Free Republic

The president-elect has to take a stand on Bush's dark legacy. A small and largely unnoticed spat among the transition planners for the president-elect, Barack Obama, broke out last week. It was the first genuinely passionate debate among the Obamaites and it centres on a terribly difficult and terribly important decision that will be among the first that Obama has to make. How does he deal with the legacy of criminal actions of his predecessor's administration when it comes to detention, interrogation, abuse and torture of terror suspects? That has long hovered in the back of the minds of those...

I should probably apologize to everyone before showing you this video. But it just the sort of thing that is being embraced in Democratic circles as acceptable behavior. That smug prick Andrew Sullivan posted it on his blog calling it Red, White And MILF. It is so reprehensible that I have no words with which to express my outrage. I am sure some of you won't have that problem. Watch the video here. I don't think anyone wants it on this site.

If you want to know why ... John McCain came to pick a total unknown with a Down Syndrome baby as his replacement as war-president, you have to understand the immense importance of the Christianist base. McCain isn't one of them, however much he tries to re-tell his life-story to make it so. They know it, he knows it, and he needed a religious running mate. He might have succeeded with Pawlenty, who is a solid pick that a mature and responsible campaign would have selected in a heartbeat. Instead - partly out of insane cynicism (did he really believe...

CONFER: Protecting property rights By Bob Confer The Tonawanda News When our founding fathers penned the Declaration of Independence they noted we are endowed with unalienable rights which include “…Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Happiness was used as an all-inclusive term, but it had its basis in the property rights of the individual. This focus was borrowed from the writings of British philosopher John Locke who emphasized life, health, liberty, and property rights in writings that appeared over a century before the Declaration. Recognizing Locke’s influence on our nation’s principles is the key to understanding just exactly what...

A quote from his site: “That’s a shame - because Obama clearly represents, whatever his faults, a different racial politics than that of Jackson, Sharpton and the past.” (that’s Andy’s quote. my response below) and what are those “faults” you speak of? I’d like to know, Andrew. Really, ‘cause I haven’t seen much about that from you. And now you’re giving Democrats advice on how to heal the divide by bringing HILLARY to the VP slot?! Wow, have your priorities changed. I mean, your style hasn’t, but your priorities have. Also, after basically writing off Hillary as the devil (one...

"One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them." -- Thomas Jefferson, to George Washington, June 19, 1796. "After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it." -- William S. Burroughs. Big Tim Sullivan was a notorious Irish gangster whose mob controlled New York City south of 14th Street around the turn of the 20th century. Throwing in his lot with the likes of Monk Eastman, Paul Kelly and Arnold Rothstein, Sullivan became an expert on that dark nexus where organized crime and politics consummate...

WHAT CONSERVATIVES SHOULD LEARN FROM 9/11. Right Turn by Andrew Sullivan These are heady times for conservatism. The last 20 years have seen a decisive shift in the West toward market economics and away from statist intervention. The welfare state as it has historically been understood is an endangered species. Culturally, the importance of family structure, religious faith, and personal responsibility is affirmed by a wider array of people than for a generation. And with September 11, the bedrock conservative insight that the world is an inherently dangerous place has been decisively proved once again. Even the democratic left has ...

WATERLOO --- The first installment of Ken Burns' long awaited seven-part World War II documentary, "The War," which aired on PBS Sunday night, captivated many but contained one error that caught the attention of some Cedar Valley residents. Local viewers noted that the show' first installment, "A Necessary War," mistakenly stated that the five Sullivan Brothers, who enlisted in 1941 and were killed Nov. 13, 1942, were from Fredericksburg, Iowa, and not Waterloo. The confusion probably arose because Bill Ball of Fredericksburg, a good friend of the Sullivans, was killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor. His death, according to...

State Sen. John Sullivan, a Rushville Democrat, won't run for the 18th District Congressional seat that U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood is vacating. Sullivan, who made the announcement this morning in a news release, said he would seek re-election to his 47th State Senate District seat next year. "Right now, I'm where I want and need to be, and I plan to continue working hard to serve the poeple of western Illinois," he said. If Sullivan, a member of the General Assembly since 2003, had opted to run for Congress, he could not also have sought to keep his state Senate...

Former US military leaders have called on the Bush administration to make major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. In a report, they say global warming poses a serious threat to national security, as the US could be drawn into wars over water and other conflicts. They appear to criticise President George W Bush's refusal to join an international treaty to cut emissions. Among the 11 authors are ex-Army chief of staff Gordon Sullivan and Mr Bush's ex-Mid-East peace envoy Anthony Zinni. The report says the US "must become a more constructive partner" with other nations to fight global warming and...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Global warming poses a "serious threat to America's national security" and the U.S. likely will be dragged into fights over water and other shortages, top retired military leaders warn in a new report. The report says that in the next 30 to 40 years there will be wars over water, increased hunger instability from worsening disease and rising sea levels and global warming-induced refugees. "The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide and the growth of terrorism," the 35-page report predicts. "Climate change exacerbates already unstable situations," former U.S. Army chief of staff...

