Free Republic

ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis yesterday blamed the Bush administration for the organization’s woes and accused Republicans of “ACORN McCarthyism.� Lewis blamed Karl Rove for instigating the legal troubles the “community organizers� are facing. At this point, reports of ACORN illegal conduct have sparked a string of criminal investigations nationwide on charges of fraudulent voter registration activities.  Most recently, two young journalists caught ACORN staffers in a sting operation exposing tax and sex trafficking advice.  Both houses of congress have passed measures to de-fund the organization, Lewis was hosted by the National Press Club at a “Newsmaker� event yesterday where she...

A Guest Blog By RONALD RADOSH I noticed the controversy over the late Senator McCarthy in the comments column at NewsReal. It is a mistake for conservatives to think that just because McCarthy's targets were real, the Senator did no harm. Stan Evans has contributed mightily to this confusion in his recent book Blacklisted By History. NewsReal readers may be interested in my review.There were Communist spies, and they did infiltrate the U.S. Government at the highest levels during the New Deal years of F.D.R.’s presidency. While the U.S. treated the Soviet Union as an ally during the war against...

Try this on for size: Palinism. What is it? It is an updated version of McCarthyism, which takes its name from the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin liar, demagogue and drunk, and means, according to Wikipedia, "reckless, unsubstantiated accusations, as well as demagogic attacks on the character or patriotism of political adversaries." As far as we know, Sarah Palin is not a drunk. But she certainly shares McCarthy's other attributes -- and this one as well: the ability to drive the debate. In McCarthy's day, it was anti-communism coupled with national security, and it hardly mattered that he frequently...

Yesterday, Roger Hedgecock and the Liberty Papers posted an unclassified DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis report titled:Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.The “report” was one of the most embarrassingly shoddy pieces of propaganda I’d ever read out of DHS. I couldn’t believe it was real.I spent the day chasing down DHS spokespeople, who have been tied up preparing for a very important homeland security event later today: The First Lady is coming to visit their Washington office. Priorities, you know.Well, the press office got back to me and verified that the document...

Why is it that in descriptions of the words and activities of Rush Limbaugh, it is not pointed out the obvious similarity of Limbaugh and Adolph Hitler. Rush knows exactly what he has started. Do you remember how overbearing, intimidating and feared Sen. Joseph McCarthy became before his crudities and chilling attacks on patriotic citizens was stopped? The rise of Hitler came about through use of the same strident, rancorous and dangerous appeal to a populace who had suffered military defeat and in times of embarrassment for their loss of economic power – how the Germans suffered because of inflation...

The AIG irony Barney Frank's televised demand, reinforced with the threat of a subpoena, that the head of the AIG hand over the names of employees who lawfully took "bonuses" earned pursuant to pre-existing contracts and authorized by statute authored by Democrats, has generated cries of "McCarthyism." The irony is that cries of McCarthyism are absolutely apposite to Barney Frank's reprehensible behavior but not in the way conventionally understood. Thanks to an unremitting media campaign the left has convinced most Americans that McCarthy was guilty of recklessly releasing the names of innocent men whom he falsely identified as communists resulting...

The 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birthday on February 12 serves as a reminder that in his name scientific McCarthyism is alive and well in America's system of education. The same mentality that kept Galileo under house arrest for the last years of his life is today punishing science teachers who dare to raise scientific questions about Darwinian orthodoxy. Secular fundamentalists have so little confidence that the theory of evolution can stand up to rigorous scrutiny that they are gagging voices of dissent. For instance, one of the world's leading proponents of intelligent design is Dr. Scott Minnich, a biologist...

The board of directors of the California Musical Theatre canceled an emergency meeting called Tuesday afternoon to respond to a boycott called against the theater by gay and lesbian artists, according to published reports. The boycott was called by activists after bloggers revealed one of the theater company’s employees made a personal campaign contribution to the Yes on Proposition 8 Campaign. Scott Eckern, the company’s artistic director and chief operating officer, made a $1,000 contribution to Yes on Prop. 8. Any contribution of $1,000 or more requires the donor to declare home city and occupation. Eckern issued an apology Tuesday,...

News has emerged that the organizers of that anti-Iran rally that famously got snarled up in Senator Hillary Clinton's ire at Governor Sarah Palin last week were threatened by New York Democrats with IRS action against their tax-exempt status if they allowed Palin to speak. CBS local NY news reported this little fact and so did NBC but most of the national news has ignored this outrageous threat to use the IRS to silence Governor Palin.

BANGOR, Maine — The Maine Humanities Council will present a two-part series, “Fear, Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law” this fall at the Bangor Public Library.

