Free Republic

Has anyone heard conservative critics complain about “socialism” as they watch Uncle Sam partially nationalize some of the nation’s big banks with an injection of $250 billion? President George W. Bush announced the desperate move -- which is completely alien to the free marketers of Republican Party -- and stressed that the government’s role would be limited and temporary. The move still represents “corporate welfare,” long resisted, but now welcome by Bush and his conservative colleagues. The goal is to restore public confidence in our financial system. The dramatic decision to have the public sector buy up part of the...

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...

Sometimes you wonder what planet Vice President Dick Cheney is living on. Last month, speaking of the war in Iraq, Cheney told CNN's Wolf Blitzer in a prickly interview: "(The) bottom line is that we've had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes. It is hard. It is difficult." Anyone keeping up with the daily news from Baghdad knows that few people in the last few months -- especially those in the military -- are bragging about big successes to quell the violence in Iraq. Even within the White House, Cheney seems like a man lost in...

President George W. Bush has alerted the American people that the war in Iraq will go on for a long time -- easily into the next presidency. Bush's 2003 "cakewalk" invasion of Iraq to bring about a "regime change" has expanded into what he told a news conference Wednesday is "the beginning stages of an ideological battle." According to the official White House line, Bush is pondering his options for a "new way forward" in Iraq, with his decision to be announced next month. But the president indicated Wednesday that he has already made his choice, hinting to reporters at...

This is a picture appearing in relation to the movement of the Intrepid, which finally got underway. the self-satisfied, smug look on the woman's face is just priceless! Caption away!

Say it isn't so. Hawkish Henry Kissinger is advising President George W. Bush about Iraq war strategy? This is deja vu all over again. The former secretary of state -- who served in that job from 1973 to 1979 and previously from 1969 as national security affairs adviser -- inspires too many bad memories of the Vietnam War. I remember when Kissinger came into the White House press room in 1972, just before the presidential election and announced "peace is at hand." Three years later, we fled Saigon by our fingertips. Who can forget the pictures of refugees piling into...

Hypocrisy is alive and well on Capitol Hill. An FBI raid on a congressman's office has caused a ruckus between his irate colleagues and the Justice Department over congressional prerogatives. If only these same members of Congress had been more sensitive about individual rights when they passed the USA Patriot Act, a law that is truly invasive of the privacy of all Americans. These are the same lawmakers who were complicit with President George W. Bush's unprecedented order to secretly eavesdrop on millions of Americans without a warrant. Where was the outrage from these lawmakers when faced with the shame...

Iran has benefitted most from the US-led war in Iraq and would make further gains if the continuing violence ended up dividing the country, former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright has said. As for the Iranian nuclear row, a "high level" member of the administration should respond to a letter from Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to US President George W. Bush and also engage in direct dialogue with Tehran, Albright told the BBC in an interview while on a visit to London. The former top US diplomat welcomed the formation on Saturday of the first permanent government in Iraq...

Helen Thomas is an 85-year-old veteran American journalist. Thomas who started as a White House correspondent during John F. Kennedy’s tenure, has been working in this profession for 62 years. Thomas has another title: The American journalist who is the most outspoken critic of the US Iraq invasion. She describes George W. Bush as “the worst president in US history.” Thomas, who has had close relations with US presidents since Kennedy, was also on friendly terms with Father Bush. However, she continually has negative views about the Son of Bush. Thomas, who was always in the front row at press...

Even amid growing chaos in the Middle East, President George W. Bush loves to boast that his policies are bringing democracy to the region. True, certified elections have taken place in occupied Iraq and occupied Palestine. But the U.S. has become a laughingstock because it rejects the results of the democratic election in Palestine, where Hamas won. The joke is, "Be careful what you wish for." Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice again was surprised at the Hamas victory, saying, "Nobody saw it coming." Well, that's because the Bush administration has long ignored the plight of the Palestinians, who have endured...

