Free Republic

2009 was the year when many journalists concluded they were slow to recognize the anti-government, anti-Obama rage that gave birth to the tea party movement. 2010 is the year when news organizations have decided to prove they get it. And get it. And get it some more. Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/36185.html#ixzz0lw2p6LOQ

NO sooner did we learn that President Bush had chosen Samuel Alito to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court than commentators began blurting: "Scalito!" Judge Alito, a man of stellar credentials and 15 years on the federal bench, has long endured the witticism that connects his lyrical surname to that of Justice Antonin Scalia. The names blend mellifluously and both men are considered conservatives, so why should we give up the clever nickname? Well, quite aside from the tedium of cliché, we might want to consider whether Judge Alito really is all that much like Justice Scalia....

Conspiracy charge a possibility for DeLay: Travis County grand jury to weigh indicting House leader, lawyers say U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's leadership post is on the line today as a Travis County grand jury is expected to consider indicting DeLay on conspiracy charges, several lawyers familiar with the investigation said. The charges would stem from the DeLay's role in using corporate money in the 2002 elections. State law generally bans corporate money from campaign activities. "I wouldn't have expected this a year ago," one Austin criminal defense lawyer said. "It's quite a turnaround if it happens." Those same...

Donald Rumsfeld gave every grunt in the Army a good reason to hate him today. At a cavernous hangar in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, the secretary of defense appeared before 2,300 soldiers to boost their morale before they headed off to Iraq. During a question-and-answer period, Army Spc. Thomas Wilson of the 278th Regimental Combat Team, a unit that consists mainly of reservists from the Tennessee Army National Guard, spoke up to complain about their inadequate supply of armor. "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our...

You've got to love all these misguided pit bull protectionists, including the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, citing the same tired line that the witless gun lobby has used all these years: It's not the dog, but the owner. No, it's the dog, thank you. It's the pit bull who clamps his steel-trap jaw down on the throat of a neighbor's hound. It's the pit bull who tears into a toddler's leg, or into a passerby's arm. Afterward, inevitably and invariably, it's the pit bull's owner who acquires a look of shock to accompany the excuse,...

In his eagerness for the approval of the Shiite religious leader — and driven by desperation to get yesterday's unanimous U.N. resolution in time for the G-8 meeting — President Bush may be double-crossing the Kurds, our most loyal friends in Iraq. Not a single U.S. soldier has been killed in the area of northern Iraq patrolled by the pesh merga, the army of Kurdish Iraqis who have brought order to their region. Savaged by Saddam's poison-gas attacks in the 80's, Kurdistan was abandoned by the first President Bush to Saddam's vengeance after the first gulf war. When our conscience...

AUSTIN, Texas - (KRT) - Unitarian Universalists have for decades presided over births, marriages and memorials. The church operates in every state, with more than 5,000 members in Texas alone. But according to the office of Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, a Texas Unitarian church isn't really a religious organization - at least for tax purposes. Its reasoning: The organization "does not have one system of belief." Never before - not in this state nor any other - has a government agency denied Unitarians tax-exempt status because of the group's religious philosophy, church officials say. Strayhorn's ruling clearly infringes upon...

It is time to ask this question: Do we have any chance of succeeding at regime change in Iraq without regime change here at home? "Hey, Friedman, why are you bringing politics into this all of a sudden? You're the guy who always said that producing a decent outcome in Iraq was of such overriding importance to the country that it had to be kept above politics." Yes, that's true. I still believe that. My mistake was thinking that the Bush team believed it, too. I thought the administration would have to do the right things in Iraq — from...

Antoinette Konz is a young education reporter for The Hattiesburg American, a daily newspaper with a circulation of about 25,000 in Hattiesburg, Miss. Ms. Konz, 25, has only been in the business for a couple of years, so her outlook hasn't been soiled by the cranks and the criminals, and the pretzel-shaped politicians that so many of us have been covering for too many years to count. She considered it a big deal when one of the schools on her beat, the Presbyterian Christian High School, invited her to cover a speech that was delivered last Wednesday by Supreme Court...

DES MOINES — Not satisfied with colonizing the Moon, scouting for Martians and civilizing Iraq, President Bush is lavishing more gazillions on another audaciously quixotic plan. He wants to become the national yenta. As Robert Pear and David Kirkpatrick wrote in The Times, administration officials are planning an extensive election-year initiative to please conservatives in a swivet over gay marriage; their social engineering scheme will try to shore up traditional marriage, offering training to couples in the interpersonal skills needed to achieve and sustain "healthy marriages." Before Mr. Bush ventures into the inner cities to practice his conjugal noblesse oblige,...

