Free Republic

What has happened to those conservative Republican leaders whose mantra was “government is the problem -- not the solution”? Tell that to the once-bloated financial giants now standing in line for whopping government handouts to the tune of $700 billion. And who can forget those who wanted to “get the government off our backs”? Their silence now is deafening. In the rush for bailouts for the hard-hit government mortgage finance giants, the U.S. Treasury seized control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and is trying to rescue American International Group, the largest insurer of the world. It allowed 158-year-old Lehman...

WASHINGTON -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has awesome self-confidence. Chosen by fellow Republicans to be Sen. John McCain’s running mate, she told an interviewer: “I’m ready.” That confidence reflects her naïveté about her role that puts her one heartbeat away from the presidency. In accepting the Republican nomination as vice-president, she invoked the greatness of President Truman, based on their small-town origins. But anyone who was around during Truman’s era knows there is a world of difference between Palin and Truman. Take, for example, humility. Truman was vice president for only a short time when on April 12, 1945, he...

Republican presidential nominee John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate has put in question his judgment and understanding of the importance of national leadership. McCain's cynical ploy seems to have been an effort to win over disenchanted feminists who had supported Hillary Clinton's strong campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination but who have failed to embrace the nomination of Barack Obama to top the ticket. Equally notable was McCain's desire to win over members of the evangelical right - so influential in the Republican Party - who have been unhappy with the choice of McCain as their...

Your must-read of the morning: Miami Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin’s barbecue of a fawning documentary about Helen Thomas. Here’s a taste: Multiple choice quiz: Helen Thomas has been covering the White House for 48 years. Which of the following stories did she break? A. President Kennedy’s plans to invade the Bay of Pigs. B. President Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia. C. The Pentagon Papers. D. The Watergate scandal. E. None of the above, or anything else, either. The answer, of course, is E, though you might not guess it from the fawning HBO documentary Thank You, Mr. President: Helen...

The relationship between presidents and the reporters who cover them is a fraught one, and there is probably no one who knows this better than Helen Thomas, who has covered every president since John F. Kennedy. As "dean of the White House Press Corps," she challenged Nixon on Watergate, Clinton on Lewinsky, and, most recently, Bush on Iraq. For that, the Bush administration banished her to the back of the pressroom after she continued to press the president on his reasons for going to war. In Rory Kennedy's new documentary, "Thank You, Mr. President: Helen Thomas at the White House,"...

For the first time, scientists have proven that "beer goggles" are real - other people really do look more attractive to us if we have been drinking. Surprisingly, the beer goggles effect was not limited to just the opposite sex among the ostensibly straight volunteers recruited for the study - they also rated people from their own sex as more attractive. Scientists in England gave 84 heterosexual college students chilled lime-flavored drinks that were either non-alcoholic or given a dose of vodka equivalent in alcohol to a large glass of wine or a pint-and-a-half of beer. After 15 minutes, the...

At a screening of a forthcoming HBO documentary honoring liberal journalist Helen Thomas in Washington, Thomas was asked whether most White House reporters are liberal. "Hell, no!" she thundered. I'm dying to find another liberal to open their mouths [sic]. Where are they?" Is this Grande Dame of Journalism serious? The answer, of course, is yes. Since Ms. Thoms is dying to find vocal liberals in the news media, the least we can do is point her in the right direction. Let's see ...

After graduating from Wayne University, Thomas went to Washington, DC. In 1943 she began working for United Press International, (UPI), a news wire service providing articles to newspapers around the country. Thomas was hired to write stories of interest to women. She broke into political reporting in 1961, when she began filing stories about the Kennedy administration. Since then, she has covered eight presidents. In 1970 she became UPI's White House correspondent. In 1972 she was the only print journalist to go on President Nixon's historic trip to China. She also traveled with presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush, and...

Jeff Dufour and Patrick Gavin, in the Tuesday edition of the Washington Examiner’s "Yeas & Nays" feature, reported that Helen Thomas gave a vehement denial of whether the media, and the White House press corps in particular, has a liberal bent. "Yeas & Nays got a sneak peak at Rory Kennedy’s new HBO documentary -- ‘Thank You, Mr. President: Helen Thomas at The White House’ -- which premieres next month, and Thomas is asked whether most White House reporters are liberal. ‘Hell no!’ she responds. ‘I’m dying to find another liberal open their mouths. Where are they!’ This is the...