With 57 years of White House reporting, Helen Thomas is commonly referred to as “The First Lady of the Press.” She talked to Adbusters associate editor Deborah Campbell about the state of journalism today. Adbusters: You’ve had a front row seat on the White House press gallery since Kennedy, and now you’ve been moved to the back of the room . . . Helen Thomas: Only for press conferences with Bush. He doesn’t want to call on me. AB: What does that say about his view of the press? HT: I’m reluctant to personalize it. No president likes the press,...

W vactationed so hard in Texas he got bushed. He needed a vacation from his vacation.So he headed West yesterday to get away from his Western getaway--and the mushrooming Crawford Woodstock--to spend a couple of days at the Tamarack Resort in the rural Idaho mountians. 'I'm kind of hanging loose as they say,' he told reporters. W. didn't go alone of course. Just as he took his beloved feather pillow on the road duing his 2000 campaign, now he takes his beloved bike.An Air Force One steward tenderly unloaded W.'s $3,000.00 Trek fuel mountain bike when he landed in Boise.I...

President George W. Bush is not letting his lame duck status stop him from displaying an arrogance of power. When a Texas newspaper reporter told him, "Power is perception," Bush corrected him, saying, "Power is being president." In fact, Bush is proving that a lame duck has a lot of power to do what he wants to do since he doesn't have to be re-elected and, therefore, is answerable to no one. Furthermore, he indicates he could care less whether he goes up or down in public opinion polls. With more than three years left in his presidency, the president's...

A parody of herself? NPR's Nina Totenberg, who has tagged Supreme Court nominee John Roberts as "very conservative," "very, very conservative" and "very, very, very conservative," as well as "a really conservative guy," "a hardline conservative" and "a clear conservative," to say nothing of being "a conservative Catholic," on Inside Washington over the weekend relayed that after she "spent five hours reviewing all of his documents from when he worked in the Justice Department," she "was actually quite surprised at how, how very, very conservative he was." Apparently, she didn't listen to herself. Inside Washington is a weekend show carried...

On an earlier thread, a few of us got sidetracked discussing Hillary's "smile" I wonder if the fact that she hasn't had her teeth fixed means she's NOT gonna run. Some may recall that just before the Dem convention in 2000..Al Gore took a week off..then he turned up with a new set of pearly whites. Cincinnatus' Wife is going to attach some brutal close ups to this thread.. we'd like to hear from any dentists or dental techs, especially..

So the anonymous second-level Democratic National Committee staffer didn't know What Hillary Clinton Knew and When She Knew It, and neither does Ed Klein. And it turns out he's not really claiming Chelsea was born after her father raped her mother, which is what his publicity machine seemed to be claiming in the excerpts last week. And as for the lesbian stuff at Wellesley, he couldn't even spell the names right, and his supposed sources denounced him before the book appeared. And this man is supposed to be a "serious journalist." Ed Klein's new book, "The Truth About Hillary: What...

I don't know anyone who went into the field of journalism expecting to win a popularity contest. It's not in the nature of the profession to be loved. We are accustomed to a public that is more inclined to "kill the messenger" who brings bad news. So it is not surprising that the respected Pew Research Center finds that public discontent with the news media has increased dramatically. "Americans find the mainstream media much less credible than they did in the mid-1980s," Pew said in report titled "Trends 2005." It added that "more ominously, the public also questions the news...

Pollster Scott Rasmussen has begun publishing a regular "Hillary Meter." The purpose of this is to track Sen. Hillary Clinton's movement to the political center by determining how much of the American public considers her to be middle-of-the-road. I find this to be a fascinating story, because it says quite a bit about Hillary and her political skills--or lack thereof. It is, of course, gospel that Hillary Clinton is a political genius, or something to that effect. She is so brilliant that potential Democratic opponents are warned by pundits everywhere that she will work her secret devil arts on the...

Who is a journalist? That is the question that Jeff Gannon, alias James Guckert, asked in his own defense during a National Press Club panel last week. The club sponsored the discussion to illuminate the differences between legitimate journalists and bloggers -- or imposters. Gannon and a couple of bloggers were on the panel. Gannon made news recently after some liberal bloggers began investigating him when he asked President George W. Bush a question that had as its premise the assertion that congressional Democrats were "divorced from reality." Bush comes to his rare news conferences armed with a list of...

