Free Republic

“We got China wrong. Now what?” ran the headline over the column in the Washington Post. “Remember how American engagement with China was going to make that Communist backwater more like the democratic, capitalist West?” asked Charles Lane in his opening sentence. America’s elites believed that economic engagement and the opening of U.S. markets would cause the People’s Republic to coexist benignly with its neighbors and the West. We deluded ourselves. It did not happen. Xi Jinping just changed China’s constitution to allow him to be dictator for life. He continues to thieve intellectual property from U.S. companies and to...

August 18, 2015The GOP Consulting Class Is Becoming Seriously Unhinged….by sundance Beyond the previous examples of DC’s chattering class punditry: George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Stephen Hayes, Dana Perino, Charles Lane, Bill Kristol et al, and their on-air splodey head moments -which are continuing with the speed of an interstate covered in bubble wrap- we now have the paid GOP consultant class joining them.GOP political consultant Rick Wilson has been in a highly visible war of words with Breitbart.com over the website’s editorial support for GOP candidate Donald Trump.Wilson said on CNN that approximately 25% of Republicans were “low information voters”,...

I know it’s still early, but it’s beginning to appear this election cycle that conventional wisdom may not hold. The pundit class and the establishment politicians inhabiting the insular bubble that is the District of Criminals are flummoxed. They can’t fathom why the hoi polloi will not fall in line behind establishment-approved candidates (and there are several, but particularly they are Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton). Some pundits are even offering to turn in their “pundit license.” For example, The Washington Post’s Charles Lane told Brett Baier on Fox News’ Special Report last week: “I think I’m going to have...

I was watching Fox News last night, and John Bolton (R-GOP-e) was asked to give a reply to a previously recorded clip from Rand Paul, and Bolton seemed to be acting as if the president (Obama) is the one who gets to wage war, while Congress just gets to merely declare and/or authorize it. As if the president (be it Nixon, GHWB, or Clinton) sits on the throne and Congress' job is to merely place the crown on their heads and the scepter in their hands. Once again, it seems as if another Republican goes to bat for Obama (like...

Not every American who marches behind a hateful crackpot is a hateful crackpot. The peaceful, thoughtful throng that assembled for Louis Farrakhan at the Million Man March in 1995 -- including a young Barack Obama -- proved that point. Notwithstanding some commentary, I tend to feel the same way about the much different (and rather smaller) assemblage that gathered at the behest of Glenn Beck in Washington last Saturday. Certainly, if you’re president of the United States, the most prudent course is to draw a distinction between the leader and the anonymous masses and treat the latter with at least...

SANTA MONICA, Calif. —  Charles Lane, the prolific character actor whose name was little known, but whose bespectacled face and crotchety persona made him instantly recognizable to generations of movie-goers, has died, his son said Tuesday. He was 102. The actor's son, Tom Lane, said he was talking with his father Monday evening. "He was lying in bed with his eyes real wide open," the younger Lane said. "Then he closed his eyes and stopped breathing." Lane, whose career spanned more than 60 years, appeared in such film classics as "It's a Wonderful Life," "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" and "Twentieth...

Charles Lane, the prolific character actor whose name was little known, but whose bespectacled face and crotchety persona made him instantly recognizable to generations of movie-goers, has died, his son said Tuesday. He was 102. The actor's son, Tom Lane, said he was talking with his father Monday evening. "He was lying in bed with his eyes real wide open," the younger Lane said. "Then he closed his eyes and stopped breathing." Lane, whose career spanned more than 60 years, appeared in such film classics as "It's a Wonderful Life," "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" and "Twentieth Century." He also...

For prime displays of Lane's acting forte, one may see him as the stage manager (billed as "Charles Levison") in Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century (1934), in which he played with John Barrymore, or as the tax assessor in Frank Capra's You Can't Take It with You (1938), pitted against - coincidentally enough - Lionel Barrymore. Thus may one learn who ordinarily got the better (or the worst) of whom! Years later Lane would again star with Lionel in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), as mean Mr. Potter's tax collector. Perhaps remembered as Homer Bedloe, the scheming railwayman in TV's "Petticoat...