Free Republic

Get your barf bags ready, boys and girls. Barack Obama could have stayed home and forgotten about his speech yesterday, because America's liberals had all weekend to come up with excuses for hate speech, and they came up with some doozies. A few random thoughts, and then I'll get to the freakiest excuse of them all. Expect to hear Pat Robertson's name kicked around a lot over the next few days as Obama's defenders try to draw equivalency between his comments about 9/11 and Wright's decades of hate speech. On Glenn Beck's show last night we were treated to NPR/Esquire...

Remember Tracy Flick from the movie Election? Well, even if you don't this is a very insightful video, put together by Slate. Click here. Hat tip to Charlie Sykes for mentioning it on his show.

On Thursday my brothers in the blue suits put 40,000 pounds of iron on Al Qaida with F-16s and B-1s. It appears that this is the last stage of clearing out the Baghdad area. What I find especially interesting is that some versions of the AP story went out on the wire with this photo... The caption (not included in some versions of the story, most notably the one on Breitbart) went like this: Children watch as U.S. army soldiers from Ghostrider Company, 3rd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, unseen, search their home during Operation Phantom Phoenix in the village...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY USAF!!! This build took a lot longer than I expected...but it was totally worth it. I built it for the USAF 60th Anniversary Group Build at finescale.com. I built it out of the box, and decided to paint the drop tanks the same color as the tail for some extra pop. Hope you like it! This model (and the group build) are dedicated to the memory of Captain Derek Argel, USAF, killed in action in Iraq on Memorial Day, 2005. Derek was a combat controller, a husband and the father of a one year old son, a recipient...

Six years ago this morning, you got up. The day before, you had watched helpless as about 3,000 of our citizens died, some of them bathed in burning jet fuel, some of them crushed under millions of tons of concrete. Some of you, like me, couldn't get Rudy Giulian's estimate of the causalties--perhaps as many as 20,000, certainly "more than we can bear"--out of your mind. You made your way through that bright new September morning, so much like the gorgeous morning the day before. You heard the silence of the empty skies. I'd like to know, what were you...

Right now I'm reading The Bomber War, a history of the WWII bombing campaign in Europe by the late British military historian Robin Nellands. It's an excellent book, and like his other works, is full of first hand accounts from veterans who were involved in the events. I came upon this passage today and just had to share it with you. It's a first hand account from Norman McHolme, a Canadian pilot serving with RAF's Bomber Command. If this doesn't break your heart and inspire you, check your pulse, you may be dead. We were on the last part of...

This thread is not an opus. I’m not going anywhere in a huff, and I’m not going away permanently. But because of goals I have set and responsibilities I’ve taken on, I need to take an FR hiatus. I just spend too much time here and I need to improve my productivity a lot. So, I’m looking to pass off my ping lists to other Freepers, and would greatly appreciate volunteers. I maintain the following lists: Pro-life (already taken care of) Breakpoint/Chuck Colson Caption-A-Rama Scuba Diving FREEPNORAD demonstration alerts The Caption-A-Rama list is on the block because somebody could turn...

They call it the Fairness Doctrine, but if they were really being honest, they’d call it the Sulu Doctrine. Allow me to explain. In 1973, George Takei, known best as Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise on “Star Trek,” ran for mayor of Los Angeles. The field was wide open, and Takei found himself facing sixteen other candidates. Those sixteen helped write a bizarre footnote in the history of American politics and censorship. Takei’s opponents complained that reruns of “Star Trek” on local TV gave him an unfair advantage. Could shots of Sulu steering a starship lead people to...

Richard Poole raises the conch shell to his lips, positions it carefully and blows. The trumpet-like blast echoes off the nearest buildings, conjuring up images of warm Pacific islands on a chilly Midwest morning. The conch is his souvenir, not from a tourist junket, but from a pilgrimage to honor fallen warriors. Poole has shared his photographs and memories of the 65th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack with The Ink, and we discuss the attack and the state of the World War II generation with survivors of the attack and other veterans. “You can’t imagine war ever being there.”...

It’s said that a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. But what if that scene is the Capitol, the deed was voted on in broad daylight and some of the conspirators never left? In May 1972 Richard Nixon launched Operation Linebacker, an air campaign to stop a new North Vietnamese drive into the South. The bombings (and Linebacker II, carried out with B-52 bombers for eleven days in December) were also intended to bring the North Vietnamese back to the negotiation table. It worked. The Paris Peace Accords were signed in January. It’s no stretch to say...