WASHINGTON, 2 March 2005 — Arab bashing reached a new low in Washington last week when Ann Coulter, a loudmouthed, mean-spirited, pro-Bush columnist, decided to defend the White House press pass controversy over faux-reporter James Guckert (a.k.a. Jeff Gannon) by writing in her syndicated column: “Press passes can’t be that hard to come by if the White House allows that old Arab Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president.” Thomas, whose Hearst column is distributed by King Features Syndicate, is of Lebanese descent. The former United Press International reporter has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, and...

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.cries as she announces with Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones , D-Ohio, that they will object to the certification of Ohio's electoral votes during a joint session of Congress today Thursday, Jan. 6, 2005

The American people are about to get a taste of what they voted for -- the most conservative domestic policies in modern times. On that score, President George W. Bush did not fool the voters. He was quite clear that he would turn the country even further to the right in his second term. He also stressed his determination to stay the course in Iraq, although it is beginning to look more and more like Vietnam every day. No exit strategy is apparent, even as public support for the war is waning. So the president is interpreting his election victory...

With the three branches of the U.S. government in Republican hands, President George W. Bush is trying to pack the United Nations with more Yes Men. But he is finding that his power is limited when he approaches the world organization where there is strong opposition to his war of choice against Iraq and go-it-alone foreign policy. The first target on his purge list appears to be U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who first ran afoul of the Bush White House when he had the audacity to call the Iraq invasion illegal. When Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., and a few...

To win a date with this beauty, submit your vital details along with 3" x 5" color photo and mail to:Ms. Helen Thomas %WCVB-TV 5 TV Place Needham, Massachusetts 02492 ================================================== Back in the days of the Vietnam quagmire, the administrations of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon insisted that they couldn't remove our troops from Southeast Asia because there would be chaos, anarchy and a blood bath. The result: Johnson and Nixon -- who did not want to go down in history as having lost a war -- stayed the course and kept us in the killing...

Now that President Bush has won reelection, maybe he'll feel secure enough to restore the First Lady of the Press to her front-row seat. "No," predicted Helen Thomas on Friday when she keynoted the 9th Annual WomenVenture Conference at the Minneapolis Convention Center. "He's still afraid of me. He can't take my questions. Mine are very simple." When I asked her how it feels to be the scariest little old lady in America, as far as W. is concerned, she said, "I don't feel anything but sorry for him, if he can't take a tough question. He's the president of...

There is new information on two abiding mysteries about the Iraq war: How many Iraqis have been killed? and, Why did President George W. Bush order a U.S. attack on Iraq in the first place? Last week, American and Iraqi researchers -- writing in the respected British medical journal, The Lancet -- estimated that the Iraqi death toll associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq was about 100,000 "and may be much higher." Most of them were women and children, victims of bombs or bullets from helicopter gunships. The estimates reported in Lancet were made by comparing the Iraqi...

This AM Maureen Dowd was being interviewed on our local "RUSH station", WGST Atlanta 640 AM. Here are the basic points she made as to why Kerry lost and what the Dems need to do to regain power. I leave it to you to figure out the consistency of these statements. - Kerry was not too liberal, so this is not something that needs to change (please keep that thought, Maureen). - Kerry didn't state his positions clearly enough, so nobody really knew what he stood for. - Kerry didn't take a stand on anything, particularly on anything "controversial".

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton warned Saturday that President Bush and his brother Gov. Jeb Bush have a "track record" of undermining Democracy in Florida, an apparent reference to Democrat claims that the two Republicans conspired to rig the vote in the state's 2000 presidential election. "If we were living in another country and we had the president of the country and his brother controlling one of the biggest provinces or states, we would ... have some doubts about whether, given their track record, they really believe in democracy," Clinton told about 300 cheering supporters in a theater in downtown...

