Free Republic

As the Trump Dynasty stumbles into misrule and failure, how long before the first well-known journalist gets murdered? With the president designating the news media as “enemies of the people,” unstable personalities like pipe-bomb mailer Cesar Sayoc and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter have been shaken loose from their moorings. Imitators surely will follow. Not that there’s anything new about it. Soreheads have been menacing journalists since the invention of newspapers. Recently, a man in Mountain Home, Arkansas, was charged with terroristic threatening after repeated phone calls targeting CNN’s Don Lemon. I wondered if he was the same idiot who used...

Economically speaking, all 237 GOP presidential candidates are selling the same Magic Beans. Everybody knows the script. Tax cuts for wealthy “job creators” bring widespread prosperity. Top off Scrooge McDuck’s bullion pool, and the benefits flow outward to everybody else. The economy surges, budget deficits melt away, and the song of the turtledove will be heard in the land. Almost needless to say, these “supply side” miracles have never actually happened in the visible world. State budget debacles in Kansas and Louisiana only signify the latest failures of right-wing dogma. Hardly anybody peddling Magic Beans actually believes in them anymore....

Everybody wants to see justice done in the Trayvon Martin case, and almost everybody acts as if they already know what that is. Never mind the Rev. Al Sharpton, activist and crusading journalist all in one. Nor his MSNBC colleague Lawrence O'Donnell, who recently announced he'd decided to forgo wearing a hoodie on TV to look more like a prosecutor. Here's GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum on "Face the Nation," assessing shooter George Zimmerman's mental health. "Someone has a very sick mind who would pursue someone like this, Santorum said. "This is clearly a heinous act. You know, there are...

Cultists now in charge Gene Lyons Some years ago, I reported on a self-defense/gun-safety class mainly for women at Rice University. There had been several forcible rapes on the Houston, Texas, campus. Students had armed themselves. The instructor was an Army ROTC officer. A Vietnam combat veteran, he found the prospect of undergraduates packing heat unsettling, but reasoned that if they were arming themselves anyway, some training was better than none. Unlike many entrepreneurs teaching concealed-carry classes from sea to shining sea, he urged students to leave their guns at home. He stressed that he couldn’t turn them into infantry...

Run-of-the-mill violence Gene Lyons Probably every decent American had the same emotional reaction as former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to the appalling events in her home state of Arizona. “It sounds like something that might happen in some place like Afghanistan,” she told The New York Times. “It shouldn’t happen in Tucson.” We keep saying that, but political assassinations and assassination attempts are more common in the United States than just about anywhere. During my adult life, lunatics with guns or bombs have changed American history more than any election: President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert Kennedy, Rev....

Fantasies old and new Gene Lyons The first great rule followed by all American politicians and most journalists is to flatter the people about how smart and savvy they are. The reality, of course, is that much of the electorate is so poorly informed that it’s a wonder our political system works as well as it does, which many think is hardly at all. Last week, CNN released a poll showing that 86 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. government is “broken.” I admit my first reaction was to wonder subversively, “How would they know?” A contemporaneous Pew survey...

``I HOPE we shall crush ... in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.'' Thomas Jefferson, 1816 Thanks in part to the Supreme Court and our diligent friends at Citizens United, the United States has now moved a step closer to formally adopting a ``one-dollar, one vote'' political system. I've long used the phrase satirically to describe the malign influence of tycoon-funded Washington propaganda shops like Citizens United upon our democracy. In the wake of last week's Supreme...

War without end Gene Lyons One of the enduring oddities of American foreign policy debate is that asking the most obvious questions is all but forbidden. For example, how does Afghanistan pose a threat to the United States? Certainly not in any military sense. The impoverished, largely illiterate Afghans have no army apart from the one U.S. and NATO forces, with very limited success, are trying to train, no air force, no navy, no offensive military capacity whatsoever. From the U.S. perspective, Afghanistan is the absolute end of the earth. Indeed, it’s not a nation at all. The idea that...

David Nelson, of the Leader Telegram, wrote a very telling piece on how irrational and wrong the left is about Governor Palin. He briefly touched on Governor Palin’s successes as governor of Alaska but his point is clearly made. Why does the left have such a preoccupation with bashing Sarah Palin? What is it about her that frightens them so? A recent column by Gene Lyons is a case in point. Most of his article came from MSNBC, which has the same credibility in evaluating a conservative as Rush Limbaugh has in giving a reasoned, rational evaluation of Obama.

No need to meet GOP halfway Gene Lyons For President Obama to treat individual Republicans with civility is one thing. Etiquette, however, has its limits. Embracing bipartisanship as a political goal can be a snare and a delusion. It has certainly seemed so of late, as GOP congressmen responded to Obama’s friendly overtures by voting unanimously against his desperately needed economic stimulus, persevering in their party’s cultlike faith in tax cuts and aligning themselves with a bombastic radio talker who brags that he wants the president to fail. In response, the mannerly official scorers at ABC’s “The Note” awarded the...

If the headline on a recent Associated Press dispatch failed to alarm you, you can’t have been paying attention. “Bush confident sweeping measure will stabilize economy,” it read. That was scant hours before the House rejected Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s Wall Street rescue plan, thrashed out over a long weekend of intense congressional negotiations. As a rule, the more confidence that George W. Bush expresses, the worse things are. How and why the administration allowed what even cautious commentators describe as “the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression” to worsen until stopgap emergency measures couldn’t wait would appear something...

Bush's cinematic war on terror Gene Lyons Why do Republican-oriented pundits spend so much energy lashing out at Hollywood for its sins? Professional jealousy. Partly because so many Americans imagine the world beyond Wal-Mart as a movie set, the Bush administration does its best work in the realm of illusion. I was reminded of this when a Kansas student recently asked President Bush what he, "as a rancher," thought of "Brokeback Mountain." On cue, Cowboy W said he hadn't seen it and would rather discuss "ranching." The TV networks ate it up. Never mind that it was sheer fakery. Bush...

Hot Springs is a haven for serious movie goers this weekend, as the 12th Annual Documentary Film Festival kicks off.  Friday's featured film was titled "Hunting The President," it's based on a book by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons.  The film's producer, Harry Thomason, is an Arkansas native. He was on hand, along with the authors, for a question and answer session Friday night. Channel 7's Michelle Rupp reports: Movie goers only saw pieces of the film.  Thomason tells me it will be finished by the first of the year and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. ...