People are saying terrible things about George Bush. They say that his officials weren't sincere about pledges to balance the budget. They say that the planning for an invasion of Iraq began seven months before 9/11, that there was never any good evidence that Iraq was a threat and that the war actually undermined the fight against terrorism. But these irrational Bush haters are body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freaks who should go back where they came from: the executive offices of Alcoa, and the halls of the Army War College. I was one of the few commentators who didn't celebrate Paul...

James Baker sets off to negotiate Iraqi debt forgiveness with our estranged allies. And at that very moment the deputy secretary of defense releases a "Determination and Findings" on reconstruction contracts that not only excludes those allies from bidding, but does so with highly offensive language. What's going on? Maybe I'm giving Paul Wolfowitz too much credit, but I don't think this was mere incompetence. I think the administration's hard-liners are deliberately sabotaging reconciliation. Surely this wasn't just about reserving contracts for administration cronies. Yes, Halliburton is profiteering in Iraq — will apologists finally concede the point, now that a...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 — President Bush's political advisers are now all but certain that Howard Dean will be the Democratic presidential nominee and they are planning a campaign that takes account of what they see as Dr. Dean's strengths and weaknesses, Republicans with ties to the White House said. "We're ready to go," said a senior Republican official involved in the Bush campaign. "The broad thematics and the whole approach to him, those things have been well thought out. As for the tactical stuff, it's still out there. The timing is a big decision." For months, members of Mr. Bush's...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 — As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal. Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman that they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, and they offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search. The businessman said in an interview that the Iraqis also offered to hand over a man accused of...

PINE LEVEL, N.C. KIM WELLONS, principal of Micro-Pine Level Elementary School, knows it takes special patience to teach special education children. Before Ms. Wellons became the principal in this farm community, she was a special education teacher for 15 years. And she was inspired to do this work because two of her cousins, now middle-aged and both borderline retarded, never learned the skills in school they needed to live independently. "They were hidden away in the basement of the school," Ms. Wellons said. To this day, those cousins live at home with their elderly mother. At Ms. Wellons's school, special...

Guantanamo Suicide Attempts Rise to 31 The Associated Press August 20, 2003 Another terrorism suspect at the Pentagon's prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has tried to kill himself, the second such attempt in as many weeks. This week's suicide attempt was the 31st since the high-security prison opened in January 2002, Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Barbara Burfeind said Wednesday. She said the suicide attempt happened in the last few days but could not be more specific. Twenty prisoners have tried to kill themselves, some more than once. None have so far succeeded. Most attempts occurred this year, which officials and...

<p>WASHINGTON -- The urge to investigate defined the capital during the Clinton years. But no more.</p> <p>For nearly a decade, special counsel inquiries and adversarial congressional hearings dominated the headlines, etched bitter partisan lines, led to the impeachment of a president and made the nation's political debates resemble hand-to-hand combat.</p>

The Bush administration, long allergic to the idea of investigating the government's failure to prevent the Sept. 11 terror attacks, is now doing its best to bury the national commission that was created to review Washington's conduct. That was made plain yesterday in a muted way by Thomas Kean, the former New Jersey governor, and Lee Hamilton, the former congressman, who are directing the inquiry. When these seasoned, mild-mannered men start complaining that the administration is trying to intimidate the commission, the country had better take notice. In a status report on its work, the commission said various agencies —...

The question of the moment is not "When will the MET-Alpha team find Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?" (we've all long ago exhaled on that one), but rather "When will the neo-imperialist intellectuals go into hiding?" George W. Bush may be mildly vexed over the failure thus far to unearth vats of VX and anthrax. But Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol, and the other strategic brains behind the operation should be absolutely mortified over the past few weeks of Iraq's unraveling and America's postwar failure to secure and consolidate its dazzling military victory. The president, after all, can deal...

Over the protests of 750,000 viewers and readers, three appointees to the Federal Communications Commission last month voted to permit the takeover of America's local press, television and radio by a handful of mega-corporations. If allowed to stand, this surrender to media giantism would concentrate the power to decide what we read and see — in both entertainment and news — in the hands of an ever-shrinking establishment elite. To the F.C.C.'s amazement, the Senate Commerce Committee said no. A bill put forward by Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, president pro tem of the Senate and defender of local control,...