Free Republic

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- How would Barack Obama pay for the $800 billion that John McCain claimed in the first presidential debate Sept. 26 in Oxford, Miss., that his Democratic opponent would spend if he were elected president? Obama replied, by "closing tax loopholes." Obama was no more specific in the debate, and tax experts doubt that structural changes without increasing taxes can raise anything close to that amount of money. My office asked the Obama campaign for the details, and it responded with a 19-page single-spaced paper on the candidate's "tax plans." In fact, there was precious little about tax...

For months Washington’s liberal chattering class filled the airwaves and spilled barrels of ink on the always implausible conspiracy theory holding that Bush White House Pooh-Bahs intentionally leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame in retaliation for her husband’s very public and largely untruthful campaign against the Bush administration’s war policy. But a new book by two decidedly not Bush-friendly reporters — David Corn of the left-wing Nation and Michael Isikoff of the Washington Post — shows the whole controversy to be a sham. No White House people were involved at all. Instead, the leaker was Deputy Secretary of...

The wife of Bush-bashing former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Joe Wilson is apparently not a covert CIA operative or an undercover agent, though she's been described that way repeatedly since the CIA asked for an investigation on how her identity was made public. According to columnist Robert Novak, who revealed Mrs. Wilson's name in his July 14 column, sources at the CIA expressly told him she was not a spy. "According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operative, and not in charge of undercover operatives," Novak told...

Here is a list of recent threads related to the current hot debate between the so-called "neoconservatives" or as some call them, "Canadian conservatives," and the so-called "paleoconservatives." This debate all started with an article from National Review by David Frum titled "Unpatriotic Conservatives." Unpatriotic Conservatives by David Frum Unpatriotic Conservatives: A war against America.When the shooting starts (Novak responds to Frum) Robert Novak: Wrong, But Still a Patriot: David Frum's analysis of Bob Novak went too far by David Keene The Right Thing (ACU's Keene slams Frum over NR article) WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? [Neocon / Paleocon respones...