Free Republic

"They grilled me on the debt ceiling, and I gave it my best; but I think the debt ceiling is a temporary sideshow to the whole deficit issue. They truly were getting the “hitting the wall” if we don’t get the deficit under control. I left a lot of books and was surprised that more than a few came with their own copies to have me sign. Senator Dan Coats set up the meeting, and Rob Portman helped round up the group. Getting that many Senators in a room is not easy. And a few of my heroes were in...

"In living memory almost every decent and legal regime in Latin America was preceded by a chaotic period in which ordinary men armed themselves with guns, said goodnight to their families, and went out in groups to kill some local dissident. That period was a bit further back in the past for the French, the English, and the Americans. But no nation can be shown to have reached the rule of democratic law without it. Isn't something missing in the current accounts of the new wave of Iraqi violence?"

WE'RE rich because they're poor. No proposition is more central to the left-wing view of the world than the idea that the rich West survives in its comfort because it exploits the poor in the Third World. A variation on this lies at the heart even of much Islamist terrorist ideology. The utterly ridiculous Peter Singer even wrote a book purporting to work out how many dollars the rich world should pay to the poor to make it rich too.

The Unfeeling President By E.L. Doctorow I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear. But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Militants sawed off the heads of three hostages believed to be Iraqi Kurds in a grisly videotape that surfaced Sunday, hours after Iraq's prime minister said January elections would be held on schedule and asserted that American and Iraqi troops were winning the fight against an increasingly bold insurgency.

Interesting look into Burkett's mind, his grievances and his predictions about how the war in Iraq was going to turn out, from just before the action started. Did a search and did not find this already posted. Note the accusations of anti-Semitism. What do you say? By Bill Burkett Online Journal Contributing Writer March 19, 2003—I've sat in total grief for the past three years, watching the institutions of America being spent as if they were lottery winnings. I don't want to say it, "But I told you so." In January of 1998 and what seems like a full lifetime...

Why talk is useless 22may03 There's no point trying to talk to terrorists who want to kill us for enjoying a drink in a bar. And still bleeding hearts say we should negotiate. THEY were still picking lumps of human flesh from the bombed-out Spanish club in Casablanca, when an Age reader bleated that perhaps we should surrender to the killers. "Maybe we need to open a dialogue with them to find out why they are so hostile," he wrote to the editor. Oh, how often we've heard such whimpering and simpering after another suicide attack by Islamic terrorists. Remember...

Just listening to Warren Rudmann and Gary Hart speaking about the Council of Foreign Relations Commission on Terrorism that they participated in. What shocked me was when Rudmann was trying to explain to the audience who James Kallstrom is. He said, he is a well known investigator formerly of the FBI who most of the public probably know best from "the TWA shoot-down". Neither the interviewer nor Gary Hart responded to Rudmann's characterization, and the discussion proceeded.

Did anyone else hear Evan Thomas on Imus this AM? He was asked to comment about the 9-11 anniversary and he said that he was tired of it, but that he supposed it was a good thing to remember and that once a year was about right, and then he added that it was especially good right now since we are headed toward war with Iraq and that seeing the coverage of 9-11 would remind us of the consequences. I was blown away. I thought he would say "remind us of what we are fighting" or something of the sort,...