Free Republic

Earlier this month, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) stirred up a tempest when they announced that they could overcome their political differences and agree on the critical need for a national policy that addresses the threat of climate change and moves the United States toward energy independence. Since the publication of their opinion piece, “Yes We Can (Pass Climate Change Legislation)” in the New York Times, pundits and policy experts alike have declared the Senators’ announcement a “game-changer” and possible tipping point that could lead to the passage of a bipartisan climate change bill — maybe even...

On the June 3, 2009 Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, host Rachel Maddow cited a false quote attributed to Rush Limbaugh in which the radio host supposedly said he wanted to award Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin the Medal of Honor. Since Limbaugh expressed interest in becoming part owner of the St. Louis Rams in October, several MSNBC hosts have repeated that and other false quotes. Reacting to Limbaugh calling then Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a racist, Maddow declared: “When you get called racist by the guy who says the assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr. should get the...

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Tuesday the worst recession since the 1930s is probably over, although he cautioned that pain — especially for the nearly 15 million unemployed Americans — will persist. Bernanke said the economy likely is growing now, but he warned that won't be sufficient to prevent the unemployment rate, now at a 26-year high of 9.7 percent, from rising. "From a technical perspective, the recession is very likely over at this point," Bernanke said in responding to questions at the Brookings Institution. "It's still going to feel like a very weak economy for some time because...

I was reading the Chron’s piece about Sheila Jackson Lee’s town hall, when something caught my eye: One supporter, Dr. Roxana Mayer, a physician who does not live in Jackson Lee’s district, praised the reform plan for overhauling a broken system. “I don’t know what there is in the bill that creates such panic,” she said. In this video, Mayer claims to be a general practitioner, eliciting applause and even a hug from Queen Sheila: I’m not sure why, but something didn’t smell right. So my colleagues and I did a little digging, and wouldn’t you know it? Roxana Mayer...

9/11 widow Ellen Mariani(Derry, N.H.) says George W. Bush is a gangster. We talk to her and her lawyer Philip J. Berg: Ellen Mariani last saw her husband Louis Neil early on the morning of September 11, 2001, at Logan Airport, where they were taking different flights to Los Angeles for a daughter’s wedding. He hadn’t gotten his tickets until the last minute, and couldn’t get on her flight, but there were seats open on Flight 175. Neil Mariani died when that plane crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center, and after rejecting a settlement offer of...

Last month, the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization affiliated with George Mason University, released "Science Suppressed: How America became obsessed with BPA," a report which accuses the media "of ignoring the extensive research of respected scientists and major health agencies in the United States and around the world, which found BPA was not only safe but played an important role in ensuring food safety."   It also confirms what countless previous studies have said; BPA is safe. If you're unfamiliar with Bisphenol A (BPA), it is a chemical used to make lightweight, versatile, durable, high-performance plastics.  It's...

"To entertain her daughter, Michelle Obama loves to make monkey sounds." Photo caption of Michelle Obama speaking to her daughter Malia posted on The Free Republic. Disclaimer on The Free Republic: "Free Republic does not advocate or condone racism, violence, rebellion, secession, or an overthrow of the government. " For those of you who have argued vociferously with me that we are living in a "post-racial America" rather than an America in which Jim Crow is on steroids, you apparently have not read the daily diet of racism that the readers and bloggers on this site consume and then regurgitate....

MOSSAD'S KILLING MACHINE COMES TO BRITAIN A killing war between Israel's Mossad and Islamic fanatics came closer this weekend in Britain. The Israeli intelligence agency has sent four members of its kidon assassination squad to this country, to join fifteen other handpicked katsas, its relentless field agents. Their brief is to "disable" any of the "close to 50" British Muslims that the extremist Islamic group, Al-Muhajiroun, last week boasted were ready to carry out suicide missions similar to the one in Tel Aviv. Al-Muhajiroun spokesman, Asif Butt, said the 50 were "primed and ready to go". The threat was sufficient...

Gordon Brown is today engulfed in crisis after a key aide resigned and the Tories threatened legal action over explosive leaked emails discussing how to smear senior Conservatives, including David Cameron's wife, Samantha, with rumours about their private lives. Damian McBride, one of the prime minister's closest advisers, quit over his exchange with the Labour blogger Derek Draper, in which the two discussed setting up a website to air scurrilous allegations about opponents, including unfounded allegations about affairs between leading opposition MPs. The idea was still being actively discussed until a fortnight ago, the Observer has learned. ..... Among the...