American conservatism is in crisis. ... A Giuliani or Romney candidacy [versus Clinton], could well eke out a victory in 2008. ... The strains are there, all right, and they have been made much more acute in the Bush years under the weight of massive spending increases, evangelical overreach, abuse of executive power, conventional corruption, and (most disastrously) a mismanaged war. ... The crisis, rather, is of a different kind. It is intellectual, and it is deeper than anything captured by the conventional categories. The sole merit of Dinesh D'Souza's new book is that it acknowledges this intellectual collapse, even...

Among my many guilty pleasures — bad reality television, solitary nose excavation, the Fox News Channel — hating Hillary Clinton was once near the top of the list. The senator from New York somehow managed to arouse every one of my love-to-hate zones. She was a self-righteous feminist (boo) who married her way to power (double-plus-boo). She wanted to turn American medicine into the National Health Service (grrr) and all her friends were wealthy lawyers (triple eye-roll). She was Lady Macbeth when she wasn’t some goo-goo liberal ideologue. There were as many ways to despise her as she had hairstyles....

The Christianist Candidate In case you were unaware, it's Mitt Romney. As with most Christianists, the idea of allowing different states to try different solutions to the same problem is dispensable when moral absolutes are involved. In other words, the fundamentalists have no interest in federalism. If federalism means that California can have marriage equality and medical marijuana, today's GOP base wants none of it. Here's Romney's discussion of John McCain's approach: Romney was less charitable to McCain, who on Sunday told ABC News: 'I believe that the issue of gay marriage should be decided by the states.' McCain also...

NEW YORK In a move that no doubt sent a shiver through several candidates in his own party, President Bush, in a special interview with wire service reporters in the White House, today guaranteed a job for his Pentagon chief for two more years, adding that both Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney "are doing fantastic jobs and I strongly support them." But it wasn't only endangered Republicans who have been calling for Rumsfeld's ouster who may have blanched. Andrew Sullivan, the conservative writer who was once a key media supporter for the Iraq war, denounced the latest Bush statement...

MADISON, Wis. -- Sex! The Green Bay Packers! Sex with the Green Bay Packers! The usually ho-hum race for Wisconsin secretary of state is being spiced up by one candidate's naughty tell-all book about her bed-hopping exploits with Green Bay football legends during the team's glory days under Vince Lombardi in the 1960s. Sandy Sullivan, a 65-year-old Republican with no political experience, self-published a gushing memoir in 2004 titled "Green Bay Love Stories and Other Affairs" in which she claims she was the girlfriend of Packers Paul Hornung and Dan Currie, deflected a pass from Hall of Famer Don Hutson...

Powell leads the right in a Bush-whack Andrew Sullivan In my first year in America, as a budding young conservative, my old friend, the writer John O’Sullivan, invited me out to dinner. The dinner, it turned out, was with none other than William F Buckley, a man who remains the undisputed titan of American conservatism. Buckley became famous in America in the 1950s and 1960s for being a conservative intellectual when such a thing was regarded as axiomatically oxymoronic. He founded the National Review, the indispensable magazine for the burgeoning American conservative movement. He was one of the inspirations for...

MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Fifty years ago, as Elvis Presley was about to make his first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Helen Kreis was staring at the TV screen, barely able to contain her teenage excitement. Then her father pulled the plug. “He was just joking, but before he could get it plugged back in, I was next door at the neighbor’s house. They were watching Elvis, of course, and I wasn’t taking any chances,” said the now-65-year-old Kreis, of Olney, Md. “Everybody was watching Elvis.” Well, maybe not everybody, but nearly everyone in America who had a TV had...

What does the term "Christianist" mean and why is Time peddling it? Time columnist Andrew Sullivan uses the term to describe evangelicals with whom he disagrees. He says his goal is to "take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist." He explains further, "Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state...

If you could save the victims of one of the following four events, which group would you save? 1. The victims of Fidel Castro's "revolution?" 2. The victims of Hezbollah's ambushes, rockets and missiles over the past three weeks? 3. The victims of the Seattle attack on the Jewish federation? 4. The victims of Mel Gibson's repulsive outburst of anti-Semitic venom? If all human life is valued equally, you'd have to save Castro's millions of victims, the Hezbollah's thousands, then the one dead and many injured in Seattle, and then Gibson's offended. As an extraordinary week draws to a close,...