Free Republic

By the way, a propos the post below, I would caution our pal David Frum to ease up on this kind of analysis: The Palin choice will intensify GOP support among downscale white voters - while adding to the GOP's difficulties among more educated white voters.You'd be surprised how crowded it is down at the "downscale" end.

Who’s Afraid of Political Elites? by: Daniel Smith, September 02, 2008 Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity often scourge the “liberal elites.” Michael Savage joins them. However, as an independent, he also scourges the “country club” and “checkered pants” conservative elites. Given the popularity of their respective talk shows, it appears Americans share a disdain for political elitism. A democratic, populist, anti-aristocratic thinking pervades the general population. The foregoing reveals a great American irony, though. Simply stated, the Constitution created an elite form of government. Examine the following quotations from Federalist No. 10, written by James Madison: Hence, it clearly appears,...

LIKE so much in his presidential campaign, Barack Obama’s search for a running mate was shadowed by the specter of race. In the weeks leading up to his decision, as a flurry of new polls showed Mr. Obama and John McCain to be almost deadlocked, many Democrats and some members of the news media embraced a new article of faith: Lower-income white voters are resisting Mr. Obama’s candidacy principally because he is African-American. “Where he’s lagging is among white voters, and with older ones in particular," John Heilemann wrote in New York magazine this month. “Call me crazy, but isn’t...

Allow me to introduce myself. According to the general clucking of the national punditry, my 2004 book – "What's the Matter With Kansas?" – is supposed to have persuaded Barack Obama to describe the yeomanry of Pennsylvania as "bitter" people who "cling to guns or religion or . . . anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Mr. Obama's offense is so grave that the custodians of our national consensus have elevated it to gatehood: "Bittergate." In truth, I have no way of knowing whether some passage of mine inspired Mr. Obama's tactless assertion that the hard-done-by clutch...

The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And order'd their estate. The 1982 Episcopal Hymnal omits that stanza, the second of Mrs. Alexander’s original six (not counting the refrain). It also omits her fifth: The tall trees in the greenwood, The meadows where we play, The rushes by the water, We gather every day … Understandable, in both cases. The fifth stanza might possibly be re-cast for a modern child (the hymn comes from Mrs. Alexander’s 1848 Hymns for Little Children), perhaps along lines like: The Xbox and the...

Karl Rove was impressed with Barack Obama when he first met him. But now he sees him as a “coolly arrogant” elitist. This was Rove’s take on Obama to Republicans at the Capitol Hill Club Monday, according to Christianne Klein of ABC News: “Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.” Actually, that sounds more like W. The cheap populism is really rich coming from Karl Rove....

Like in a scene from one of his horror novels, writer Stephen King channeled the spirit of John Kerry while addressing a group of high school students at the Library of Congress recently: I don't want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that. It's, it's not as bright. So, that's my little commercial for that.What mysterious and evil force compels liberals to morph into complete...

If Barack is out of touch with America, then the media must be too. People with the slightest interest in politics, especially journalists, spent 2006 and 2007 smacking their lips and rubbing their hands in anticipation of 2008, relishing the prospect of gorging on the story of a lifetime: no incumbents running, a free-for-all of mad-interesting candidates, world-historical issues at stake. Mmmm! Be careful what you wish for. This election cycle now reminds me of the one Looney Tune that terrified me as a child, where a selfish and gluttonous Porky Pig is subjected by a mad scientist to a...

RFFM.org Commentary I have a very close friend who worked in the oil industry for many years. Let's call him Joe. Joe started working in the oil fields of foreboding places like North Dakota as a roughneck where temperatures regularly reached forty degrees below zero or more in the winter. In the summer, the weather was not forgiving either. Frequently, the thermometer topped 100 degrees in the shade, but the derricks never shut down because the oil had to keep flowing. In later years, Joe worked his way up into management where he learned the ins and outs of the...

Northwestern rescinds honorary degree offer to Rev. Wright 21 minutes ago Northwestern University has withdrawn its offer of an honorary degree to the former pastor of Democrat Barack Obama. A university official says the school had offered the Rev. Jeremiah Wright an honorary Doctorate of Sacred Theology. But vice president for university relations Alan Cubbage now says the offer has been rescinded because of the controversy surrounding Wright. He also says the school wants "to ensure that the celebratory character of commencement not be affected." Wright is the former senior minister at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. His...

