Free Republic

Richard Viguerie, the legendary hard-right activist who spent much of the past decade arguing that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were too liberal, now declares that: "Tea Party Activists Are the New GOP." There is little reason to argue with the man whose direct-mail campaigning funded the rise of the Republican right in the late 1970s and who grumbled loudly when Newt Gingrich, Bush, Cheney and Republican leaders tried to soften the party's roughest edges. Viguerie isn't grumbling now. He's celebrating. And rightly so. With the decision of moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava, the party's nominee in New York state...

When Sarah Palin's big-bucks memoir "Going Rogue: An American Life by Sarah Palin" comes out Nov. 17, there'll be another book about her hitting the stores the same day: "Going Rouge: Sarah Palin, an American Nightmare." The "Rouge" book, with a similar name and cover, will be put out by a new company, OR Books, says Publisher's Marketplace, which says it will be composed of "essays assembled by Nation editors Richard Kim and Betsy Reed." Marketplace adds that "it promises 'progressive perspectives on Sarah Palin's political career' by writers including Naomi Klein, Jane Mayer, Katha Pollitt, Jim Hightower, Christopher Hayes,...

(CNSNews.com) - Emily Douglas, Web editor for The Nation magazine, said Wednesday that making the “recession worse” and making goods “more expensive” for Americans are means to reduce consumerism and preserve the environment. Douglas was one of three journalists participating in a panel discussion, “Covering Climate: What’s Population Got to Do With It,” which was held at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. The other two panelists were Dennis Dimick, executive editor of National Geographic, and Andrew Revkin, environmental reporter for The New York Times (who participated via Web camera). An audience member who identified herself as an employee...

If you want some indication of the disarray that the "progressives" find themselves in, consider that disgraced broadcaster Dan Rather will be keynoting a September 23 event sponsored by The Nation magazine on "What Will Become of the News?" The Nation calls Rather "legendary," ignoring how he was put out to pasture by CBS News after he used fake documents in 2004 to smear then-President Bush. Tickets to hear and see Rather are $200 each. Rather is a legend in his own mind-and apparently the minds of those left-wingers who appreciate his effort to defeat Bush's re-election bid and throw...

Several weeks ago an important report commissioned by the Vermont Health Care Commission was quietly posted on the Legislative Council Web site. No fanfare, no press conferences, no attention given. Media ignored it. The committee that ordered it ignored it. The Legislature ignored it. The administration ignored it. The report's findings tumbled into the political abyss... What it says ought to be engraved in the thinking of every legislator and every administration member... The Kavet-Rockler report ordered by the Legislature, and apparently dust-binned by it, carries a very disturbing "inconvenient truth." That is that ...

From last week’s issue of The Nation, the flagship publication of the Left: The White House call for progressives to ignore these Democratic obstructionists is not much different from Lyndon Johnson telling Martin Luther King Jr. to halt civil rights demonstrations in a South ruled by segregationist Democrats. Change never comes from following such advice. This comparison isn’t an accident. “Progressives” continually try and cast the push for socialized medicine as the new Civil Rights cause, as though the inability to get taxpayers to pay for one’s medical care was in any way comparable to Jim Crow and segregation. Just...

he Nation is claiming to have information from informants that Blackwater founder Erik Prince is some sort of delusional latter-day Templar Knight, ordering murders to cover up his plot to wage war against the Islamic world. If it sounds a bit far-fetched … well, it should. Without going into the specific allegations being made in the consolidated civil cases, logic and factual errors in claims made in the article are troubling. See this claim from a man who claims to be a former member of the Blackwater management team, identified as John Doe #2: "Using his various companies, [Prince] procured...

I heard one news report on the radio when all of this happened a couple days back that talked about the 3 Americans captured in Iran, but haven't heard anything about it since, nor do any of the reports on the internet say anything about it. One was described as a teacher and a "campus activist", and another one was a "community activist". Anyone else here this?

Washington has said it is checking reports that three US tourists were detained by Iranians while hiking along the northern Iraqi border. The three are reported to have gone missing in Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region which borders Iran.

SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq (AP) - The U.S. State Department says it's investigating reports that three Americans have been detained by Iranians after wandering near the border in the self-ruled Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Two Kurdish officials say the three Americans apparently were arrested after entering Iranian territory without permission. One security official says the missing Americans were tourists on an outing. The official says the three contacted a colleague Friday and said "they had mistakenly entered Iranian territory and troops surrounded them." The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to release the information. State Department spokesman...

