Free Republic

The Orange County Register , a major newspaper in Southern California, has endorsed conservative talk radio host Larry Elder in the Sep. 14 recall against Gov. Gavin Newsom. In an editorial Sunday, the Register said : As one of the state’s few right-of-center editorial pages, readers — and the state’s political leaders — no doubt expected us to come to our conclusion that voters should recall Gov. Gavin Newsom. Perhaps that explains why Newsom, whose policies we’ve often criticized, would not meet with our editorial board, despite our numerous attempts to arrange a meeting. … Pick an issue and the...

Freedom Communications Inc., owner of the Orange County Register, filed for bankruptcy protection Sunday, and its chief executive said he plans to lead a bid to acquire the troubled newspaper company. The Santa Ana-based newspaper firm, which also owns the Riverside Press-Enterprise, filed for Chapter 11 reorganization in U.S. Bankruptcy Court’s Central District of California. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-orange-county-register-bankruptcy-20151101-story.html

Gov. Schwarzenegger first ran for office during the 2003 recall election as a fiscal conservative and social moderate, but he quickly abandoned any pretense of fiscal restraint. He has expanded government and has proposed far-reaching health care programs and other measures. His current plan is to "fix" the state's massive and intractable budget deficit by dramatically raising sales taxes and expanding the sales tax to additional services. This governor has put the state in a precarious position with his debt spending, which really is nothing more than a tax on our grandchildren. Yet the California GOP, under his ostensible leadership,...

... Theft and vandalism of Proposition 8 signs have been reported in Santa Ana, Yorba Linda, Huntington Beach, Fountain Valley, Irvine and Laguna Hills. In Fullerton, five people were taken into custody after police there found 10 torn "Yes on Proposition 8" signs in their car. The suspects told police they had just attended a "No on 8" rally. In Irvine, two citizen arrests have been reported of people stealing or vandalizing "Yes" signs and on Tuesday, three students were stopped by a police officer in an area where several signs had the word "No" spray-painted over several "Yes" signs....

It is simply amazing how the "No on Prop. 8" campaign is unwilling to stand up for what it believes. For a week now the campaign has said one thing; yet it believes something else. What do I mean? Well, the "No on Prop. 8" campaign maintains that, if Proposition 8 fails, kids will not be exposed to same-sex marriage instruction in school; yet it maintains that gay marriage is a fundamental right. Huh? If gay marriage is a fundamental right, then it should be taught in school. Can you think of another fundamental right that is not taught in...

Drugs and a shotgun were planted in his car, police report. His estranged wife has been named a person of interest. Authorities believe Sunny Hills High School history teacher Gregory Abbott was the victim of an elaborate setup by someone who planted drugs and an unloaded shotgun in his car. His estranged wife have been named as persons of interest.

A decisive chunk of the Republican primary electorate didn't find this goofily endearing. When Mitt stood up and warbled, they didn't like his tune. They wanted something meaner and rawer and tougher, and there was John McCain. At the risk of overextending my musical analogy way beyond its natural 32 bars, it should be noted that the defining McCain moment came back in the fall when he responded to Hillary Clinton's support for public funding for a Woodstock museum. If you're under 70 and have no idea what "Woodstock" is or why it would require its own museum, ask your...

Now there are generally two reactions to the above story. If you're like me, you're reminded yet again why you love capitalism. It's dynamic. And the more capitalist your economy, the more dynamic it is. Every great success story is vulnerable to the next great success story – which is why teenagers aren't picking their CDs from the Sears-Roebuck catalog. There's a word for this. Now let me see. What was it again? Oh, yeah: "change." Innovation drives change, the market drives change. Government "change" just drives things away: You could ask many of the New Hampshire primary voters who...

This guy Huckabee is some kind of genius. A week ago, you had to be the Pope or the Queen to do your own big televised Christmas message. But now, since Huck climbed into his red sweater and hired George Lucas to do the notorious "floating cross" effect, every single-digit nickel 'n' dime presidential candidate is donning his gay apparel and trolling the ancient Yuletide carol. I haven't seen so much festive knitwear since "The Andy Williams Christmas Show" 1973. Because Mike Huckabee mentioned "the birth of Christ," he liberated the equivocal tentative finger-in-the-windy candidates and enabled them to utter...

Law enforcement officials on both sides of the border are seeing a crime wave fueled by U.S. deportation policies, which dump busloads of criminal immigrants in large groups at border cities like Tijuana. "Nobody saw this coming," said Tijuana's Mayor Kurt Honald, who has protested the dumping of criminals at the Tijuana gates. He says deportees have triggered a 300 percent rise in petty crime during the last year, as criminals raise money for a return to the U.S. Others join narcotics cartels and smuggling organizations to pay for their return. "They just go right back to the United States....

