Free Republic

An often-repeated story about W.C. Fields holds that as he approached the end of his life, a friend was surprised to find him reading a Bible. “Looking for loopholes, m’boy,” he reportedly explained. “Looking for loopholes.” That scene comes to mind these days as I hear the standard response given by the National Rifle Association, the Gun Owners of America and other gun rights groups to even the most modest attempts to inject a little sanity into our nation’s gun laws. The latest example of loophole-seeking has emerged in the recent pandemic of “ghost guns.” I’m not talking about the...

... an old all-too-familiar thought popped into my mind: Please don’t let the perpetrator be Black. Alas, he was. And the beating was very disturbing. The perp, later identified as 38-year-old parolee Brandon Elliot, can be seen on the security camera video kicking 65-year-old Vilma Kari in the stomach and stomping repeatedly on her head.... She cites New York Police Department data to write, “a black New Yorker is over six times as likely to commit a hate crime against an Asian as a white New Yorker.” “In 2020,” she writes, “blacks made up 50 percent of all suspects in...

All sports fans, and most everybody else, will get a kick out of this letter written to the Chicago Tribune. No matter which side you are on in the matter of renaming the Washington Redskins, this guy is hilarious. This is an e-mail sent to Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune after an article he published concerning a name change for the Washington Redskins. Dear Mr. Page: I agree with our Native American population. I am highly jilted by the racially charged name of the Washington Redskins. One might argue that to name a professional football team after Native Americans...

Witnesses say the white gunman who killed nine people at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., was quite vocal about his motives: He wanted to kill black people. Sylvia Johnson, whose cousin the Rev. Clementa Pinckney was one of three ministers killed in the church, said a survivor of the horror told her the shooter muttered, "I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go." In Charleston, a slaughter in the sanctuary In Charleston, a slaughter in the sanctuary Facebook photos and other evidence suggest...

I am not normal. This, I learned from a news story 35 years ago. The details have faded with the passage of time, but the gist of it remains clear. Some expert had crunched a bunch of numbers in search of the “average” human being, the planetary norm, and found that she was an 8-year-old Japanese girl, living in Tokyo. I don’t fit that profile; I’m willing to bet you don’t, either. So as a matter of statistical fact, I’m not “normal” and neither are you. I went to church with Bruce Jenner. Here's what Caitlyn Jenner taught me about...

Just when I thought David Duke had gone the way of the Betamax, buggy whips and record stores, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, Republican politician and jailbird has re-emerged to haunt the new Republican-controlled Congress. The new House Republican whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana apologized this past week for an honest "error in judgment" that led him to speak in 2002 to the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, a white nationalist group founded by Duke.

Hadn't watched the McLaughlin Group in quite some time as they had lost or jettisoned some of the more interesting panelists (and no, Jay Carney wasn't one of them!). The lineup seems to have stabilized although these poor folks are looking O-L-D...perhaps because they are. Felt bad for McLaughlin who apparently was wearing someone else's suit, so baggy was it on his frame. I'm not condemning anyone for aging or illness but it was a bit alarming. In the days before cable news and the internet, the McLaughlin Group were one of the few doses of political candor and a...

Since Brown’s death, local or state police have arrested or detained at least 11 reporters or photographers, according to a running tab on the Poynter Institute’s website. Even Amnesty International sent human-rights observers to the city to support free speech and press — the first time it’s done so in this country. Among the first and most widely reported incidents was when Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and Huffington Post reporter Ryan Reilly were arrested and briefly put in a holding cell after police ordered them to leave a McDonalds. Lowery was “illegally instructed to stop taking video of officers”...

U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., claims liberals are waging a "war on whites." If so, Barack Obama must be at war with himself. That's how goofy Brooks' logic sounds. But he's not nuts. It is an old reflex, when cornered in politics, to lash back with the same charge others have leveled at you — or, put another way, to project your own flaws onto other people. What's sad about Brooks' claim is his feeble attempt to play the white victim card, plucking the strings of white nationalism, just to have his way with the nation's immigration policy.

Now that they're facing Washington's first serious push for new gun violence prevention laws since the Columbine massacre, gun lobbyists are grasping at straws — as in "straw" purchases. That's the slang for someone who legally buys a firearm from a licensed gun dealer, then sells it to someone whose criminal or mental health record prohibits them from making a legal purchase. The National Rifle Association's official position favors prosecuting straw purchasers, but defends allowing sales at gun shows without background checks from private dealers. In the 1990s, you may recall, Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's executive vice president, supported universal...

