Free Republic

The day after New Year's 1996, operatives for Barack Obama filed into a barren hearing room of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. There they began the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of state Sen. Alice Palmer, the longtime progressive activist from the city's South Side. And they kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama's four Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot. Fresh from his work as a civil rights lawyer and head of a voter registration project that expanded access to the ballot box, Obama launched his first campaign for...

It seems that Senator Obama's Old party was called the New Party. The party was a Marxist Political coalition. This was not a guilt by association thing. Senator Obama sought out their nomination. He was successful in obtaining that endorsement, and he used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers. Read more on the Marxist endorsement that Barack Obama sought out: Co-founded in 1992 by Daniel Cantor (a former staffer for Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign) and Joel Rogers (a sociology and law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), the New Party was a Marxist political coalition whose...

Clinton's records vanished after warning May 12, 2008 By Jerry Seper - Hillary Rodham Clinton's Rose Law Firm billing records, found in the White House residence in January 1996 two years after they had been subpoenaed by government regulators, disappeared shortly after the first lady was warned that the firm's billing problems were "very serious" and the then-ongoing Whitewater investigation could result in criminal charges, newly obtained records show. More than 1,100 pages of grand jury testimony, investigative reports, memos, charging documents, chronologies, narratives and draft indictments, previously undisclosed but now being "processed" at the Library of Congress, say Mrs....

Bill Clinton Retells Hillary's 1996 Bosnia Story April 10, 2008 7:10 PM ABC News' Sarah Amos and Eloise Harper Report: After a trip to Puerto Rico and two days entirely off the campaign trail, former President Bill Clinton eagerly discussed myriad topics with the crowd that awaited him in Boonville, Ind., and what he said of a trip his wife made to Bosnia in 1996 seemed a bit misleading. "I am so glad to be here. And I'm glad that Indiana is gonna have a say in who the nominee of the Democratic Party is and the next president of...

WASHINGTON - A great old war hero - arms man gled by battle and known as an acerbic straight shooter - is picked by Republicans to be their nominee to make darned certain that a Clinton doesn't get back into the White House. John McCain? No, Bob Dole in 1996. And it didn't work out very well for Republicans. Dole lost after a campaign vexed by senior moments such as when the nominee fell off a stage, or when he referred to the Los Angeles Dodgers as the Brooklyn Dodgers. All along, President Bill Clinton showed extreme deference to Dole,...

April 3, 1996 Ronald H. Brown, the U.S. secretary of commerce, is killed along with 32 other Americans when their U.S. Air Force plane crashes into a mountain near Dubrovnik, Croatia. Brown was leading a delegation of business executives to the former Yugoslavia to explore business opportunities that might help rebuild the war-torn region.

Accused Saddam Agent Says He Met With Hillary at White House By IRA STOLL, STAFF REPORTER OF THE SUN | March 27, 2008 A Michigan man facing federal criminal charges of illegally working for Saddam Hussein's Iraqi Intelligence Service says he met with Hillary Clinton at the White House in May 1996. In a 1997 interview with this reporter, Muthanna Hanooti said that at the meeting, Mrs. Clinton was "very receptive" to his request for an easing of the American sanctions on Iraq that were in place at the time. He said Mrs. Clinton "passed a message to the State...

Sen. Hillary Clinton has used a story of arriving in Bosnia under sniper fire to bolster her foreign policy bona fides, but the Washington Post retrieved a photo showing that upon landing, she actually was greeted in a customary tarmac ceremony, complete with a kiss for a native child. Hillary Clinton arriving in Bosnia in 1996 Clinton has declared on the campaign trail that a welcoming ceremony for the March 25, 1996, arrival in Tuzla was canceled, and she had to run from the airplane into an airport building for safety. The then-first lady's traveling party included 15-year-old daughter Chelsea,...

My NARN colleague Michael Brodkorb discovered this nugget of Al Franken’s comedy genius last week, and today the Minnesota GOP has demanded an apology from the Senate hopeful for his sexist and racist routine. Franken reads a chapter from his book Rush Limbaugh Is A Big, Fat Idiot, And Other Observations called “Chickenhawk” and supposedly recounts a sexual fantasy of Newt Gingrich. It goes without saying that this is Not Safe For Work.(Warning: Video Contains Strong Language) The GOP sent out its review of the comedy stylings of Al Franken in a press release today: “The outrageous and offensive ‘comedy’...

