and a few in the Senate) posed, the bailout passed.   Secretary Paulson appointed a gent fortuitously named Kashkari to restore the credit market, though...

Barack Obama bumped into something hard on Saturday night. The nuanced naif of Illinois preceded -- in Paris Hilton’s wonderful snark -- the “wrinkly white-haired dude” in Pastor Rick Warren’s civility summit and came up very short. You can judge how well McCain did by the minimalist coverage in the media. The highlights reported here were virtually ignored in the Sunday papers. McCain has never been better. His self deprecation, his humor, and his life story turned the back-to-back interviews into a conclusive demonstration that he is ready for the presidency and Obama isn’t. Continued -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sponsored Links: Amazing Japanese...

Barack Obama bumped into something hard on Saturday night. The nuanced naif of Illinois preceded -- in Paris Hilton’s wonderful snark -- the “wrinkly white-haired dude” in Pastor Rick Warren’s civility summit and came up very short. You can judge how well McCain did by the minimalist coverage in the media. The highlights reported here were virtually ignored in the Sunday papers. McCain has never been better. His self deprecation, his humor, and his life story turned the back-to-back interviews into a conclusive demonstration that he is ready for the presidency and Obama isn’t. McCain was energized, comfortable and quietly...

On Today’s Show... If you have the means, please donate: Center for Health Transformation (Attn:The Tony Snow Family Trust) 1425 K Street, NW, Suite 450, Washington, DC 20005 Jed Babbin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for President George H. W. Bush and editor of Human Events, filled in Thursday while Rush attended Tony Snow's funeral. » Visit Jed Babbin's Stack of Stuff at RushLimbaugh.com, and Jed's Latest Columns» Note: HumanEvents.com will be honoring Rush the week of July 28th. Check it out!Senate Minority Leader, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) joined Jed Babbin to discuss the Gas Price Reduction Act of 2008,...

Today and on Friday, Rush will not be seated in the prestigious Attila-the-Hun chair at the Limbaugh Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies. He will be away from the golden EIB microphone to attend the funeral of the late, great Tony Snow. Jed Babbin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for George H. W. Bush and editor of Human Events (which publishes Pat Buchanan's nonsense), will host today. Mark Davis will host on Friday.

Too Big, Too Heavy by Jed Babbin, Human Events Posted: 03/24/2008 The mission of the US Air Force is to fly and to fight. Everyone in the Air Force’s job falls into one of three categories: to do the flying and fighting, to command those who do, or to support them. Part of supporting the warriors is to buy the best aircraft to accomplish the mission at lowest risk. Which is why the Air Force’s decision to buy urgently-needed tanker aircraft from the Northrop Grumman – EADS consortium must be reversed. That decision -- announced on February 29 -- could...

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s petition to Congress demanding the removal of government obstacles to increasing our energy supplies is gathering momentum by the minute, while the Democrats’ do-nothing Congress wants to raise fuel prices. Actually, labeling Congress a bunch of “do-nothings” is almost right, but not quite. They’re doing their best to create more obstacles to growing our energy supply. And while the price of energy is already unreasonably high, they’re working hard on a liberal agenda that will raise the prices consumers pay for gasoline, diesel fuel, natural gas and home heating oil. With the summer upon us (and...