Free Republic

It's very easy to fall behind the times.  It is for this reason that you find parents who never seem to really know what the younger generation is involved in, older folks who still act as if a hot dog should be 10 cents, and people who fight yesterday's social battles.  As to the last thing, there are those who ask if a woman can be elected president. The real question is, can a man running against a woman be elected president? With androgyny being the order of the day, it has often been lamented that men no longer know...

At two campaign events in Iowa this year, aides to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton encouraged audience members to ask her specific questions, a tactic that drew criticism from an opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination and led her yesterday to promise that it would not happen again. Mrs. Clinton, speaking to reporters in Iowa, said she was unaware that her aides had ever planted questions. “It was news to me,” said Mrs. Clinton, of New York, “and neither I nor my campaign approve of that, and it will certainly not be tolerated.” Staff members have been told to avoid doing...

Bill Clinton was hit with caustic criticism Tuesday from his wife's Democratic rivals, who accused the popular former president of falsely comparing questions about her candor to smears of past campaigns. In a presidential nomination fight growing more intense by the day, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama also criticized the former first lady for having voted in the Senate against incentives for ethanol production and higher fuel efficiency standards. And 2004 vice presidential nominee John Edwards challenged her to spell out what she would do about Iraq. The week after Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign accused her rivals of "piling on," those...

Summary: At a Democratic debate in Philadelphia, Sen. Hillary Clinton ducked some questions and gave misleading answers to others. She falsely implied that the reason White House documents about her communications with her husband haven't been released is due to bureaucratic delays, and she avoided saying whether she would ask Bill Clinton to clear their release from the National Archives. She avoided a yes-or-no answer to whether she supports giving New York driver's licenses to illegal immigrants and at one point denied saying the idea made sense, when in fact she said less than two weeks earlier that it "makes...

Former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) will undergo a presidential campaign rite of passage fraught with both peril and potential positives when he appears this Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Thompson has appeared on Tim Russert’s famed Sunday morning news show nine times, his campaign said, but this will be his first time as a candidate. Karen Hanretty, a spokeswoman for Thompson, said the ex-senator is grateful for the chance to expand on some issues that warrant more time than debate formats allow for. “Fred Thompson is a thoughtful candidate who has said many times that debates and 30-second sound...

Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson suggested on Thursday that Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton's lack of clarity in her debate answers raises questions about her ability to handle diplomacy. Addressing a crowd of Republican donors, the former Tennessee senator joined Clinton's Democratic opponents in seizing on her debate answer on whether she supported a plan by New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer to grant drivers' licenses to illegal immigrations. At first, Clinton appeared to praise the plan. Pressed later in the debate, she seemed to backtrack, saying she didn't say it should be done. Her campaign sought to clarify her comments...

The chairmen of the House and Senate Democratic campaign committees sounded differing notes of optimism on Wednesday, just more than a year away from what they say will be a second straight election on the offensive. Speaking to reporters at a briefing, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) was effusive, saying the 2008 election could be “a seminal election” on par with only a few in the history of the country. The two-cycle chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said the results could “change the tectonic plates of politics.” Schumer said he expects to hold all 12 seats that Senate Democrats...

Republican presidential candidate who led a Senate inquiry into illegal foreign fund raising in the 1996 presidential campaign, Fred Thompson of Tennessee, is warning that the phenomenon may be repeating itself with Senator Clinton's current White House bid. "From what I read in the papers, it looks to me like some of the same familiar refrains are playing when I look at Senator Clinton's situation," Mr. Thompson told reporters yesterday during his first campaign swing through California. "I'm not going to jump to any conclusions or make any accusations until all the facts are in, but when I see people...

During Hillary Clinton's marathon of television performances Sunday, she was asked yet again about the MoveOn.org newspaper ad that questioned Gen. David Petraeus' truthfulness. Clinton had already been asked about the ad four times previously, but this time she had a new answer: She denounced it. "I don't condone anything like that, and I have voted against those who would impugn the patriotism and the service of the people who wear the uniform of our country," she told Tim Russert. "I don't believe that that should be said about General Petraeus, and I condemn that."

