Free Republic

The outrageous attack on President Bush's television commercials was the work of an extreme left-wing group that has been in the forefront of the battle against the War on Terrorism for years, but you'd never know it from the coverage it has received in the establishment news media. By picking up the charge, rather than reporting on its dubious source, the media have done major damage to the President's campaign, which compounded the problem by "defending" the ads, rather than exposing the hateful anti-Americanism of those who attacked them. The President's actions in the immediate wake of 9/11 were nothing...

-snip- This relates to the Soros-funded ad, how? Well, when I heard the ad I recognized the music bed: it’s a Soundtrack loop. I used it in the start of my Doctor Poppycock tune. To those guys it sounded downbeat and ominous; to me it sounded mysterious and ethereal. Compare and contrast with the music beds for the Bush ads. They remind me very much of the music for the Rick Burns New York series; it’s “American” music, because it’s plain, simply arranged, with a touch of sadness. The Burns documentary used a few simple tunes over and over again...

The antidote to John Kerry is Mrs John Kerry, if she’ll forgive the designation. Teresa Heinz is the last person on the Kerry team to remember the days when a John Kerry campaign appearance meant a campaign appearance by John Kerry. Now it’s like the title song of Hello, Dolly!, but even longer and with a bigger cast — thousands of state officials, veterans, designated human-interest victims of the “special interests” and paunchy fellow Senators frantically prancing around the stage as they anticipate the arrival of the Great One. Eventually, after several hundred choruses of what a great President he’ll...

A friend heard this one about the recent Super Bowl: President Bush called the Patriots to congratulate them on their victory. Al Gore called the Panthers to say they were robbed of the victory. And Bill Clinton called Janet Jackson. Cute, huh? The good news hereabouts is that it is staying light out after 5 p.m. The bad news is that this means we can see the snow and ice even longer each day. Which is one reason I took three days off and went to Florida. One of the kids had accompanied his grandmother down to her winter home...

It’s the best part of two decades since Denys Arcand gave us The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire, a very Quebecois gloss on The Big Chill about a group of boozy, bed-hopping, bantering boomers connected one way or another to a university history department. They were in their prime, though they did not fully realize it. Eighteen years on, one of their number is now facing the biggest chill: death. In his mid-50s, Remy (Remy Girard), a self-described “sensual socialist”, is perforce heavy on the latter and lighter than he’d wish on the former. He’s no longer banging...

Friends help each other out. That’s why the US sends billions of dollars every year to Israel. In return, Israel advances US strategic interests in the Middle East. But despite this mutual back scratching, Israeli-American relations are enduring a rough patch. Last December, a senior State Department official blasted Israel for having “done too little for far too long” to resolve the conflict with its Palestinian neighbors. Indeed, President Bush himself had scolded Israel a month earlier with his demand that “Israel should freeze settlement construction, dismantle unauthorized outposts, end the daily humiliation of the Palestinian people and not prejudice...

President Bush is set to give a speech today in which he finally drops the "new tone" nonsense, takes the gloves off, and attacks the Democrats for, among other things, being soft on the war on terrorism. This is long overdue. For many months now, Democrats have managed to turn tremendous foreign-policy and military victories into American defeats. For the most part, Republicans, conservatives, and even George W. Bush's campaign operatives have allowed it, watching while Democrats completely transform these issues into political negatives for the president. President Bush has done more in three short years to liberate and defend...

MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) - U.S. military helicopters landed a seven-member Marine team in Liberia on Wednesday, marking the first U.S. troops on the ground to support a West African peace force. Excited children on Monrovia's Atlantic beaches waved at the three helicopters as they swept in from ships far off shore and disappeared behind the U.S. Embassy's high walls. Minutes later, the Marines rolled out and sped away to meet with West African military officials at their temporary base at Liberia's main airport. The U.S. team arrived as Nigerian troops at the airport - the vanguard of a West African...

Dhaka - A 24-year-old man was sentenced to death in Bangladesh for throwing acid on his nine-year-old bride, disfiguring and blinding her for life, prosecution lawyers said on Tuesday. A special tribunal in the industrial town of Gazipur, 35km north of the capital Dhaka, handed down the death sentence on Swapan Gazi after a lengthy trial. The tribunal also fined him.

The software that runs many high-tech voting machines contains serious flaws that would allow voters to cast extra votes and permit poll workers to alter ballots without being detected, computer security researchers said yesterday. "We found some stunning, stunning flaws," said Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, who led a team that examined the software from Diebold Election Systems, which has about 33,000 voting machines operating in the United States." -------- Since we can't copy a whole article from there I've only used the first paragraphs.