Free Republic

Speeding from Los Angeles to Las Vegas at more than 150 miles per hour by train has been talked about for more than 20 years, but it's a last-minute federal decision that might have kicked it into high gear earlier this week. The $789 billion all-but-approved federal stimulus plan in Washington includes a late change made, according to The Associated Press, at the behest of Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. Funding for high-speed rail programs, which the House capped at $2 billion, was increased in the final bill to $8 billion. Reid, the Senate majority leader, has long been a proponent...

CHICAGO Conrad Black, who led the thieving band of executives that put the Chicago Sun-Times pretty far down the road to ruin, had just been convicted in a Chicago federal courthouse, but Publisher John Cruickshank had something more urgent to talk about Friday afternoon in the tabloid's offices. "We're not going to start being a Democratic paper or a liberal paper or a conservative paper or an ideological paper -- we're an independent paper," he said. "We're not going to be a small L liberal paper. We're not going to bind ourselves to a party or ideology in anything." On...