There is no science to validate the thesis that follows, no academy to adjudicate it, and little hope of convincing the Obama faithful even to consider it, let alone concede its validity.  That much said, the evidence is self-evident, accessible to all, and overwhelming.  The thesis is simple enough:  Bill Ayers served as Barack Obama's muse in the creation of Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.  Ayers breathed creative life into this ungifted amateur, who had written nothing of note before, and reconceived him as a literary prodigy.  "I was astonished by his ability to write, to think, to...

In a sequence of events that neatly captures the contradictions of Barack Obama’s rise through Illinois politics, a phone call he made three months ago to urge passage of a state ethics bill indirectly contributed to the downfall of a fellow Democrat he twice supported, Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich. Mr. Obama placed the call to his political mentor, Emil Jones Jr., president of the Illinois Senate. Mr. Jones was a critic of the legislation, which sought to curb the influence of money in politics, as was Mr. Blagojevich, who had vetoed it. But after the call from Mr. Obama, the...

CHERRY HILL, N.J. - He railed against the United States, helped scout out military installations for attack, offered to introduce his comrades to an arms dealer, and gave them a list of weapons he could procure, including machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. These were not the actions of a terrorist, but of a paid FBI informant who helped bring down an alleged plot by six Muslim men to massacre U.S. soldiers at New Jersey's Fort Dix. And those actions have raised questions of whether the government crossed the line and pushed the six men down a path they would not...

NEW YORK, (AP) -- MSNBC was the victim of a hoax when it reported that an adviser to John McCain had identified himself as the source of an embarrassing story about former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the network said Wednesday. David Shuster, an anchor for the cable news network, said on air Monday that Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, had come forth and identified himself as the source of a Fox News Channel story saying Palin had mistakenly believed Africa was a country instead of a continent. Eisenstadt identifies himself on a blog as a senior fellow at...

CNN) -- With 10 days until Election Day, long-brewing tensions between GOP vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin and key aides to Sen. John McCain have become so intense, they are spilling out in public, sources say. Several McCain advisers have suggested to CNN that they have become increasingly frustrated with what one aide described as Palin "going rogue." A Palin associate, however, said the candidate is simply trying to "bust free" of what she believes was a damaging and mismanaged roll-out. McCain sources say Palin has gone off-message several times, and they privately wonder whether the incidents were deliberate....

With his electoral prospects fading by the day, Senator John McCain has fallen out with his vice-presidential running mate about the direction of his White House campaign. McCain has become alarmed about the fury unleashed by Sarah Palin, the moose-hunting “pitbull in lipstick”, against Senator Barack Obama. Cries of “terrorist” and “kill him” have accompanied the tirades by the governor of Alaska against the Democratic nominee at Republican rallies. Mark Salter, McCain’s long-serving chief of staff, is understood to have told campaign insiders that he would prefer his boss, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, to suffer an “honourable defeat”...

Eric Haney, a retired command sergeant major of the U.S. Army, was a founding member of Delta Force, the military's elite covert counter-terrorist unit. Q: What's your assessment of the war in Iraq? A: Utter debacle. But it had to be from the very first.

(CBS) Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon ordered a top secret team of American commandos into Afghanistan with a single, simple order: kill Osama bin Laden. It was America's best chance to eliminate the leader of al Qaeda. The inside story of exactly what happened in that mission, and how close it came to its objective has never been told until now.

WASILLA, Alaska- Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so. According to news coverage at the time, the librarian said she would definitely not be all right with it. A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired. The censorship issue was not mentioned as a reason for the firing. The letter just said the new mayor felt Emmons didn't fully support her and...

VILLANOVA, Pennsylvania: As the 60th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift approaches, recycled myths about its accomplishments drop from the sky like candy into the waiting arms of Americans hungry for a foreign policy alternative to endless war and secret torture. But politicians and pundits looking for a humanitarian policy to win the world's hearts and minds should look back to the airlift with caution. Sixty years after British and American planes began to fly supplies to West Berliners facing a Soviet blockade, even the faux news program "Colbert Report" has reprised the Cold War refrain that the airlift saved the...

Three months ago, at a birthday party, I met a dour young man wearing a “9/11 was an inside job” T-shirt. I’d already been noticing a lot of “inside job” stickers and graffiti around town, and now, faced with a real-life Truther, I found that I couldn’t stop staring at him: He was at a celebration of a friend’s life and he was wearing a shirt announcing that nearly 3,000 American citizens were killed by our own government. It’s easy to dismiss a guy like this as a lone wolf, but he’s actually not alone: A 2006 Scripps Survey Research...