That's very true. As America demonstrates, faith thrives in a free market. In Europe, the established church, whether formal (the Church of England) or informal (as in Catholic Italy and Spain), killed religion as surely as state ownership killed the British car industry. When the Episcopal Church degenerates into wimpsville relativist milquetoast mush, Americans go elsewhere. When the Church of England undergoes similar institutional decline, Britons give up on religion entirely. Instead of a state church, Europe believes in the state as church – the all-powerful beneficent provider of cradle-to-grave welfare. "Freedom requires religion," said Mitt Romney, and, whether or...

But the point is that the right not to be offended is now the most sacred right in the world. The right to freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, all are as nothing compared with the universal right to freedom from offense. It's surely only a matter of time before "sensitivity training" is matched by equally rigorous "inoffensiveness training" courses. East is east, and west is west, and in both we take offense at anything: Santas saying "Ho ho ho," teddy bears called Mohammed. And yet the difference is very telling: The now-annual Santa lawsuits in the...

t's one thing for a government to use its police powers to take a property to make way for a truly public project, such as a freeway, but quite another for it to bulldoze neighborhoods because a developer is coveting the property. The League of California Cities and the California Redevelopment Association, whose members benefit by the current lax standards for eminent domain, funded a campaign in November 2006 to stop Proposition 90, a statewide initiative that would have banned eminent domain for economic development and forced cities to pay compensation for "regulatory takings." Fortunately, supporters of a more traditional,...

Rudy Giuliani was a brilliant can-do executive who transformed the fortunes of what was supposedly one of the most ungovernable cities in the nation. But on guns, abortion and almost every other social issue he's anathema to much of the party. Mike Huckabee is an impeccable social conservative but, fiscally speaking, favors big-government solutions with big-government price tags. Ron Paul has a long track record of sustained philosophically coherent support for small government but he's running as a neo-isolationist on war and foreign policy. John McCain believes in assertive American global leadership but he believes just as strongly in constitutional...

So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation-states. Europeans, because they've been so inept at exercising it, no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation-state underpins, in turn, Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the United Nations. But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens – a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan – the United States can project itself anywhere on the...

Well, I dunno. It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate when offering advice to Islamabad. Gen. Musharraf is – as George S. Kaufman remarked when the Germans invaded Russia – shooting without a script. But that's because he presides over a country that defies the neatness of scripted narratives. In the days after 9/11, George W. Bush told the world that you're either with us or against us. Musharraf said he was with us, which was jolly decent of him considering that 99.9999 percent of his people are against us. In the teeth of that glum reality, he's...

Peter Robinson, a Reagan speechwriter in the last years of the Cold War, posed an interesting question the other day. He noted that on Feb. 22, 1946, a mere six months after the end of World War II, George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat in Moscow, sent his famous 5,000-word telegram that laid out the stakes of the Cold War and the nature of the enemy, and that that "Long Telegram" in essence shaped the way America thought about the conflict all the way up to the fall of the Berlin Wall four decades later. And what Mr. Robinson wondered was...

So many of the administration's present problems derive from squeamishness about ideological confrontation that any effective Long Telegram would have to address. When President Bush declared a "war on terror," cynics understood that he had no particular interest in the IRA or the Tamil Tigers, but that he was constrained from identifying the real enemy in any meaningful sense: In the fall of 2001, a war on Islamic this or Islamic that would have caused too many problems with Gen. Musharraf and the House of Saud and other chaps he wanted to keep on side. But it's one reason, for...

Well, when you've got a headache, you take an aspirin. When you've got the flu, you take something a little stronger. When you've got cancer, you need chemotherapy, which kills cancer cells but can come perilously close to killing the patient. It's a sad truth, but the Republican Party has the political equivalent of cancer. The party is immune from internal reform. Only the nastiest medicine imaginable can save it, and four (but probably eight) years of Clinton, backed by a Democratic congressional majority, is pretty tough medicine. Columnist Joe Dumas, writing for the Chattanoogan.com, captured the party's problem succinctly:...

Santa Ana, Calif. (AP) -- N. Christian Anderson III, publisher of The Orange County Register, will leave the company Sept. 15 after joining the paper as its editor 27 years ago and leading it to two Pulitzers, the newspaper said Wednesday. Anderson will be replaced by Terry Horne, publisher of the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz., which also is owned by the Register's parent company, Freedom Communications Inc., the newspaper said on its Web site. Anderson's departure was announced two weeks after the Register said it was laying off staff and trimming other services amid steep declines in profit...