A new poll suggests that Mitt Romney may achieve the nearly impossible: He may receive even less than the tiny 4 percent of the black vote that Sen. John McCain won four years ago. President Barack Obama holds a four-point lead over his Republican challenger Mitt Romney in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released in the final week before the Republican National Convention. What caught my eye were the numbers reported in key segments of Obama's political base: He led among African Americans "by 94 percent to 0 percent." Say what? No, that was not a misprint. The poll...

TALK about sore losers. Just when you think the health care debate can't sink any lower, somebody manages to punch through the floor. The ink of President Obama's signature was hardly dry on his health care overhaul legislation before reports of vandalism and death threats against congressmen on both political sides threatened to upstage the bill that apparently sparked the anger.

Lib Reporter Says Protesters Were Asking For It When the Media Labeled Them “Teabaggers” Monday, December 28, 2009 Jim Hoft The corruption of the state-run media continues… Liberal Chicago Tribune reporter Clarence Page says old ladies carrying protest signs are “asking for it” when they are called “teabaggers“: NewsBusters reported: The bitterness toward the tea party movement continues to go on and on. Case in point – Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, who on the Dec. 27 broadcast of “The McLaughlin Group,” deemed it “The Most Defining Political Moment” of 2009, but refused to call it the “tea party.” Instead,...

Clarence Page: "Now they regret it."

The bitterness toward the tea party movement continues to go on and on. Case in point - Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, who on the Dec. 27 broadcast of "The McLaughlin Group," deemed it "The Most Defining Political Moment" of 2009, but refused to call it the "tea party." Instead, he granted the movement the preferred name by the left-leaning cable network MSNBC, the "teabaggers" and somehow devised the notion that the movement "asked for" the derogatory name. "The backlash movement known as the ‘teabaggers,' who kind of asked for that name and now they regret it," Page said. ...more...

To hear the right-wing crowd, you would think Bill Ayers and President Barack Obama were joined at the hip. Who could forget Sarah Palin's charge that Obama was "palin' around with terrorists"? Well, goodbye to all that. The 1960s Weather Underground radical-turned-University-of-Illinois professor sounds as steamed up against Obama as he used to feel about President Richard Nixon. The reason, once again, is a presidential escalation of a faraway war. SNIP Meanwhile, what are the Glenn Becks, Sean Hannitys and Sarah Palins of the world going to talk about now that Ayers says Obama's a conservative war hawk? Hint: I'm...

Surely President Barack Obama and his advisers don't really think that their feud with Fox News will do anything but enhance the cable network's viewership. A deeper problem is what the flap reveals about Team Obama, which seems to be more comfortable with campaigning than governing. I'm not happy about that. It does not fill me with glee to see Fox News star Sean Hannity joyfully replaying Obama's 2004 come-together speech about how we're "not red states or blues states" but "the United States of America" and asking where is Obama's promise now? I don't agree with Hannity on much....

Never underestimate the power of a 20-year-old woman in hot pants. Just hook her up with an apple-cheeked young man dressed as a sort of preppy pimp, add a video camera and send them off for a chat with some dimwitted neighborhood financial counselors for ACORN. Stir in enough chutzpah to make Borat look like a shrinking violet and you've got one heckuva scandal. Young conservative activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles hardened up their fresh-faced looks just enough to pose as a pimp and prostitute seeking advice at ACORN offices on setting up a brothel...

Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page softened the MSM’s portrayal of 9/12 protesters as vile racists Monday night to suggest another possibility: they may be ignoramuses. David Shuster, filling in for Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s Countdown, continually baited Page to quantify precisely how “bigotry was fueling this” protest. Clarence Page replied “it’s sad” that, while some of the protesters may be “nutcases”: A lot of these folks, though, are just plain workaday people, who, uh — I bet a poll would show half of them didn’t know what socialism was, but they know it’s not good and they’re afraid of...

Fight crazy talk with sanityBy Clarence Page Published: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 5:16 PM EDT What is it about President Obama that drives some people crazy? Take, for example, his former pastor. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is back in the news again. This time he’s apologizing. He really did not mean to blame “them Jews” in an earlier interview for keeping him away from the president, he says now. He had meant to refer to “Zionists” and not all Jews. The sound bite in question occurred a day earlier. In a walking interview with a reporter for Virginia’s Daily Press,...