Free Republic

I'll keep this short and bitter. Every god damned blue state senator who failed to sign on to the Alito filibuster MUST be fought in the primaries and replaced. The Democratic party has failed the rank and file members. It is time to take back the Democratic party from the right wing, loser hacks who have been fumblingly, failingly controlling it and the candidates put forward. I can't believe how many people tell me that they believe the DLC and right wing democrats are really Republican operators. IN the OpEdNews.com/Zogby people's poll I just ran in Pennsylvania, about 29% of...

There I was, across the street, a six lane street. Just me. And my little camera. I stood quietly on the empty sidewalk taking pictures of the Code Pink protest at Walter Reed. The one that used to be at the main entrance to the hospital, until they forgot to renew their permit for that location. Now, they've taken to infesting a location down the street, in front of a small sidewalk park, but still in front of the hospital. I had gone down alone, with my camera and tripod to document their little public protest. I had less than...

S14240 December 21, 2005 Did you see that? Did you see how it devastated the land, and all the plant life is now dying because it was inundated in saltwater? The earthquake in my State did that. I saw one town disappear. I saw a third of my city, Anchorage, disappear. You have to have had that experience to understand how I felt when I went to New Orleans. You people didn’t believe it. Many of you said I did this for political reasons, just a crass thing, pick up some money and give it away for votes. I never...

Iraq: Why did Democrats shut down the Senate on Tuesday? To make a point against the war. No, wait. They say they support the troops. Could it be that they're trying to have it both ways?.....They aren't letting up on Iraq... What then? The logical endpoint of such a strategy is withdrawal from Iraq. After all, if the war is shown to be a mistake, why keep fighting it? That's the view of the Democratic Party's anti-war base. But the party can't win elections with votes only from its Cindy Sheehan wing. It needs to appeal to people in the...

On October 3rd, President Bush announced his nomination of his longtime friend, White House Counsel Harriet Miers as his nominee for the vacancy created by the departure of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Miers had been leading the White House effort to help Bush choose nominees to the Supreme Court. Unlike recent Democrat presidential nominees Al Gore and John Kerry who declared they would never nominate a pro-life Supreme Court justice, Bush has repeatedly indicated that he has no litmus test for his judicial nominees on abortion clearly implying a willingness to select judicial nominees who support the arguably...

I generally like the Republicans that Sean Hannity has on his show, but George Will really got on my nerves when he defended keeping the ability to filibuster judges based solely on partisan politics. His first statement that got me going was to the effect of, "Sean, we don't want to place limits on what requires a supremajority in the Senate. You would have it that anything not allowed by the Constitution is forbidden. Such limits are antithetical to a free society". HELLO?!!! Mr. Will, please READ the Constitution before you ever dare to utter another idiotic statement like this....

Nilotpal Basu, chairman of the standing committee on civil aviations, has ruled out the possibility of any kind of probe into the deal between Air-India and the Boeing company on the purchase of 50 aircraft by the official airlines. Speaking to rediff.com on Thursday, Basu said that the talk of a probe by CVC into the deal is absurd. "I think the issue raised by the Airbus is totally unwarranted. If at all there has to be a probe on whether there is any issue of irregularities or Air-India not getting the best price, then it would be done by...

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. (AP) - Police arrested an 8-year-old boy who allegedly had a violent outburst in school, head-butting his teacher and kicking an assistant principal, when he was told he couldn't go outside to play with other students. The 4-foot pupil was led away from Rawls Byrd Elementary School in handcuffs Tuesday and charged with disorderly conduct and assault and battery. "It's not something that happens every day," Maj. Stan Stout said of what could be the department's youngest arrest ever. Stout said the chair-tossing, desk-turning outburst occurred after a teacher, and later the assistant principal, attempted to stop the...

No Name Calling Week?     1/12/2005By Warren Throckmorton, Ph.D.Yes, name-calling is wrong. But this event’s sponsors reveal the agenda behind banning it. “There is a special place in hell for people like you!” These words were directed at me by a teacher during this past summer’s National Education Association (NEA) convention in Washington, D.C. This delegate to the NEA convention made his prediction in response to my presence at the NEA’s Ex-Gay Educators’ Caucus booth in the convention exhibit hall. His cheery salutation caught me off-guard given the message of tolerance and acceptance I had been hearing around the exhibit hall....

(excerpt of article copied from hard copy edition of FT) - SNIP - These testimonies to irrelevance recalled themselves on the eve of this week’s Nato summit in Istanbul. As we gazed sout-east over the Bosphorus in the direction of Iraq, one of those charged with drafting the leader’s communiqué remarked that the outcome had been another bad-temepered compromise. Nato ambassadors had sweated long and hard to gloss over their differences. But, though thickly applied, the gloss was patchy. The ambiguities of the text, this official said, had left room for the obligatory public spat between France and the US....

LONDON (Reuters) - An Iranian refugee has sewn his eyes, ears and mouth shut in protest at the rejection of his asylum application, a friend says. The move by Shahin Portofeh, 23, comes less than two months after another Iranian refugee, Abas Amini, won the right to stay in Britain after resorting to the same extreme tactic. "I'm standing next to him right now and he is in a lot of pain," said a woman describing herself as a friend and interpreter in Portofeh's bedroom in Coventry. The interpreter, who declined to be named, said Portofeh was lying on his...

Toddler tantrum grounds jet By James Sturcke, Evening Standard 12 March 2003 Like any two-year-old Marcello Ferrand is prone to the occasional tantrum. So when an aircraft crew tried to make him wear a seatbelt he panicked and sat under the seat - the kind of scene any parent will recognise. However, for the staff of a British Airways flight from Milan to Heathrow it demanded immediate action - which resulted in the police being called and Marcello, along with his grandparents, being hauled off the plane. The airline's ground staff then refused to let the elderly couple and Marcello,...

Comedian Allegedly Has Tantrum Over Rental Car Joan Rivers Could Lose Gun Permits POSTED: 11:15 a.m. EST December 28, 2002 Comedian Joan Rivers may lose her permit to carry guns because of a recent incident at a rental car counter, according to a recent report in the New York Post. Rivers, 69, allegedly threw a marker at a Dollar Rent-A-Car clerk after what the newspaper calls a "foul-mouthed tantrum." The report said that Rivers' driver had to wait in line at the rental car business, although the location was not revealed. Griselda Santana, 38, allegedly was the recipient of Rivers'...

Americans who value the Constitution should stand with Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and oppose George Bush's attempted power grab in conjunction with establishing a Department of Homeland Security. The Bushies are trying to frame the debate as either protecting bureaucracy or providing security for Americans. In fact, the debate is about preventing an authoritarian president from sacrificing the Constitution in the name of providing security. Let me remind you that those who prefer security to freedom will lose both. Bush wants to be able to disregard labor contracts and civil-service rules, as well as move money within the department as...

We have a war-crazed vice president. An addict, a verifiable military junkie. Many of us perhaps do not fully realize this. We are very unfortunately saddled with one of the least charismatic least interesting most intellectually acrimonious and most desperately hawkish, violence-hungry, soulfully inscrutable vice president in decades, and he wants this country at war, now and always. Oh yes he does. Here is Dick Cheney, speaking to veterans of foreign wars, hyping up the need for a dramatic, wildly expensive pre-emptive strike against evil Saddam and evil Iraq because Saddam is without a doubt right this minute developing super-evil...