Free Republic

Nora Volkow was born three years after Stalin died, and 16 years after the Soviet dictator sent a student with an ice ax to kill her great-grandfather. Her grandmother committed suicide, and her grandfather was shot to death in a Stalinist prison. She grew up in Mexico City knowing that her family was both steeped in greatness and marked by tragedy. Today, Volkow is the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and one of the United States' leading experts on the science of drug addiction. "I've studied alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, marijuana and more recently obesity. There's a...

The Trotsky Two-StepBy Greg YardleyFrontPageMagazine.com | June 16, 2003 Trotskyists in the White House? A recent article in the Canadian National Post suggests that President Bush's advisors were influenced by Leon Trotsky, the big loser in the Bolshevik power struggle after Vladimir Lenin's death, hounded out of the country by Stalin and eventually murdered by Stalin's agents in 1940. Although the link between dedicated Communist Leon Trotsky and the conservative Bush administration is tenuous, the author, Jeet Heer, pursues the link with zeal. According to him, Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz frequently consult an...

Trotskycons? Pasts and present. By Stephen Schwartz EXCERPTS ".....This path had been pioneered much earlier by two Trotskyists: James Burnham, who became a founder of National Review, and Irving Kristol, who worked on Encounter magazine. Burnham was joined at NR by Suzanne LaFollette, who, piquantly enough, retained some copyrights to Trotskyist material until her death. But they were not the only people on the right who remained, in some degree, sentimental about their left-wing past. Willmoore Kendall, for example, was, as I recall, a lifelong contributor to relief for Spanish radical leftist refugees living in France. Above all, Burnham and...

In June 7, the National Post, a Canadian daily, published a rather amusing article by Jeet Heer, titled "Trotsky's ghost wandering the White House." The aim of the author was to illuminate two issues occasionally argued in political media: first, the scurrilous claim by a group of neofascists that the neoconservatives are all ex-Trotskyists, and second, the very real evolution of certain ex-Trotskyists toward an interventionist position on the Iraq war. In the U.S., these are fringe topics discussed only in the most rarefied circles. In Canada, however, a labor and socialist party remains a major political force (the New...

My Dogs Watch FoxNewsby Paul Gottfried This morning, when I turned on FoxNews for our three dogs, who seem to like the staccato sounds on Rupert Murdoch Central, I caught sight of the well-publicized visage of David Frum. Apparently Frum was being asked to comment on the Christian faith of George W. Bush, a spiritual disposition that had just received high grades from an Evangelical Republican who was particularly struck by the Prez's remarks about everyone having the potential for democracy. Frum, who was in agreement with the Evangelical, spoke about how effusively Bush's faith had come out in his...

After his fifth apology, on Black Educational Television, and his promise to honor Martin Luther King Day and support affirmative action forever, Trent Lott packed it in. That was the signal for the pogrom.

Last Thursday, House Democrats elected Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as House Minority Leader. Pelosi won the minority leader position on a 177-29 vote. That is, only 29 House Democrats voted against her. Clearly, 177 agree with her positions. This is a very important point. Because, now we can define, specifically, what the House Democrats are and what they stand for. Money is the life-blood of politics. Like Hillary in the Senate, Pelosi capitalized on that. In so doing, Pelosi bought her position within the Democratic Party. According to Opensecrets.org(1), Pelosi set up her own PAC and quickly became a major...