Free Republic

There’s something about Kerry. The 5-term Democratic senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate seems to be looking younger by the day. A photo from the 2008 Democratic National Convention shows his face is looking pretty haggard, with bags under his eyes that are headed for Pope Benedict XVI level: Then, last month, he showed up at the White House with two black eyes and a swollen nose. The party line was a hockey puck broke his nose. From CBS: "Senator John Kerry surprised a few people at the Boston Bruins Stanley Cup ceremony at the White House Monday afternoon. The...

Elizabeth Warren doesn't like the way Mitt Romney pays his taxes: "And that is that Mitt Romney pays 14% of his income in taxes and people who get out there and work for a living pay 25%, 28%, 30%, 33%. I get it. Mitt Romney gets a better deal than any of the rest of us because he manages to earn his income in a way that has been specially protected for rich folks. I think that's wrong," Elizabeth Warren, a democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Massachusetts said on MSNBC's "The Last Word." In 2003 John Kerry paid an...

Obama called on lawmakers to pass a bill that would halt "insider trading" by members of Congress. Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown introduced legislation last year to ban members of Congress and their staff from trading stock based on non-public information. Brown championed the cause after watching author Peter Schweizer discuss his book on the subject called "Throw Them All Out" on "60 Minutes." Schweizer’s analysis focused on members of Congress whose stock market profits correlated with legislative matters under their consideration. One of the politicians cited in the book for apparent "insider trading" was Bay State Sen. John Kerry

The Justice Department on Monday charged a former CIA officer with repeatedly leaking classified information, including the identities of agency operatives involved in the capture and interrogation of alleged terrorists. The case against John Kiriakou, who served as a senior Senate aide after ending his CIA career, extends the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on disclosures of national security secrets to journalist. Kiriakou, who was among the first to go public with details about the CIA’s use of water-boarding and other harsh interrogation measures, was charged with disclosing classified information to reporters and lying to the agency about the origin of...

A former staffer for Bay State Sen. John F. Kerry has been charged with leaking the names of CIA operatives, including one who was involved in the interrogation of terror suspects held at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, according to the U.S. Department of Justice and Kerry’s office.

Senator John Kerry surprised a few people at the Boston Bruins Stanley Cup ceremony at the White House Monday afternoon. The 68-year-old senator had two black eyes and a swollen nose. His spokeswoman Whitney Smith told WBZ-TV Kerry broke his nose playing ice hockey recently

In his book Prescription for the Planet, the environmentalist Tom Blees explains the remarkable potential of integral fast reactors (IFRs). These are nuclear power stations which can run on what old plants have left behind. Conventional nuclear power uses just 0.6% of the energy contained in the uranium that fuels it. Integral fast reactors can use almost all the rest. There is already enough nuclear waste on earth to meet the world's energy needs for several hundred years, with scarcely any carbon emissions..... When the hot waste has been used up, the IFRs can be loaded with depleted uranium (U-238),...

In the Washington Times, Charles Hurt writes, “Both Mr. Kerry and Mr. Romney look like they should be cast as president in a made-for-TV movie. But in reality, both are hopelessly out of touch, calculating wax figurines. They both even speak French! In the end, Mitt Romney is John Kerry without the war medals.” Oh, come on, that’s not true. For starters, Kerry doesn’t have his war decorations anymore, since he threw them away. But I know John Kerry. John Kerry’s a blog target of mine. And Mitt Romney is no John Kerry. David Harmer is a California lawyer who...

Crony capitalism is the most serious current danger to the American community, a threat not simply to government or the economy, but to our very way of life. It is the worst such threat since the trusts and monopolies of the early 20th century, and in much the same way. Cronyism is one of the major forces behind the establishment of the corrupt pseudo-aristocracy that has been taking shape in this country over the past two decades, a synthetic privileged class made up in large part of politicians, hustlers, and hangers-on who have become expert in exploiting the rest of...

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Ma) is in Egypt where he has been sucking up to the Muslim Brotherhood. With the US already $15 trillion in debt, Kerry wants the International Monetary Fund - for which the US provides the largest piece of the budget - to finance the Muslim Brotherhood's takeover of Egypt. In addition to praising the Brotherhood’s election as a model of transparency and integrity, Sen. Kerry also called for an infusion of cash from the International Monetary Fund to undergird Egypt’s new Islamist government.

