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www.pottymouth.com This may or may not come as a surprise, but there's more profanity on "The Internets" than in traditional media. Lots more. The enterprising blogger Patrick Ishmael (newsbuckit.blogspot.com) did an, excuse the pun, quick and dirty analysis of the ideological divide in online trash-talking. Make that, ideological chasm. He did a Google search for comedian George Carlin's famous "seven dirty words" on popular lefty and righty blogs. Lefty Daily Kos took top honors with 146,000 pages containing one or more of the words in question. Its lefty competitor, The Huffington Post, was close behind with 109,000. No right-wing site...

The Mayor Who Would Be PresidentOr would he? A look at Rudy’s career, character, and prospects KATE O’BEIRNE Rudy Giuliani became “America’s Mayor” when he confidently took charge after the terrorist attacks of September 11. He rose to the challenge with grace and grit, and his pitch-perfect reactions captured something far more universal than his own anger, determination, and heartache. The tough-talking former mayor now enjoys a unique status among national politicians. Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift had plenty of company when she contemplated Hurricane Katrina’s devastation and asked, “Where is Rudy Giuliani when we need him?” In the political-leadership sweepstakes, Giuliani...

Defeat This MonstrosityWhat Hill conservatives can do on immigration JOHN O’SULLIVAN Now that the U.S. Senate has made a strong argument for unicameral government by passing the “comprehensive” immigration monstrosity, attention turns to the House. It has already passed a sensible “enforcement only” bill. It should stand firm on that legislation, at most making it an “enforcement first” bill by promising to consider some of the Senate’s reasonable proposals in the next Congress, if any can be found. But the Bush-Democrat coalition has an almost mystical attachment to the Senate’s guest-worker and amnesty provisions. It will be faithful unto death...

WASHINGTON -- The Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) will have finished its work by week's end, and Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota probably will be closed forever. That also will close Sen. John Thune's tenure as national Republican poster boy following his victory last year over Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle. This is a cautionary tale of what happens when politicians forget politics. President Bill Clinton saved Ellsworth for then Sen. Daschle during the last BRAC process in 1995, but President George W. Bush was detached in 2005. The resulting closure demolishes Thune's home state prestige and threatens...

<p>PHOENIX -- Patrick Byrne, a 42-year-old bear of a man who bristles with ideas that have made him rich and restless, has an idea that can provide a new desktop computer for every student in America without costing taxpayers a new nickel. Or it could provide 300,000 new $40,000-a-year teachers without any increase in taxes.  His idea -- call it The 65 Percent Solution -- is politically delicious because it unites parents, taxpayers and teachers while, he hopes, sowing dissension in the ranks of the teachers unions, which he considers the principal institutional impediment to improving primary and secondary education.</p>

EAGER TO DIVERT ATTENTION from the incredible incompetence displayed in the handling of Eason Jordan's remarks before the Davos audience (and Jordan's November 2004 accusation that the U.S. military was torturing journalists), a number of voices within the mainstream media have argued that the credentials of bloggers are suspect and that in their amateurism there lays a danger to the public discussion. The most surprising of these attacks came in an unsigned editorial in the Wall Street Journal. The Journal chose to ignore Jordan's November 2004 accusation about the American military torturing journalists, and pronounced the Davos pratfall as...

The Bush administration's push for urgent partial privatization of Social Security is the most dishonest, economically unsound, diversionary fraud ever devised.It is a complete waste of time, perhaps only rivaled by a previous Republican Congress's ignoring all of the real problems facing our country by diverting attention to Clinton's sex life. To promote reforming Social Security as an immediate crisis demanding attention, is a clear statement that the administration is self-serving and it believes that the American electorate is stupid. Any Congressman that supports this wasteful activity should be vigorously opposed in the election two years from now.Let's consider...

Sorry in advance, because I know vanities can be out of control here. But I am going absolutely crazy trying to figure this out and compare settings between my 2 browsers. When I open Internet Explorer and go to Free Republic, I get no forum polls over on the right, just the breaking news sidebar (which is exactly how I want it). When I open Firefox and go to the same exact link, I get the latest poll on the sidebar, which obscures the breaking news from being on the top. Ready to be called an imbecile here-- what am...

Hot RepublicansJohn McCaslin For its November "Women We Love" issue, Esquire polled 3,414 readers - whose eyes for the ladies tend to favor the GOP.In the category "Hottest wife of a presidential or vice-presidential candidate," the winner was first lady Laura Bush (47 percent), with 30 percent choosing Teresa Heinz Kerry, 20 percent picking Elizabeth Edwards and 3 percent choosing Lynne V. Cheney.And since John Kerry's campaign has declared the children of candidates "fair game," The Beltway Beat can report that Esquire readers judged the Massachusetts Democrat's daughters less attractive than President Bush's girls.For "Hottest daughter of a presidential candidate,"...

