Free Republic

Conservative talk host Laura Ingraham expects to be back on the air “in the next several days.” When she does return, the program may be unfamiliar to some listeners. She’s not offering many specifics, but in an interview with a Houston station, Ingraham hints it will be more of an entertainment-based show than what’s she’s done for the past 11 years. “It’s time for a new show and it’s time for a new focus that really embraces the culture and expands the conservative reach,” Ingraham told KSEV host Edd Hendee during an appearance yesterday on his morning show. Ingraham thinks...

*snip* First as national security adviser and later as secretary of state, Ms. Rice often argued against the hard-line approach that Mr. Cheney and others advanced. The vice president’s staff was “very much of one ultra-hawkish mind,” she writes, adding that the most intense confrontation between her and Mr. Cheney came when she argued that terrorism suspects could not be “disappeared” as in some authoritarian states. In November 2001, she writes, she went to President George W. Bush upon learning that he had issued an order prepared by the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, authorizing military commissions without telling...

Gov. Cuomo and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie have signed off on $1.50 toll hikes for all Port Authority crossings that’ll go into effect next month, sources said. The final fare hikes are far lower than the ones the Port Authority rolled out last month, which called for a $4 increase on most crossings and were met with widespread disgust by politicians and the public. Christie and Cuomo are also calling for an audit of the agency. The new $1.50 hikes will apply to cash and EZ-Pass customers on all the Port Authority’s bridges and tunnels. Cash payers will also...

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who will have far-ranging subpoena power in the new Congress as a result of Tuesday’s election, is going out of his way to dispel perceptions that he’s a partisan bombthrower who plans to use his newfound authority to paralyze President Barack Obama’s administration.“I want to prove the pundits wrong. My job is not to bring down the president. My job is to make the president a success,” Issa said on a midnight conference call with reporters, just after House Minority Leader John Boehner’s victory speech. Issa took a restrained view of his likely new post as...

Workers in the Shadows By DAVID BROOKS Imagine a person 10 times as determined as you are. Picture a guy who will wade across rivers, brave 120-degree boxcars and face vicious smugglers and murderous vigilantes — all to get a job picking fruit for 10 hours a day. That person is the illegal immigrant. Let's call him Sam. This whole immigration debate is about him, the choices he faces and the way he responds. One thing we know about Sam: he will get here. Between 1986 and 1998, Congress increased the Border Patrol's budget sixfold. Over that time the...