Free Republic

On Thursday’s Hugh Hewitt radio show, conservative commentator Mark Steyn, author of “The Undocumented Mark Steyn,” said the actions by Sony Corporation not to face down apparent threats from North Koreans was a bad sign for the so-called power of American pop culture in its current state.

Rep. Ernest Hewett, who was removed as deputy speaker this week after making what some saw as an inappropriate comment to a teenager, defended himself Friday. “I have been disciplined and I haven’t even had due process,” said Hewett, a New London Democrat. During a Feb. 20 Appropriations Committee hearing, a female 17-year-old ambassador for the Connecticut Science Center asked the committee to continue funding the center’s ambassador program. During her speech, she said the program helped her overcome her shyness and get over her fear of snakes. According to an audiotape of the hearing, Hewett said: “If you’re bashful...

HARTFORD -- A veteran House member from New London was stripped of his deputy speaker title this week after he made a lewd comment during a budget hearing. Speaker of the House J. Brendan Sharkey said Thursday that Rep. Ernest Hewett made a remark perceived as sexually harassing during an exchange with a 17-year-old intern from the Connecticut Science Center. ... After hearing an audiotape of the incident, which occurred Feb. 21, Sharkey stripped Hewett of his deputy speaker title Wednesday. With the removal of the title goes $6,446 in extra pay above the rank-and-file rate of $28,000.

'Minutes' man gets Rather curt CBS legend Don Hewitt hasn't been shy about criticizing Dan Rather, but the grand old man of "60 Minutes" had stopped short of publicly recommending termination for the central figure in CBS News' painful 2004 Memogate flap. Until yesterday. "Should Dan Rather have been fired?" Time magazine managing editor Jim Kelly asked the 83-year-old Hewitt during a Court TV journalism panel at Michael's. "Yes," Hewitt answered. He suggested that the 74-year-old Rather - a "60 Minutes" correspondent since stepping down last March as "Evening News" anchor - was politically motivated in airing a controversial pre-election...

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MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND begins the high season at Main Beach in California's Laguna Beach. Two-player beach volleyball is never gone completely from the beach, but during the summer it is always in play during daylight. Even a Midwesterner like me understands the game. Try and score on the serve, but if your opponent digs out that shot, be ready for a set-up followed by the spike. Thanks to the McCain Caucus, working harder to rehabilitate the Arizona senator's 2008 GOP primary chances than the constitutional provisions governing judicial selection, the Democrats were able to dig out from the majority leader's...

THE TERRI SCHIAVO TRAGEDY has been seized on by long-time critics of the "religious right" to launch attack after attack on the legitimacy of political action on the basis of religious belief. This attack has ignored the inconvenient participation in the debate--on the side of resuming water and nutrition for Terri Schiavo--of the spectacularly not-the-religious-rightness of Tom Harkin, Nat Hentoff, Jesse Jackson, and a coalition of disability advocacy groups. The attack has also been hysterical. After Congress acted--ineffectively, it turned out--Maureen Dowd proclaimed that "theocracy" had arrived in the land. Paul Krugman warned that assassination of liberals by extremists was...

If I were the guest booker for Hewett or Hannity, I'd book the editorial board members of the Pittsburg Post-Gazette and Philadelphia Inquirer, and other Pennsylvania papers that endorsed Spector on the grounds that he told them he'd stop "extremists" from getting on the courts.How exactly did he define "extremists"? Is what he's saying now - that he'll support all of Bush's nominees - at odds with what he told his home-state newspaper editorial boards? If so, do the editors feel they were lied to -- and will they condemn him in print for reneging on a pledge? Or are...

There is palpable fear among Democrats as they contemplate their presumptive nominee, John Kerry, the candidate who couldn't keep his lies straight. Kerry followed a week made disastrous by his military records fiasco with a Monday morning performance with Charlie Gibson of ABC's Good Morning America that will live in TV history alongside the 1980 Roger Mudd-Teddy Kennedy exchange through which it dawned on America that a senator in search of a verb wasn't really equipped to be a president. Gibson's refusal to be deflected by Kerry's rambling incoherence led to a post-interview denunciation of ABC by Kerry. "They are...