Barack Obama has a point. There are a group of people who are seeing it all slip away. They grab onto what they can hold and use these illusory points of reference as a substitute for genuine power and verifiable free will. They indulge in bong hits of false consciousness to the point where they genuinely believe that reality is the wasteland for individuals not up to the task of handling the narcotic of intellectual self-justification. Barack missed the metro train when he assigned these characteristics to small towns scattered throughout the American Hinterland of Central and Western Pennsylvania. America’s...

<p>WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama may be exactly what his supporters suppose him to be. Not, however, for reasons most Americans will celebrate.</p> <p>Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.</p>

This weekend, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright made his first comments since his public sermons made national headlines. He came out swinging, once again attacking the United States for racism. He also singled out Fox News for criticism. Speaking Saturday at a eulogy for former appellate Judge R. Eugene Pincham, a member of Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ, Wright blamed the Founding Fathers for the woes of blacks today, claiming they “planted slavery and white supremacy in the DNA of this republic.” Wright cited Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who recently said the country has a “congenital birth defect” owing...

Obama's Great Mistake, The "San Francisco Democrat" By David Paul Kuhn It's difficult to underestimate the enduring impact of Barack Obama's "bitter" remark. The day after John Kerry blurted that he "actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it" Vice President Dick Cheney ripped into the Democratic nominee and GOP strategists were already envisioning a new ad featuring the gaffe, intent on undercutting Kerry's character as a flip-flopper. That week, four years ago, there were no banner headlines in major American newspapers declaring a turning point in the presidential race. Soon after the remark Kerry took...

Senator Barack Obama fought back Saturday against accusations from his rivals that he had displayed a profound misunderstanding of small-town values, in a flare-up that left him on the defensive before a series of primaries that could test his ability to win over white voters in economically distressed communities. For a second day, Mr. Obama sought to explain his remarks at a recent San Francisco fund-raiser that small-town Pennsylvania voters, bitter over their economic circumstances, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” as a way to explain their frustrations. Acknowledging Saturday that “I didn’t...

Hillary Clinton and John McCain both ripped into Barack Obama Friday for reportedly saying residents of small-town America “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” out of bitterness over lost jobs, a remark his opponents interpreted as arrogant...

<p>You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.</p>

Presidential hopeful Barack Obama has released a list of $740 million in earmark requests he made in the past three years, and it includes $1 million for the hospital where his wife Michelle is a vice president. The request for $1 million for the University of Chicago Medical Center was to help pay for construction of a new pavilion. “I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that Michelle Obama was not part of our lobbying over the request, not in any way,” Kelly Sullivan, another vice president at the medical center, told the New York Times. In any case,...

Thrasymachus (to Socrates): You think that shepherds and cowherds seek the good of their sheep and cattle, and fatten them and take care of them, looking to something other than their master's good and their own.Moreover, you believe that rulers in cities - true rulers, that is - think about their subjects differently than one does about sheep, and that night and day they think of something besides their own advantage.You are so far from understanding about justice and what's just, about injustice and what's unjust, that you don't realize that justice is really the good of another, the advantage...

UPS delivered my hedge trimmer a few weeks ago. Actually, it is not just a hedge trimmer but has interchangeable heads so that it can trim grass, mow down brush and cut small tree limbs. The whole thing was a steal: $359. As I powered it up, I felt mild pangs of guilt -- the two-cycle contraption uses a mixture of oil and gas to cool the engine as well as fuel it, which makes it not just copiously smelly but also a behemoth when it comes to producing carbon dioxide. If you think that is bad, so do I...

EXCLUSIVE Celebs and VIPs snub plea to share private planes and cut CO2 emissions. Just 78 out of 3,500 rich & famous agree to stop flying solo to red carpet. By Susie Boniface 02/12/2007 VIPs have snubbed a plea to go green - by refusing to share their luxury private jets. Thousands of the rich and famous were invited to pool their planes in an effort to cut carbon emissions. But so far just 78 out of 3,500 who either own or regularly use private planes have signed up. Prince Charles, climate campaigner Al Gore, Simon Cowell, Madonna and Kate...

After decades on the political sidelines, liberalism is making a comeback. Polls show plunging support for Republicans and their brand of conservatism among young, independent voters and Latinos. But what kind of liberalism is emerging as the dominant voice in the Democratic Party? Well, it isn't your father's liberalism, the ideology that defended the interests and values of the middle and working classes. The old liberalism had its flaws, but it also inspired increased social and economic mobility, strong protections for unions, the funding of a national highway system and a network of public parks, and the development of viable...