MI6 plotted to murder Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in a staged car accident in a tunnel five years before Diana, Princess of Wales died in a similar crash, a renegade former spy has told the inquest into her death. Richard Tomlinson, who worked for MI6 in the early 1990s, told the High Court he had seen a two page document, drawn up in 1992, detailing three plans to kill Mr Milosevic. Diana inquest: MI6 plotted tunnel murder One plan was to use a strobe light to blind Mr Milosevic’s chauffeur The first involved using a Serb opposition paramilitary group, which...

Reagan's War, Not Charlie Wilson's Media Bias: Hollywood would have us believe that Democrats defeated the evil empire in Afghanistan, and that President Reagan played only a minor role and even helped pave the way to 9/11. If you think Hollywood's idea of a Christmas movie being one about the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan is strange, even stranger is the plot line. "Charlie Wilson's War," which opened Friday, manages to reduce the president who won the Cold War to a background footnote. Charlie Wilson was a pro-abortion, Equal Rights Amendment-supporting congressman widely known as "the liberal from Lufkin." To his...

I saw that Coca-Cola is promoting the movie [<a href="http://zenit.org/article-21008?l=english">What Every Parent Should Know About "The Golden Compass"</a>], and I wrote to them to express my feelings about it -- including mentioning that the villains are called "The Magisterium" in the movie. Here is the response I got: "We appreciate the opportunity to respond to your concerns. "The Golden Compass movie is a story about friendship, love, loyalty, tolerance, courage and responsibility. This movie also provides an opportunity for Coca-Cola to help raise awareness about climate change and the perilous state of the polar bear. "We do not believe that...

By now, almost everyone in America has heard of Jena, La., because they've all heard the story of the "Jena 6." White students hanging nooses barely punished, a schoolyard fight, excessive punishment for the six black attackers, racist local officials, public outrage and protests – the outside media made sure everyone knew the basics. There's just one problem: The media got most of the basics wrong. In fact, I have never before witnessed such a disgrace in professional journalism. Myths replaced facts, and journalists abdicated their solemn duty to investigate every claim because they were seduced by a powerfully appealing...

Mike Huckabee would not have been our first nominee to be engineer of the Straight Talk Express, but among the Republican presidential candidates that is what he unmistakably is. Except for the dour libertarian, Ron Paul, Huckabee alone among the nine gray eminences dares to challenge party orthodoxy. Whether it is conviction or a calculated attempt to bring some attention to his laggard campaign we cannot say, but at the moment we are sort of proud of the second boy from Hope. Back in 2000 it was Sen. John McCain who separated himself from the field by insisting on a...

The History Channel is running a pretty good special on the assorted groups behind the 9-11 conspiracy theories. I decided to take a look at some of these sites, particularly the site devoted to the "documentary" called "Loose Change". This is the one that Charlie Sheen is supposed to be considering narrating. What I found was the usual collection of goofballs, morons and runaway nutjobs. It seems no amount of factual information can influence these people. What they display is the expected amount of self-delusional fantasies and paranoia. What I found that I DID'T expect (but should have) was that,...

Army investigators have concluded that the private whose dispatches for the New Republic accused his fellow soldiers of petty cruelties in Iraq was not telling the truth.... ~~~Snip~~~ An investigation has been completed and the allegations made by Pvt. Beauchamp were found to be false," an Army statement said. "His platoon and company were interviewed and no one could substantiate the claims."... ~~~Snip~~~

DETROIT (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co. Chief Executive Alan Mulally is no longer laughing about his suggestion that he saved President Bush's life during a recent White House visit. The No. 2 U.S. automaker has apologized after Mulally said his claim that he had intervened to prevent U.S. President George W. Bush from plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of an experimental Ford vehicle had been meant as a joke. On Wednesday, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said, "The story wasn't accurate, and I'll just decline to comment further." Ford said Mulally never expected the story he told...

IN New York and elsewhere a “Messiah Sing-In” — a performance of Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” with the audience joining in the choruses — is a musical highlight of the Christmas season. Christians, Jews and others come together to delight in one of the consummate masterpieces of Western music. The high point, inevitably, is the “Hallelujah” chorus, all too familiar from its use in strange surroundings, from Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, Part 1,” where it signified the origins of music among cavemen, to television advertising for behemoth all-terrain vehicles. So “Messiah” lovers may be surprised to learn that the...

It was 3 a.m. in Italy on Jan. 29, 2003, when President Bush in Washington began reading his State of the Union address that included the now famous -- later retracted -- 16 words: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Like most Europeans, Elisabetta Burba, an investigative reporter for the Italian newsweekly Panorama, waited until the next day to read the newspaper accounts of Bush's remarks. But when she came to the 16 words, she recalled, she got a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. She wondered: How could the...

