Free Republic

This is no velvet revolution, but nor is it an uprising of fascist Cossacks or a zero-sum game with Russia. Europe must intervene on the side of democracy and human rights Ukraine has not yet died – as the country's anthem observes. But the face of Ukraine today is that of the bloodied, scarred opposition activist Dmytro Bulatov. Comparisons with Bosnia are still far-fetched, but think of this as a political Chernobyl. I have no idea what will happen in Ukraine tomorrow, let alone next week. But I know what all Europeans should want to happen over the next year...

Despite our endless blather about democracy, we Americans seem to be able to put our devotion to democratic principles on the shelf, when they get in the way of our New World Order. In 2012, in the presidential election in Egypt, Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood won in a landslide. President Obama hailed the outcome. One year later, the Egyptian army ousted and arrested Morsi and gunned down a thousand members of his brotherhood. The coup was countenanced by John Kerry who explained that the Egyptian army was “restoring democracy.” Comes now the turn of Ukraine. In 2010, Viktor...

Tbilisi (AFP) - French authorities have detained a former Georgian defence minister wanted in his homeland on corruption charges, a police source said Tuesday. Davit Kezerashvili, a close ally of outgoing president Mikheil Saakashvili, was detained Monday at the Nice airport just before 1:00pm (1100 GMT), as he was trying to board a flight to Tirana, the capital of Albania, the police source said. "He was stopped by border police during an identity check. The police realised that he was the target of an international arrest warrant," the source said. Kezerashvili will now face an extradition hearing to determine whether...

While we scrambled to meet income tax deadlines last April 15, Maine politicians passed $70 million in tax increases on health care and beverages to pump more tax dollars into Dirigo Health. In response, the state Chamber of Commerce, the beverage industry and other businesses united as the Fed Up With Taxes coalition to put a people's veto question on the November ballot, hoping voters will reject the new taxes.

ABC News' David Wright reports: At a joint rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa Thursday, Republican John McCain slammed the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) for being "asleep at the switch" saying that if he were president, he would fire Chris Cox, the chairman of the SEC since 2005 and a former Republican congressman. McCain said the SEC has allowed trading practices such as short selling to stay in place that turned the "markets into a casino." "The regulators were asleep, my friends," McCain said. "The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the president. And in my view...

As I've said before, McCain deserves a large part of the credit for the surge—he pushed to have it implemented both in his public advocacy and his behind-the-scenes lobbying of the Bush administration, and he has been its foremost defender. Romney wasn't as enthusiastic about it and in his body language, if nothing else seemed ready to distance himself from it if it failed. This is a perfectly legitimate issue for McCain to raise, and he has, by saying things like Romney was "looking at his shoes" while he was putting it all on the line for the surge. But...

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore, John McCain spoke about two things that should frighten Republicans and Democrats alike: Teddy Roosevelt and Bull Moose. Although Moore recounts that McCain characterized Roosevelt’s bolting to the Progressive Party (popularly called the Bull Moose Party) in 1912 as “a mistake,” it’s not clear whether McCain felt the mistake was Roosevelt’s or the Republican Party’s.Whatever McCain’s analysis of that almost-century-old mess, there can be no denying some of the close parallels between McCain and TR and between the partisan alignments of then and now. The Republicans were seen as...