It's a hardy perennial in the more philosophically-oriented conservative circles, despite its manifest political infeasibility: the argument that the Seventeenth Amendment should be repealed or should never have been passed. While this argument does have its virtues, I disagree. Regardless of whether it was a good idea at the time, repealing the 17th Amendment today would only weaken the mechanisms that are essential to conservative policies and conservative philosophy. Specifically, restoring to state legislatures the power over the election of Senators would make the Senate less directly accountable to the people and insulate the federal courts even further from public...

There's a strange debate dominating the Democratic campaign so far. Hillary Clinton's calling card seems to be the experience that she possesses and that Barack Obama lacks. " 'Change' is just a word if you don't have the strength and experience to make it happen," she told an audience this past week, before promptly making the line the centerpiece of a new ad in New Hampshire and Iowa. "Hillary is the best-prepared to be president of any non-incumbent I have ever had a chance to vote for," the clearly biased Bill Clinton has said repeatedly on the trail this summer....

And here I thought liberals were the ones who love to glorify those "hard-working average Americans." The mythic salt of the earth who sit around the supper table discussing the need for universal health care, or whatever, before getting up in the morning, grabbing their lunch buckets and heading off to work hard and play by the rules. Isn't it supposed to be those mean-spirited conservatives who denigrate those same folks as irresponsible? And yet . . . Proving that there's no elitism like liberal elitism, the Boston Globe emits an astonishing editorial this morning, analogizing those with less-than-ideal credit...

I must confess to being disappointed five years ago when my son, Vineet, told me he had no interest in applying to any of the schools I consider elite. He said he would fit in better at a public state university and he didn't believe that choice would lessen his chances of career success. Perhaps it was the bias that my company's venture capitalists showed toward management teams from top-tier colleges that skewed my thinking. Whatever the cause, I have since concluded I shouldn't have been upset in the least. An education from one of the world's top schools may...

Liberals around the country are smiling today at an Associated Press poll and story circulating on the web claiming that conservatives read less than liberals, non more so than former Colorado Democratic congresswoman Pat Schroeder who despite being president of the American Association of Publishers decided she felt like insulting half of her potential reading audience by dusting off an old liberal refrain: "The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: 'No, don't raise my taxes, no new taxes,' [...] It's pretty hard to write a book saying, 'No new taxes, no...

Actual op-ed column, or parody of Upper West Side liberal mockery of Middle America? You be the judge of this p.p.v. opus today by Gail Collins, New York Times columnist turned Editorial Page Editor now returned to her column-writing roots. We'll begin with the title, Republicans in the Straw, and proceed to these excerpts: Today 40,000 Republicans are expected to make a pilgrimage to a large tent in Ames, Iowa, where they will eat an enormous amount of free food and vote for a presidential candidate. Mitt Romney is going to serve barbecue, and one of his sons has just...

Senator Clinton waxed philosophical on the problems faced by holders of sub-prime mortgages. She looked into the abyss and the abyss gave her yet another chance to pander. Thus spake Caligula Rodham Clinton."Today, we have a choice. We can look at the statistics, wring our hands, and continue to do nothing, or we can do what America has always done in times of difficulty: acknowledge that we face a real challenge, and confront it head-on with real solutions," said Clinton. "I think the choice is clear. I think we need to act now, with smart, practical solutions to strengthen our...

GREENWICH, Conn. -- You know you're in a different kind of town when the signs against drunk driving show a line drawn through a Martini glass to which the artist thoughtfully added a stirrer. Greenwich, Conn., is one such town. Greenwich is home to billionaire hedge-fund managers, private-equity kings and corporate chieftains, as well as ordinary multi-multimillionaires. Interviewing people here requires leaving phone messages with au pairs and catching folks between board meetings. You'd think that Greenwich would be solid Bush-loving turf -- what with all those tax cuts for the rich. It is not. The voters are roughly 40...

On “The Corner” the other day, by way of commemorating the centenary of the sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein, I posted Heinlein's contribution to the 1950s radio series “This I Believe.” Eschewing any religious or metaphysical affirmations, Heinlein laid out his social credo: “I believe in my neighbors... in my townspeople... in my fellow citizens.” He went on to write about his local priest, whose “goodness and charity and loving kindness shine in his daily actions. ... If I’m in trouble, I’ll go to him.” (Heinlein was an atheist, by the way.) Heinlein’s next-door neighbor, he tells us, was a...

Former Sen. Fred Thompson has begun his unannounced quest for the Republican presidential nomination by telling audiences in New Hampshire that Washington is badly out of touch with the country. As a senior campaign adviser put it to The Washington Post's Michael Shear, Thompson believes that "the politicians have lost their connection with what people really want and what they really expect." Few if any of the other 17 men and one woman vying for the presidency would be bold enough to challenge Thompson's claim. The belief that official Washington is deaf to the people's wishes is a staple of...

