Free Republic

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Thursday on “CNN This Morning” that the Republican investigations in President Joe Biden have gotten to “Alice in Wonderland territory.” Raskin was discussing House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) and his colleagues investigating allegations by Gal Luft, who was indicted last year. Raskin said, “They are out there playing spy-versus-spy with these people who are basically using the Oversight Committee of the United States House of Representatives as a dupe. This guy is in hiding. He is a fugitive and he is using his ability to wow the members of the majority of the...

The Democrats? I’d rate the chances of the party reining in its extremes at below zero.

A ‘terrorist cell’ believed to be linked to Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah and housing weapons intended to attack Israeli and Western targets has been discovered in a compound in northern Nigeria, the country’s security services said on Thursday. Nigeria's security services said Thursday they had discovered a home in the northern city of Kano where Lebanese nationals had stored weapons intended to attack Israeli and Western targets in Nigeria. The Kano state intelligence chief, Bassey Etang, and a separate military statement described the compound as hosting a "terrorist cell" tied to the powerful Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah. No evidence was...

Rumor has it that before Helena Bohnam Carter was cast in the latest Alice In Wonderland movie Tim Burton wanted the film to have a more political undertone... I didn't start said rumor...and by "didn't" I mean "maybe." Click to see a larger version, if you're brave enough... The Looking Spoon is a conservative humor/satire/art/commentary blog, visit www.thelookingspoon.com to see more posts and art

The canyons of Wall Street are ringing with Democratic politicians and liberal pundits crying out for the renewal of ancient values and a return to basics. The political right wants market failures to be punished with Old Testament ruin. The financial crisis has brought calls for a return of ethics, standards and rules -- and not just on Wall Street. Dan Henninger tells Kelsey Hubbard how these themes are affecting the campaign trail. (Sept. 25) So we're all agreed: Standards of behavior matter. All that remains is to see if this week's left-right consensus on standards can be extended to...

The media is turning the news into a presidential video game. "Hurricane Ike" or "Wall Street Meltdown" appears onscreen, and the media boots up Barack Obama and John McCain to see how well they talk the problem. Mostly they are speaking gobbledygook about things they barely understand. Whatever a credit default swap is,

If anyone wonders why American poll respondents rank Congress lower even than President George W. Bush in terms of job performance, a review of the past two months in Congress may be enlightening. Much of that time has been devoted to debating, drafting, revising and promoting versions of a non-binding resolution of non-support of the president’s surge policy in Iraq. Think about that for a moment. With a host of serious problems, foreign and domestic, facing the nation, the legislative branch of government lavishes time on a resolution that is essentially meaningless. Supporters argue, of course, that it is not...

Let's start with the one thing we know for sure about the Bush administration's program to listen to al Qaeda's phone calls into and out of the United States: It's dead. After all the publicity of the past two weeks, does anyone think that the boys working on plans for Boston Harbor, the Golden Gate Bridge or Chicago's Loop are still chatting by phone? If the purpose of the public exposure was to pull the plug on the pre-emptive surveillance program, mission accomplished. Be safe, Times Square. At the least, al Qaeda's operatives in Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Hamburg and the...

A very long time ago, before what we would call modern civilization, people ravaged by the sea, as in South Asia on Christmas day, blamed it on the gods. The god of the sea, their poets might write, had lifted the water with his hands to rage at some mortal slight, and shaken it, like a quilt across a bed. But these are not ancient times, and the anger of unseen deities is not available as explanation or cold comfort. We know for a fact that these deaths in South Asia were caused by the violent movement of tectonic plates...

"American influence" is the greatest white whale of the 21st century. We see where a curator at France's Pompidou Center says his museum is opening a branch in Hong Kong, because "U.S. culture is too strong" there, and "we need to have a presence in Asia to counterbalance the American influence." With the Pompidou Center? "American influence" is the great white whale of the 21st century, and Jacques Chirac is the Ahab chasing her with a three-masted schooner. Along for the ride is a crew that includes Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Vladimir Putin, North Korea's Kim Jong-Il, Kofi Annan, the Saudi...