The two Independent candidates on this year's ballot for U.S. House of Representatives each expect to draw more votes than Independents traditionally have gleaned in South Dakota, and that could make a difference in how the Democratic and Republican candidates fare. Independent Stacey Nelson said Friday he expects to draw between 15 and 55 percent of the popular vote. Independent Kurt Evans said that he estimated his support at 5 to 8 percent of the vote as of Oct. 24... Democrat Rick Weiland and Republican John Thune are expecting to share most of the votes. Weiland's campaign press secretary Clay...

Reason Magazine has long associated themselves with the Ron Paul campaign, if not officially endorsing him. Their Hit & Run blog has served as the heart of rational Paul apologetics, and in their skilled hands, that has proven essential to his campaign. Now, as the magazine has Paul on its cover, its new editor has the unpleasant task of looking a little more closely at the candidate, and Matt Welch finds it an unpleasant journey. Has Paul really disassociated himself from, and "taken moral responsibility" for, these "Ron Paul" newsletters "for over a decade"? If he has, that history has...

The candidates for South Dakota's lone U.S. House seat debated again Sunday night, and, for the most part, refrained from direct attacks and addressed questions from citizen panelists. The forum, at the South Dakota Public Broadcasting studios in Vermillion, was broadcast on radio and television. It featured five panelists and audience members asking questions of Democrat Rick Weiland, Republican John Thune and independents Stacey Nelson and Kurt Evans. Most of the questions dealt with economic matters. One panelist, noting that the net worth of the three richest people in the nation is three times the value of all of South...

(Editor's note: Following are the answers given by Kurt Evans, an independent candidate from Wessington Springs who is seeking a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Evans is one of four candidates, including Stacey Nelson, Milbank, an independent affiliated with the Reform party; John Thune, Pierre, a Republican; and Rick Weiland, Madison, a Democrat.) * What are two pieces of legislation that you want to introduce if elected?One of my priorities would be legislation to end U.S. support for the United Nations. The U.N. is, in my opinion, irredeemably corrupt. It is using its worldwide propaganda machine to promote...

If ever there was a candidate who seemed tailor made for talk radio, it is Patrick J. Buchanan... Yet having won in New Hampshire, Mr. Buchanan has suddenly been rebuffed by the nation's most prominent talk-radio hosts ... "I'm amazed at how outspoken a lot of them are," said William Adams, publisher of Talk Daily, a newsletter that reports on the nation's most popular radio hosts... The most dramatic break has been between Mr. Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh ... Now, as radio's archconservative, he is refusing Mr. Buchanan a conservative's label. "Pat Buchanan is not a conservative," he announced on...

Giuliani: I'm really not a Republican. I ran as a Liberal - which really confuses people.

My staff and I agreed that we needed to focus on the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which appeared to be running out of control. By the time we came to the subject, investigation by the General Accounting Office (GAO) and congressional committees had already indicated that the White House used the INS to further its political agenda. A blatant politicization of the agency took place during the 1996 presidential campaign when the White House pressured the INS into expediting its "Citizenship USA" (CUSA) program to grant citizenship to thousands of aliens that the White House counted as likely Democratic...

TWA FLIGHT 800 was DOWNED in 1996 by a MISSILE, not the fuel tank! HOW MANY JOBS WERE LOST DUE TO CLINTON COVERUP?? 2002 - The GOVERNMENT COVER-UP is STILL GOING ON! TWA Flight 800 shot down on July 16, 1996. On July 15 a communiqu‚ was issued by Islamic jihad connected to Iraq. It read: "The mujahideen [holy warriors] will deliver the ultimate response to the threats of the foolish American president. Everyone will be amazed at the size of that response. Their time is at the morning-dawn," which corresponded to dusk in New York when TWA Flight 800...

ATLANTA - Richard Jewell, the former security guard who was erroneously linked to the 1996 Olympic bombing, died Wednesday, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said. Jewell, 44, was found dead in his west Georgia home, GBI spokesman John Bankhead said.

