Free Republic

At last, a believable sighting of that peace president many of us thought we had elected. Give Barack Obama credit, big time, for the startling progress he has made in tempering the threat of nuclear annihilation. The Obama administration's Nuclear Posture Review Report for the first time prohibits "first use" of nuclear weapons against nations complying with the nonproliferation treaty. It also pledges a halt to US efforts to modernize such weapons, as had been proposed by then-President George W. Bush in his call for new nuclear "bunker busters." Whereas his predecessor succeeded only in eliminating the nonexistent Iraqi nukes,...

Barack Obama's faux populism is beginning to grate, and when yet another one of those "we the people" e-mails from the president landed on my screen as I was fishing around for a column subject, I came unglued. It is one thing to rob us blind by rewarding the power elite that created our problems but quite another to sugarcoat it in the rhetoric of a David taking on those Goliaths.In each of the three most important areas of policy with which he has dealt, Obama speaks in the voice of the little people's champion, but his actions cater fully...

Is there a more hypocritical figure in American politics than Joe Lieberman? The Connecticut senator declared Tuesday that he would support a filibuster of any health care reform bill that has a public option - even the version with the "trigger" compromise accepted by Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe - because it might cost money. "I think that a lot of people may think that the public option is free," said Lieberman, one of the Senate's big spenders, in a suddenly frugal mood. "It's not. It's going to cost the taxpayers and people that have health insurance now, and if it...

The Obama revolution, and there was the hope of one, might still succeed. But only if Barack Obama follows the model of the incredibly successful Reagan revolution and heeds the political base that made his presidency possible. Love him or not, Ronald Reagan had at least one outstanding political virtue - his respect for the concerns of those who placed their trust in him. And whenever the political vultures that feast on power tried to lead him astray, they were fired at the insistence of Reagan or his remarkably savvy wife, Nancy. Hopefully Obama and his no-less-impressive mate, Michelle, will...

That's last night. Over 12,000 contracts traded in two five-minute periods, over 10,000 right up on the time of that spike. There was no news of any sort related to the US markets on the wire last night. Zero. None. I and many others were wondering what the heck caused that. This morning, the buying began in earnest at 8:30 Central, and then again at 10:00 Eastern - one hour in front of the "announcement", again on heavy volume. Where is the SEC? Where is the SEC's demand for trading records on these contracts, particularly the ones last night on...

It's not working. The Bush-Obama strategy of throwing trillions at the banks to solve the mortgage crisis is a huge bust. The financial moguls, while tickled pink to have $1.25 trillion in toxic assets covered by the feds, along with hundreds of billions in direct handouts, are not using that money to turn around the free-fall in housing foreclosures. As the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, "The Mortgage Bankers Association cut its forecast of home-mortgage lending this year by 27 percent amid deflating hopes for a boom in refinancing." The same association said that the total refinancing under the administration's...

Why rush to throw another $350 billion of taxpayer money at the Wall Street bandits and their political cronies who created the biggest financial mess since the Great Depression? And why should we taxpayers be expected to double our debt exposure when the 10 still-secret bailout contracts made in the first round are being kept from the public? We don't have time, President-elect Barack Obama's key economic adviser Lawrence Summers insisted in a letter to Congress on Monday, promising that the new infusion would not be squandered as was the first installment. But given that Summers is personally as responsible...

In the end, the shame of Vice President Dick Cheney was total: unmitigated by any notion of a graceful departure, let alone the slightest obligation of honest accounting. Although firmly ensconced, even in the popular imagination, as an example of evil incarnate - nearly a quarter of those polled rated him the worst vice president in U.S. history, and another 41 percent as "poor" in this week's CNN poll - Cheney exudes the confidence of one fully convinced that he will get away with it all. And why not? Nothing, not his suspect role in the Enron debacle, which foretold...

Let the record show that it was George W. Bush, the rich Texas Republican, who brought socialism to America, so don't blame it on that African American Chicago Democrat community organizer who made it into the White House. The government takeover of the banking and automobile industries not only happened on President Bush's watch, it was also the deregulatory mania of this president's family, beginning with his father, which took this country into such starkly unfamiliar territory. What a betrayal of unfettered free market capitalism. And who would have thought that it would be the candidates backed by conservative pundits...

In his column last week, Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer, who created the myth that the Bush administration gave $43 million to the Taliban after misreading a New York Times story, spreads two more falsehoods now working their way through the media. First, Scheer addresses the report of the Congressional committee set up to investigate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, focusing on the portion dealing with Saudi Arabia. He writes that while Saudi Arabia has close ties to terror, "The report finds no such connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorists," making it appear that Congressional investigators sought evidence...