Last week I received an unexpected Christmas lesson from the heavy metal band Twisted Sister. They appeared on The Tonight Show, thrashing out a steel-reinforced rendition of “O Come All Ye Faithful.” You may remember these guys for their Eighties hits “We’re Not Going To Take It” and “I Wanna Rock,” or you might recall lead singer Dee Snider embarrassing Tipper Gore’s anti-rock crusaders in the Senate with his polite but unyielding testimony. My favorite part was when the committee counsel referred to him politely as "Mr. Sister." Dee and the boys blew the roof off the place: “O come...

I expected the report of the Iraq Study Group (or ISG, known in my home as the Iraq Surrender Group) would be bad, but what they delivered was quite horrendous. Retired Special Operations Master Sergeant James Hanson titled his post on it at the famous BlackFive blog “Group Studies Iraq- Fails to find clue bag.” Actually, he concludes, they can’t even tell you the color of the clue bag. Here was a commission tasked fix a war and almost none of them had even served in the military. James Baker and Chuck Robb both saw combat as Marines, but for...

Elvira Arellano’s new T-shirt has me wondering how many hospitals Jesus would close. Arellano is the illegal alien and pro-law breaking activist (she wouldn’t call herself that, but a spade is a spade) who is holed up in a Chicago church, hoping to avoid deportation. She says she should get to stay here because her 7 year old son Saulito is an American citizen. Her new shirt, pictured in the Journal-Standard recently, reads “Who Would Jesus Deport?” Strangely, I don’t recall hearing any teachings on immigration policy during my Sunday school days. But given the wild success of products asking...

Most post-election analyses are political Rorschach tests where the pundit looks at a tiny sample of information and tells you a lot more about his or her worldview than about what really happened, like a football fan guessing why his team lost a game he didn’t watch. Still, from what we do know, we can come to two Rorshach-free conclusions. First, the electorate didn’t reject conservatism, only Republicanism. Most of the winners ran as conservative Democrats. Second, as Shirley Bassey would sing, “it’s all just a little bit of history repeating itself.” Take a look at 1974 and 1976. It...

I have maligned her, if you can indeed malign a liberal pro-abort. I've referred to her quite often as "Blago in a dress." I even--boy, this was painful--voted for the clueless "Taliban Jim" Oberweis in an effort to keep her away from the nomination. But tomorrow I will be putting a clothespin on my nose and voting for Judy Baar Topinka, and here are the reasons why: 1. Blagojevich forced pharmacists to fill prescriptions that they felt were murderous. Topinka, while believing that the scripts should be filled, has said that if she had been governor she would have met...

For those who'll have trouble reading the fine print, I'll summarize. This is Chief Master Sergeant John Gebhardt, and the girl he's holding is the only survivor of a family methodically executed by terrorists in Iraq. They shot her in the head, too. If the Dems win tomorrow...well, I'll let Freeper El Gato tell ya, as he put it in this thread: Cut and run Kerry, and his buddy Bug Out Murtha would leave this little girl to the tender mercies of the human garbage that killed her family. BTW, a USAF CMSgt is very high ranking NCO (E9)....

Wisconsin will soon vote on an amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman, and some of the arguments made against it have implications for the Land of Lincoln. In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that ran mid-month, Mike Tate, campaign manager for the anti-amendment group FairWisconsin, said “If I can get every voter to think for 15 seconds, I can win this election hands down. I’m not glib about that. Getting voters to think for 15 seconds is really hard because they have lives, families, football.” Though I’ve been a hopelessly addicted news junkie for about...

Michelle Malkin has the latest on State Department functionary Alberto Fernandez, who went on Al-Jazeera to give an interview in fluent Arabic and describe our policy in Iraq as one of "stupidity" and "arrogance." Now, most reasonable people would just call for this idiot to be fired. After all, this is equivalent to a guy from State appearing with Lord Haw Haw or Tokyo Rose in 1944 to discuss how many guys we'd lost at Omaha Beach. But I'm curious about something... I wonder, when al-Fernandez used the Arabic term for “stupidity,” was the word closely related to the one...

If I put on my reporter hat and told you President Bush’s approval rating is 77%, but might be as high as 137%, how would you view the quality of my reporting and of this newspaper? You can view some recent conduct by the three major broadcast networks the same way. All three prominently covered a study published in The Lancet, the famed British medical journal, by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. I use the terms “study” and “researchers” very loosely. The researchers claim post-invasion violence in Iraq has killed 655,000 civilians there. Introducing the...

In all the wrestling over the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on terror last week, Congressional Democrats dramatically lowered my estimate of their intelligence. A full analysis of all the cynicism and density they exhibited this week would probably require a book, but let’s take a look at eight things that jumped out at me. 1. The Left was quick to jump on the report’s assessment (two paragraphs out of a nine page summary) that anger over the Iraq War is increasing terrorist recruiting. The New York Times even made those paragraphs the sole point of their article that broke the...