The long hunt for the new leader of the Republican Party has at last come to an end, and the winner isn't Rush Limbaugh, Mitt Romney, or even Sarah Palin, but this woman in a red T-shirt: (VIDEO AT LINK) If you're going to lead a low-tech lynch mob, you've got to be able to get that Gilbert Gottfried screech into your voice like the Lady in Red does when she says, "I want my country back!" That's leadership for you, ever so much more forceful than poor Delaware Rep. Mike Castle, a GOP moderate (one of eight who voted...

WASHINGTON – Walter Cronkite is dead at 92 – but most Americans, many of whom considered him "the most trusted man" in the country during his reign as CBS News anchor – still don't know what motivated him and how he secured such an influential and lofty position. He was like a grandfatherly institution in the early days of TV. People believed him. Uncle Walter wouldn't lie, America believed. Thus, when he gave his opinions, they had impact. One example was his report on the Tet offensive in Vietnam, which is credited with swinging the tide of opinion against the...

Kung Fu and Kill Bill star David Carradine was found hung in a hotel room in Bangkok on Wednesday, Thai police said. "Kung Fu" and "Kill Bill" star David Carradine was found hung himself in a closet in a hotel room in Bangkok on Wednesday, Thai police said.

Ask those on the left what values they champion, and they will say equality, tolerance, women's rights, gay rights, workers rights and human rights. Militant Islamists oppose all that, not infrequently through the application of lethal force. So how does one explain the burgeoning left-Islamist alliance? I know: There are principled individuals on the left who do not condone terrorism or minimize the Islamist threat. Author Paul Berman, a man of the left, has been more incisive on these issues than just about anyone else. Left-of-center publications, such as The New Republic, have not been apologists for jihadism. But it...

All is not well in Obamafanland. It's not clear exactly what accounts for the change of mood. Maybe it was the rancid smell emanating from Treasury's latest bank bailout. Or the news that the president's chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, earned millions from the very Wall Street banks and hedge funds he is protecting from reregulation now. Or perhaps it began earlier, with Obama's silence during Israel's Gaza attack.

John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney were the founders, with Josh Silver, of Free Press, which has launched a campaign to save the news. Their book, Saving Journalism: The Soul of Democracy, will be published by New Press in the fall. Communities across America are suffering through a crisis that could leave a dramatically diminished version of democracy in its wake. It is not the economic meltdown, although the crisis is related to the broader day of reckoning that appears to have arrived. The crisis of which we speak involves more than mere economics. Journalism is collapsing, and with it...

The most expensive presidential campaign in history and the cataclysmic financial meltdown of the past few months combined to produce a "perfect storm," Romero told me recently. The storm blew a $19 million hole in the ACLU's budget, resulting in a hiring freeze and the cancellation of various projects, followed by the announcement, in January, that 10 percent of the national staff was being let go. Employees with decades of experience were told to clear out their offices; no department was left unscathed.

Cut the Military Budget--IIBy Barney Frank This article appeared in the March 2, 2009 edition of The Nation. February 11, 2009 I am a great believer in freedom of expression and am proud of those times when I have been one of a few members of Congress to oppose censorship. I still hold close to an absolutist position, but I have been tempted recently to make an exception, not by banning speech but by requiring it. I would be very happy if there was some way to make it a misdemeanor for people to talk about reducing the budget deficit...

Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men,...

CAN YOU HEAR the grumbling over in what Howard Dean used to call "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party?" The tolerance-and-diversity crowd is upset with Barack Obama; it seems the president-elect has been bringing people into his circle who don't agree with them on every single issue. The consternation on the left began with the naming of Obama's national security team - Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Robert Gates to continue as secretary of defense, and retired four-star General James Jones as national security adviser. "Barack Obama's Kettle of Hawks," they were promptly dubbed in the Guardian by...

Now it has officially gone too far: Democrats, in their zeal to appear friendly to evangelical voters, have chosen celebrity preacher and best-selling author Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at Barack Obama's inauguration. There was no doubt that Obama, like every president before him, would pick a Christian minister to perform this sacred duty. But Obama had thousands of clergy to choose from, and the choice of Warren is not only a slap in the face to progressive ministers toiling on the front lines of advocacy and service but a bow to the continuing influence of the religious right...