Communism for Dummies by: Malcolm A. Kline, August 28, 2008 America’s so-called intellectual elites remain either smugly ignorant or in outright denial of the West’s struggle with communism that consumed much of the 20th Century and is still too much with us, late and soon. “Some historians cannot bring themselves to call Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot what they truly are,” writer and scholar Lee Edwards noted when accepting an award from the Fund for American Studies. “I refer you to the current edition of Webster’s New College Dictionary in which Hitler and Mussolini are described as ‘dictators’ while...

Short Pants’ Short Memory Swift-boat THIS.by Steve Finefrock Michael Kinsley is wearing his intellectual short pants again, in his essay on Swiftboating. Wishing upon wishes for a ‘clean’ campaign of purity, he asserts, “Swift-boat is shorthand for the brilliant, despicable Republican campaign strategy in 2004 that turned John Kerry's honorable service in Vietnam into a negative factor in his campaign. The phrase has become more broadly the term for a particular category of campaign tactics and has even become a verb. To ‘swift-boat’ somebody is to use these tactics against him or her.� Kinsley is not stupid, nor ignorant, but...

John McCain and Barack Obama are about to face a moral choice. It will probably be made in bits and pieces over the next five months, but we can imagine it as a single dramatic incident: the adviser approaches and says, "Yes or no. Do you want to swift-boat?" If you were the presidential candidate, what answer would you give? Swift-boat is shorthand for the brilliant, despicable Republican campaign strategy in 2004 that turned John Kerry's honorable service in Vietnam into a negative factor in his campaign. The phrase has become more broadly the term for a particular category of...

Barack Obama supporter accuses Jewish lobby members of McCarthyism By Alex Spillius in Washington Last Updated: 1:04PM BST 27/05/2008A foreign policy expert consulted by Senator Barack Obama, the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, has accused members of the American Jewish establishment of "McCarthyism" in its attitude towards critics of Israel. Mr Brzezinski has been accused of being 'anti-Israel' by some Jewish academics, writers and bloggers Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser, said that the pro-Israel lobby in the US was too powerful, while the slur of anti-Semitism was too readily used whenever its power was called into...

A foreign policy expert consulted by presidential hopeful Barack Obama has accused members of the American Jewish establishment of "McCarthyism" in its attitude towards critics of Israel. Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski says that the pro-Israel lobby in the US is too powerful, while the slur of anti-Semitism is too readily used whenever its power is called into question. Presenting a solution for the Middle East, he listed historical compromises that had to be made by Israelis and Palestinians but accused the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) -- the largest and most influential lobby group -- of obstructing...

I want . . Freedom of the press to be the right not to be lied to. You are confused. So very seriously confused about the First Amendment, that you are not thinking any more clearly about it than I was before the mid-1990s, when I began to see through the system by which the "journalistic objectivity" con is perpetrated. And since I was already in my fifties by then, I have every reason to understand how you might see things the way you do. Freedom of the press is much more like "the right to lie to you"...

SDS General Educational Development by: Cliff Kincaid, May 06, 2008 Tom Hayden, who cheered for a communist military victory in Vietnam, is calling attention to Senator Hillary Clinton’s old ties to communists. But Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, formerly of the Washington Post, wonders if Hillary’s comments on Senator Barack Obama’s ties to communist terrorist Bill Ayers constitute McCarthyism. Bernstein, now an election analyst for CNN, has reason to be concerned about where all of this may lead. His parents were members of the Communist Party USA, and he says in his book about them, Loyalties, “I am proud of the...

National Security: The latest sin ex-President Clinton is accused of is "McCarthyism." But a new, meticulously researched book corrects misconceptions about the abuse of that term by the media and the left.Over the weekend, a retired Air Force general and Barack Obama supporter charged the former president with McCarthyism for seeming to question the patriotism of the Illinois senator, now leading the Democratic race for president. The Obama and Hillary campaigns both soon scrambled to apologize — such sting does that venomous word carry. The dictionary defines McCarthyism as "personal attacks on individuals by means of widely publicized indiscriminate allegations,...

History Shows Joe McCarthy's Reputation is Undeserved By Phyllis Schlafly Monday, January 28, 2008 Ronald Reagan was dismissed by the intelligentsia as just an actor who read speeches written by others until Kiron K. Skinner discovered a box of Reagan's original radio scripts written in his own hand on ruled yellow paper from 1975 to 1979. Since he had no staff to research and write for him in those years, the scripts prove that Reagan was a one-man think tank, well versed in political philosophy and history, fully capable of writing his own speeches. Skinner is the W. Glenn Campbell...