Saddam's Shadow Africa Energy & Mining June 18, 1997 Copyright 1997 Indigo Publications Africa Energy & Mining June 18, 1997 SECTION: MINING; DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO; N. 207 LENGTH: 787 words HEADLINE: Saddam's Shadow BODY: It's not only diamonds and base metals that interest big mining companies and the latter are not alone in being interested in Katanga. In the delegation that the United States sent to Kinshasa on June 2 under its ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, the state department's African affairs department was represented by Marc Baas, director for Central Africa. (Susan Rice, director for African...

Two weeks back, the Chinese military shocked America by shooting one of China's aging satellites out of the sky with a ground-based missile. As it happens, no American played a greater role in the success of that shoot-down than the much-discussed chairman and founder of Stonebridge International, Samuel "Sandy" Berger. I do not know whether the results pleased Berger, but I cannot imagine a better advertisement for his subsidiary, Stonebridge China. Berger knows these circles well. During the Clinton years, according to the New York Times, he served as "the point man for the White House's China policy." That policy,...

My regular readers know that I patrol South-Central Los Angeles. Recently I saw this flyer which, as you can imagine, piqued my curiosity: (click pictures for larger versions) This document was distributed by a group called the Black Riders Liberation Party, an offshoot of the Black Panther Party started by this man: Whom they call Taco: The Black Riders Liberation Party was formed in 1996 by Bloods and Crips in the California Youth Authority college class. As their political understanding grew, especially being inside the belly of the beast, they were able to see up close how oppressive and dehumanizing...

SEOUL, Oct. 12 (Yonhap) -- North Korea has already manufactured several nuclear weapons and is ready to deploy these in the event of a war, a high-ranking North Korean defector claimed on Thursday. Hwang Jang-yop, a former secretary of the Workers Party of Korea and one of the North's top theorists, said the reclusive nation signed a pact with Pakistan in 1996 on the transfer of uranium-based nuclear technology

WASHINGTON - Federal officials are investigating how National Archives documents of interest to Indians suing the Interior Department were found discarded in a trash bin and a wastebasket. The discovery came to light on Sept. 1, when Archives staff noticed federal records in one of the trash bins behind the National Archives Building near the Capitol. They notified the Archives' inspector general, Paul Brachfeld, whose staff recovered the documents. They found at least a portion of the documents were Bureau of Indian Affairs records dating to the 1950s, according to Jason Baron of the Archives' Office of General Counsel, in...

The following text is a fatwa, or declaration of war, by Osama bin Laden first published in Al Quds Al Arabi, a London-based newspaper, in August, 1996. The fatwa is entitled "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places." ..... But your most disgraceful case was in Somalia; where- after vigorous propaganda about the power of the USA and its post cold war leadership of the new world order- you moved tens of thousands of international force, including twenty eight thousands American solders into Somalia. However, when tens of your solders were killed in...

Revelations in the Peoria Journal Star earlier this week that the Peoria/Champaign area is one of seven in the United States on a terrorist “circuit” were frightening. “Terrorists enter the United States in San Francisco and Los Angeles, then move to Phoenix, then Denver," reported Phil Luciano of the PJS. "From there some head to Peoria and Champaign. Some terrorists remain in those communities, while others head on to New York City" (emphasis added). Luciano was provided this information by Peoria County Sheriff Mike McCoy, who received it at a recent FBI conference held in Springfield. Names of larger cities...

This is a reference thread with links to previous FR threads discussing the arrest of a suspect, John Mark Karr, in the decade-old cold case concerning the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, plus case resources for continued commentary on investigation of the crime.

SCATTERED AMONG the loose papers and bound files unearthed last week at the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad was "letter no. 140/4/5," labeled "Confidential and Personal" and addressed to "The President's Office--Secretariat." The letter concerns George Galloway, a pro-Saddam member of the British Parliament, who founded a charity known as the Mariam Appeal, ostensibly to aid Iraqi children suffering under U.N. sanctions. The missive, from the Iraqi Intelligence Service, is a request that money be funneled directly to Galloway. It reads in part: His projects and future plans for the benefit of [Iraq] need financial support to become a motive...

