Free Republic

Meia Bias: President George W. Bush has issued a full-throated defense of the media's role in modern society. He's being way too generous. "I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy. … Power can be very addictive," Bush said in remarks on NBC's "Today." "We need an independent media to hold people like me to account," he said. Yes, we agree wholeheartedly. But he seemed to imply today's media were fulfilling that role. They aren't. And there's no better example than Bush's own two terms in office. While we deeply admire the former president for not holding a grudge,...

Three influential leaders in the conservative movement have summoned other top conservatives for a closed-door meeting this Thursday in Washington D.C. to talk about how to stop Donald Trump and, should he become the Republican nominee, how to run a third-party “true conservative” challenger in the fall. The organizers of the meeting include Bill Wichterman, who was President George W. Bush’s liaison to the conservative movement, Bob Fischer, a South Dakota businessman and longtime conservative convener, and Erick Erickson, the outspoken Trump opponent and conservative activist who founded RedState.com. "Please join other conservative leaders to strategize how to defeat Donald...

Parents Fleeing San Francisco - City, Media in Denial About Whyby Sheri Urban The S.F. Chronicle is reporting that San Francisco is losing families in droves and blames crowded schools, and lack of housing. Despite San Francisco officials' efforts to keep families in the city, the percentage of children among the city's total population continues to decline....Just 13.4 percent of the city's 805,235 residents are younger than 18, one of the smallest percentages of any city in the country. The school district has lost almost 7,000 kids over the past decade, down in 2010 to 53,033. Why is it that...

Creators Syndicate – George W. Bush must have been the despair of the history department of every school his daddy managed to get him into. Consider his latest excursion into the history of the republic, at Southern Methodist, where the Great Man's papers are to be housed.

The Interior Department reversed a Bush-era policy on wilderness on Thursday, restoring the authority of its Bureau of Land Management to identify and recommend new areas for protection. Green Since 2003, the department has excluded wilderness as a criterion it applies in managing federal lands for the public benefit. “The new Wild Lands policy affirms the B.L.M.’s authorities under the law — and our responsibility to the American people — to protect the wilderness characteristics of the lands we oversee,” the bureau’s director, Bob Abbey, said in a statement. Environmentalists welcomed the decision but questioned why it had taken nearly...

Senate Republicans on Saturday voted against extending the Bush tax cuts to only the middle class in a pair of votes Democrats are seizing to paint the GOP as guardians of the rich. The Senate voted 53-36 to extend all expiring tax cuts on individuals with incomes of less than $200,000 a year and married couples making less than $250,000 -- seven shy of the required 60 to advance. The other proposal, which drew opposition from White House officials, would have renewed them for all tax filers with incomes of $1 million or less. That also failed in a 53-36...

President Obama and his leftist pals ought to start taking responsibility for the shortcomings of their extreme ideology. The left’s knee-jerk reaction: Blame former President George W. Bush for anything that goes wrong, seems to have no bounds. Bush has been saddled with everything from a bad economy to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Continues... To stem the Gulf oil gusher and clean up the mess, Obama has been mustering all the incompetence his entire administration could manage under the circumstances. His biggest achievement thus far is watching this drag out for over a month before realizing...

Jeb Bush is finally endorsing in the big GOP primary, but it's not the primary we've been waiting for. Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) reelection campaign announced Wednesday that Bush will back him over former Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.). We'll continue to wait and see whether Bush feels the need to weigh into the GOP primary in his home state. At this point, though, he'd really just be piling on by endorsing Marco Rubio over Charlie Crist. Here's Bush's statement: "As we continue to face tough challenges both at home and abroad, America needs leaders like Senator John McCain in the...

If vindication means anything its name is spelled George Bush. As former U.S. president George W. Bush spoke to a Saskatoon audience, I stood in the wings, sneaking a peek through the curtains at the spectators beyond the footlights. The crowd was friendly to be sure. But more than that, the relationship was like a musical virtuoso carrying the audience through every nuance, crescendo and dynamic of a composition. With every pause, smile, laugh and down stroke of seriousness, Bush had the crowd in his hand. Before the show, a friend who recently dined with the former Texas governor and...