It couldn't have been easy for Bill Ayers to keep quiet while the McCain campaign tarred him as the Obama's best friend, the terrorist. Unfortunately, the silence was too good to last. On Saturday's New York Times op-ed page, he announced that "it's finally time to tell my true story." Like his memoir, Fugitive Days , "The Real Bill Ayers" is a sentimentalized, self-justifying whitewash of his role in the weirdo violent fringe of the 1960s-70s antiwar left. "I never killed or injured anyone, "Ayers writes. "In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an...

It couldn't have been easy for Bill Ayers to keep quiet while the McCain campaign tarred him as the Obama's best friend, the terrorist. Unfortunately, the silence was too good to last. On Saturday's New York Times op-ed page, he announced that "it's finally time to tell my true story." Like his memoir, Fugitive Days , "The Real Bill Ayers" is a sentimentalized, self-justifying whitewash of his role in the weirdo violent fringe of the 1960s-70s antiwar left. "I never killed or injured anyone, "Ayers writes. "In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an...

The names floated for Barack Obama's national security team "are drawn exclusively from conservative, centrist and pro-military circles without even a single -- yes, not one! -- chosen to represent the antiwar wing of the Democratic party." In his plaintive post this week on the Nation magazine's Web site, Robert Dreyfuss indulges in the political left's wonderful talent for overstatement. But who are we to interfere with his despair? If reports are correct, on Monday the President-elect will ask Robert Gates to stay on as Secretary of Defense and name retired Marine General James Jones as National Security Adviser. These...

There are some heated conversations under way in the progressive blogosphere, including some at thenation.com, in which our own writers as well as people like Glenn Greenwald, Jane Hamsher, David Sirota and Digby are debating why Barack Obama has so far appointed few progressives to his cabinet. It's worth checking them out. I think that we progressives need to be as clear-eyed, tough and pragmatic about Obama as he is about us. President-elect Obama is a centrist at a time when centrism means energy independence and green jobs and universal healthcare and massive economic stimulus programs and government intervention in...

Here is the ugly, unofficial truth that neither Wall Street nor the government will acknowledge: the pinnacle of the US financial system is broke--with perhaps $2 trillion in rotten financial assets on the books. Nobody knows, exactly. The bankers won't say, and regulators won't ask .... [which]feeds the conviction that banking's problems are far worse than we've been told. The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College puts it plainly: "It is probable that many and perhaps most financial institutions are insolvent today--with a black hole of negative net worth that would swallow Paulson's entire $700 billion in one gulp." The...

Hillary's Mystery Money MenRuss Baker & Adam Federman Thu Oct 18, 2:04 PM ET The Nation -- In the Clintons' pursuit of power, there is no such thing as a strange bedfellow. One recently exposed inamorata was Norman Hsu, the mysterious businessman from Hong Kong who brought in $850,000 to Hillary Clinton's campaign before being unmasked as a fugitive. Her campaign dismissed Hsu as someone who'd slipped through the cracks of an otherwise unimpeachable system for vetting donors, and perhaps he was. The same cannot be said for the notorious financier Alan Quasha, whose involvement with Clinton is at least...

Southerners, Farmers Rejoice at Obama Victory. Follow link http://www.notthenation.com/pages/news/getnews.php?id=636

John McCain is right about one thing: he's no George W. Bush. Bush, for all his flaws, would never run a campaign as badly as McCain's. The Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004 were disciplined, on message and well-organized. The McCain campaign is exactly the opposite. McCain bragged in the first debate that he understands the difference between strategy and tactics. But apparently his campaign doesn't. Ari Berman says that "Most Americans don't care about ACORN or Bill Ayers or Joe the Plumber" Complaining about ACORN's bad voter registrations? That's a tactic, too, and not a very effective one.

The upcoming presidential election will shape the Supreme Court for decades to come. John Paul Stevens is 88, David Souter dislikes Washington and the 75-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been treated for cancer. One or more of these liberal Justices will probably leave the bench in the next four years. The replacement of one or two of them by a conservative would mean a rollback of key rulings of recent years. Roe v. Wade has drawn the most attention, but many other liberal rulings of the past twenty years that were decided by 5-to-4 or 6-to-3 votes could be reversed....