The first time I encountered Tony Snow was through his columns for the Detroit News in the 1980s, when I was an undergraduate subscribing to a forgotten but quite good publication called Conservative Chronicle. His articles were like his later work for Fox News: a combination of reliable research and lively commentary, with the latter grounded in the former, making his arguments cogent and convincing. When you read Tony Snow’s op-ed pieces, you were engaged and learned something; you came away with the assurance that the case you just heard was rational and reasoned. He advanced his particular point and,...

NEW YORK Washington, D.C. legend Helen Thomas has been off the job for the past three weeks suffering from a gastric infection that has caused her to miss her weekly column for Hearst Newspapers, according to Hearst D.C. Bureau Chief Chuck Lewis. Lewis said Thomas, 87, was hit with the illness on May 18 and has not written a column since May 14. Her weekly columns are distributed each Wednesday to all 500 clients of Hearst News Service. "She is being treated for an infection and is on leave," Lewis told E&P Monday. "She became ill and has been recovering...

Leave it to "Hezbollah Helen" to attack the only Middle East democracy on its 60th anniversary. FAIR WARNING/LEGAL DISCLAIMER: Horrific image follows...

Some readers resented The Washington Post for publishing an Associated Press photograph of a critically wounded Iraqi child being lifted from the rubble of his home in Baghdad’s Sadr City “after a U.S. airstrike.” Two-year-old Ali Hussein later died in a hospital. As the saying goes, the picture was worth a thousand words because it showed the true horrors of this war. Neither side is immune from the killing of Iraqi civilians. But Americans should be aware of their own responsibility for inflicting death and pain on the innocent. The Post’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, said about 20 readers complained about...

The American people have heard President George W. Bush and his spokespersons say many times that the U.S. government does not engage in torture. Whether Bush was believed or not is another story -- especially in light of the photographic evidence of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the prison near Baghdad. It’s understood that many of the photos are too sadistically graphic to be made public. Still, the official U.S. denials of torture continued until earlier this month when Bush acknowledged in an interview with ABC-TV that he knew about and approved “enhanced interrogation” of detainees, including “waterboarding”...

Q. Is there any level to which Helen Thomas won't stoop? A. Apparently not. That's my conclusion, based on Thomas's exchange during today's press gaggle with White House Press Secretary Dana Perino. Here is the front page of today's Washington Post to which Thomas refers [warning: graphic image]. A slide-show from WaPo's web edition contains another photo of what appears to be the same child, with this legend: Two-year-old Ali Hussein is pulled from the rubble of his family's home in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad, Iraq on Tuesday, April 29, 2008. The child, who later died...

If history repeats, the loser of this year’s presidential election will blame the news media. Richard Nixon, in the wake of his loss in the 1962 California gubernatorial race, bitterly taunted reporters, telling them, “You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” (Turned out he was wrong on that point.) Barbara Bush also had some choice words about the press when her husband, President George H.W. Bush, lost his reelection bid in 1992. The media could be even a larger target this year because of the influence of blogs and talking heads...

Long-time White House correspondent turned loose-cannon Helen Thomas hasn't been sold on Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama like many of her colleagues in the mainstream media. Thomas, now a columnist for Hearst Newspapers, told a Bethesda, Md. audience the race between Obama and Clinton has gotten mean-spirited. She attacked the role of bloggers in the news cycle, but that wasn't before she had some very harsh criticisms of Obama's rise in popularity. "We're in the midst of a presidential campaign which is really getting rotten - down and dirty between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama," Thomas said. "The Democratic...

'Most seductive woman of all time' revealed By Bonnie Malkin Last Updated: 3:25am BST 18/04/2008 She is two parts Kelly Brook, one part Jennifer Lopez and one part Angelina Jolie. Angelle was created from a survey of British women’s views about seduction Meet Angelle L Brook, a computer-generated composite representing British women’s idea of the "most seductive woman of all time". Angelle combines Brook’s hair and body, Lopez’s nose and Jolie’s lips, wrapped up in "the most seductive dress of all time": Marilyn Monroe’s white halter dress from The Seven Year Itch. She was created from a survey of British...

Sad to say, with the popularity and availability of e-mail, personal letters may soon be a thing of the past. Historians, too, will lose out. Communications may soon be reduced to instant messages and sound bytes on the air. That’s why we should savor the National Geographic’s new collection of letters to first ladies titled “Dear First Lady” that give us some insights into their personal sorrows and joys. The authors -- Dwight Young and Margaret Johnson -- selected some poignant missives, love notes between presidents and their wives and letters that marked great moments in history, such as President...

