Free Republic

An unfortunate inevitability of politics is that not all vague and beautiful-sounding campaign promises are discarded. Some emerge as real-life policy proposals soon after the election. Barack Obama's intentionally vague promise of Change You Can Believe In will now manifest itself in new laws, regulations, and personnel. And his nearly-as-contentless call for a "stimulus package" to aid the ailing economy has been written up as legislation. So, what is in this bill? In what ways is it supposed to stimulate the economy? The Bills

"I think Chechnya," Asne Seierstad laments, "is very much forgotten." Eight years ago this month, the Second Chechen War had reached a bitter crescendo. But today, as Ms. Seierstad shows in The Angel of Grozny, the Chechen dystopia festers far out of the headlines. The Angel of Grozny recounts Seierstad's experiences as a journalist during the wartime Chechnya of 1994 and the peacetime Chechnya of 2006. It's a peace that would seem all too familiar to Abkhazians or Ossetians. Although Chechnya has largely rebuilt itself since the wars, Seierstad reveals a generation of children still growing up in a world...

What is a revolutionary? A man with ideas? A man with a gun? An inspirational leader? Judging from Che, Steven Soderbergh's four-hour biopic on the life of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevera, the answer is none of the above; instead, it's just a guy who talks your ear off about being a revolutionary. In fact, the impression you'd get from Che is that he hardly talks about anything else — including the guiding philosophy that drove him to revolution. Che seems to be an attempt to understand the revolutionary mindset while ignoring revolutionary ideas. Sure, it's offhandedly mentioned that Che is...

Last month Newsweek published an interesting exercise, asking critics to identify the book, film, television show, album, etc. that best encapsulated the George W. Bush era. Some of the choices — Sci Fi's Battlestar Galactica, Green Day's American Idiot — were inspired. The film selections, however, were wanting. Evan Thomas argued in favor of Black Hawk Down, which was made prior to the September 11th attacks, released way back in December 2001, and is about a Clinton Administration fiasco. Furthermore, Thomas' interpretation of the film ("the overall effect was stirring, if slightly pornographic") does not jibe with my memory. Ridley...

Neither of us voted for Barack Obama, but we never doubted that a black man could be elected president of this country in 2008, and we celebrate his election along with millions of other Americans — those who voted for him and those who did not. Now the time has come to bury many prejudices of the past and truly to move beyond racial politics in America.

Proposition 8 was an unsung victory for defenders of individual liberty. Wait, I know what many people will say to this. How can a measure that prevents gay couples from getting a marriage license be beneficial to the defense of individual liberty? It's because that vote represented a line drawn in the sand, even if a thin one, preventing the government from furthering its control over the institution. As it currently stands, there is nothing short of the problem of finding a pastor, priest or rabbi who is willing to perform the marriage rite that is stopping most gay couples...

Out-of-touch Earmarks & Elites by: Lance Nation, September 25, 2008 Those congressmen who defend earmarks as necessary may be grateful that few in the Washington press corps look too carefully at them. “I realized that there was no merit in this system,” U. S. Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., said at the weekly meeting of Washington, D. C. area bloggers at the Heritage Foundation. “Jim Oberstar who represents the 8th District in Minnesota got as much money for transportation earmarked for that district as the other seven of us combined.” “Was that because the 8th district was growing faster and had...