Free Republic

"Mike Lupica is being blamed for the cancellation of “The Sports Reporters” after the show’s run of nearly 30 years on ESPN. The Daily News columnist was a panelist for many years on the Sunday morning show, on which he and other print reporters such as the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan and the Detroit Free Press’ Mitch Albom discussed the week’s hot-button issues in sports. When longtime host John Saunders unexpectedly died at 61 in August, Lupica jumped at the chance to replace him. “He was a total diva,” one insider said. “He was abusive to people, and mean to...

There is no politician in recent memory who seems more a product of her handlers than Hillary Clinton. But her handlers in 2008 did hardly anything for her, and now you wonder if the reinforcements she’s brought in this time are doing any better, or giving her better advice. Because all she continues to do is serve this whole thing up for Donald Trump. The other day she said that she was going to ask Bill Clinton to help her with the economy. She did this in a political season when Trump has sold himself two ways, apart from walls...

Mike Lupica ought to stick to sports. When he wanders into politics he says silly stuff, as on today's Morning Joe. With HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell being interviewed about Obamacare, Lupica unctuously wondered out loud: "how did something that was this noble an idea become something over time that the other party uses against this president constantly? And is there a way, over the last two years of his presidency, for him to throw some sort of Hail Mary pass and make this look like the triumph he thought it was going to be?" View the video here.

For the second consecutive day, President Obama reappeared at a golf course on the island of Martha's Vineyard, seemingly counting the strokes toward being an ex-President following the release of video showing American journalist James Foley being executed by an ISIS jihadist. There are so many reasons, too many, why the American people now think Barack Obama is about as good at being President as he is at hitting a golf ball. His reaction to the execution of journalist James Foley in front of the world is just the latest. When the going gets tough, the tough really do go...

The Republican candidates for President may not pose much of a threat to Barack Obama. The very best Halloween parade this year would feature all the Republicans trying to get their party’s presidential nomination. At a time of debt and joblessness and so often hopelessness in this country, in a Foreclosure America where the President seems better at raising money than making very much for Americans, the question on Barack Obama ought to be this. How can he possibly win a second term? Only the way things are going with the Republicans, right up to Halloween 2011, and only a...

Now we are expected to believe that Bernie Madoff, once a star of the one-percenters, could run the kind of elaborate Ponzi scheme he did and steal billions under the nose of the SEC, but not know how many sleeping pills he and his wife needed to take themselves out. Like he finally forgot how to count. Apparently Madoff and his wife Ruth, who failed spectacularly at killing themselves, apparently now intend to kill the rest of us telling their pathetic story. Somehow a thief and rat like Bernie Madoff is still treated as if he should be in beer...

Now here comes Condoleezza Rice, the latest from the Bush White House trying to rewrite history on Iraq, make it out to be some kind of triumph for all of them, make herself a hero of a war that cost this country so many young lives and so much money and so much prestige. So a war started under false pretenses becomes one given over to this kind of false past tense. George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and now Rice all panhandle for a better place in history, trying to make the Bush administration into something so...

When I get ready to write this column, I have a little ritual. The first thing I do is play UFC Champion Dan Severn's theme when he was a pro wrestler with the WWF. (I'll call it whatever I want, treehuggers.) Next, I spend about 20 seconds spinning my dreidel on one of Ron Paul's books. Then I'll pace the floor for about 20-30 seconds. Finally, after I convince my wife Jenny not to Baker Act me, I say these these magic words before I begin writing: DO NOT WRITE ABOUT THINGS YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT. See folks, I don't...

Maybe it is a 10-minute drive back up Lake Shore Drive from Barack Obama's red-brick home at Hyde Park Blvd. and S. Greenwood to the south end of Grant Park. That's where he spoke at a rally seen around the world on the night he was elected President, and when the people who voted for him believed he was going to change the country. Now, on a morning nearly three years later, it is quiet on Hyde Park Blvd., a Secret Service van parked in front of the house and Secret Service signs posted around the neighborhood, and metal barriers...

His name is Vidar Eldholm, and he is 38, from Bergen on the west coast of Norway. These days he is the cultural director at the Norwegian Seamen's Church on E.52nd St., and his wife, Rita, is a deacon there, ready to deliver the sermon at the 5 o'clock service. "This is a Sunday," Eldholm is saying in the afternoon, "when Norwegians will want to be with other Norwegians, because this time it has happened to us." It is a small Lutheran church, and in the summer averages maybe 50 people on Sunday afternoons. And like all churches everywhere, it...