The CIA's search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found no evidence that former president Saddam Hussein tried to transfer chemical or biological technology or weapons to terrorists, according to a military and intelligence expert. Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, provided new details about the weapons search and Iraqi insurgency in a report released Friday. It was based on briefings over the past two weeks in Iraq from David Kay, the CIA representative who is directing the search for unconventional weapons in Iraq; L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civil administrator...

Saddam Accepted the American Ultimatum Before the US Invasion, According to Rights and Freedom International Monday October 30, 4:35 pm ET TORONTO, Oct. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- A former political adviser to Saddam Hussein's son said today that Saddam was willing to yield to all American demands before the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- but that the Bush administration refused his offers. The disclosure was made by Hossam Shaltout, a Canadian aerospace engineer, former American pilot, and founder of the peace organization Rights and Freedom International (http://www.rightsandfreedom.com), who said that war could have been averted, but Bush aides blocked his efforts...

Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word "quagmire" has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad. Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world? Premature the questions may be, three weeks after the fighting began. Unreasonable they are not, given the scars scoured into the national psyche by defeat in Southeast Asia. For all the differences between the two conflicts, and there are many, echoes of Vietnam are unavoidable. Today, for example, Defense Secretary Donald H....

Iraq is emerging as one of the fastest-growing refugee crises in the world, with an estimated 1.7 million Iraqis displaced from their homes and up to 100,000 fleeing the country to Jordan, Syria and other nations amid intensifying sectarian violence, U.S. officials and experts testified yesterday. Yet the United States has allowed only 466 Iraqis to immigrate under refugee status since 2003 -- including 202 out of 70,000 slots for refugees last year -- in part because of more stringent security screenings, officials said at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Democratic lawmakers and advocates for refugees called for...

A documentary says French special forces had Osama bin Laden in their sights twice about three years ago but their U.S. superiors never ordered them to fire. The French military, however, said that the incidents never happened and the report was "erroneous information." The documentary, due to air next year and seen by Reuters on Tuesday, says the troops could have killed the al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan but the order to shoot never came, possibly because it took too long to request it. "In 2003 and 2004 we had bin Laden in our sights. The sniper said 'I have...

Fair use for education/discussion purposes: Yahoo! News News Home - Help AFP CIA renditions of terror suspects are 'out of control:' report Sun Feb 6, 5:57 PM ET WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites)'s 'rendition' of suspected terrorists has spiralled 'out of control' according to a former FBI (news - web sites) agent, cited in a report which examined how CIA (news - web sites) detainees are spirited to states suspected of using torture. Michael Scheuer a former CIA counterterrorism agent told The New Yorker magazine "all we've done is create a nightmare," with regard...

A senior al-Qaida operative deliberately planted information to encourage the US to invade Iraq, a double agent who infiltrated the network and spied for western intelligence agencies claimed last night. The claim was made by Omar Nasiri, a pseudonym for a Moroccan who says he spent seven years working for European security and intelligence agencies, including MI5. He said Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, who ran training camps in Afghanistan, told his US interrogators that al-Qaida had been training Iraqis. Libi was captured in November 2001 and taken to Egypt where he was allegedly tortured. Asked on BBC2's Newsnight whether Libi or...

David Kuo WASHINGTON – Top White House political advisers embraced evangelical supporters publicly to get their votes while mocking them privately as "nuts" and "goofy," according to a new book by David Kuo, the former No. 2 man in President Bush's so-called "faith-based" initiatives program. In "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction," Kuo also says it's time for conservative Christians to take a time out from politics and to re-evaluate their priorities. The book hits stores today. Kuo quit the White House in 2003. Now he accuses Karl Rove's political staff of cynically hijacking the faith-based initiatives...

THE cluttered closet of the Republican Party is being wrenched open by the sex scandal involving the disgraced former Congressman Mark Foley and his explicit computer messages to teenage male interns on Capitol Hill.Washington’s gay Republicans — the “velvet mafia” — are caught in the crossfire of an election-time battle over who should take the blame for allowing Mr Foley to continue his predatory activities for so long. On one side are radical gay activists seeking to expose the “hypocrites” willing to work for a party that has campaigned so hard against proposals such as same-sex marriage. Since the Foley...

http://www.blogactive.com/ Monday, October 09, 2006 Call them out..... NEW CASES: When I get back from the taping up will go the names of a Hastert senior staffer, and I mean the kind of senior staffer making over $150,000 a year.

