Free Republic

very season seems to bring a new best-selling book full of sordid details about the Kennedys, from allegations that JFK was a pill-popping intern predator to Carolyn Bessette Kennedy having a fondness for cocaine.  The Kennedy Curse, by Edward Klein, is the latest entry. The premise is simple: "The Kennedy Curse is the result of the destructive collision between the Kennedys' fantasy of omnipotence — their need to get away with things that others cannot — and the cold, hard realities of life."Sen. Ted Kennedy once wondered "whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys." Of...

BOSTON (Reuters) - Kennedy relative Michael Skakel will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in a bid to overturn his conviction in the 1975 murder of his 15-year-old neighbor Martha Moxley, his lawyer said on Tuesday. ADVERTISEMENT Skakel, now 45, was convicted in 2002 of bludgeoning Moxley to death with one of his mother's golf clubs and was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. In January, Skakel, 15 at the time of the murder, lost an appeal of that decision to the Connecticut Supreme Court. Skakel's lawyers filed a motion on February 14 asking the court to review...

Energy: Sens. John Sununu and John McCain are right to question America's reliance on foreign fuel. If barriers to U.S. drilling and nuclear power weren't so bad, we wouldn't see such oil-fueled menaces. This must change. Right now, it's easier for big oil companies to drill in faraway places such as Nigeria, Russia and Iran than get a permit to drill in the U.S. That's why we don't have many options when an unbalanced dictator such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez taunts his No. 1 customer as a "perverse, murderous, genocidal, immoral empire" and calls on the world's leftists to "bring...

If he’s going to be a Kennedy, then Christopher Allen needs a new name to reflect his heritage. How about “Delmont Kennedy.” Let me explain the significance of “Delmont.” The Kennedys often name their children after historical events or personages. Remember that the alleged love child’s father, Edward Moore Kennedy, was named after old man Joe’s pimp, as Hunter S. Thompson always so delicately put it. So why shouldn’t Ted’s third son be named after the model name of the 1967 Oldsmobile that Teddy drove off the Vineyard bridge in July 1969? Delmont Kennedy, come on down! To paraphrase the...

Last month, as chilly November winds hinted at the winter to come, Massachusetts received a warm gift from Venezuela via CITGO Petroleum Corporation. It could not have come at a more critical moment as those on fuel assistance faced heating price increases of up to 50 percent. Many low-income families looked ahead to a winter of unbearable options: choosing between heat and food or medication. As a result of the Venezuelan oil program, more than 12 million gallons of heavily discounted heating oil will flow to needy households and social service institutions across the state. Together with local nonprofits Citizens...

Latin America: Oil earnings have given Hugo Chavez a colossal sense of his own power at home and abroad. He's not limiting himself to small countries like Bolivia, though. Surprise: The U.S. is also in his cross hairs. Venezuela's president has targeted America and not just by organizing political fifth columns called "Bolivarian Circles" ... He's also getting himself good press for delivering discounted oil for his handpicked "poor" ... Chavez has won plaudits from the mainstream media for his newly launched program to deliver cheap heating oil to carefully "screened" low-income constituencies. Venezuela's state oil company, PDVSA, through its...

Stamford — Prosecutors who won a murder conviction against Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel want his attorneys to identify two men implicated in the murder by a cousin of basketball star Kobe Bryant. Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, is seeking a new trial based on a claim by Gitano “Tony” Bryant that two of his friends killed Martha Moxley in 1975. Prosecutors are seeking the identity and whereabouts of the two men, identified only as “A” and “B” in court papers, so they can respond to the claim and prepare their case. “Moreover, it is against the interests of justice...

Could Air America's radio hosts possibly be in a stickier situation? While they rail endlessly against Bush and "corporate America", more damning revelations are uncovered almost daily about their own company's sleazy actions. Yet the network's personalities continue to pretend nothing is happening. Compounding the on-air dishonesty: fiery public speeches filled with especially ironic ethical allegations. Don't they feel guilty, knowing their own hands are unclean in the integrity category?

Twenty-five hundred Katrina refugees are nearly on their way to Camp Edwards at Cape Cod's Massachusetts Military Reservation, according to the Cape Cod Times. Some thoughts and questions immediately come to mind: --- It's fantastic to see Gov. Mitt Romney and other officials stepping up to the plate. Exceptionally generous Texans simply can't take everybody, so when other states willingly share the burden, it's great for America. --- What will life be like when they reach the Bay State? ......

When Joe Kennedy starts running those inspid Citizens Energy ads in a few weeks, just remember these two words: Pam Kelley. Oh yeah, he's a great humanitarian, Joe is. At least as long as the cameras are rolling. But Joe forgets that charity begins at home, because when he had a chance to walk the walk, as opposed to talking the talk, he walked . . . away. That's one thing Pam Kelley can't do – walk. Because 32 years ago, driving like a madman over sand on Nantucket, Joe Kennedy flipped a Jeep and put her in a wheelchair...

