Free Republic

In my estimation, the hallmark of the true politician, the true Washington insider, is the intentional evasion of responsibility and/or blame – the sin of omission. By this standard, Rick Santorum, in the end, is nothing but a typical two-bit political hack. For all his bloviating and posturing, painting himself as a true conservative, selling his alleged “genuineness”  and values – a regular Joe – Santorum has shown his true colors by failing to endorse when it could have made a difference. Plainly, he is avoiding the ire of the GOP establishment by not endorsing Gingrich, and he is avoiding...

I’ve known Rick Santorum for 22 years, having first met him in 1990 before he’d won his first campaign for Congress. I interviewed him on WORD-FM, an evangelical Christian radio station where I was a frequent guest host (and eventually a full-time host) early in his campaign. If I was not the first media personality to interview Rick, I was one of the first. I had Rick as a guest at the request of my friend, Mark Rogers, who was running Rick’s campaign. Over the years I interviewed Rick at least a dozen times and debated him several times as...

Former Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.) writes in a new book that President Obama ditched him in the 2010 election after he helped Obama win the biggest legislative victory of his term by passing healthcare reform. Specter also claims that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) did not uphold his promise to grant him seniority accrued over 28 years of service in the Senate as a Republican. Specter, who rocked Washington’s political establishment and made headlines around the country when he left the Republican Party to join Democrats in April of 2009, has kept quiet about these slights until now ...

CNN's Patrick Oppmann moves from Seattle to Havana, Cuba.

Yesterday, Mitt Romney said he’s “not going to say outrageous things about the president.” Trouble with that statement is that “outrageous” is a pretty subjective adjective. Outrageous to whom? Apparently, Romney meant to say he’s not going to say anything about the president that would outrage the left — because he doesn’t seem to be afraid to say something about the president that would outrage the right. In fact, he did just that earlier today, when he essentially said the president shouldn’t be held responsible for the high price of gas. “I think people recognize that the president can’t precisely...

“When you look that closely at someone, you almost always develop sympathy for them,” Rockwell says. “It's like sitting next to someone for a long bus ride. … I want to think about who these people are and why they made the choices they did. I want to share the results of my thoughts, which are my paintings, with other people.” She was particularly inspired to paint bin Laden. “We take for granted who he was and what he did and why, and stop thinking of him as a human being with profoundly human motivations. The war on terror is...

.. US filmmaker Sean Stone, son of Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone, converted to Islam on Tuesday in Iran, where he is making a documentary, he told AFP. "The conversion to Islam is not abandoning Christianity or Judaism, which I was born with. It means I have accepted Mohammad and other prophets," he said in a brief telephone call from the central Iranian city of Isfahan, where he underwent the ceremony. Sean Stone's famous father is Jewish, while his mother is Christian. The 27-year-old filmmaker did not say why he converted. According to Iran's Fars news agency, Sean Stone had become...

<p>I was taking photographs of the police arresting Occupy Wall Street demonstrators at the December 12 Winter Garden flash mob, which had been organized in solidarity with the port shutdowns on the west coast, when I found myself targeted. "That one," I heard a voice say in a brutal "New Yawk" accent, realizing that a senior police official was pointing me out over a row of people, "he goes. He goes."</p>

Occupy Oakland has called for a city-wide strike and rally on Wednesday to protest income inequality, and several businesses, including Men's Wearhouse and the Grand Lake movie theater, have closed their doors in support... The store's decision will likely meet with approval from the corporate HQ: George Zimmer, founder and chairman of Men's Wearhouse, has repeatedly donated to Democratic candidates in multiple election cycles, including progressives like 2004 presidential candidate Howard Dean and Rep. Barbara Lee (Calif.).

(Reuters) - U.S. officials have met members of the Muslim Brotherhood's political party, a U.S. diplomat said, after Washington announced it would have direct contacts with Egypt's biggest Islamist group whose role has grown since U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak was ousted.

