Free Republic

ABC NEWS: It’s Obama vs. Obama As Democratic Convention Begins. “President Obama has met his own worst enemy, and his name is Barack Obama. As the Democratic National Convention gets underway this week in North Carolina — a state that epitomized the Obama wave of 2008 but has slipped steadily from the Democrats’ grasp since then — memories of the hope and expectations the president embodied four years ago loom over the gathering.” UPDATE: The GOP agrees: We’ve Heard It All Before.

Republican loathing for Hillary Clinton used to be viewed as her Achilles' heel. But Tuesday night in Philadelphia, she wore Republican hate as a badge of honor, fending off her Democratic rivals' sharpest attacks yet by casting herself as a kind of partisan warrior queen. Barack Obama, pressed for weeks by his donors and by the media to take on Clinton more directly, came out swinging against her, moving from uncertainty to a more confident criticism. She parried an early blow from him, an accusation that she is too close to President Bush and his party on Iran. "I don’t...

Avraham Poraz, our secular "Zionist" minister of the interior, is a modern man untrammelled by bigotry and superstition. His revulsion to religious values is directed against his own people's faith, Judaism; one does not recall him expressing offensive remarks about the religious rituals of other people. His contempt for Jewish ritual was manifested even before his appointment as interior minister. How else would one judge an Israeli politician congratulating the Dutch government for moving toward a ban on Jewish ritual slaughter - shehita? The ban was never imposed because, unlike Poraz, the Dutch authorities concluded that such a move would...