Sunday, April 13, 2008 Posted By:MAF Blogger DannyPermalinkPatraeus testifies again: Liberals pile on Helen Thomas has written another scathing opinion dripping with contempt for General Petraeus, Ryan Crocker and of course, we can’t forget, the President. Surprisingly even Democratic would-be presidents Obama and Hillary could not escape her livid criticism. In their disappointing comments, the Democratic rivals were as cautious as Petraeus. Clinton said “it’s time to begin an orderly withdrawal of our troops.” Obama told Petraeus that while he wants U.S. troops out of Iraq, he “would not initiate a precipitous withdrawal.” Watching the testimony myself, and looking at...

Surprise, surprise. Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, wants to put a halt to any more troop withdrawals for the foreseeable future. The highly politicized Petraeus seemed to be dutifully following his White House marching orders when he testified before congressional committees earlier this week. Under his scenario, there will be no drawdown of U.S. forces in that strife-ridden country until President Bush leaves office. That’s fine with Bush, who obviously has no intention of ending this futile war on his watch. Apparently feeling no responsibility for starting the war, Bush is planning to pass the Iraqi...

Hillary Clinton should hang in there and run a good race. And she has vowed to do so. Clinton has been under unprecedented pressure to bow out of the divisive Democratic primary and to clear the field for her opponent -- Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. Among those who want her to throw in the towel are, of course, Obama’s supporters. But many other Democrats are trying to push her out of the contest on the ground that a contentious race can hurt the party and could help their Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Clinton also has been...

Back in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s worst days when he was grappling with the Vietnam quagmire and raucous anti-war protests at home, he said that in the big decisions about war and peace, “The people should be in on the takeoffs as well as the landings.” Tell that to President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who apparently could care less what Americans think -- except every four years at election time. Cheney made that clear in an intriguing interview with ABC News on his recent Middle East trip. Despite the difficulties surrounding the unprovoked U.S. invasion of...

A salute is due Adm. William Fallon, who tried to prevent a wider war with Iran. After serving one year as commander of U.S. Central Command, Fallon has resigned, saying he was quitting because his differences with official U.S. policy had become a “distraction.” But there is a widespread perception that he was pushed out by the neo-conservatives among President George W. Bush’s aides, especially Vice President Dick Cheney, because of Fallon’s reluctance to go along with the administration’s hawkish moves toward Iran. Cheney, who took five consecutive draft deferments to stay out of the Vietnam war, does not mind...

Man, wouldn’t this be great to see on youtube? President Bush brought the 123rd annual spring dinner of the Gridiron Club to a rousing close Saturday by donning a tan cowboy hat above his white-tie and tails singing, onstage, a self-parody of a Texas-flavored country-and-western song. “You have just witnessed the first and final performance of Bush and the Busharoos,” the president said, after rendering a final encore of the “Brown, Brown Grass of Home,” the venerable waltz tune, in a voice that did minimal musical justice to Tom Jones’ popular version. **snip** In another stanza, Bush sang, “I spend...

Let us hope that the next president of the United States knows some history. And let us hope that the next president will know that the United States cannot call all the shots, or pick and choose which leader-dictator we will talk to or decide which countries can have unconventional weapons. In other words, the U.S. should not rely totally on the arrogance of its formidable power in its foreign relations. That is why the performance of the New York Philharmonic in the Stalinist-style closed society of North Korea is a remarkable breakthrough. Music is the universal language. In the...

The successor to President George W. Bush has a clear-cut choice of saving lives or saving face. Bush wants to leave to the next president the burden of ending the debacle he started five years ago when he ordered the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, against a people who had done us no harm. Bush cannot explain his reasons for the war without compounding his folly. To this moment, Bush has not given a logical explanation for his disastrous militarism. How can he tell American families that their sons and daughters died for a terrible, tragic mistake committed by...

Helen has been deserving this for some time. Here you go, Helen. Sing-Along on YouTube: HELEN THOMAS IS MY CALENDAR GIRL Give ‘em Helen By Ken Herman Tuesday, February 26, 2008, 10:05 AM Today’s installment in one of Washington’s best long-running shows: Hearst Newspapers’ Helen Thomas vs. whoever happens to be in the White House. The topic was President Bush’s insistence on lawsuit immunity for telecommunications companies that cooperated in the federal government’s program to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists. Ms. Thomas, as she has for several weeks, wanted White House Press Secretary Dana Perino to explain why immunity is needed....

President George W. Bush should stop worrying about his legacy. It’s already established. By his deeds you shall know him; preemptive war, torture and wiretapping, for starters. Nothing said in history can wipe out those flaws in his administration. And no revisionist historian down the road can diminish the importance of those acts. He has governed with threats -- and by nourishing fear in the American people. The president seems to have a hard time abiding by the law. Referring to his struggles with Congress during his first year in office, Bush joked that ``a dictatorship would be heck of...

