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Long video of Rick Santorum campaigning in Amherst and Hollis, NH on January 7, 2012 prior to the debate. No editing out, no commentary. Just the candidate and questions from the folks.

Noted presidential historian David Pietrusza discusses America's most neglected great president, Calvin Coolidge, on the August 13, 2010 Glenn Beck program.

Add another one to the bizarro world of New York politics. It appears that the names of all four of the dropouts in the Democrat primary still appear on the ballot. Now, just which one of the two remaining candidates would benefit by a split of the vote? The Board of Elections has an excuse: "because the candidates dropped out of the race too late for their names to be removed from the ballot." Fair enough. But wait, Dodd and Biden dropped out before Fred Thompson. Kucinich dropped out before Giuliani, and Edwards dropped out the same day as Giuliani....

As if the week were not bad enough, now comes news that Fred Thompson is at his 90 year-old mother's bedside, as she fights off pneumonia. I rather suspect that politics is the last thing on his mind at the moment. So let me do the thinking for him. All the experts are telling him it's time to get out. The pragmatists and the realists are saying he's fought the good fight, but now the party needs to begin the process of unifying around one of the remaining candidates. They, for the most part, like what Fred had to say...

(with apologies to Johnny Cash) I was out in California just a while back, Hopin' that a judge would cut me some slack-- Just a little fraud back in 1992. Judge said,"Gonna sentence you another day. "Now you make sure you don't run away!" I laughed, "Hell, you can trust a boy named Hsu." Well we all thought that was some great joke And everyone laughed (them legal folk) And the next plane out I got on it and flew. And I soon set up in old Hong Kong Where every other feller's name is Huong And no one's gonna...

With apologies to Harry Turtledove, consider if you will this alternate history scenario: Franklin D. Roosevelt, out of great consideration for his wife's uncle Teddy and never being one to avoid political expediency when the opportunity presents itself, joins the Republican Party and is elected President of the United States in 1936, soundly whupping one term wonder Alfred E. Smith who is widely perceived to have brought on the Great Depression by his misguided policies of international neutrality, hard liquor and First Saturday novenas. With the return of Prohibition, the nation's productivity soars and the Depression is soon over. FDR...

Former Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy has died at the age of 89. Back in 1968, when I was a junior in High School, he ran a quixotic campaign for president, challenging Lyndon Johnson in the early primaries. At a time when the really scummy look was becoming popular, "Keep Clean with Gene" was the slogan of his student volunteers. He is often credited with having driven Johnson from the presidency. I don't believe he ever actually won a primary, but he beat the expectations game. He was on the ballot in New Hampshire and Johnson wasn't. Johnson's 55% of the...

Several news items this morning point to the possibility that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has the unusual achievement of being both the youngest and oldest Defense Secretary ever (the last person in a comparable position was, of course, War Secretary Henry Knox during the first Washington administration), may be retiring soon and possibly being replaced by Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman. I think this would be a bad idea for the country. Not because Lieberman would be bad for the position. I think that he would likely be excellent. Rather, I'm concerned that by leaving the Senate he would be...

I managed to arrange my schedule over the last week to watch three adults and I forget how many kids play John Paul II on the dueling docudramas from ABC and CBS.//Having read Weigel's biography, I can see how it would really take a year-long miniseries to truly capture all the drama and importance of this great man's life and teachings, but for the time allotted I must give CBS applause for an outstanding and faithful effort. *************** Unfortunately, due to the football-delayed Sunday schedule I was forced to endure what is truly one of the most grueling hours on...

Though I have never worked in a federal prosecutor's office, I have been an Assistant District Attorney and have presented cases to Grand Juries and have many years experience as a Criminal Court Judge at all levels, and as a defense counsel. I have been analyzing the "Scooter" Libby indictment and I must say I don't see much there there.  Without all the underlying evidence and testimony, of course,  it's always hard to judge the strength of an indictment, but what I see thus far is not too impressive. First, the whole thing seems to rest on what exactly Libby...