Prairie Politics From the September 27, 2004 issue: Daschle, Thune, and the race for South Dakota. by Joseph Bottum 09/27/2004, Volume 010, Issue 03 LAST YEAR--on August 16, 2003, speeding in a borrowed white Cadillac down one of those long, dusty South Dakota highways that glide across the plains like endless ribbons--a Republican congressman named Bill Janklow ran a stop sign at 70 miles per hour and killed a passing motorcyclist. It was a horrible incident, and it brought an end to Janklow's long domination of South Dakota politics. Though routinely reckless, he'd always gotten the good breaks before,...

For Bush, every penny countsLarry Kudlow Bush and Kerry are in a virtual dead heat according to the Iowa Electronic Market -- a winner-take-all futures market with a great track record of picking the victors in November. At midweek, Bush was trading at 50.5 cents and Kerry at 49.9 cents. Kerry had taken a small lead going into the Democratic National Convention, his first lead of the year in the Iowa market. But Bush pulled ahead by the convention's halfway point. Looks like the Boston con game -- "We're not really left liberals who believe in soaking the rich, high taxes,...

For the life of me ... what about life?Neil Cavuto (archive) July 24, 2004  Did you ever read or catch something in the news that was so stupid, so asinine that right then and there you threw up your hands or just screamed, or just threw up your hands AND screamed? It happened to me last week, while reading a column in The New York Times Magazine. It was about this woman, Amy Richards (as told to Amy Barrett), who was pregnant with triplets. You'd think that was wonderful news. But not to Amy. She wanted to know if there was...

<p>DURING THE PARTS of this presidential campaign that I've managed to stay awake through, it's striking how few gaffes and humiliations John Kerry has suffered. When he does, they nearly always result from his flying his freak flag, trying to talk to the young people, or otherwise waiting for his hipster credit to get approved.</p>

The Dean dilemmaRobert Novak (archive) December 22, 2003 | Print | SendWASHINGTON -- Before a single vote has been cast anywhere, thoughtful Democrats across the country are reaching a melancholy conclusion. Howard Dean is close to clinching the nomination. The question is not merely whether he can be stopped but also whether he should be stopped.This poses a dilemma that was discussed during a small, private dinner party last week attended by people actively engaged in politics for much of the last half-century. They viewed Dean's increasingly probable nomination with loathing and fear that it benefits George W. Bush. But...

<p>SACRAMENTO--The recall of Gov. Gray Davis is heading for a fall election. "It'll be covered like a mini-presidential race," says GOP consultant Joe Shumate--and watched like a thriller movie. Part of the reason will be Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, his campaign advisers believe, will be running--or starring, to put it in Hollywood idiom, in a political sequel to his "Total Recall."</p>

FIRST THINGS FIRST: I don't know Bill Bennett, I've never even met him, and I don't have any interest in his rise or fall. That said, what's happening to him tonight is silly. The Internet is blazing with the news that Bennett, a conservative and author of "The Book of Virtues," among other titles, gambles (read the two stories in Newsweek and the Washington Monthly here and here). And he doesn't just gamble a little, he gambles a lot. Certain commentators are shocked--shocked!--at this breathtaking scoop. The American Prospect's anonymously written blog, Tapped, says, "Don't miss Josh Green's breathtaking scoop--co-broken...

GOP tiring of judicial confirmation battlesRobert Novak (archive) April 19, 2003 | Print | SendWASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans are tiring of the battle to confirm contested judicial nominees, indicating that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's Democratic plan to prevent President Bush from shaping the federal judiciary is succeeding.Weekly meetings of Republican senators produce increased grumbling. The complaining senators ask the White House and the Republican leadership why they should keep fighting to confirm as appellate judges Washington, D.C., lawyer Miguel Estrada and Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen. Not only liberal GOP senators but also some old guard committee chairmen claim...

John Kerry's Hari-Kari Calling for "regime change" in America is only one of the Democratic candidate's problems.by Noemie Emery 04/21/2003, Volume 008, Issue 31 IT'S NOT OFTEN that you see an American commit hari-kari in public, but that's what John Kerry appears to have done. In one thrill-packed day--April 2--in New Hampshire, he managed to (1) blame George W. Bush for the train wreck in the U.N. Security Council, (2) take his stand with this country's foreign detractors, (3) take the side of France, Germany, Russia, and China in their cold war with the United States and Great Britain,...

Stardumb: Whoopie Goldberg The center square of comedy doesn't like it when people make jokes about lefty entertainers--it's unconstitutional. Also, a Coldplay update and Chrissy Hynde's literal anti-Americanism.by David Skinner 03/13/2003 12:00:00 AM BLACKLIST. Censorship. The Constitution. Free Speech. This is what the Stardumb phenomenon is all about: The guaranteed right of every entertainer to make an ass of himself as he rushes to the public square with his fresh-from-the-mouth-of-Bill-Maher pronouncements on the issue of war. And, thus, by ridiculing such statements, the American people are attempting to subvert the Constitution and take us all back to some dark,...