What's wrong with them? That's what I'm thinking more and more as I watch the news from Washington. A few weeks ago it was the senators who announced the judicial compromise. There is nothing wrong with compromise and nothing wrong with announcements, but the senators who spoke referred to themselves with such flights of vanity and conceit--we're so brave, so farsighted, so high-minded--that it was embarrassing. They patted themselves on the back so hard they looked like a bevy of big breasted pigeons in a mass wing-flap. Little grey feathers and bits of corn came through my TV screen, and...

I’m here to announce that we are not a nation of scholars. Good lord, we’re barely literate. It’s a wonder that more of us don’t walk around with our knuckles dragging on the ground. And it’s about time that high school counselors and all the rest of us quit pretending that every 17 and 18 year old squirt should be shoehorned into colleges and universities. Probably half, maybe three-quarters of the kids wandering around the Groves of Academe have no legitimate reason to be there. Of course I realize that in order for those youngsters to be out in the...

The juxtaposition of two events - Arnold Schwarzenegger's retreat on pension changes and his wife's televised declarations that his family wants him back home - has touched off a feeding frenzy of media speculation that he may be on his way down and out of politics.

A decade after the Kennedys sold off their Palm Beach estate in the wake of the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, the celebrated clan has made a return to the posh beachfront community. Reports the Boston Herald's Inside Track: "Snowbird Ethel Kennedy, who has put the family nest Hickory Hill in Virginia up for sale for $25 million, has settled into a $2.2 million three-bedroom rental on a private beach on North Ocean Boulevard." The Kennedy widow is reportedly planning to stay for six months, or until it's time to head north to the family compound in Hyannis Port. The...

CHICAGO (CBS 2) Audra Soulias, 28, filed a civil suit against William Kennedy Smith on Tuesday, five years after she says he forced her into his home, and sexually assaulted her. Audra Soulias isn't the only woman who's making allegations against Smith. The 2 Investigators have obtained confidential information involving sexual harassment allegations by a number of women who worked for Smith and traveled with him to foreign countries. "I think he is a person who has a lot of problems. He is obviously very sick," said Soulias. Audra Soulias is talking about her former boss William Kennedy Smith. She...

Kennedy clan black sheep William Kennedy Smith is again facing accusations that he raped a woman. The nephew of Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy and the late President John F. Kennedy was sued yesterday in Chicago by his former personal assistant, who charged that Smith, 43, sexually assaulted her in his home five years ago. The suit, filed 13 years after Smith beat a highly publicized rape case in Florida, comes from Audra Soulias, who says Smith attacked her at his North Side digs in 1999 after plying her and friends with booze to celebrate her 23rd birthday. "He dragged me...

  Revisiting Chappaquiddick After 35 Years Posted Jul 19, 2004Thirty-five years after the night of July 18, 1969, when Ted Kennedy drove his Oldsmobile sedan off the side of a wooden bridge on Chappaquiddick Island on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., and left for dead Mary Jo Kopechne, the 28-year-old former secretary of his brother Robert F. Kennedy, in his submerged car, unanswered questions linger over the events of that fatal evening. Kennedy escaped the wreckage with a concussion and waited nine hours before reporting the incident to the police shortly after a young boy noticed the sunken car. Kennedy pleaded guilty to...

The American Spectator November 2002 - December 2002 The Squirminator; Things we don't need: a Kennedy Republican BYLINE: George Neumayr BODY: Perhaps nothing reveals the California GOP's troubles more clearly than the gimmicks proposed to erase them. Take the giddy GOP talk about Arnold Schwarzenegger as a potential Republican candidate in the Golden State. Will such desperate superficiality solve the party's malaise? No, but it does help illustrate and explain it. A state party fallen low enough to champion Schwarzenegger as its savior clearly needs one. Schwarzenegger, for all his charm and charisma, can't redeem the California Republican Party, for...

This one deserves some serious attention by those who are interested in sharing their opinion about one big fat leftist loser who has probably committed manslaughter while drunk and certainly has been a tap into the viens of our governments through which poison flows for FAR too long. Just go to http://www.worldnetdaily.com/ and look for the link to "Ted's excellent venture" and FReep away!!! The Jabba the Hut of the Senate (TK) deserves no less.

IMPEACHED EX-ERSATZ PREZ STUMPS FOR DAVIS CLINTON PARADIGM PROVES INSTRUCTIVE FOR CALIFORNIA by Mia T, 9.14.03 Hamilton (or Madison) discussed the importance of wisdom and virtue in Federalist 57. "The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust." (Contrast this with clinton, who recklessly, reflexively and feloniously subordinates the common good...