There he goes again. President George W. Bush, having run out of attack slogans, has gone back to the old Republican standby of accusing his opponent, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., of being a liberal. What's wrong with that? It's ironic that the Bush 43 is accusing Kerry of being a "tax-and-spend liberal." This is the same president whose legacy will include a huge budget deficit that will be with us long after he has left office. The attempted demonization of the word "liberal" began with Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign in 1980 and was picked up by George H.W. Bush in...

Scientists said on Wednesday a huge mass of slimy flesh that washed up on a Chilean beach last week may be a rare type of giant octopus or just discarded whale blubber. In an unrelated story, Helen Thomas, Maddy Albright, and Janet Reno were seen on a Chilean beach during their vacation late last week.

THE West Wing press corps is hopping mad over how the Valium-drip March 6 Presidential news conference - the second primetime Q&A Dubya has deigned to hold - was conducted. Or maybe they're just het up because they are being called on to give Bush a free skate through what presidential hagiographer Bob (Bush at War) Woodward calls "a wake" and others liken to "a well-choreographed ballet of sleepwalkers". Apart from ABC News reporter Terry Moran, who had the temerity to imply that Bush had ducked a previous question about the world's opposition to war (and who later carped that...

Q Since you speak for the President, we have no access to him, can you categorically deny that the United States will take over the oil fields when we win this war? Which is apparently obvious and you're on your way and I don't think you doubt your victory. Oil -- is it about oil? MR. FLEISCHER: Helen, as I've told you many times, if this had anything to do with oil, the position of the United States would be to lift the sanctions so the oil could flow. This is not about that. This is about saving lives by...

If you've ever seen the hilarious Helen Thomas making an ass of herself at the White House press briefings, spouting her leftist opinions and launching into diatribes at President Bush rather than just asking a question, you won't be surprised that she thinks Sen. Hillary Clinton would be a "wonderful" Democrat nominee for president. Former Clintonoid George Stephanopoulos, however, is "not sure."

9/11/02: A Different America Changes In United States Not All For Better POSTED: 11:54 a.m. EDT September 9, 2002 UPDATED: 12:25 p.m. EDT September 9, 2002 WASHINGTON -- America has fundamentally changed since last year's horrific terrorist attacks, but not all for the better. We are still trying to fathom the depths of the hatred that brought this incredible catastrophe to our land and transformed our lives. The fallout from the tragedy, with its senseless loss of life, will be felt for years to come. Indeed, it was a sad turning point for America. Since then, we have learned some...

A Toast To Groundbreaking Female Journalists Nellie Bly, Ida Tarbell, Marquerite Higgins And Ethel Payne Broke Mold POSTED: 12:20 p.m. EDT September 12, 2002 UPDATED: 12:34 p.m. EDT September 12, 2002 WASHINGTON -- I'm happy to say that women have found their place in journalism. It took a long time, and of course they were not alone. Women in many other fields have struggled over the years for job equality. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, women journalists fought uphill battles for the opportunity to write "hard news" -- the breaking stories of the day -- for their...

Let's Avoid Homeland Snitching Operation Tips Sounds Like Orwellian Nightmare POSTED: 3:56 p.m. EDT August 1, 2002 UPDATED: 11:56 a.m. EDT August 2, 2002 WASHINGTON -- Thank heavens wiser leaders than President George W. Bush have prevailed, and we are not going to become a nation of official snitches. In an Orwellian nightmare of a "Big Brother" society, Bush put forth his neat little public-spy plan called Operation TIPS (for Terrorism Information and Prevention System) in his State of the Union address. It would have deputized millions of people -- including letter carriers, truck drivers, telephone and cable repair workers...

PRESIDENT Bush won worldwide acclaim when he spotlighted the ruthless treatment of women by the Taliban regime. His bold stance on the issue contributed heavily to the international backing he received when he decided to attack terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere. But now he risks losing much of that support by withdrawing his earlier approval of an international women's rights treaty. The pact, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979, was signed by President Carter in 1980 but has languished in the Senate since then, although 170 nations have ratified it. Senate ratification requires a two-thirds majority of...