A Conversation with Journalism Legend Helen Thomas March 2, 2008, 2:00 PM Central Library Auditorium Often called "The First Lady of the Press," veteran White House reporter, author and Hearst Newspapers columnist Helen Thomas looks back as an eyewitness to history and delves into her story when she sits for a conversation with Arlington Public Library Director Diane Kresh. This event is in recognition of National Women's History Month. A book signing will follow the remarks.

If Americans want to continue the Iraq war, then Sen. John McCain -- the apparent Republican presidential candidate and relentless hawk -- is their man. It seems McCain was not kidding when he said the U.S. might have to remain in Iraq for 100 years. At a town meeting in New Hampshire, McCain was told that President Bush had indicated the possibility of U.S. forces staying in Iraq for 50 years. “Make it a hundred,’’ McCain responded. Presumably McCain means that would still be with a volunteer U.S. army because even the “straight talking” senator would not dare to suggest...

How strange is this? The nation’s chief law enforcement officer cannot say whether “waterboarding” is illegal. At a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Attorney General Michael Mukasey acknowledged under questioning that he would feel tortured if he were waterboarded, but he staunchly refused to say whether it was illegal. A heinous technique dating back to the Spanish Inquisition, waterboarding involves strapping a prisoner down and pouring water over his cloth-covered face to create a sensation of imminent drowning. Mukasey -- whose confirmation for the Cabinet post was championed by two Democrats, Sens. Charles Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein...

With a year to go in the White House, President Bush has said he will sprint to the finish line. But in his lackluster final State of the Union address this week, the president acknowledged that he is leaving behind a troubled nation and a shaky economy for his successor. He also offered no clue on how to end the needless war he started five years ago against Iraq. He finds solace in a drop in the U.S. casualty rate, with 160,000 American troops and nearly as many mercenary private contractors on assignment in Iraq. But American soldiers are still...

Thinking of his legacy, President George W. Bush says he views himself as a peacemaker, but at the same time he acknowledges that some may see him as a warmonger. The president -- who launched an unprovoked war against Iraq in 2003 -- had previously said he wanted to be known as a war president. That is more likely, since the wars he initiated against Iraq and Afghanistan have gone on longer than World War II -- and there is no end in sight. The president made the peacemaker remarks in an interview with ABC-TV's "Night Line" as he was...

Like it or not, race and gender will play roles in the choice of a Democratic presidential standard bearer. It can't be avoided, even though the party's leading candidates have decided to bury the hatchet. In the Tuesday night debate in Las Vegas, both Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., said their supporters had been over-zealous in their week-long tiff over the role of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the enactment of federal civil rights legislation in the 1960s. The two candidates agreed to stop the squabbling and to keep their focus on current issues. Someday, they...

President George W. Bush is desperately in search of a foreign policy success on his current journey to the volatile Middle East. He has put his best hopes on resolving the 60-year-old Palestinian-Israeli territorial dispute before he leaves office next January. Solving that problem was the same goal sought by former President Bill Clinton in his final months in office. Clinton ended up blaming the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for not accepting a proposed bifurcated Palestine surrounded by Israeli enclaves. No Arab leader could have approved such a plan. Bush has been praised by Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert...

This is almost too good. It’s the standard Big Media snobbishness about bloggers — coming in a quote from one of bloggers’ biggest punching bags, Helen Thomas: “What I really worry about is that I think the bloggers and everyone, everyone with a laptop thinks they’re journalists,” Thomas said. “And, they certainly don’t have our standards. They don’t have our ethics, and so forth. There’s a deterioration.” “[T]hey certainly don’t have our standards. They don’t have our ethics . . .” Well, she’s right about that.Here’s one example.On January 2, crab-grass blogger Dan Riehl wrote a post about a wide...

Helen Thomas on stage with Hill and Bill in Iowa?

When a fire broke out in Vice President Dick Cheney's ceremonial office last week, reporters quipped that someone must be burning the videotapes of the CIA interrogation of two al-Qaida detainees. The joke was an allusion to the administration's admission that the CIA videotapes had been destroyed. The videotapes reportedly showed the harsh interrogations and waterboarding of the prisoners in secret prisons abroad­. One has to wonder what other forms of torture U.S. agents shamefully adopted as their own in their unfettered drive to question prisoners. The New York Times had reported that the pros and cons of destroying the...