Democrats can’t tell the difference between tax revenues and tax rates.Democrats are unanimous in charging that the debt-reduction supercommittee collapsed because Republicans refused to raise taxes. Apparently, Republicans are in the thrall of one Grover Norquist, the anti-tax campaigner, whom Sen. John Kerry called “the 13th member of this committee without being there.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid helpfully suggested “maybe they should impeach Grover Norquist.” With that, Norquist officially replaces the Koch brothers as the great malevolent manipulator that controls the republic by pulling unseen strings on behalf of the plutocracy.

Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.) Monday said a deal to cut the federal deficit fell apart because Republicans refused to raise taxes, and said the issue would be the defining debate for Congress as the country heads toward the 2012 elections. "America is stuck with the absolute rigidity of people who wanted to protect the wealthiest people in the country instead of providing $1.2 trillion of deficit reduction," Kerry said in impassioned remarks hours after the congressional panel announced it had failed to reach a deal. "That's the fight we have to take out to the country over the course...

The "public's right to know" has received a thorough vetting the past couple of weeks with release of a U.S. Senate candidate's sealed divorce records, the contents of which were sufficiently embarrassing to cause him to withdraw from the race. Republican candidate Jack Ryan's divorce files, which were opened at the behest of the Chicago Tribune and a television station, revealed that Ryan had taken his wife to a "sex club" and asked her to have sex with him in front of others. Ryan and his former wife sought to keep the particulars of their divorce private; just days after...

Local residents upset about the lack of jobs, home foreclosures and possible cuts to health care and social security protested outside Sen. John Kerry’s office at 1550 Main Street Monday afternoon. More than 50 people held signs and shouted “jobs not cuts” as cars drove by honking their horns. “I think people are fed up with the government. We need jobs, we don’t want to see Medicare and Medicaid cut and we want to see the wealthiest members of our population paying more taxes,” said Denise Conboy, a member of MoveOn.org, which organized the protest. She said they got the...

For twenty years – long before 9/11 – the danger of terrorists armed with surface to air missiles shooting at passenger planes has been the secret fear of many top political leaders. In the late 90s, a terrorist network was nabbed trying to bring them into Newark Airport, but the airline industry and the government have done nothing to equip passenger airplanes with any defense against these always deadly missiles. Now Barack Obama has committed the ultimate sin: He has let 20,000 surface-to-air missiles escape from military depots in Libya. According to ABC News “U.S. officials had once thought there...

[...]Take AT&T, for example. The telecommunications giant is pushing for the supercommittee to increase wireless spectrum, reform corporate tax and minimize government regulation. The company, which is also in the midst of fighting for its merger with T-Mobile, bundled $71,000 for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee through the first six months of this year and $20,750 last year for Washington Sen. Patty Murray, who co-chairs the supercommittee and runs the campaign arm that is charged with maintaining a Senate majority next November. In fact, Murray received the most bundled contributions of any individual supercommittee lawmaker since last year, also taking...

John Kerry can trace his roots to John Winthrop and has a net worth of $239 million. His wife, Teresa, is worth a cool billion which she inherited from her first husband, H. John Heinz 3rd. Pajamas Media notes that they did not pay a penny in taxes on the $4.8 million they earned last year. Kerry, of course, is the progressive-leftist Democrat senator from Massachusetts who was the Democrat candidate for president in 2004 and was the darling of progressive leftists everywhere.

Who's been cozying up to the members of the new Congressional super committee? With the committee set to decide on a whopping $1.5 trillion in federal deficit reduction this fall, lobbyists and corporations are trying to figure out which industries are best connected to the 12 members of the new panel. You can bet that those connections will be pressed to the limit in coming months as companies and sectors scramble to ensure that federal spending they like and tax breaks they depend on aren't slated for elimination. As it looks at the new committee members, Wall Street may like...

Together We Can Beat the Deficit We did it in the 1990s and we can do it again today. By PATTY MURRAY, MAX BAUCUS AND JOHN KERRY Our country has long been a beacon of light in the world because the American people always come together when times are tough. Over the past few months, in debating the debt ceiling and deficit reduction, that light of common cause has appeared to flicker at times in our nation's capital. As appointees to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction—12 members of Congress charged with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction over...