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen won't let go of the mystery: Just where did the Cuban government get up to $3.9 billion it funneled through a Swiss bank over seven years. Was Havana simply, as it claims, banking its income from tourism and remittances that Cubans abroad send to their relatives on the island? Or was dirty money involved? Ros-Lehtinen, the Cuban-born Florida Republican, wants to know, and she has been badgering officials of the United Bank of Switzerland (UBS) and the U.S. Federal Reserve for answers. ''That's an awful lot of money,'' Ros-Lehtinen told The Herald. According to the latest answers...

(AP) ATLANTA Richard Jewell's fortunes changed in a split second. The security guard was initially hailed as a hero for spotting a suspicious backpack in a park and moving people out of harm's way just before a bomb exploded during a concert at the 1996 Summer Olympics. Then the media called him a suspect and he became a public spectacle. As the 10th anniversary nears of the July 27 blast that killed one and injured 111 others, the episode is still fresh in Jewell's mind. "The heroes are soon forgotten. The villains last a lifetime," Jewell told The Associated...

Per http://www.sweetness-light.com/ Excerpt: Lest we forget, our good friends in China sold C-802 missiles to Iran in 1996 and subsequently. The Clinton administration announced they wouldn’t call for sanctions, since they didn’t see this as a destabilizing action on the part of China and Iran: Testifying in April, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Robert Einhorn said the law "does provide for a substantial list of actions" against anyone providing Iran or Iraq with destabilizing numbers or types of conventional weapons, or assisting them in the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. The administration has maintained since March 1996 that China’s...

The next time you do your banking, be sure you don't do anything out of the ordinary. If you do, you may end up caught in the crosshairs of a government program designed to target terrorists and money launderers. According to critics, innocent American bank customers who are doing nothing more than conducting their honest financial transactions are being vicitimized by Suspicious Activity Reports, or SARs. A SAR is a secret filing, triggered by any financial activity the government deems unusual. Specifically, any group of transactions totaling $5,000 or more that "is not the sort in which the particular customer...

President Bush yesterday called for the Senate to send him a bill establishing a legislative line-item veto, saying the tool is important to restrain spending and keep the economy growing. The House has passed a version of the line-item veto that would give the president new powers to strip projects out of spending bills. Mr. Bush, in his weekly radio address, said it is time for the Senate do the same. "This was a victory for the taxpayers and for spending restraint," he said. "I call on the Senate to show a bipartisan commitment to fiscal discipline by passing the...

SADDAM HUSSEIN'S REGIME PROVIDED FINANCIAL support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq. An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support--temporarily, it seems--after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group. The...

"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...

<p>BASRA, Iraq (AP) - Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed ``Chemical Ali'' by opponents of the Iraqi regime for ordering a poison gas attack that killed thousands of Kurds, has been found dead, a British officer said Monday.</p> <p>Maj. Andrew Jackson of the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment told The Associated Press that his superiors had confirmed the death of the man who is also President Saddam Hussein's first cousin.</p> <p>Jackson said the body was found along with that of his bodyguard and the head of Iraqi intelligence services in Basra.</p>

Israel tried to kill bin Laden in 1996: paper Thu Jan 26, 2006 10:57 AM ET JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel's Mossad spy service and a foreign counterpart enlisted a confidante of Osama bin Laden to kill the al Qaeda leader in 1996 but the plan fell apart over a political dispute, a newspaper said on Thursday. Mossad picked up bin Laden's trail while helping U.S. and Egyptian agents probe an attempt by Islamist militants on the life of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak as he visited Ethiopia, Israeli daily Yedioth Aharonoth said citing security sources. According to the report, Mossad recruited...

Abdullah Khadr at large: Brothers were caught in Afghanistan, father is wanted for aiding Osama bin Laden The federal government released secret intelligence documents yesterday revealing that an al-Qaeda training camp in eastern Afghanistan was under the command of a Scarborough man whose two brothers are captives in the war on terrorism. Abdullah Khadr, 22, is described in a Privy Council Office intelligence report as a suspected al-Qaeda member who is thought to have "commanded an extremist training camp in Lowgar Province in Afghanistan." He is the fourth member of the Khadr family to come to the attention of Canadian...