Let's keep religion out of the presidential campaign, if possible. I say, to each his own. Let's rejoice that the founding fathers established a secular nation and that no one has to publicly defend his or her beliefs. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney -- put on the defensive because of his Mormon faith -- recently felt compelled to explain his religion to skeptical voters. So he tore a page out of John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign appearance before a group of Protestant ministers in Houston. At the time, Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, had to dispel rumors that he would be...

Skip CNN's self-inflicted wounds, and save your outrage for the doyenne of the White House press gaggle. Helen Thomas decided to get her feelings about the American military out into the open today: Q Why should we depend on him? MS. PERINO: Because he is the commander on the ground, Helen. He's the one who is making sure that the situation is moving — Q You mean how many more people we kill? MS. PERINO: Helen, I find it really unfortunate that you use your front row position, bestowed upon you by your colleagues, to make such statements. This is...

Transcript: HELEN THOMAS: Does the President want no troops out from Iraq on his watch? I’m talking about all the troops. MS. PERINO: Well, 5,700 troops will be home by the end of the year, so that is some troops coming home. The President said that troop levels are going to be made by commanders on the ground, and that we’re going to have to talk about – THOMAS: Why should it be? Why can’t the American people have a say? MS. PERINO: — return on success. The American people have had a say. They elected a President who is...

PLOCNIK, Serbia (Reuters) - If the figurines found in an ancient European settlement are any guide, women have been dressing to impress for at least 7,500 years. Recent excavations at the site -- part of the Vinca culture which was Europe's biggest prehistoric civilisation -- point to a metropolis with a great degree of sophistication and a taste for art and fashion, archaeologists say. In the Neolithic settlement in a valley nestled between rivers, mountains and forests in what is now southern Serbia, men rushed around a smoking furnace melting metal for tools. An ox pulled a load of ore,...

The dying months of the disastrous Bush presidency are beginning to resemble the twilight of the Clinton administration. Both presidents have had to plaintively proclaim they were still "relevant" even as their epitaphs were being written. Both presidents belatedly looked for a solution to the perennial Israeli-Palestinian problem to put a feather in their foreign-policy caps. On that score, President Clinton struck out big time and petulantly put all the blame on the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Clinton supported a plan by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak for Palestinian enclaves to be surrounded by Israeli checkpoints, making a...

WASHINGTON -President Bush has no better friends than the spineless Democratic congressional leadership and the party's leading presidential candidates when it comes to his failing Iraq policy . These Democrats seem to have forgotten that the American people want U.S. troops out of Iraq, especially since Bush still cannot give a credible reason for attacking Iraq after nearly five years of war. Last week, at a debate in Hanover, N.H., the leading Democratic presidential candidates sang from the same songbook: Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, along with former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, refused...

For anyone hoping to find out some racy details within the pages of Jeff Gannon’s newly published book, “The Great Media War,” you’ll be sorely disappointed. Gannon resigned as White House correspondent from the conservative Talon News in 2005 amid charges of right-wing bias, inexperience and salacious accusations about his personal life. In the book, he admits nothing, referring only to his “perceived sexuality” and “photographs said to be me in various states of undress.” “In actuality,” he writes, “my personal life was dull compared to the fantasy world created by the Angry Gay Left.” No, in the tome that’s...

WASHINGTON -- It was too much to expect that Karl Rove -- the architect of President Bush's presidential victories -- would depart the White House with grace and style. He instead was true to form, taking political pot shots at Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Rove called Clinton "fatally flawed." Despite leaving the White House, he left no doubt that he remains in the game and is still in attack mode. He called Bush critics "the sort of elite effete snobs who can't hold a candle to this guy (Bush). What they don't...

WASHINGTON -- During the Cold War, President Dwight D. Eisenhower often said that he would go anywhere, any time, any place in pursuit of peace. Ike promoted co-existence with the former Soviet Union and invited Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to visit the United States. Conservative Republicans were unhappy when President Richard M. Nixon made his surprise journey to hard-line communist China in 1972. But the move was mostly applauded as a diplomatic breakthrough, leading to better relations between the two nations. The American people rejoiced at those peacemaking gestures and didn't think that Eisenhower -- a World War II hero--...

Helen Thomas, the Hearst columnist and long-time scourge of Republican presidents as UPI White House correspondent, was "miffed" at Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau because he joked that the rumors were that she was Harry Truman's lover: "I wished he said I was Jack Kennedy's lover." If that makes Thomas sound like a liberated woman, that would be in line with her recent Planned Parenthood luncheon speech in Iowa, where she claimed conservatives would love to deny women even their right to vote: "It seems now, more than ever, the Supreme Court is prepared to put Americans -- especially women --...