Liberals:Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee: "All of the Republican candidates have made clear their allegiance to the Tea Party, supporting extreme policies that would hurt the middle class, seniors, and students. The only winner tonight was the Tea Party." One thing which you should learn about the left; whatever they accuse conservatives of doing, that is their modus operandi. Wasserman Schultz: "Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul represent the extreme right wing, which is the core of the Republican Party today." Again, almost every attack that they make is a description of themselves....

Brace for impact! Sen. John Kerry has been named to the supercommittee that will help decide the financial future of this country. Seeing as Anchors Aweigh Kerry has only a 3 percent rating with Citizens Against Government Waste and an overwhelming propensity for raising taxes earning him a 6 percent rating with the National Taxpayer Unions, I thought that he might need some common sense suggestions. • Enable liberals to lead by example by letting them pay more taxes. • Repeal Obama-care. • Eliminate the National Labor Relations Board. • Abolish the czar layer of government. • Preserve the home...

THE FIRE hall next to my in-laws’ house in northern New York State has a siren that can be heard for miles. “Loud’’ doesn’t begin to describe the sound: a shrill, relentless, piercing wail that is impossible to ignore - and can be extremely upsetting for anyone who isn’t used to it. There’s good reason for that. None of the rural towns in the area has a professional fire department, so when a fire breaks out, the siren is needed to summon volunteers. The urgent blast of that siren used to terrify my younger son, who would hide under a...

WASHINGTON, Aug 11 (Reuters) - Here is a look at some of the top donors to election campaigns for the 12 members of the U.S. Congress named to a deficit-fighting "super committee." Known as the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, the panel is expected to be the most heavily lobbied body in Washington ahead of its Nov. 23 deadline for making recommendations on $1.5 trillion in additional budget savings. Unless specified, donations below combine members' campaign committees and leadership PACs (political action committees). Data is from www.opensecrets.org. SENATE DEMOCRATS Patty Murray of Washington state * Software giant Microsoft Corp...

The 12 lawmakers appointed to a new congressional supercommittee charged with tackling the nation's fiscal problems have received millions in contributions from special interests with a direct stake in potential cuts to federal programs, an Associated Press review of federal campaign data has found. The newly appointed members — six Democrats and six Republicans — have received more than $3 million total during the past five years in donations from political committees with ties to defense contractors, health care providers and labor unions. That money went to their re-election campaigns, according to AP's review. Supporters say the lawmakers were picked...

All 6 Democrats on Deficit-Reduction Panel Earned 'F's From Taxpayers’ Union Thursday, August 11, 2011 By Terence P. Jeffrey (CNSNews.com) - All six Democrats that have been assigned to the special joint congressional committee that will recommend means for cutting the nation’s anticipated spending by $1.5 trillion over the next ten years compiled voting records last year that earned them grades of “F” from the National Taxpayers Union (NTU). House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) announced today that she has assigned Assistant Democratic Leader James E. Clyburn (S.C.), Democratic Caucus Vice Chairman Xavier Becerra (Calif.) and Budget Committee Ranking Member...

n the first of what will be a closely watched selection process for a powerful new deficit panel, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he will appoint Democratic Sens. Patty Murray (Wash.), Max Baucus (Mont.) and John Kerry (Mass.) as his three choices for a super committee charged with finding more than $1 trillion in spending cuts by the end of this year. Murray will serve as co-chair of the 12-member panel. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will select her co-chair and two other panelists, as required by the debt limit agreement signed into law by President Barack Obama last week....

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced Tuesday he's naming Sen. Patty Murray to co-chair a powerful "super committee" charged with finding more than $1 trillion in deficit cuts this fall. Murray will be joined by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Max Baucus, D-Mont., on the panel, which was established last week by hard-fought legislation to increase the national debt.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced Tuesday he's naming Sen. Patty Murray to co-chair a powerful "super committee" charged with finding more than $1 trillion in deficit cuts this fall. Murray will be joined by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Max Baucus, D-Mont., on the panel, which was established last week by hard-fought legislation to increase the national debt. Murray, who is chairwoman of the committee to elect Democratic senators, is a longtime protector of Democratic priorities such as Medicare, Social Security and veterans' benefits, as are Kerry and Baucus. Reid, D-Nev., said in a statement that Murray has "a...

