Free Republic

Senate Leader [Kate O'Beirne] A veteran Senate aide reminded me that the essential function/core responsibility of a Senate majority or minority leader is to represent his party on procedural issues. This responsibility doesn't rest with other members of the party's Senate leadership. Speaking for his party on procedural issues defines the job of a Senate leader. A majority of Republican senators voted against cloture and Senator McConnell voted on the other side. Apparently, that's unprecedented.

The Senate immigration bill now being resurrected is long on promises and short on actual reforms. Outside of providing amnesty to an estimated 12 million aliens living in the United States illegally, the bill contains little substance. No guarantee for control of our borders. Insufficient fraudulent document protections. No real protections against alien gangs and criminals. And no fixes for our broken visa system. In other words, it is a huge step in the wrong direction, a bill that would reward 12 million lawbreakers and only serve to weaken the security of our nation. To counter this misguided bill, Representative...

June 19, 2007 -- MICHAEL Moore’s latest documentary, “Sicko,” is an urgent bipartisan plea. Liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, Yankees and Red Sox can surely all agree, says Moore, that our health-care system ought to be run by Fidel Castro. The silliness of Moore’s oeuvre is so self-evident that being able to spot it is not liberal or conservative, either; it’s a basic intelligence test, like the ability to match square peg with square hole. His documentaries are political slapstick that could have been made by a third Farrelly brother or a fourth Stooge. I will pay him the...

HAUPPAUGE, N.Y. — A recent day in May began in crisis mode for Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive, over an allegation that a police crackdown on unlicensed drivers amounted to the ethnic profiling of illegal immigrants.Soon, he was preparing a response to accusations by 30 state legislators, fellow Democrats all, that his policies in this Long Island county of 1.4 million “instigate divisiveness, hatred and intolerant behavior toward immigrants.” By 2 p.m., Mr. Levy seemed relieved to turn from “the whole illegal immigration thing,” as he calls it, to a topic confined to his 631 area code: a health...

ONE of the biggest - and least discussed - problems with the immigration bill now before the Senate is the sheer impossibility of implementing it. The measure would triple the workload at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services - an agency that the Government Accountability Office says is already at the breaking point. It's an invitation not only to fraud, but to any terrorist group or criminal gang that's looking to insert minions into America. AT the center of the bill is the massive "Z visa" amnesty - whereby virtually all of the 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens...

DEPRESSING BUT enlightening: Gray don Carter in Vanity Fair for June, citing how we have entered the Age of Denial. His most interesting example is high gossip! - "Democratic steamroller Hillary Clinton is in denial over the rumored, er, friskiness of her husband, Bill. If journalists are aware of this apparent friskiness, you can be damned sure Karl Rove and the Republican intelligence machine knows about it, too . . . (Should Clinton get the nomination) . . . they can grind her campaign into the gutter with all the lurid specifics."

Injured...more to follow

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research, an independent, nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization committed to achieving a freer, more prosperous Tennessee through free market policy solutions, issued a press release late Monday: Last night, Al Gore’s global-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, collected an Oscar for best documentary feature, but the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has found that Gore deserves a gold statue for hypocrisy. Gore’s mansion, located in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville, consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, according to the Nashville Electric Service (NES). In his...

Per WABC local news

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Results from an initial air sampling after North Korea's announced nuclear test showed no evidence of radioactive particles that would be expected from a successful nuclear detonation, a U.S. government intelligence official said Friday. The test results do not necessarily mean the North Korean blast was not a nuclear explosion, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose the sampling results.

When it comes to outrage, parents of toddlers know how to make themselves heard. Skip to next paragraph Readers’ Opinions Forum: Television The Public Broadcasting Service has weathered recent criticism from free-speech advocates saying that the network is being overly cautious in a new policy to censor foul language in nonfiction programs by digitally obscuring the mouths of speakers. But the outcry has been dwarfed by the thousands of complaints, mostly from parents, over the PBS Kids Sprout network’s firing of Melanie Martinez, the host of “The Good Night Show,” after learning that she appeared years ago in two videos...

Caught the last two minutes of Hardball. Matthews had corralled 6 Republicans at the Tennessee convention to ask who they would be voting for. The three men said Frist. Two women said Rice. I didn't catch the third woman. When he asked if they would vote for McCain they all said no. Chris looked like he would pass out, because John is his boy. He asked them again and this time they said he was a fence sitter and an opportunist. It was a golden moment. Try to catch it on the repeat.

There was a time when the press was the strongest guardian of free expression in this democracy. Stories and celebrations of intrepid and courageous reporters are many within the press corps. Cases such as New York Times v. Sullivan in the 1960s were litigated so that the press could report on and examine public officials with the unfettered reporting a free people deserved. In the 1970s the Pentagon Papers case reaffirmed the proposition that issues of public importance were fully protected by the First Amendment.

He wasn't very clever. He wasn't very nice. And he's been trying to make it up to a certain red-haired columnist ever since. MAUREEN DOWD doesn't like me. This is not unusual. But unlike a lot of people, the New York Times columnist has a good reason.

Once again, Steven Spielberg transforms a serious subject—an historic act of Arab terrorism—into a skillfully arranged horror show, trivializing another example of 20th century barbarism. Recalling the terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich, West Germany, Olympic Games, in which 11 Israeli athletes were seized and murdered, Munich tracks besieged Israel's response. It makes for a slow motion wreck.

Per TV report. No one was hurt. King said he is not sure if it was meant for him. There is also a bank by his office.

Oct. 17, 2005 issue - The White House's handling of a potentially crucial e-mail sent by senior aide Karl Rove two years ago set off a chain of events that has led special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to summon Rove for a fourth grand jury appearance this week. His return has created heightened concern among White House officials and their allies that Fitzgerald may be preparing to bring indictments when a federal grand jury that has been investigating the leak of a CIA agent's identity expires at the end of October. Robert Luskin, Rove's lawyer, tells NEWSWEEK that, in his last...

August 28, 2005 -- FORMER First Daughter Chelsea Clinton and her longtime boyfriend Ian Klaus have called it quits. "They are no longer together," a source close to Clinton confirmed. And Klaus isn't wasting any time getting back to the dating business. Early last week, the tousled-haired history buff - having recently returned from a lengthy stint in Iraq doing humanitarian work - was seen romancing a "curly blond-haired girl, looking very much together," at the new downtown in spot, Employees Only on Hudson Street, another reliable source told PAGE SIX. "It was a date, a romantic thing," says the...

Quick story. In the mid 1980s I went to a fancy Fifth Av. party for Senator Ted Kennedy. There were journalists there and lots of other bigwigs. The only time I'd seen Kennedy before was at a campaign stop in 1979 when he'd been seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He might have won, but I realized at the party that it would have been a terrible thing because he was the drunkest human being I had ever encountered in my life, and chances were that it hadn't just started that night. Sure, he already had this reputation, but it was...

Brookhaven town officials Friday launched another volley in their ongoing war on illegal housing, ordering the closing of three residences they said housed as many as 90 tenants. In documents filed in State Supreme Court in Riverhead, the town alleged that the conditions in the houses, all zoned for single-family -- one in Ronkonkoma and two in Farmingville -- were filthy and overcrowded, with fire hazards such as exposed wiring and blocked exits. The homeowners each face possible $10,000 fines for violations of town codes, officials said. Two of the homeowners could not be reached for comment, but one said...