Free Republic

Lady Gaga is the first major star of the digital age. * * * [D]espite showing acres of pallid flesh in the fetish-bondage garb of urban prostitution, Gaga isn’t sexy at all – she’s like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era…

Congress Must Assert Power Over War Bush Term Will End Before War Does Helen Thomas, Hearst White House columnist It's time for Congress to re-assert its sole constitutional authority to declare war. But do the newly empowered lawmakers have the courage? Both President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney gave TV interviews Sunday to assert their argument that the commander-in-chief has the right to continue the war against Iraq even if it is against the will of the American people and Congress. The president is obviously playing for time. Bush is losing ground with more and more members...

For the record, Helen Thomas, who at age 86 has been covering news at the White House for about half a century, no longer heads straight to the office at 5:30 a.m. each weekday. Instead, she goes to Starbucks, where she orders her coffee -- black -- and settles in for some quality reading time with the New York Times and Washington Post. Then, she heads to the White House press room.

A new Helen Thomas thread!!!