From page 3: For McConnell, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) is widely expected to get the nod, given his conservative credentials, ties to McConnell and his work in the Biden group. But if Republicans stay united, they’d need one additional Democrat to break ranks and back a cuts-only approach - so McConnell may want to choose a senator with bipartisan appeal who is loyal to leadership, like either Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) or Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio). At a townhall in Winchester, Ky. on Monday, McConnell told a crowd that he wanted “significant entitlement reform” to be part of...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., will appoint Democratic Sens. Patty Murray of Washington, Max Baucus of Montana, and John Kerry of Massachusetts to the new super committee tasked with finding $1.2 trillion in additional deficit reduction by November 23, according to a senior Democratic aide familiar with Reid’s decision, which is expected to be made public as early as Wednesday. Additionally, Murray is expected to co-chair the committee, officially named the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, along with a still unnamed House Republican. A spokesman for Reid did not respond to a request for comment. Reid’s decision to...

When the Democratic Party nominated Al Gore for the Presidency in 2000, they made what seemed at the time – before the man unveiled himself as a “crazed sex poodle” – a respectable choice. Gore had been a prominent member of the Senate, and he had served for eight years as Vice-President of the United States. Nothing in his background, after he got a grip on himself in the wake of doing military service in Vietnam, suggested that he would go off the deep end – as he did after losing the Presidency. When, however, that same party nominated John...

The tea party has John Kerry running scared, and it is not a pretty sight to behold. The senior senator from Massachusetts, who called a nothing-to-announce press conference last Thursday, spent the first 20 to 25 minutes of the presser making a speech defending President Obama and attacking the tea party. Bewildered veteran reporters, used to news coming out of a news conference, fidgeted as Kerry droned on with a recycled Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce speech, pausing now and then to praise the Chinese and bash "traitorous" tea- party Republicans for "holding the nation hostage." Read more: http://www.lowellsun.com/columnists/ci_18644582#ixzz1UXVnTs00

Am in DC tonight with old network friends and fiends. The word in DC is that John Kerry is working the media HARD to try to get himself back in headlines. Kerry still wants very much to be Prez. He is promoting the idea that, politically, Obama is a "dead man walking." Kerry claims he can save the Dem party by running in the primaries to the LEFT of Obama.... and be elected in both the primaries and the general! Idiocy... and old political news hands agree!

Sen. John Kerry on Sunday laid the blame for the recent downgrade of the nation’s credit rating at the feet of conservative House Republicans. “I believe this is, without question, the tea party downgrade,” Mr. Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Standard & Poor’s rating agency on Friday dropped the U.S. credit rating from AAA to “AA+, questioning the ability of leaders in Washington to deal seriously with the nation’s debt crisis.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) on NBC's "Meet the Press" and Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod on CBS' "Face the Nation" lead a new propaganda push against the Tea Party movement. First they were "astro-turf", then racist, then stupid, then violent, then dangerous, then terrorists, and now they're responsible for the S & P downgrade even though the Tea Party was pushing for the exact entitlement reforms that would have avoided the downgrade. It's obvious that the White House is fearful that the president will be blamed for the unprecedented downgrade of America's bond rating.

Kerry Blames The Tea Party For Credit Downgrade By Ben Wolfgang-The Washington Times1 Sen. John Kerry on Sunday laid the blame for the recent downgrade of the nation’s credit rating at the feet of conservative House Republicans. “I believe this is, without question, the tea party downgrade,” Mr. Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Standard & Poor’s rating agency on Friday dropped the U.S. credit rating from AAA to “AA+, questioning the ability of leaders in Washington to deal seriously with the nation’s debt crisis. The Obama administration’s debt-ceiling proposal, which included more spending cuts than the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two senators and former presidential candidates say Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade the U.S. credit rating speaks to the need for more bipartisan compromise — but they also say the blame lay with the other party.

On MSNBC, John Kerry told us that Tea Party ideas are not “real” ideas, not “factual,” and thinks that the media should stop reporting on anything that smacks of ideas or news coming from Tea Partiers. If this isn’t proof of how Democrats and leftists would use the power of government to quash free political speech, what is? Not long ago, several Democrats tried to once again raise the ugly head of the defunct Fairness Doctrine that was killed during the Reagan administration in order to limit the free political speech of conservatives.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: "And I have to tell you, I say this to you politely. The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it's exercising today. The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual."

John Kerry has waded into the media waters and now wants the news to cut out conservatives he doesn’t agree with. During a discussion of the debt deal and the economy on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Friday, the current Massachusetts senator and former presidential candidate lambasted the Tea Party and conservatives and the idea that they should be given “equal time” in the media. According to him, their ideas are so whacky that they don’t deserve air time: “And I have to tell you, I say this to you politely. The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it’s...

Libya's Moamer Kadhafi will "never run the country again," US Senator John Kerry insisted Friday, although he urged patience over the embattled strongman's departure from power. Washington last month announced it would recognize the rebels in the five-month civil war as Libya's de facto government, and US lawmakers have pressed for an American embassy in the rebel-held east of the country, but a defiant Kadhafi has so far refused to leave power in Tripoli. "Kadhafi will never run the country again under any circumstances whatsoever," Kerry told US broadcaster MSNBC, hours after rebels said a NATO air strike killed Kadhafi's...

“I would love nothing more than compromise. But I would say to you that compromise that's not a solution is a waste of time. “If my house was on fire, I can't compromise about which part of the house I'm going to save. You save the whole house or it will all burn down. “We either save this country or we do not. “And to save it, we must seek solutions.”

A Vietnam veteran who defended Sen. John Kerry against "Swift Boat" attacks in the 2004 presidential race has been stripped of his Silver Star by the Navy -- more than a year after he was sentenced to prison on a child pornography charge. But the Silver Star wasn't stripped from Wade Sanders because of the child porn conviction, per se.

<p>John F. Kerry almost became president running on the basis of his alleged heroism in Vietnam. Thanks to the efforts of a group of truth-tellers, the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, the serious holes in the fantasy narrative propounded by the Kerry campaign came to the attention of enough Americans that John Kerry was not the first faux-Irish President of the United States.</p>

San Diego- In a highly unusual move, the Navy secretary has stripped a Silver Star awarded to a retired captain and Vietnam swift boat veteran who is serving a federal prison sentence after admitting to child pornography. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus revoked the Silver Star, the nation's third-highest valor award, which was awarded nearly 20 years ago to retired Capt. Wade Sanders of San Diego. A spokeswoman for Mabus confirmed the secretary's decision, which he made in August 2010 following a review and recommendation by the Navy Department Board of Medals and Decorations. "Mabus signed a memorandum in which he...

The idea of such a bank has been around since the 1990s but has never gained significant attention until now. In March a bipartisan bill was introduced in the Senate that gained the support of the US Chamber of Commerce, America’s leading business lobby, and the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest labor federation — two groups on opposite sides of most debates. The BUILD Act, proposed by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., Kay Hutchinson, R-Texas, and Mark Warner, D-Va., would create a national infrastructure bank that would provide loans and loan guarantees to encourage private investment in upgrading America’s infrastructure. There are...

Former presidential candidate Senator John Kerry (D-Mass) laid the blame for the nation’s current troubles at the feet of the American electorate. “Look, if voters had elected me instead of Bush we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in right now,” Kerry maintained. “The obvious benefit, of course, is that Bush would’ve been sent to early retirement. But let’s not overlook the likelihood that we’d now be in the midst of my second term instead of suffering under the incompetent ministrations of the current Administration. At worst, Barack Obama would now be a junior senator from Illinois. That’d have to...

State officials say final design and construction plans have been approved for high-speed rail in western Massachusetts. U.S. Reps. John Olver and Richard Neal and Sen. John F. Kerry and federal and state transportation officials said Friday that the U.S. Department of Transportation signed a nearly $73 million grant agreement. Funding is available from federal stimulus money. Officials say the project, which is expected to cost $75.6 million, will rehabilitate the Connecticut River rail line. Amtrak’s Vermonter service will be rerouted to the line, providing a more direct route to Northampton and Greenfield.

Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) are working together to expand the U.S.' role in the Arab Spring, according to The Washington Post. Kerry and McCain traveled to Egypt last weekend with eight Fortune 500 executives to explore how the U.S. can expand economic investment in that country after the fall of Hosni Mubarak. They envision similar plans across the Middle East in the aftermath of the Middle East revolts that would be similar to the U.S.' “Marshall Plan,” in which the U.S. invested billions of dollars in war-torn European nations after World War II.