Free Republic

This is an excellent resource/reference on the timeline of the last 9 supreme court nominations, compiled by Progress for America.

USA Today's got an editorial today on the Bush speech that's filled with bad information and mis-leading implications. (Surprising, right? Not.) They got one thing right ("setting a timetable would be a mistake") and a whole lot wrong...

Last week, the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid, made an offer to head off a nuclear exchange over judicial nominations. Reid offered to allow votes on a few of the judges stuck in limbo if the Republicans would withdraw a few of the others. But there was another part of the offer that hasn't been publicized. I've been reliably informed that Reid also vowed to prevent a filibuster on the next Supreme Court nominee. Reid said that if liberals tried to filibuster President Bush's pick, he'd come up with five or six Democratic votes to help Republicans close off debate....

With Dan Rather hosting CBS' coverage tonight of the 3rd presidential debate, moderated by Bob Schieffer, I thought it an interesting historical note that both men were featured in the Sunday Doonesbury strip 30 years ago today.This message has no point, in particular. I just got a kick out of it, and thought others might, as well...

History is useful. That, at any rate, is the theme of Alan Bennett's new play, The History Boys. History gets you into a good university. History gets you a good job. History is a key to cracking the secret of life.Or is it? I have been a dedicated history boy for 50 years but these past few months I have begun to wonder if history is any use at all. Britain and the United States have got into a difficult situation in Iraq and the entire Western media are reacting as if an unprecedented disaster is about to overwhelm their...

Last week, the L.A. Times' Mark Swed filed a review of the opera "Die Frau Ohne Schatten" at the Music Center. He wrote that the Richard Strauss epic is "an incomparably glorious and goofy pro-life paean..." But when it ran in the paper, pro-life had been changed to anti-abortion.

Just about exactly as I am writing this, up in Westchester County, north of New York City, Kathy Boudin, aged 60, is being released from prison after 22 years. Back in 1981, she helped the Black Liberation Army, an extreme-Left terrorist group, rob a Brinks truck. A security guard was killed in the robbery. When the getaway vehicle was stopped at a police roadblock soon after, Ms. Boudin in the passenger seat, her companions gunned down two policemen. For her participation in this robbery and these three murders, Ms. Boudin was sentenced in May, 1984 to serve 20 years to...

By Jonathan Rauch © National Journal Group Inc. Friday, May 9, 2003 Quagmire? Sure, the war in Iraq was a quagmire. It was just a short quagmire. On the spectrum of quagmires, it was the shortest since the Six Day War. Bush is no sophisticate, but he has the great virtue of knowing a dead policy when he sees one. In fairness, the war's critics feared a quagmire not so much during the fight as after, and they had a point. One reason the first Bush administration didn't drive to Baghdad in 1991 was to avoid an American occupation of...

<p>PERHAPS the craziest notion bouncing around the media is that Saddam Hussein is a brilliant military strategist. He may be a champion dictator, good at slaughtering, torturing, raping and starving his own people. But his military schemes are masterpieces of incompetence.</p>

...When Martin Sheen, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon and Barbra Streisand speak about the Iraqi people, they are not speaking about people like me, who are Shiite Muslims -- the largest religious group in Iraq that is nonetheless forced to live as second-class citizens under the Sunni regime of Hussein and his Baath Party. When I was 10, I fled Iraq with my mother and four siblings after the failure of the 1991 uprising against Hussein....When Iraq is finally liberated, these actors will learn that they have never spoken for the people of Iraq.

Suppose I have a couple of tickets to a play, but I can't go. I know you and your spouse want to see it, so I call you up and offer the tickets to you for what they cost me. It isn't a convenient evening for you to go, but you tell me that if nobody else wants them, you'll take them off my hands for half price. I don't like that, but I can't find anyone else who's interested. Then I get an idea: Your spouse is at the office and doesn't know I've spoken to you. I call...

Pakistan's intelligence services have a notorious reputation for being indistinguishable from the hoodlums they chase in the name of preserving national security for the country's 155 million citizens. So it was in the wee hours of last Saturday morning that a masterful raid on an al Qaeda safe house near Islamabad by Inter-Services Intelligence officials netted one of the world's most dangerous men, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He left behind a veritable gold mine of information about al Qaeda's current and future terrorist operations.In the process, the ISI may have recast its tarnished image as a stalwart in the global...

Excerpted: Powell's prosecutorial summary of the case against Saddam should have been prelude not to further warmongering but to a legal indictment of the Iraqi leader for crimes against humanity. In what court, you ask, and under what jurisdiction? America's imminent war takes on an absurd -- and also tragic -- character in the light of what else is happening right now. Last week the International Criminal Court was initiated with the formal election of judges. Next month the court will be official. Its purpose is exactly to deal with offenses like those of which Saddam stands accused. A forceful...

The Coming Islamic ImplosionOne of the most consistently interesting and original writers on the war on terror is David Warren, a columnist for Canada's Southam news chain. Warren grew up in Pakistan, and spent many years working and traveling in Southeast Asia. He knows the Islamic world well - has wide contacts there - and writes with both fairness and passion about the turmoil it is going through. Last month, he delivered a brilliant lecture at the University of Toronto on the future of Islam. One passage made an especially sharp impression on me:"It is a commonplace today that Christians...

<p>ONE day in 1998, I was invited to have an off-the-record chat with an important staff person on the Clinton administration's National Security Council. We met, at the important person's suggestion, at the important person's important club, where the majordomo was kind enough to lend me a tie.</p>

Early polls taken by the GOP indicate Terrell has broken out to a small lead over Landrieu. Inasmuch as there have been no polls released by the Democrats, we can safely assume their numbers reflect about the same thing.

According to Carl Cameron at 12:55 AM EST, Zogby has Chambliss 1 point ahead of Cleland right now.

The Romney campaign tracking polls show a 7 point bulge for Mitt. This is up from 4 points ahead in the tracking before the debate. One of the concerns that any GOP effort has in Massachusetts is that the Dems have all of the ground troops for a big GOTV effort. Professionals usually credit an additional 3 to 4 points to the Dems just because of their GOTV. Now the Romney folks will never be able to match the bodies that O'Brien has at her disposal, but they have been aggressive in using telephone calls and mass mailings. They have...

COATES, Minn. (AP) - Prosecutors charged 95 people with forgery Wednesday for an alleged scheme in which they all registered to vote using the same address: a strip club recently shut down by city officials. Most of the alleged forgers lived outside the town. The scheme, in which the club's owner also was charged, could have given club supporters a political majority in the town of 163 people. The mayor and two council members are in contested races next month in Coates, where 79 voted in the 2000 general election. "It's shocking to see such a blatant attempt to undermine...

SUMMONED: [Rod Dreher] A well-connected Eastern Orthodox source tells me that President Bush has asked to meet with top Orthodox church leaders at the White House on Wednesday afternoon. Word is none of the Orthodox know why they were invited. Yet this source recalls that the president's father invited Christian leaders, including heads of the Orthodox churches, to the White House in a similar fashion before Operation Desert Storm. He suspects this Wednesday invitation may be a signal that the invasion of Iraq is imminent.