First there is Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who came here from Milwaukee and sounds more like somebody from out of town than ever, saying that the idea of gay marriage constitutes an "ominous threat" to everything good and decent. Dolan sounds like somebody worrying that if gay marriage becomes law in New York on his watch, it may drop a safe on his chances of being promoted to Cardinal. Dolan also tells Fred Dicker on the radio last week how he understands that those who want the gay marriage bill in the state Senate to become law in New York are...

Here was your weekend in Republican presidential politics, first Mike Huckabee and then Newt Gingrich. You want to know where the Republicans are these days? Start with the two of them. Huckabee was like the holy-rolling, right-wing version of one of those rhetorical questions the guy with the gravelly voice asks in the television commercials: "Can Geico help you save 15% on your car insurance? ... If a Republican candidate pulls out of the race and nobody's around to hear him, did it actually happen?" No kidding, when I read that Huckabee, who practically had to be dragged off the...

Now one of the grandstanding governors of the recession, a political chump named Scott Walker, expects everybody to believe that the only way to save the State of Wisconsin, and maybe the whole country, is one union worker at a time. Walker comes riding into office in Madison on this huge wave of anti-Obama, anti-government hysteria. He promises that he will create 250,000 jobs and now expects suckers to believe that he would already be doing that if these Democrat-loving unions would get out of his way. In a country where it seems that only Bernie Madoff does time after...

Sarah Palin was on the Rev. Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network over the weekend, another soft television place for her to land, even better than the one where she swung away at fish like a golfer beating balls at the driving range. Maybe Palin likes Robertson because she thinks that if he could run for President, which he sure did once, anybody can. So Palin showed up on CBN to weigh in on Egypt, maybe because she thought all the real news outlets were taken. And after she got done with questioning the motives of the protesters in Cairo, she...

This time the pictures, the demonstrations about democracy and freedom, are from Tahrir Square in Cairo. This time the opposition leader is a brave, learned man named Mohamed ElBaradei, standing up over these past few days the way the heroes always do in these moments. He has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in his distinguished life and served as the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. And in the runup to George Bush's war in Iraq, ElBaradei stood up there, too, telling Bush and Dick Cheney that he did not believe Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of...

One of the new stars of the Tea Party movement, an entertainer recently mistaken in Delaware for an actual politician, is Christine O'Donnell. Start here with O'Donnell, just because you have to: Even Karl Rove thinks she is too far off the grid. This from a guy who thought Dick Cheney was fine. Delaware is a state that has about one-third the population of Brooklyn. O'Donnell, running for the U.S. Senate, won her primary race with just over 30,000 votes. Even the Mets occasionally draw more people than that. No matter, she was suddenly a new drum majorette for the...

We are 100 yards, no more than that, from the front entrance to the school. There is a stop sign here, and underneath the word "Stop" someone has spray-painted "Obama." Stop Obama. Why has somebody done it? Because in the current climate, people have been convinced they can. Or, more likely, that they should. My son is in the seat next to me in the car. He says, "This isn't the only one. There are others in different parts of town." At least here it is only vandalism about this President and the country's new health care bill, not phone...

This week it was Dick Cheney and Joe Biden. This week they were the dancing bears on the Sunday morning talk shows, which really have become the big top of American politics. And the dream day for these shows is one like Sunday, bickering becoming front-page news, the most serious issues trivialized all over again, like some argument on sports talk radio about who should bat second for the Yankees. Sunday it was the former vice president and the current vice president bickering on the eve of Presidents' Day, making headlines about ... dueling veeps! Even old news - from...

There is a State of the Union speech Barack Obama should give Wednesday night, needs to give and won't. There is a speech he should write and deliver without input from all those geniuses around him who didn't see Scott Brown's pickup truck coming until it ran them all over. That speech would begin this way: "There are people who say I was a far better candidate than I am a President, and you know what? So far, they're right about that. It is why I pledge to you tonight to become something more than the President of words. "The...

The new year begins even worse than the last one ended. Only this time it isn't a debate about health care showing how lousy and mean partisan politics have become in America, it is the debate over the war on terrorism. As usual it starts with a has-been like Dick Cheney acting as if that war is some party issue, as if the country is somehow more vulnerable to fanatics because Democrats have the White House and the Congress, as if all those who hate America and want to kill Americans see this tremendous opening to do that because Barack...