<p>One day, at the height of her fame in the mid-Seventies, Jane Fonda turned up on the doorstep of her ex-husband, Roger Vadim. She was lugging a bulging sack.</p> <p>Vadim’s glamorous new girlfriend let her in, thrilled to meet the movie icon at last. But her excitement soon turned to disbelief. The star of Julia, Klute and The China Syndrome had come to do her laundry. Why? Because her second husband, Tom Hayden, a Left-wing activist with a bulbous nose and acne-scarred cheeks, had forbidden her to have either a washing machine or dishwasher. Far too bourgeois.</p>

You saw it here first, folks! Clueless?Over at the American Spectator, the great Jeffrey Lord writes that “almost to a person … prominent pre-Ron Paul non-interventionist “Paulist” politicians of the 20th century were overwhelmingly not conservatives at all. They were men of the left. The far left.” From three-time Democratic presidential nominee and Woodrow Wilson Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan to powerful Montana Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler to FDR’s ex-vice presidential nominee Henry Wallace to the 1968 anti-war presidential candidacy of Minnesota Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy to 1972 Democratic presidential nominee (and Henry Wallace delegate in 1948) George...

National Popular Vote is good for conservatives, the GOP, and public policy. Period. Having been active in support of the initiative for over a year now, I have met and talked to hundreds of conservative leaders, activists, and elected officials. I have found most of those who reflexively oppose it do so because they think it is a process to amend the Constitution, don’t understand how it works or how it would affect outcomes, or are convinced of some grand conspiracy to turn America into a permanent Democrat hegemony. The reality is the current system disenfranchises millions of conservatives from...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., will appoint Democratic Sens. Patty Murray of Washington, Max Baucus of Montana, and John Kerry of Massachusetts to the new super committee tasked with finding $1.2 trillion in additional deficit reduction by November 23, according to a senior Democratic aide familiar with Reid’s decision, which is expected to be made public as early as Wednesday. Additionally, Murray is expected to co-chair the committee, officially named the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, along with a still unnamed House Republican. A spokesman for Reid did not respond to a request for comment. Reid’s decision to...

Here's Frank Schaeffer, the David Brock of the religious right, on Rachel Maddow characterizing all conservatives as dangerous nutjobs. Rachel Maddow guest, author Frank Schaeffer, summarizes The Right Wing

The moral bankruptcy of the Left – epitomized by its backing of Islamic dictators and extremists over moderate Muslims – saw it defeated across Europe in recent EU elections. From what I read yesterday, the Huffington Post, and American liberals, might want to take a lesson from that. In one op-ed piece, Frank Schaeffer tells us that “the real lesson of Iran” actually has nothing to do with Iran, and everything to do with American conservatives. Neoconservatives and the religious-Right are – so we’re told – trying their best to establish a Christian, pro-Israel dictatorship, replete with Old Testament law....

As we watch the horrors in Iran, it makes us wonder if anything like that could happen in America. In Iran, the mullahs control everything and feel justified in any injustice they commit because of a belief in the rightness of their own actions. Is there anyone like that here? In an answer to that question, Frank Schaeffer wrote a column for the Huffington Post entitled “The Real Lesson of Iran — Beware America’s Republican Mullahs.” Reading it and the comments to it, I came to a realization: people who think the religious right are just like Iranian mullahs are...

The earth bursts with life. Far right exclusionary religion bursts with death. If there is a creator of life He/She/It must hate fundamentalist religion. The countries in the world that are the most fundamentalist and religious, and/or those whose identity is most religion-based, are the world's greatest troublemakers. Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the USA, Vatican City and the state of Israel come to mind. Just take one example of religion’s baleful influence: President Woodrow Wilson’s messianic religion-inspired intervention in World War One. "My life would not be worth living” Wilson wrote, “if it were not for the driving power of...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie delighted conservatives last week when he pledged to withdraw his state from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) of Northeastern states. Conservative delight, however, quickly turned to frustration as Christie emphasized he was merely taking issue with the political and economic mechanisms of RGGI, but did not disagree with the notion that humans are causing a global warming problem that needs to be addressed. "[W]hen you have over 90% of the world's scientists who have studied this stating that climate change is occurring and that humans play a contributing role, it's time to defer to...

BREAKING: United States will apologize for burying Osama bin Laden at seaA U.S. delegation consisting of President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, and Admiral Gary Roughead will make an emergency visit to Cape Sounion in Greece to apologize for burying Osama bin Laden's body at sea. It was revealed that the State Department received a very strongly worded complaint along with thinly veiled threats of retaliation against the United States Navy. Although it is generally not the policy of the United States to respond to any threat, the Administration felt it prudent to resolve...