Washington can act with breathtaking urgency when the right people want something done. In this case, the people are Wall Street's titans, who are scared witless at the prospect of their historic implosion. Congress quickly agreed to enact a gargantuan bailout, with more to come, to calm the anxieties and halt the deflation of Wall Street giants. Put aside partisan bickering, no time for hearings, no need to think through the deeper implications. We haven't seen "bipartisan cooperation" like this since Washington decided to invade Iraq. In their haste to do anything the financial guys seem to want, Congress and...

If, God forbid, foreign policy had to be the deciding factor in choosing between Barack Obama and John McCain, then last night's terrible showing by Obama would make me a Ralph Nader voter in a heartbeat. Obama's performance was nothing short of pathetic, and only a Democratic-leaning analysts and voters with blinders on could suggest that Obama won the debate. More important, he utterly blew a chance to draw a stark contrast with John McCain on America's approach to the world. He checked all the boxes. Barack ("Senator McCain is right") Obama couldn't find anything to disagree with the militarist...

John McCain chose the supremely under-qualified Sarah Palin as his running mate partly because she is a woman. If you have a problem with that, you're a sexist. She talks incessantly about being a mother of five and uses her newborn, Trig, who has Down syndrome, as a campaign prop. If you wonder how she'll handle all those kids and the Veep job too, you're a super-sexist. "When do they ever ask a man that question?" charges that fiery feminist Rudy Giuliani. Indeed, Palin, who went back to work when Trig was three days old, gets nothing but praise from...

posted by Ari Melber on 09/06/2008 Sarah Palin is an able liar, as her acceptance speech showed. She may be a coward, too, at least when it comes to facing down the reporters she blasted from the comfort of that solitary podium in St. Paul. The McCain campaign has admitted to a ban on most press interviews for its largely unknown but popular running mate. McCain's aides are selling this highly unusual approach with rank contempt for the public. "Who cares?" laughed Nicolle Wallace, when pressed on why Palin won't take questions by Time's Jay Carney, on MSNBC. "But I...

In a February interview with MTV, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin lavished praise on maverick Republican presidential contender Ron Paul. She had a few nice things to say about another GOP candidate, Mitt Romney. But Palin made no mention of John McCain. Now that McCain is the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, he has selected Palin as his prospective running-mate for vice president. McCain calls Palin his political "soul-mate." But, in February, at a point when McCain was closing in on the Republican nomination, it sure sounded like she was sweet on Paul. The governor, who sported a Pat Buchanan pin at...

Last week, while the media focused almost obsessively on the DNC's spectacle in Denver, the country's most influential conservatives met quietly at a hotel in downtown Minneapolis to get to know Sarah Palin. The assembled were members of the Council for National Policy, an ultra-secretive cabal that networks wealthy right-wing donors together with top conservative operatives to plan long-term movement strategy. CNP members have included Tony Perkins, James Dobson, Grover Norquist, Tim LaHaye and Paul Weyrich. [ snip ] I learned of the get-together only through an online commentary by one of its attendees, top Dobson/Focus on the Family flack...

Very good news from The Nation: >Remember when Pat Buchanan ran a number of hard-right, fringe campaigns for president in the late 1980s, 1990s and 2000? Well, guess who was supporting him: From an AP report in 1999: Pat Buchanan brought his conservative message of a smaller government and an America First foreign policy to Fairbanks and Wasilla on Friday as he continued a campaign swing through Alaska. Buchanan’s strong message championing states rights resonated with the roughly 85 people gathered for an Interior Republican luncheon in Fairbanks. … Among those sporting Buchanan buttons were Wasilla Mayor Sarah Palin and...

"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane." -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Pressured by progressive activists who objected to the tepid language in a draft document prepared by the Barack Obama campaign, the Democratic platform-writing committee reworked the party's official agenda Saturday to include a clear commitment "that every American man, woman and child be guaranteed to have affordable, comprehensive health care." The official draft, which was adopted at the platform committee's gathering in Pittsburgh, will now be submitted to the Democratic National Convention for approval. The platform is likely...

We urge you, then, to listen to the voices of the people who can lift you to the presidency and beyond. Since your historic victory in the primary, there have been troubling signs that you are moving away from the core commitments shared by many who have supported your campaign, toward a more cautious and centrist stance--including, most notably, your vote for the FISA legislation granting telecom companies immunity from prosecution for illegal wiretapping, which angered and dismayed so many of your supporters. We recognize that compromise is necessary in any democracy. We understand that the pressures brought to bear...