In February 2006, Norm Feck learned that the city of Parker, Colorado was thinking about annexing his neighborhood, Parker North. Feck attended a meeting on the annexation, realized that it would mean more bureaucracy, and concluded that it wouldn’t be in Parker North residents’ interest. Together with five other Parker North locals, he wrote letters to the editor, handed out information sheets, formed an Internet discussion group, and printed up anti-annexation yard signs, which soon began sprouting throughout the neighborhood. That’s when annexation supporters took action—not with their own public campaign, but with a legal complaint against Feck and his...

President Bush’s latest attempt to salvage the Immigration Bill has made it crystal clear that there is indeed a political class of those we elect, who blatantly ignore the wishes of the electorate. Despite the overwhelming outcry against the bill in its present form, the president and many members of Congress seem determined to pass a collection of glued-together agendas, which are far from being a comprehensive solution. The Senate responded to the outcry by voting to not end debate, which prompted Senator Harry Reid, the Majority Leader, to pull the bill from the floor for the time being. That...

MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) -- Presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton outlined a broad economic vision Tuesday, saying it's time to replace an "on your own" society with one based on shared responsibility and prosperity. The Democratic senator said what the Bush administration touts as an "ownership society" really is an "on your own" society that has widened the gap between rich and poor. "I prefer a 'we're all in it together' society," she said. "I believe our government can once again work for all Americans. It can promote the great American tradition of opportunity for all and special privileges for none."...

Lifelong Roman Catholic Raymond Ross and his church agree on one thing: The U.S. needs to change its immigration policies. From that point, their views sharply diverge. Strapped with a pistol and binoculars, Ross, 69, and a posse of fellow Minutemen spent four days last month patrolling an Arizona valley that they say is heavily trafficked by illegal border-crossers from Mexico. When they spied a group of suspected undocumented immigrants, they called the U.S. Border Patrol, Ross said. “We’re just people who got tired of our government not doing anything,” Ross said of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps. Arizona’s Catholic...

Trenton, N.J. (AP) -- It was an ominous tale — an erratic driver in a red pickup racing wildly along the nation's busiest toll road sends the governor's sport utility vehicle careening into a guard rail. But that story, relayed hours after Gov. Jon S. Corzine was critically injured, has been debunked by a new state police report detailing how his driver was dashing with emergency lights flashing at 91 mph in a 65 mph zone. The alleged erratic driver wasn't a villain but a young man trying to get out of the way of the governor's onrushing SUV. Corzine's...

THE widening gap between rich and middle-class Americans is undermining political support for free trade in the US, Federal Reserve Bank of New York president Tim Geithner warns. Mr Geithner told the Council on Foreign Relations the political challenge of sustaining support for further global economic integration may be the greatest economic challenge of our time. He warned also that the inflow of surplus savings from abroad could be distorting US asset prices and keeping risk premiums artificially low across financial markets. Mr Geithner's comments came amid growing concern in US political and business circles over the risk of a...

Was it just good-natured joshing, or did some MSM elitism creep into Matt Lauer's interview-ending question to Tim Russert on this morning's "Today"? "What's up for the New Year for you? Same thing as usual: keg of Old Milwaukee and a noise-maker?"What's this? Condescension to Russert's blue-collar image leavened with a touch of drunken-Irishman humor? The camera crew burst into guffaws, but check the video - was Russert's laugh a bit more strained? Matt and Dutch-born wife, former-model Annette Roque, might be well be staying in for New Year's, the couple recently having welcomed son Thijs into the world. But...

By Linda Kimball “There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international…network which operates…in the way the radical right believes the Communists act…this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups…” (Prof. Carroll Quigley, mentor of Bill Clinton, in his opus, Tragedy and Hope; Source: A Chronological History: The New World Order, D.L. Cuddy, Ph.D) In a powerful composition entitled, “The Ideological War within the West,” author John Fonte cautions that, “Talk in the West of a ‘culture war’ is somewhat misleading because the...

If one wants to get a glimpse of why it's just impossible to stay cross with Rep. Charles Rangel, feature the furor that erupted over the weekend over his comments in respect of Mississippi. The day after the election, the next chairman of the Powerful Tax-Writing House Ways and Means Committee was heard to say," Mississippi gets more than their fair share back in federal money, but who the hell wants to live in Mississippi?" Mississippians were livid, and took to the pages of local newspapers to mark their displeasure. In the matter of enthusiasm for where we live, we're...