Back in the old days when I was a real judge, and not just the titled-for-life kind, whenever a Justice of the Supreme Court died or retired, I would invariably get an excited call from Mary advising that I just went up a notch in seniority. You'd have to climb mighty high to be able to jump into and fill Bill Rehnquist's robe. I met him once, back in the late 70's when he gave the Robert Jackson lecture at Albany Law School (Rehnquist had clerked for Jackson, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, and...

What follows is a series of emails I received this week from my friend Paul Fraser whose son and family started out last week in New Orleans. I'll let the story tell itself. There are lots of heroes out there. -rngAugust 30, Tuesday Hi all, As most of you know, Paul and his family live in New Orleans. (Barbie and her family moved to VA two years ago.) As of Tuesday night, this is the up date. Davina and Hunter evacuated with her mother, grandmother, aunt, and cousin to a motel in Tyler, TX. Paul stayed behind. He and his...

Robert N. Going, who volunteered at Ground Zero for several months following 9/11, believes that what the Gulf Coast needs is another Rudy Giuliani: All hell broke loose [in New York on 9/11]. They had emergency plans and equipment, but those got wiped out, too. What did it take, one maybe two seconds for him to improvise? By giving orders, he created order out of chaos. One just can't imagine the NYPD driving past thousands of dehydrating people and giving them no help, no information, no instructions, no water. How hard would it be for SOMEONE to tell the dispatchers...

Mom got a special present the Christmas, I think, when she had the first four grandchildren around: Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss, of course. It was the perfect gift, from my sister, who knew how much Mom would enjoy reading to the kids. Many years have passed and the rascals have grown. I imagine the book ended up in Mary's pre-K collection at St. Mary's. I had forgotten about it until we took our 15 1/2 year old baby to see Seussical the Musical the other night, which blends the two Horton plots with various other Seuss characters...

Lucianne Goldberg took a substantial amount of criticism when she shut down the Terri Schiavo threads at Lucianne.com during the height of the coverage. The death last week of her husband Sidney allows a bit more light to be shed on that decision. What follows is an email I received from a member of the L.com staff, in response to a tribute I had written on my blog, Cheer up! Life Isn’t Everything which had also been linked from a Free Republic condolence thread: Sidney's hospitalization began the same week the Terry Schiavo situation hit the national media. Imagine having...

Our church bell tolled 84 times. We draped the front door in purple and black. A framed action photo of the Holy Father was on display in the sanctuary, surrounded by the Easter flowers, propped between the new Paschal Candle and the baptismal font used only last week to welcome and sanctify the new members of our parish. The mourning came twice: first yesterday, prematurely, when the false announcement came, then this afternoon when I was alone and Mary was teaching the new altar servers. An angel-weeping drizzle had been falling all day. I wiped some tears. I turned on...

Before John Paul II there was another Polish savior of Europe, King John Sobieski, called upon by the countries of Old Europe to save Austria and the West from invasion by the Turks. Though the hour was desperate, Sobieski marched his troops two days out of the way, to the Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, there to pray and copy her image onto their shields. He rallied the weary and wasted remnants of Christianity and gave them new life, and new hope. And victory. From my birth in 1951 to our wedding in 1978 Mary and I had known...

Whittaker Chambers called it the world's second oldest religion: "Ye shall be as gods." That temptation in the Garden has manifested itself in many forms over the centuries. Currently it's hanging out in a courtroom in Florida and similar places. I've been on the bench. I know what it's like to be all-powerful. Every decision I rendered was with the sure knowledge that there was very little likelihood of being overturned on appeal, or even of an appeal being taken. Part of my training as a Family Court Judge came from Judge Judy. Several of us spent an afternoon with...

The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in March of 1857 purported to settle the slavery issue once and for all. Then, on December 2, 1859 the Abolitionist John Brown was executed for his part in the raid on Harper's Ferry. Although generally viewed as a crackpot, the cause for which he died stirred such emotion that all over the northern states people stood in silence and church bells tolled at the hour of his death. A cultural chasm opened; the moral and spiritual revulsion arising from this national focus on the slavery question galvanized public opinion. The election of Lincoln...

Sister Lucia Marto, the last of three children who claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary in a series of 1917 apparitions, has died, Portuguese media reported today. She was 97.