Free Republic

The U.S. government eagerly reached out to Venezuelan presidential candidate Hugo Chavez in 1998 and moved quickly to denounce a rumored coup plot against the man who's become one of the Bush administration's archenemies, newly declassified State Department documents obtained by McClatchy Newspapers reveal. State Department officials initially appeared dazzled by Chavez's oversized persona and his promise for sweeping reforms, and seemed sincere in their efforts to help him, the documents show. Some of those overtures drew positive responses from Chavez, who said he wanted U.S. help in fighting corruption and drug trafficking.... ...A Jan. 20, 1999, cable setting the...

Mike Huckabee once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public, opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure and said homosexuality could ``pose a dangerous public health risk.'' As a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in 1992, Huckabee answered 229 questions submitted to him by The Associated Press. Besides a quarantine, Huckabee suggested that Hollywood celebrities fund AIDS research from their own pockets, rather than federal health agencies. ``If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague,'' Huckabee...

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Sept. 21 — Norman Hsu, the fund-raiser for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and other Democrats who was charged with defrauding investors in a multimillion-dollar scam, was ordered held without bail here on Friday in a 1992 fraud pleading that his lawyer now wants expunged. Continues...=============================================================== The Womanchurian Candidate Democrats are preparing 'The Best Tax Increase In American History!' The Clintons are having a Chinagate scandal. O.J. just got arrested. Hillary's plugging her health plan. Question is, can Bob Dole beat Bill Clinton in November? Oops, sorry. Thought for a second there we were back in the 90s....

Queen City Cigarettes & Candy, a Clinton Street warehouse owned by food broker Mohamed T. Albanna, is one element of investigators' picture of a money-transmitting business that sent large sums to Yemen. A leader of Lackawanna's Yemeni-American community and two other men were in custody today on charges they operated an illegal money-transmitting business that sent funds from Western New York to Yemen. Mohamed T. Albanna, vice president of the American Muslim Council of Western New York and a frequent spokesman for the defendants known as the "Lackawanna Six," appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Hugh B. Scott on Tuesday after...

Man of the people - arrested By SANDRA TAN News Staff Reporter 12/18/2002 Mohamed T. Albanna, photographed in his Clinton Street store last July, is considered outspoken on issues crucial to Lackawanna. Business owner Andrea Haxton saw Mohamed T. Albanna several days a week. He was her main cigarette distributor and regularly dropped off boxes at her A&E Goods store on Ridge Road and Ingham Avenue on his way home from work. "He delivers them, we pay him, chit-chat, and he goes home," the Lackawanna business owner said. "We talk about politics all the time." Albanna came by Monday night...

Andrew. Around these parts, no need to put "hurricane" in front of it. We know the name refers to the most destructive storm ever to hit the Gold Coast's tri-county area, wreaking most of its wrath on Miami-Dade County. It happened 15 years ago today. Millions of people throughout South Florida still vividly remember the horrific early morning hours of Aug. 24, 1992. Compact and destructive as a buzz-saw, Andrew slashed ashore near Homestead with sustained winds of 165 mph, and gusts topping 200 mph. Roofs were torn from the sturdiest homes. Buildings were shredded. Neighborhoods were reduced to rubble....

EVIDENCE FROM INVESTIGATION OF 1992 RUBY RIDGE MATTER ONLY SUFFICIENT TO CHARGE ONE OFFICIAL WITH CRIMINAL CONDUCT Disciplinary Penalties Being Weighed for Others WASHINGTON, D.C. -- After an exhaustive investigation involving hundreds of interviews and the review of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, the Justice Department announced today that the available evidence does not support further criminal prosecutions of FBI officials arising from the August 1992 incidents, at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and their aftermath. In October 1996, E. Michael Kahoe, Chief of the FBI's Violent Crimes and Major Offenders Section, was charged with, and later pleaded guilty to,...

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Mayor Bloomberg is decrying the state of the 2008 presidential race, faulting the major party candidates for offering shallow, simplistic prescriptions, and scolding the press for failing to demand more from those seeking the White House. During an appearance at Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley yesterday, Mr. Bloomberg said the televised debates among the presidential candidates have been, in essence, a waste of time. "They have absolutely nothing to do with the job and the qualifications. And they don't tell you anything about whether or not any of those candidates would be good or bad presidents....

Shoddy Repairs Prevented Her From Connecting Electricity Volunteers Helped End 15 Years Of Cold Showers *** An elderly woman who had been living without power in her home due to hurricane damage was finally seeing the light Friday night, when power to her home was restored. (snip) .....she's been living without power to her house since August 24, 1992. No heat when the winter chill settled over South Florida. No air conditioning when the mercury climbed into the 90's and the humidity clung to 100% . Not one hot shower at home in nearly 15 years. Every morning started with...

CBS 2 has learned the details of a private dinner for the mayor that was held at an apartment building on Manhattan's Upper East Side last month. There, he spent the evening in serious discussions about the viability of a White House run. Sources told CBS 2 Bloomberg brought three deputy mayors with him, and proceeded to talk through every angle of a presidential run. By the end, the group had zeroed in on his running as an independent in 2008. And, the sources said, he seemed intrigued. The dinner was held at the home of Michael Steinhardt, a legendary...