Since your historic victory in the primary, there have been troubling signs that you are moving away from the core commitments shared by many who have supported your campaign, toward a more cautious and centrist stance--including, most notably, your vote for the FISA legislation granting telecom companies immunity from prosecution for illegal wiretapping, which angered and dismayed so many of your supporters.

Before Barack Obama had said anything about Iraq last week, the McCain campaign was desperate to attack his Iraq position. At first they criticized Obama for sticking to his plan to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office. A day later they accused Obama of reversing that pledge. What changed? Obama said in South Dakota on Thursday that he would listen to military commanders on the ground when he visited Iraq this summer and tactically revise his Iraq plan afterwards. "I am going to do a thorough assessment when I'm there," Obama said. "I'm sure...

<p>The last vote that George Carlin said he cast in a presidential race was for George McGovern in 1972.</p> <p>When Richard Nixon, who Carlin described as a member of a sub-species of humanity, overwhelmingly defeated McGovern, the comedian gave up on the political process.</p>

John Hagee, the controversial pastor who has endorsed John McCain, argued in a late 1990s sermon that God sent Hitler to help the Jews get to the promised land (Israel, not Auschwitz). Why did God allow the Holocaust to happen? According to a report in the Huffington Post by Sam Stein, Hagee's answer was: "Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel." The report raises several questions. Did God have to be so rough in his methods? Instead of putting the Jews on trains to Auschwitz,...

In the course of Hillary Clinton's historic run for the White House--in which she became the first woman ever to prevail in a state-level presidential primary contest--she has been likened to Lorena Bobbitt (by Tucker Carlson); a "hellish housewife" (Leon Wieseltier); and described as "witchy," a "she-devil," "anti-male" and "a stripteaser" (Chris Matthews). Her loud and hearty laugh has been labeled "the cackle," her voice compared to "fingernails on a blackboard" and her posture said to look "like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court." As one Fox News commentator put it, "When Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear, Take...

I come from a religious tradition where we shout from the sanctuary and march on the picket line! Where we give God the glory and give the devil the blues! — Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Sunday night in Detroit. The black church in America has long lived between the glory and the blues, between the ecstasy of worship and the exigencies of politics. It is a place concerned with both the sacred and the profane, both a religious and a political institution. It is for that reason that an ambitious young Barack Obama first sought out Reverend Wright twenty years ago....

That Hillary Clinton has apparently found success in talking tough about foreigners and sinking to Bush-like "politics of fear" only illuminates how little American foreign policy has been seriously debated in the Democratic presidential nominee race, and how little voters know or remember about Bill Clinton's international legacy. Against the background of Hillary Clinton's repeated claims to cosmopolitan experience, her scores of foreign stopovers (not unlike the travels of Laura Bush) and her meetings with a lot of world figures, the record of the 1992-2000 period bears more scrutiny than it is getting, beyond the NAFTA flip-flop. This is nowhere...

My wife Barbara has begun yelling at the television set every time she hears Hillary Clinton. This is abnormal behavior, since Barbara is a meditative practitioner of everything peaceful and organic, and is inspired by Barack Obama's transformational appeal. For Barbara, Hillary has become the screech on the blackboard. From First Lady to Lady Macbeth.It's getting to me as well. Last year, I was somewhat reconciled to the prospect of supporting and pressuring Hillary as the nominee amidst the rising tide of my friends who already hated her, irrationally I thought. I was one of those people Barack accuses of...

Like the Third Amendment against the peacetime quartering of soldiers in private homes, the Second Amendment used to be one of those obscure constitutional provisions that Americans could safely ignore. Legal opinion was agreed: this relic of the late eighteenth century did not confer an individual right "to keep and bear arms," only a collective right on the part of the states to maintain well-regulated militias in the form of local units of the National Guard. While a few gun nuts insisted on their Second Amendment right to turn their homes into mini-arsenals, everyone else knew they were deluded. Everyone...

Last year, forty-three states reported increased home foreclosure rates. Nevada led the way for eleven consecutive months; in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, nearly one in twenty homes is in foreclosure. Whole blocks have been foreclosed in Chicago. Nationwide, rates are nearing Depression-era highs--ravaging working- and middle-class neighborhoods that fell prey to the soft sell and outright chicanery of predatory lenders in the heyday of the housing boom. These lenders have targeted the most vulnerable--black and Latino borrowers have been twice as likely to receive subprime loans as whites; female homeowners, 30 percent more likely than male; black women,...

There's a reason Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama.