Free Republic

It was a typical playground — if you ignored the barbed wire and bizarre signs: “PLEASE COOPERATE; SILENCE IS REQUESTED.” “NO PHOTOGRAPHS ALLOWED TO BE TAKEN OF THE CHILDREN.” The children in question were the internationally famous Dionne quintuplets, the first-ever five identical siblings to survive infancy. Four times a day the girls waddled into their private playground to shovel in a sandbox or wade through baby pools as thousands of onlookers gawked at the spectacle. Their mere existence created a mania only rivaled three decades later by the arrival of the Beatles in America. When the playground opened to...

Vengeance is mine sayeth the horde! Washington Post columnist is in such a rage over what he calls the "coup" of confirming Brett Kavanaugh as a Justice on the Supreme court that it caused his mind overload to the extent of forgetting about the federal system of government established by the Constitution. In addition, he is now out for revenge against conservatives by packing the Supreme Court chock full of additional seats occupied by liberals.

Why are so many willing to back down when logic is on their side? Talk about power: The gun lobby barely had to say a word before the media sent advocates of saner gun regulation shuffling off in defeat. In a political version of Stockholm syndrome, even those who claim to disagree with the National Rifle Association's absolutist permissiveness on firearms lulled themselves into accepting the status quo by reciting a script of gutless resignation dictated by the merchants of death. It's a script built on half-truths and myths. For example, polls showing declining support for gun control in the...

Actual title is :Is this Media Matters ‘favorite’ WashPost columnist?: Undisclosed group instrumental in promoting Obama’s political career. A Washington Post columnist to which Media Matters reportedly pushed its content has a previously undisclosed connection to President Obama – the two were part of a small group at Harvard University that met for a period of three years purportedly to promote involvement with U.S. community institutions. Participants at the research project, which took place between 1997 and 2000, included scores of individuals with ties to Obama, including several activists who were later appointed to positions in the Obama administration. Other...

You can tell Michele Bachmann had a great debut at the Republican primary debate in New Hampshire last night, because swarms of liberal writers are breaking off from their pursuit of Sarah Palin’s tour bus to dive-bomb her. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post decided to headline a basically complimentary assessment of Bachmann’s debate performance as “Bachmann assumes the position.” He was riffing on CNN moderator John King’s instruction for the candidates to assume their positions at the lectern, which he turned into a rather tortured metaphor for the entire debate. (Milbank was watching a different debate than the rest...

In the 1980s and 90s, Washington Post columnist E.J.Dionne, Jr. was a sensible centrist; a man who took conservatives seriously and often tried to comprehend what they were saying without animosity. In 1991, he wrote a book titled Why Americans Hate Politics. In 1996, just about the time Bill Clinton was set to run for his second term, Dionne was author of a book defending the “progressive” agenda, titled They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era. I reviewed the book for Commentary, and you can find an abstract of what I said here. (Unless you...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calmly assessing the political cyclone that routed her Democratic majority and will, at least temporarily, force her to vacate one of the best offices in the city, with its inspirational view of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. She keeps coming back to the courage of her colleagues who cast hard votes that helped make the past two years one of Congress's most productive periods in recent times - and made her one of the most effective speakers in history. Her message is unmistakable: Democrats have nothing to apologize for, nothing to be...

President Obama allowed Republicans to define the terms of the nation's political argument for the past two years and permitted them to draw battle lines the way they wanted. Neither he nor his party can let that happen again. Democrats would be foolish to turn in on themselves in a fruitless battle over whether their troubles owe to a failure to mobilize and excite their base or to win support from the political center. In fact, Democrats held onto moderate voters while losing independents. What hurt them most was this brute fact: Voters younger than 30 made up 18 percent...

Who could have imagined that the bailout of the auto industry, one of the single most unpopular moves by the Obama administration, would become one of its best talking points? But don't for an instant imagine that the comeback of the nation's rescued car companies, particularly General Motors, will change the way we debate government's role in the economy. When it comes to almost anything the government does, ideology trumps facts, slogans trump reality, and loaded words ("socialism") trump data. Let there be no mistake: Rescuing GM and Chrysler took political courage, and I want to put in a good...

President Obama's decision to televise his Q&A with House Republicans was one of his shrewdest political moves since he transformed the 2008 controversy around his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, into an occasion to discuss race in American life. The hour-long session accomplished two things that Obama has been struggling for months to achieve. It set his political base on fire, even as it set a post-partisan tone that political Independents, who have been straying from him in the polls, like so much. Evidence of how the base took the event was all over the blogs (Daily Kos, for example, live blogged...