Brian Springer - Spin 57 min 26 sec - Apr 9, 2006 Using the 1992 presidential elections as his springboard, documentary filmmaker Brian Springer captures the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of politicians and newscasters in the early 1990s. Pat Robertson banters about 'homos', Al Gore learns how to avoid abortion questions, George Bush talks to Larry King about halcyon - all presuming they are off camera. Composed of 100% unauthorized sattelite footage, Spin is a surreal expose of media constructed reality.

"My name is Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States," the broad-shouldered 58-year-old tells audiences wherever he goes. The line has replaced an earlier joke - "You win some, you lose some, and then there's that little-known third category" - but the message in both cases is the same: laugh along with me, please, because otherwise, imagining how different things could have been, we might have to cry... As the early rumblings of the next presidential election campaign grow louder, it should come as no surprise that Mr Gore's activities have led to...

Does someone know of a link or source for PJB's 1992 "Culture Wars" speech from San Diego? I have the text but I've fruitlessly Googled for the audio!

Abdullah Khadr, the eldest son of a reputed Canadian Al Qaeda financier, was arrested by the RCMP yesterday on terrorism-related charges at the request of American authorities. The 25-year-old Canadian recently returned from Pakistan where he was held for 14 months without charge. He was arrested last night after agreeing to meet an RCMP officer at a McDonald's near his Scarborough apartment, his relatives said last night. His mother, Maha Elsamnah tried to intervene in the arrest and was also taken into custody, but later released without charges. Khadr's brother, 22-year-old Abdurahman was also at the fast food restaurant and...

This Day In History | General Interest BUSH ORDERS U.S. TROOPS TO SOMALIA: December 4, 1992 President George H. Bush orders 28,000 U.S. troops to Somalia, a war-torn East African nation where rival warlords were preventing the distribution of humanitarian aid to thousands of starving Somalis. In a military mission he described as "God's work," Bush said that America must act to save more than a million Somali lives, but reassured Americans that "this operation is not open-ended" and that "we will not stay one day longer than is absolutely necessary." Unfortunately, America's humanitarian troops became embroiled in Somalia's political...

Television's liberal 'luminescent triangle' of Rather, Brokaw and Jennings, including all their little cable runts, have turned a blind-eye to the seriousness of the scandals surrounding Vice-President Al Gore. The most any TV News Show (Translation: the left's re-education camp in a box) has been willing to offer, is some quick, cursory soundbite. For the most part, this is also true of their less prominent cousins in the print media. An exception, recently, was an in-depth article by Bill Hogan in the March 23 issue of National Journal revealing that Tony Coelho, who chairs Al Gore's presidential campaign, is...

The 13th Anniversary of Andrew, the Cat. 5 Hurricane that Brought Devastation to South Florida and The Most Costly Natural Disaster to Hit the US Excerpt: Hurricane History-NOAA:Hurricane Andrew 1992 The most destructive United States hurricane of record started modestly as a tropical wave that emerged from the west coast of Africa on August 14. The wave spawned a tropical depression on August 16, which became Tropical Storm Andrew the next day. Further development was slow, as the west-northwestward moving Andrew encountered an unfavorable upper-level trough. Indeed, the storm almost dissipated on August 20 due to vertical wind shear. By...

Early on the morning of March 16th, 1984, William Buckley left for work at the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Officially, Mr. Buckley, a decorated veteran of the Special Forces, served as the political officer at the embassy. In reality, however, Mr. Buckley was the embassy’s CIA station chief. On his way to the compound, Buckley’s car was stopped by a group of masked men, who forced him from his car at gunpoint. His assailants would later be identified as terrorists from the group Islamic Jihad, which served as an alias for the real perpetrators, Hezbollah. The circumstances surrounding the...

War brutalizes man, every afghan bears living testimony to this. If the landscape of Afghanistan bears the craters of the endless war, the political and military leadership in Afghanistan also carries war's indelible scars. It is important never to lose sight of this. Ahmed Shah Mas'ud was born to an army family in 1953 in the Panjshir Valley north of the Afghan capital Kabul. His father was a colonel in the Afghan Army and enrolled his son at Kabul's Lycee Istiqlal High School. Upon graduation Mas'ud joined Kabul's Polytechnic Institute. In 1973 King Zahir Shah was deposed and exiled by...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Tracey Schmitt 202-863-8614TO: RNC Members FROM: RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman RE: Social Security: Good Policy and Good Politics DATE: February 11, 2005 While modernizing Social Security was once considered "touching the third rail" of American politics, today Social Security reform is not only good policy, it's also good politics. A majority of Americans agree with the President that reform is needed and personal retirement accounts (PRAs) are a good idea. Support for PRAs and reform is particularly high among ticket splitters, swing voters and some groups that historically vote Democrat.Americans Overwhelmingly Agree With President Bush: Social...