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...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam "well beyond the Middle East," but the government chose not to deter the move, newly declassified documents show. In what would prove a prescient warning, the State Department intelligence analysts said in a top-secret assessment on Mr. bin Laden that summer that "his prolonged stay in Afghanistan - where hundreds of 'Arab mujahedeen' receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate - could...

<p>WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam "well beyond the Middle East," but the government chose not to deter the move, newly declassified documents show.</p>

The New York Times leads again with another revelation from secret government files about al-Qaeda and the American response to its development into a worldwide organization of terror. In response to a FOIA request, the State Department has declassified internal documents showing that it warned President Bill Clinton to stop Osama bin Laden from relocating to Afghanistan, presciently predicting dire consequences if al-Qaeda established bases among the battle-hardened mujahedin: State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical...

(CBS) In the Persian Gulf, in late July 1996, American warships, a full complement of military hardware, and nearly 4,000 Marines, sailors and SEALs, were praying they could pull off the mission of their lives. They had been assigned to grab the man, who before September 11th, had killed more Americans than any other terrorist. His name is Imad Mugniyah, and U.S. intelligence believed they had tracked him to the waters of the Persian Gulf, aboard a merchant ship, the Ibn Tufail. Marine commander John Garrett helped plan this top-secret mission to take down the ship, and take Mugniyah into...

Other group helping in Iraq not prosecuted Friday, March 07, 2003By Renee K. Gadoua The same federal act used to indict three Central New Yorkers accused of illegally sending money to Iraq has not been enforced against at least a dozen local residents who openly violated U.S. law by traveling there. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act authorizes U.S. sanctions against Iraq. Four Muslims, including three Onondaga County residents, were indicted Feb. 26 on charges that include violating the act by using the Syracuse-based charity Help the Needy to send money to Iraq without a license. About 600 people have...

One year ago, I wrote a piece exposing radical Islam within Florida Atlantic University (FAU). My goal was twofold: [1] to bring awareness concerning a growing problem within FAU [2] to push the university to take action so that this problem ceases to exist. Unfortunately, only the first part of my goal was accomplished, as FAU is continuing to allow radicals on its campus, the latest being this Saturday'S (Jan.22, 2005) return engagement of potential co-conspirator to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Siraj Wahhaj. The Enemy Thrives at FAU In recent times, a fairly large list of...

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...

LINCOLN, Neb., May 12 (AP) - A federal judge on Thursday struck down Nebraska's ban on same-sex marriage, saying the measure interfered not only with the rights of gay couples but also with those of foster parents, adopted children and people in a variety of other living arrangements. The amendment to the state's Constitution, which defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman, was passed overwhelmingly by the voters in November 2000. The Nebraska ruling is the first in which a federal court has struck down a state ban on same-sex marriage, and conservatives in the United...

You'll hear the word "closure" a lot with regard to the Eric Rudolph case, and if you have no idea who Rudolph is, you're probably living a wonderful life. He's the humanoid who bombed Centennial Park at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, bombed a lesbian night club, bombed two abortion clinics, killed two people, maimed a nurse, and injured 120 folks unlucky enough to be caught on planet Earth in the same tiny sliver of lifetime as this unbridled loser. Now Rudolph has cut a deal with federal officials under which he will go to prison for the rest of his...

Today, Christians around the world celebrated their Savior's rising from the dead almost 20 centuries ago. In 1996, the leader of the Free World went to an Easter Service at his church in Washington, D.C. dutifly carrying his Bible. What he did later, however, proved that this disgusting piece of human garbage used our White House for his own whore house. He even did it on Easter Sunday. We are all failed human beings to be sure, but we actually endured a perverted sociopath for eight long years. We suffered 9-11 because this man did not pay attention to foreign...

Breaking...

ACLU Urges Washington Supreme Court To Uphold Marriage Equality March 8, 2005 OLYMPIA, WA -- In a case filed on behalf of 11 couples across the state who wish to marry in Washington or to now have their marriage recognized under Washington law (Castle v. State), the American Civil Liberties Union appeared before the Washington Supreme Court today to urge the court to uphold marriage equality for same-sex couples. Plaintiffs include a police officer, a firefighter, a banker, a nurse, a retired judge, a college professor, a business executive, and others. They reside in communities from Seattle to Spokane and...