Of the many privileges we enjoy as a democratic society, ‘freedom to vote’ is paramount for our country’s survival. Equally important for our personal survival is ‘freedom of movement,’ because without it we could not travel to and from work or accomplish a multitude of our endeavors, including going to the polling station to vote. To ensure that our citizenry has accessible maneuverability, it is a primary function of government to facilitate our public freeway system so that all motorists have uniform liberty to mobilize his or her self in their pursuit of happiness. To the contrary, our individual mobility...

Shift in Harvard Curriculum Reflects Larger Trend Toward Global Law Leigh Jones The National Law Journal 10-24-2006 Harvard Law School's recent announcement that it is making the most sweeping changes to its first-year curriculum in 100 years heralded a major shift in legal education, including a new emphasis on global law. But some of its competitors say that they already have revamped their programs in similar ways. Harvard will begin requiring first-year students to take three new courses, including a class on legislation and regulation, another covering global legal systems and a third focusing on problems and theories. The school's...

After Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and killed a bunch more this summer...after Israel responded with its assault on Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon...after Israel's stock market dropped 10 percent in the first week of...a strange thing happened to Israel's capital markets: nothing. The stocks quickly recovered almost all their early losses. So did those in Egypt, Kuwait, Dubai, and Qatar. Even the Saudi Tadawul, which shed more than 6 percent in the days after the fighting started, climbed soon after (and 6 percent wasn't that big a deal since it had doubled last year and was looking to resettle)....

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Defense lawyers in a major South Florida terror case want to make sure jurors never hear from witness Evan Kohlmann. The proposed government expert on al-Qaida is simply no expert, lawyers say. He has no Ph.D., no faculty position and no real-life experience in the Middle East. Plus there's the age thing. Kohlmann, who has testified five times for the government already, is just 27. He's been called the "Doogie Howser" of terrorism. One critic cracked that prosecutors have been using Kohlmann "since he was a zygote." Kohlmann has fought off such attacks before. The Fort...

by Mark Finkelstein August 22, 2006 - 06:52 So this is Thomas Frank? This is the man so lionized by the left for his authorship of “What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America’’? Could he really have made an argument as simplistic and palpably wrong-headed as the one seemingly propounded in his New York Times column of this morning, G.O.P. Corruption? Bring In the Conservatives [subscription required]. Having read it a couple times, the answer is inescapably . . . yes. Frank's fundamental thesis is that, since conservatives don't believe in the beneficent powers of...

KATIE Couric had fellow passengers aboard a New York-bound jet on the warpath this week when, as their plane was about to taxi to the runway, she got out of her seat and begged the pilot to allow one of her late-arriving producers to board. "It was like, 'Who the hell does she think she is?' " fumed one passenger who observed Couric's diva-like antics. "If you or I attempted something like this, we'd be cooling our heels at Guantanamo." The witness told Page Six that attendants on Wednesday's 6:30 p.m. Delta Shuttle flight out of Washington, D.C., had already...

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna. From Citizen to Subject — The Rule of Experts and the Rise of Transnational Anti-DemocratsBy Baron Bodissey At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama pronounced that we had arrived at “The End of History”, and that capitalism and liberal democracy would now be the only global system left. But when I look at Europe today, I see democracies under threat because of an elaborate Eurabian bureaucracy and Islamic fanaticism. I see countries unwilling or unable to defend themselves against massive immigration/colonization. Has democracy become too soft...

Bush's disconnect on illegal immigration -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: July 10, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2006 WorldNetDaily.com "We cannot kick people out who have been here for awhile." That's what President Bush said last week. And he means it. That is his policy toward those who have broken into our country, defied our immigration laws, cheapened our way of life and driven a stake through the heart of what it means to be an American. This is amnesty, no matter what the president says. If we "can't kick people out who have been here for awhile," then we have no alternative...

Well, it seems as if the rank and file elitist Country Club Republicans are flexing their muscles in the High Desert, not to mention down the hill, too, when it comes to who backs whom for the 59th assembly district race and why. When it comes to the two most likely frontrunners in the Victor Valley—encompassing Hesperia and Apple Valley—longtime GOP grass-roots crusader and people’s champion, Barry Hartz, versus government bureaucracy insider and recipient of Supervisor (San Bernardino County First District) Postmus’ back-scratching political favors, Anthony Adams, the battle lines have clearly been drawn and it’s easy to see, when...