Free Republic

Here it is, your comments please. And be nice, it's from a Viet Vet friend who happens to be helplessly liberal... Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards. With his first swallow of coffee, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to insure their safety and that they work as advertised. All but $10 of Joe's medications are paid for by his employer's medical plan...

Newly confirmed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has had a long career in and out of government, from working as White House chief of staff and defense secretary in the Ford administration to serving as chairman and CEO of G.D. Searle & Co. and General Instrument Corp. Over the past 40 years he has gathered "rules, reflections and quotations." Some excerpts follow. For a full set of Rumsfeld's Rules, see OpinionJournal.com. Serving in the White House *Don't accept the post or stay unless you have an understanding with the president that you're free to tell him what you think "with the ...

We here in my office were throwing around some ideas on how to get the Al-Qaeda thugs out of their mountain retreats and into the killing zone. One idea was that if we could somehow take over the opening to one of these caves and pump in an explosive gas, it would spread throughout their little world. Upon ignition, preferably at night, we'd fry a good number of towels. A side benefit would be that an eye in the sky could detect heat coming from any other entrances/exits related to the one through which the gas was pumped and the ...

I just spoke with my brother, who works at One Battery Park Plaza for the law firm Seward & Kissel, after receiving the e-mail below. There was a mysterious package received on the 7th floor of the building. The elevators have been brought down to the lobby, and the people in the office building have been told to stay put. In fact, here is the e-mail he originally sent to me. There was a mysterious package sent to the 7th floor of our building (One Battery Park Plaza) today. It was not a bomb but we have been told that ...

Yesterday I wrote Sen Boxer to complain about her religiously bigoted view towards Sen Ashcroft. I share with you here, her response Dear Mr. ****: January 10, 2001 Dear President-elect Bush: In your victory speech following Vice President Gore's concession, you struck a conciliatory note saying that: "America wants reconciliation and unity...now it is time to find common ground and build consensus." You spoke of beginning the work of healing and said you would be the President of every single American. You have also indicated many times that you would govern from the "center." The purpose of this letter is ...

Shortly after the November election, upon prompting from Hugh Hewitt, I e-mailed him regarding how the early call of Florida had affected my vote. I'd never heard anything back until I received the following e-mail yesterday from a woman named Ann Washington with the Majority staff of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade and Consumer Protection: "I am an investigator with the Majority staff of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Commerce. The Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade and Consumer Protection currently is conducting a review of the apparent errors, irregularities, and inconsistencies in network projections for ...

This is important. How many votes did the Reform Party candidate for Senator get in West Palm Beach County? I heard last night that this candidate also received an unusually high number of votes, which would counter the claim that these idiots voted Reform for President by accident. Where can we find the vote total I'm talking about, by county, by candidate?

If they could run Carnahan in a casket for the Senate in Missouri yesterday, then we were entitled to have Eddie Kay, who died the other day, cast his vote for Gore. Carnahan's widow broke her bereavement to announce that if her husband's casket won the election, she would go to Washington to continue his great work. He was registered in Centerville and his name remained in Queens. Somebody went into a booth in Ridgewood yesterday and said a small prayer and voted as Eddie Kay for Gore. Eddie Kay's work was every gambler's dream, to break even. He ...

In his appearance before the Orange County World Affairs Council Wednesday evening, Rep. Tom Campbell, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, displayed an impressive grasp of foreign policy issues and a willingness to break ground with provocative proposals. (The nonpartisan World Affairs Council has invited Sen. Dianne Feinstein to give her views but the scheduling hasn't worked out; Rep. David Bonior of Michigan, the House minority whip, will give an address on the Democratic approach to foreign policy in September.) We didn't agree with everything he said, but his views are consistently thoughtful. Rep. Campbell says that it is ...

I got a great chance to thank Chris Cox and to plug FR and to slam the Clinton Administration in front of C-Span cameras.

Flipping through the channels late last night, I came upon an unbelievable, 20 minute puff piece on Albore on VH-1. Interviewing the Bore himself, as well as his college pal Tommy Lee Jones, this thing was dripping with admiration for Bore. They did it with MTV for Clinton, now they're doing it on VH-1 for Albore. It is my hope to bring attention to this so the Republican candidate can challenge VH-1 to provide equal air time, and equal favorable interviews. Did anyone else see this? It was truly remarkable.

January 13, 2000 During the 1970s, when presidential scrutiny was taken seriously, historian Arthur Schlesinger penned the influential work entitled "The Imperial Presidency." Time has hastened to fulfill the worst of expectations. Never before has concern over unbridled presidential power been more aptly needed than in reference to the current Washington palace. The executive branch has been feverishly ambitious over the course of the past few years in the seizure of authority. Presidential action in the form of executive orders and other tangible presidential memoranda has created an illicit reapportionment of power. For example, a major in the Air ...

To understand the basic problem confronting the housing industry in Southern California, I ask you to indulge me in a short thought experiment: Think about what life would be like if government treated the First Amendment right to speech in the same way that it treats constitutional protections for property. Would anyone say that my right to express my opinions was safe if I had to negotiate a series of obstacles to proclaim it? Let's say that before I printed this column I had to submit it to the Santa Ana Publishing Commission, which would vote on whether or not ...

The evidence that California's "three strikes" law is due for a second look and some revision keeps growing. As the Legislative Analyst's Office reported last week, the number of people serving longer prison sentences at taxpayers' expense because of the law is at almost 50,000 and increasing. And there's no reliable evidence that this extra expense has reduced crime or crime rates, and some people are in prison who really shouldn't be there. "Three strikes" laws -- different versions have been passed in 26 states -- are an effort to take career violent criminals off the streets, and that's what ...

American Family Enterprises Files for Bankruptcy Protection Newark, New Jersey, Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) -- American Family Enterprises, a magazine subscription seller and sweepstakes sponsor, filed for bankruptcy protection to help settle lawsuits alleging it uses deceptive tactics to promote its contests, company officials said. American Family, 50 percent owned by Time Inc., the magazine-publishing unit of Time Warner Inc., and 50 percent owned by private investors, has faced a slew of lawsuits alleging the company misled consumers into thinking that buying magazine subscriptions would help them win the company's multi-million-dollar sweepstakes. Those contests are touted by celebrities like Ed ...

Just when you think you've heard every bone-chilling totalitarian proposal from the U.S. government and its orbit of unaccountable, quasi-official satellite agencies, along comes something straight out of Orwell. How else can you categorize Federal Reserve official Marvin Goodfriend's plan to track possession of dollar bills in private hands? That's right. Goodfriend, senior vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, delivered a paper to a Federal Reserve conference in Vermont that calls for U.S. currency to include tracking devices that would allow the government to tax private possession of cash, according to a report by Declan McCullagh ...