Norman Hsu, the Democratic fund-raiser with a habit of fleeing the law, confessed to F.B.I. agents last week that he had swindled investors in what the government describes as a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, and acknowledged pressuring at least some of them to contribute to political campaigns, prosecutors said in a criminal complaint unsealed yesterday. The complaint, filed in the Federal District Court in Manhattan, charges Mr. Hsu with bilking hundreds of investors around the country out of at least $60 million over the last four years. It says he used some of that money to reimburse, in violation of election...

It is an honor and privilege to live in the United States, the greatest country in the world. Yet for all its blessings, American society is beset by serious problems, including jihadists seeking weapons of destruction who want to create a world caliphate; a violent, sexually loaded popular culture that targets our children; unelected judges who ignore the Constitution and abuse their powers; and a disrespect for human life that has resulted in tens of millions of abortions. It is possible to become demoralized and conclude that everything is hopeless, and that we should withdraw from the political and cultural...

I have been touting Fred Thompson since January 2007, and it has been several months since I have written an article about him. Among other things, I have noted that Thompson antagonizes no one and would unite the Republican Party – no one really had anything bad to say about him in the New Hampshire debates, and the closest anyone came was John McCain, a close friend of Thompson. I have noted that Fred got the gay marriage issue precisely right – a constitutional amendment which does not require states to give full faith and credit to gay marriages is...

To raise $850,000 for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign in just eight months, Norman Hsu tapped an eclectic group of donors that included wealthy investors in his apparel ventures, hotel shopkeepers, a 96-year-old in a Florida retirement home and an auto-body worker who mistakenly thought he would get a tax break for his political generosity. The Clinton campaign has not yet released any information about the 260 donors whose contributions it is now refunding because they were credited to the prodigious fundraising of the former fugitive, but a detailed analysis of donors Hsu brought to Clinton shows that he...

Norman Hsu was politician's dream who became a nightmare. He knew people, hosted fundraisers, solicited donations. And he was an unabashed fan of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Now in disgrace, his role as one of Clinton's top money bundlers will dog him and her presidential campaign while law enforcement authorities investigate his business and political dealings. Eager to sever her links to Hsu, the Clinton campaign this week returned $850,000 in contributions linked to his fundraising activities. But Hsu's troubles aren't over and the spotlight on his political connections won't recede easily. Hsu is the latest poster boy for rogue fundraising,...

Very seldom will I venture a prediction on a major race like president, especially over a year out and with each party having 10 candidates openly vying for their nomination. In addition, it is the most open presidential race in my lifetime. It has been 80 years since a president was not seeking reelection and a sitting vice-president was not seeking to move up. The race is truly wide open. I am going out on a limb and predicting that Fred Thompson will be chosen as the republican nominee for president at their convention this time next year and that...

Of all the possible vulnerabilities facing Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton has long believed that the one of the biggest was money, friends and advisers say. Some sort of fund-raising scandal that would echo the Clinton-era controversies of the 1990s and make her appear greedy or ethically challenged. As a result, Mrs. Clinton told aides this year to vet major donors carefully and help her avoid situations in which she might appear to be trading access for big money, advisers said. Also to be avoided, the senator said, were fund-raising tactics that might conjure up the Clinton...

Hillary Clinton has been in politics long enough to know the value of the word "change." In 1992, her husband's political guru, James Carville, hung a white sign in the Clinton campaign war room that read CHANGE VS. MORE OF THE SAME. Bill Clinton won the presidency that year with 370 electoral votes. Over the course of the summer, she watched her rivals for the Democratic nomination try again and again to define themselves as change and Clinton as the status quo. ("We're more interested in looking forward, not backward," Barack Obama told reporters. "And the American people feel the...

Former vice president Al Gore's pronouncement that he is likely to endorse one of the Democratic candidates for president before the primary season is over has set off a slew of speculation about who his choice might be. Truth is, the courting of the "Goreacle" began many months ago. Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Gore huddled in Nashville in December, and Gore has also met with former senator John Edwards (N.C.). Gore and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) conferred as recently as last week. Not surprisingly, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) has not met with Gore. Neither has Sen. Joseph...

...RUSH: She was shocked and surprised her own brother was selling pardons... ...RUSH: Yeah, it was a big surprise to find out that Norman Hsu was this bad guy!...When her brothers were involved in the Marc Rich pardons, she was stunned at that...

If women are from Venus and men are from Mars, the former valuing peace and the latter reveling in war, Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lot more like Mars than Venus. She loves war.