While thousands came on 9/11/2006 to honor and remember the 3,000 murdered five years ago by Islamofascists terrorists, a couple hundred people came to repeat scurrilous accusations. Their gathering to express these views is free speech yet their gathering on 9/11, at Ground Zero, says a lot about their lack of character.CLICK ON THE IMAGE ABOVE FOR DETAILSThe leader of these self-proclaimed "9/11 truthers" is Alex Jones, who was also there Monday. He is the guy in the sunglasses in the bottom left of the photo below. The truth is the last thing these ghouls want for their otherwise mundane...

The CIA learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad regime, according to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report. Although President Bush and other senior administration officials were at that time regularly linking Hussein to al-Qaeda, the CIA's highly sensitive intelligence supporting the contrary view was apparently not passed on to the White House or senior Bush policymakers.

WASHINGTON — In a "60 Minutes" interview on April 23, Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the CIA's Europe division, made a sensational charge. He claimed that President Bush and his White House ignored intelligence before the invasion of Iraq indicating that Saddam Hussein had no had weapons of mass destruction. On the CBS-TV show, and in subsequent media interviews that appeared throughout the world, Drumheller said that the White House was excited about the fact that the CIA was getting information straight from Naji Sabri, the then Iraqi foreign minister. But when the White House found out this source...

Liberal Air America radio host Mike Malloy had his show abruptly “terminated” on Wednesday, allegedly for financial reasons. The network is failing but there could be another factor behind the Malloy debacle. There is still fallout from Malloy’s recent decision to turn over two-and-a-half hours of his three hour show to a former associate of ex-con Lyndon LaRouche, a perennial candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination who campaigns against what he views as British and Zionist control of the U.S. political system. The LaRouche organization is frequently labeled as a cult. The former high-level LaRouche associate, Webster Griffin Tarpley, was...

To the editor of the Washington Post, After spending almost three days traveling with and being interviewed by one of the co-writers of a very poorly written article (“Much Undone in Rebuilding Iraq, Audit says”, Washington Post, August 2, 2006), I’m astounded at how distorted a good story can become and what agenda drives a paper to see only the bad side to the reconstruction effort here in Iraq. Instead of distorting the facts, let’s get to the truth. There is no flailing reconstruction effort in Iraq. The United States has rightfully invested $20 billion in Iraq’s reconstruction - in...

A former White House aide under indictment for obstructing a leak probe, I. Lewis Libby, testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from the special prosecutor in the case.

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- In 1996, Jim Jordan, campaign manager for Democrat presidential contender Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), was press secretary for Tim Johnson during his challenge to then-incumbent Sen. Larry Pressler (R-SD). The long, negative campaign resulted in the end of the South Dakota Republican's 22 years in Congress. During the campaign, Pressler was dogged by questions about his health, since his father suffered with Alzheimer's disease. But the most damaging attack was delivered by James Abourezk, the man Pressler replaced in the Senate in 1978. Abourezk brought Alexander Cockburn, author of "Washington Babylon" to speak to a Sioux...

WARSAW - US and Polish troops did not damage the archaeological ruins of ancient Babylon despite setting up a military headquarters at the site for two years, Iraqi Deputy Minister of Defence Ziad Cattan said on Friday in Warsaw. “There was no damage done to archaeological artefacts in Babylon by either Polish or US troops,” PAP news agency quoted him as saying. Cattan echoed claims by Polish defence officials that the presence of troops at the site helped to preserve Babylon’s archaeological treasures. Earlier this month, John Curtis, a senior archaeologist with the British Museum, had alleged that more than...

The take-no-prisoners social critic skewers Bush, Ashcroft and the whole damn lot of us for letting despots rule. It's lucky for George W. Bush that he wasn’t born in an earlier time and somehow stumbled into America’s Constitutional Convention. A man with his views, so depreciative of democratic rule, would have certainly been quickly exiled from the freshly liberated United States by the gaggle of incensed Founders. So muses one of our most controversial social critics and prolific writers, Gore Vidal. When we last interviewed Vidal just over a year ago, he set off a mighty chain reaction as he...

ICONOCLAST SPECIAL RANT FOR THE DAY GORE VIDAL & THE MOTHER OF ALL CONSPIRACIES by Denis Schulz Oliver Stone knew his Lee Harvey Oswalds and his Jack Rubys. He could tell the difference between Herbert Hoover and J. Edgar Hoover without a cue card. And he didn't like either one of them. Stone could visualize a grassy knoll before he could see one. And he could imagine a conspiracy with the best of them. The result was JFK, the movie. It was, alas for Ollie, not the Mother of all Conspiracies. Hillary Clinton is more encompassing when it comes...