Free Republic

The LA Weekly ”…only thing missing is the noose.”: A new poster depicting President Obama as a version of Heath Ledger’s Joker character in The Dark Knight has appeared in Los Angeles. It has a bit of everything to appeal to the drunk tank of California conservatism: Obama is in white face, his mouth (like Ledger’s Joker’s) has been grotesquely slit wide open and the word “Socialism” appears below his face. The only thing missing is a noose.

It seems the L.A. Weekly wants to seek out and destroy Christianity itself instead of any particular sect thereof. I can say this because the newspaper has admitted as much in a recent column (go here). More on that later. This June 10 column has identified Christians as “Christers,” the kitschy new hate word created by anti-religionists in the U.S.A. to describe their foe: you and me. The Weekly uses this pseudo word some 16 times in the Op Ed even going so far as to make it appear as if the word was used in a Wall Street Journal...

If the first 10 days of the war had been a tennis match, the score would have been 6-0, 6-1, 6-0. And yet, listening to much of the commentary about it on television and elsewhere, you’d have thought that every set had ended in a tiebreaker with the plucky Iraqi underdog pushing the pampered infidel overdog to the point of exhausted, red-faced collapse. And that was on American television. Imagine what it was like on Al-Jazeera. This war, with its multichannel, multinational perspectives, is turning out to be a moral relativist’s wet dream. (CNN is just so March 18; the...

FIRST, THIS DISCLOSURE: THE ODDS of my ever complying with the Weekly’s tortuously acrobatic endorsement of Gray Davis and actually voting for the guy were always about nil to zero. But any slight chance of my slipping from my stand was blocked by my teenage daughter this past weekend. Next Tuesday will be 18-year-old Natasha’s first chance to vote, and she’s been taking it seriously. Seriously enough to register in time. Seriously enough to read or watch the occasional piece of election coverage. And seriously enough to check out this paper’s endorsements that were published last week. Along with nearly...

PowerlinesA Democrat Despite Himself by Harold Meyerson IT IS INSTRUCTIVE THAT NO WING OF THE DEMOCRATIC Party claims Governor Gray Davis as its own. Though he is a fiscal conservative and attempts to govern from the center, the centrist Democratic Leadership Council -- a group that hails every remotely friendly sewer commissioner as a path-breaking New Democrat -- gives Davis a wide berth. Though Davis delivers for unions when he feels compelled to, I know no labor leaders or union activists who really think of Davis as a union Democrat. Left to his own devices, Davis doesn't really fall anywhere...