Free Republic

The Seattle Times has recently reported on the close ties between Sen. Maria Cantwell and former boyfriend, boss and campaign consultant, lobbyist Ron Dotzauer ...

Arlo Guthrie & Friends will travel the Amtrak City of New Orleans train for twelve days in December, performing along the way to benefit the small venues in the train’s namesake city that were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Arlo was the first to record Steve Goodman’s song, “City of New Orleans” and make it a national hit. The song is based on a version of the train prior to the creation of Amtrak.

Randolph Hobson Guthrie III, the black-sheep scion of one of the city's oldest, wealthiest and most socially prominent families, is behind bars in Shanghai, waiting to find out if he'll be spending the next 15 years in a Chinese labor camp. The 38-year-old heir — who can trace his family roots back to Founding Father Robert Livingston and his family fortune back to Andrew Carnegie's partner, Henry Phipps — has just been tried for video piracy and will soon learn the court's verdict. He was arrested last July in what U.S. Customs officials called their "first-ever joint law-enforcement investigation" with...

Courtesy of New York's Klezmatics, some old Jewish lyrics of folk legend Woody Guthrie have been rerecorded in all their kitschy glory. Woody Guthrie was a dust bowl drifter, a guitar strummer, and a proto-folkie who wrote enduring songs about America's workers and underdogs. He also was a longtime New York City resident who relished Jewish culture and wrote pages of unpublished lyrics about Hanukkah, Jewish history, and spirituality. That "other" Guthrie is now in the spotlight, decades after his death. A batch of his Jewish lyrics has been dusted off, set to music, and recorded by the Klezmatics, a...

FBI Suspected McVeigh Link to Robbers JOHN SOLOMON Associated Press WASHINGTON - The FBI believed Timothy McVeigh tried to recruit additional help in the days before the deadly 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and gathered evidence that white supremacist bank robbers may have become involved, according to government documents never introduced at McVeigh's trial. The retired FBI chief of the Oklahoma City investigation, Dan Defenbaugh, said he was unaware of some evidence obtained by The Associated Press and that the investigation should be reopened to determine whether the robbery gang was linked to McVeigh. The evidence never shared with Defenbaugh's investigators...

"This Land Is Your Land," of course. "Hard Travelin'," certainly. But "Honeyky Hanukkah"? "Hanukkah Tree"? There seems to be no end to the surprises dug up by Woody Guthrie's daughter and tireless archivist, Nora Guthrie. Five years ago she gathered rock stars to write music for some of Guthrie's thousands of unpublished lyrics, touching on decidedly non-Dust Bowl topics like U.F.O.'s, Joe DiMaggio and Ingrid Bergman. Now Ms. Guthrie has hit another jackpot. After further searches in the Woody Guthrie Archives on West 57th Street in Manhattan, where she is the executive director, Ms. Guthrie has found a series of...