If you held a contest to pick the worst thing a politician could be called at this moment, my nominee would be “Wall Street liberal.” That label has everything. I personally despise the way the noble liberal idea has been devalued, but face it: Conservatives have had great success in discrediting liberalism, to the point that most liberals dare not call themselves by their own name. And what institutions are held in lower esteem right now than those represented by the words “Wall Street”? The left has always disliked Wall Street. Populists of all stripes have gone after financiers since...

At the risk of flacking for the Boston Globe – a newspaper, I confess, that I dearly love, and not just for its Red Sox coverage – I’d like to share one other insight from a Globe columnist. This morning, Joan Vennochi makes an essential point: There is a long history of Massachusetts voters getting fed up with the dominance of Democrats in the state legislature and of sending a message of protest by voting for Republicans at the top of the ballot. This year, that disaffection is compounded by the unpopularity of Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick. (By the way,...

Is there room in the Republican Party for genuine moderates? Truth to tell, the GOP can't decide. More precisely, it's deeply divided over whether it should allow any divisions in the party at all. That's why the brawl in a single congressional district in far upstate New York is drawing the eyes of the nation. Conservatives are determined to use the race to prove that there is no place in the party for heretics, dissidents or independents. President Obama set up the fight by nominating the district's former representative, John McHugh, as his Army secretary. Maybe Obama is as fiendishly...

Things are looking up for the Republicans, relatively speaking. President Obama's poll numbers have dipped, GOP recruitment for the 2010 elections is going better than expected, and the health-care battle has been rough on the Democrats. On top of that, the surveys show Republicans now leading in this year's two major governor's races, in Virginia and New Jersey. There's just one problem: The country still doesn't like Republicans. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last week captured the public's mixed verdict. The headlines focused on growing doubts about Obama's health-care plan and the drop in his approval rating, from 60...

In addition to disparaging Brian Williams for offering a "candygram" to Barack Obama in prime time, PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers organized another one-sided left-wing discussion on the alleged conservative bias of the news media last Friday, picking up on Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne’s complaint that the media are giving too much time and weight to Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich on the Sotomayor nomination. Former NPR correspondent Brooke Gladstone, who now hosts the weekly show On The Media for WNYC radio (distributed nationally by NPR), denounced the "canard" of liberal media bias and how it causes "overbalance": What I...

Liberals are obsessed with contradiction. I’m convinced that in order to be a Liberal one must possess the ability to suspend reality and replace it with some polar opposite to the truth, a flight over Bosnia or a Third Way if you will, which is a political philosophy that President Clinton was a disciple of. That is not what Barack Hussein Obama is doing [Obama is not attempting a Third Way Obama is tearing down the old way] and E.J. Dionne has got it all wrong in his article Obama and the limits of mastery.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Democratic Presidential candidate, was accused of plagiarism while in his first year at Syracuse University Law School, academic officials familiar with Mr. Biden's record said today. Mr. Biden, who as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is presiding over the hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork, has called a news conference for 9 A.M. Thursday to discuss this charge and reports that he has lifted material from speeches by other politicians to use in his public addresses. A Biden aide, who asked not to be identified, declined to comment...

John McCain's campaign acknowledged this weekend that Sarah Palin is unprepared to be vice president or president of the United States. Of course, McCain's people said no such thing. But their actions told you all you needed to know. McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden all subjected themselves to tough questioning on the regular Sunday news programs. Palin was the only no-show. And it's not just the Sunday interviews. She has not opened herself to any serious questioning since McCain picked her to be next in line for the presidency. McCain's advisers clearly don't trust Palin to answer questions about...

John McCain's campaign acknowledged this weekend that Sarah Palin is unprepared to be vice president or president of the United States. Of course, McCain's people said no such thing. But their actions told you all you needed to know. McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden all subjected themselves to tough questioning on the regular Sunday news programs. Palin was the only no-show. And it's not just the Sunday interviews. She has not opened herself to any serious questioning since McCain picked her to be next in line for the presidency.

It's sort of hard to come away from that thinking "nonpartisanship." McCain tried to get voters to remember that man in his acceptance speech Thursday night, the one who "worked with members of both parties to fix the problems that need to be fixed." But that man has disappeared. The stage in the middle of the cavernous Xcel Energy Center was rearranged so McCain could conjure the feel of the town hall meetings he loves as he laced into "partisan rancor" and "the Washington crowd." Yet a set change could not disguise the fact that this convention -- including the...