It is often said that the only sure winner in American politics is the media. Amid GOP victory parties or the ruined dreams of the Kerry candidacy, the one constant is that the media marches on. Maybe not this time. Big Media lost big. But it was more than a loss. It was an abdication of authority. Large media institutions, such as CBS or the New York Times, have been regarded as nothing if not authoritative. In the Information Age, authority is a priceless franchise. But it is this franchise that Big Media, incredibly, has just thrown away. It did...

"And you tell me over, and over, and over again my friend Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction." --Vietnam War Protest Song, 1965 How did the 2004 election map of the United States come to look like a color-field painting by Barnett Newman? In fact, if you adjust the map's colors for votes by county (as at the Web sites for CNN and USA Today), even the blue states turn mostly red. Pennsylvania is blue, but between blue Philadelphia and Pittsburgh every county in the state is red. California, except for the coastline, is almost entirely...

That bloody carnage at a grade school in Beslan, Russia, last week made one thing clear: Now we are all living in 9/11 World. 9/11 World, defined by Islamic bombs that are designed to blow to pieces the bodies of civilians where they reside, work or go to school, now rings the world from New York to Moscow, Madrid to Jakarta, Jerusalem, Rome, Nepal and Fallujah. The rubble of New York looks like the rubble of Beslan. This is 9/11 World, where tears flow constantly for the bleeding and burial of innocents. Three Septembers ago in America, children buried their...

The photograph below was taken at Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base 38 miles north of San Diego. It shows Col. Robert Knapp and Spirit of America's Jim Hake in front of the television equipment that was bought with contributions from readers of this newspaper and others. It will be in the air tomorrow, bound for Al Anbar province in Iraq. There, Marines from the First Expeditionary Force will help Iraqis restore seven local TV stations. This is a remarkable story of can-do. I think it is also the story of a nation willing to do more than it has...

<p>This past Friday, Dan Henninger's Wonder Land column1 gave readers a chance to contribute money to help restore seven small TV stations in Iraq. The project is the joint idea of the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Al Anbar province, west of Baghdad, and Spirit of America, a philanthropy begun by Los Angeles businessman Jim Hake to assist American GIs in Afghanistan and Iraq.</p>

<p>Thus spake George W. Bush this week: "The people of our country are united behind our men and women in uniform, and this government will do all that is necessary to assure the success of their historic mission." Still, many Americans who support the war don't much like sitting on their hands doing little more than watch it on TV. Some have written here, asking what they can do to help. This column will describe a real project that lets the folks at home lend a hand to the soldiers in Iraq.</p>

<p>Perhaps every generation of Christian Americans needs its own movie version of the Passion. And maybe this one needs it more than most.</p> <p>Many of Europe's smartest people decided they no longer needed their version of the Christian tradition and let it slip, alas before their unlovely experience with the 20th century. But before that and the immediacy of cinema, Europe created magnificent, painted interpretations of Christ's passion, and these works were often meant to reinforce faith.</p>

<p>We've been tough on the Kerry candidacy the past few weeks, and so with only 31 weeks left to mix it up, perhaps this is the moment to have some sympathy.</p> <p>Mr. Kerry has been running non-stop for the presidency for nearly a year and arguably as far back as 1966. With the nomination finally in his mitts, he and his wife get on a plane, not for the umpteenth Joe's Diner photo-op in one of Iowa's 99 hallowed counties (Winneshiek! Morona! Pottawattamie!) but instead to sneak off to their renovated 16th century Scottish barn in Sun Valley for a week's relief on the snowboarding slopes, and what does he get -- a week of grief.</p>

<p>Remember the remarkable coming together Americans experienced after the terrorists' mass murders of September 11? It's dead. It sank beneath the ever-churning waves of America's presidential politics. Global terror may be a big problem, but not bigger than winning the presidency.</p>

<p>Former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill is famous for the political truism that all politics is local. Like just about everything else "local" these days, that truism is under siege. Ask George W. Bush.</p> <p>Mr. Bush is at the border's edge of a presidential campaign that will require him and a Democrat to traipse the country, nipping and tucking big national issues to smooth local sensibilities. Trouble is, many of the day's biggest issues are no longer containable inside the U.S. landmass. Like it or not, other nations are increasingly casting a "vote" on issues, such as jobs "outsourcing," which drive our politics.</p>