Excuse me, Jeb Bush, but your daddy and brother already helped push the Republican Party beyond “the good old days” of its Reagan legacy, and we all see how well that’s been working for the GOP since 2006, don’t we. And excuse me, Gen. Colin Powell, but which election did you win because “Americans are looking for more government in their lives, not less …”? Forgive me if I seem a bit cranky here, but, being a card-carrying Reaganaut since 1964, it’s hard not to be whenever the national media lectures the GOP on how to regain voters’ trust. Inevitably,...

Monica Ramos and Patty Compean still have hope. It is the slim hope that President Bush will, in his administration's final hours, commute the sentences of their husbands. Ignacio "Nacho" Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean, two former Border Patrol agents, were sentenced to 11 and 12 years in prison, respectively, in October 2006 in the nonfatal shooting of a now-convicted Mexican drug smuggler. They have been in federal prison since January 2007. The convictions of the two men led to an outcry across the nation, and nearly a half-million signatures were collected for a presidential pardon. The notoriety of the...

President Bush has extensively discussed his immigration reform policy in exit interviews and given a $60,000 bonus to a Border Patrol chief who has been criticized for not supporting Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean – but he refuses to talk about whether pardons could be in store for the imprisoned agents. In a Jan. 6 interview with John Gizzi, political editor of Human Events, Bush said he regrets that the comprehensive immigration bill he endorsed did not prevail. "Well, I'm sorry it didn't pass, because I felt strongly that the comprehensive approach to immigration reform was necessary for border enforcement,...

Nineteen months after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared the war in Iraq "lost" and just nine months after Speaker Nancy Pelosi asserted the war has been a "failure" because it had not brought political change leading to reconciliation, it can now be said conclusively that both were wrong. One of the great military reversals in history is close to achieving victory. That is contributing to stability in Iraq, along with reconciliation between warring factions. These conclusions are contained in a report compiled by retired General Barry R. McCaffrey after a recent visit to Iraq during which he consulted with...

As I noted in a post during the Republican convention in September, there was something fishy about the Republicans' use of the slogan "Country First" in the recent campaign. Why not "America First?" We got the answer the other day when the Bush administration continued its attack on the two U.S. Border Patrol agents who were sentenced to long jail terms for shooting and wounding a drug smuggler. The Bush Justice Department continued to go after the men this week and succeeded in an effort to prevent any significant reduction in the sentences of former agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose...

A former Border Patrol agent's lengthy sentence for shooting a fleeing drug smuggler had been described as extreme by his supporters, but a federal judge showed no mercy Wednesday at the former agent's resentencing hearing in El Paso, Texas. The judge upheld Jose Alonso Compean's original punishment and resentenced him to 10 years in prison for his conviction on a charge of using a weapon in the commission of a felony and another two years in prison for assault and other charges, the U.S. Attorney's Office said. Compean's attorneys plan to turn to the Supreme Court for a review of...

ABC-TV decides not to air Bush's news conference... Developing... (not a whole lot right now.)

Three Afghanis were arrested Wednesday at an international airport in India’s Kerala state for flying with forged Mexican passports. They had just arrived there from Kuwait, where officials examined the passports identifying them as “Antonio Lopez Juan,” “Javier Sanchez Alberto,” and “Atonio Lopez Ernesto,” and found that they didn’t understand any Spanish. Maybe they were also suspicious of these inept attempts to ape Spanish names. “Antonio,” “Javier,” and “Atonio” insisted they were trying to get to France, but given their newly-minted Mexican identities, that seems about as likely as the possibility that Hillary Clinton will cede the Democratic nomination gracefully...

WASHINGTON – In her first public statements on the Mexican trucking controversy, U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters defended yesterday the pilot program that allows Mexican trucks to travel throughout the United States in defiance of a congressional order. U.S. officials also responded to complaints that a Mexican carrier that withdrew from the program several days ago never should have qualified because of an allegedly poor safety record. Peters got an earful of criticism from several lawmakers during a House appropriations transportation subcommittee hearing on President Bush's proposed budget. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, accused Peters of being in violation of the...

Bush is going down in the polls...