McCarthy Without The Ism by: Malcolm A. Kline, December 17, 2007 As with his last book, The Theme Is Freedom, veteran journalist M. Stanton Evans demolishes another set of misconceptions in his new book Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies. What he did with those disparate subjects—America’s founding and the Cold War in the United States—is to challenge prevailing wisdom accepted by both the left and the right. In The Theme Is Freedom, he made a convincing case that America’s freedoms come not from the Enlightenment but from the Bible....

M. Stanton Evans, a stalwart of the conservative movement for half a century, has written a new book about Joe McCarthy, the long-reviled senator from Wisconsin whose name became a term of opprobrium. In a review in the conservative magazine, the Weekly Standard, Robert Novak asserts that Evans make a convincing case that McCarthy was innocent of the three main charges leveled against him: The demonization of McCarthy was essentially a three-part indictment. First, he labeled as security risks and drove from public life officials (especially skilled Foreign Service professionals) whose only sin was liberalism. Second, he accused innocents of...

Long-time conservative intellectual and commentator M. Stanton Evans discusses his important new book in defense of Joe McCarthy. Long awaited, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy, was released on released on Nov. 6, 2007. Program re-airs on Sunday, 11/25, at 11 p.m. ET on C-Span2 (BookTV). Program length is 58 minutes.

A month after voters last year had given Democrats control that would elevate Nancy Pelosi to House speaker, she received a letter from a trial lawyer in Santa Ana, Calif., named Daniel J. Callahan. "We look forward," he wrote, "to the New Direction of America, and to your dedication to putting an end to the fleecing of the American taxpayers and death to its citizens in the name of war profiteers such as Blackwater." That plea was answered last week by House hearings. Callahan did not disguise his political orientation, requesting a full-scale investigation of an "extremely Republican" company: Blackwater...

The American Spectator has reported that Henry Waxman D-Calif. is beginning investigations on Rush Limbaug, Hannity and Mark Levin. This is out of hand! When did we move to Cuba??? http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=12128

Nothing frightens those who peddle lies than the cold hard light of truth. They react to exposure of their deceits the way vampires react to a having a crucifix held up in front of them. Ever since the birth of conservative talk radio and the Internet ended the liberals’ total monopoly over the news, the left has been simmering with impotence -- over the loss of their absolute control over what the Americans are allowed to see and hear, and their inability to do anything about it. Time and again liberal attempts to sell the nation their shoddy goods have...

HillaryMatters.org is calling for people to call/email their local radio stations that carry Rush Limbaugh's show to encourage those stations to remove him because of the phony phony soldier fatwa against him. I say, yes, let's contact our local Rush Limbaugh station today and PRAISE them for carrying Rush's show and for supporting Free Speech in America today!! I've already contacted mine (wbap.com) and it only took about 5 minutes. I think we need to FReep our radio stations and commend them for keeping Rush on the air! BTW--isn't HillaryMatters.org breaking the rules for a 501c by promoting this sort...

Recently, at least 41 Democratic Senators, joined by a howling mob including George Soros’ Media Matters, sought to silence Rush Limbaugh because of his reference to “phony” anti war soldiers. Limbaugh’s comments, taken in context, referred to Jesse Macbeth, a confessed and convicted phony, whose faked but graphic war crimes confessions received far wider media notice than his later confession. He had been discharged in boot camp after 40 days of service. Macbeth follows a grand tradition of fake soldiers whose “war crimes” confessions have been used by the Left to slander the service of our troops. For example, Micah...

<p>I normally ignore Rush Limbaugh, but his comments last Wednesday went too far for me to remain silent. It's one thing to call me "Dingy Harry" - it's another to insult our men and women in uniform, calling those who oppose the war "phony soldiers" as Rush did during his Sept. 26 broadcast.</p>

Are Congressmen above the law? The case of Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich against Congressman John Murtha (D-PA) tests this basic question. Of course there are other reasons to ask the same question. In a year when Congressional committees see no limits to what they will subpoena from the executive branch or about what they will interrogate its officers and employees, they rushed to court to keep the Department of Justice from subpoenaing the records of a Congressman caught with tens of thousands of dollars in his freezer. Bad as shielding suspicious Congressional cold cash from view may be, insulating Congressmen...

NEWSWEEK magazine, which tells us in a recent edition about a "well-funded," global-warming "denial machine," is itself something of a trashing machine, a journalistic pretender that mistakes smear for substance. The stumbling, bumbling exercise in ad hominem McCarthyism takes it as an unchallengeable truth that global warming is a human-induced catastrophe that could be readily prevented, and concludes there is just one way to explain the "naysayers" to this holy writ: They are part of a "well-coordinated," heavily financed scheme cooked up by self-serving corporate interests to dupe the public and confuse or buy off politicians. The article not only...

Either the concept of "special prosecutor" needs to be done away with once and for all, or we need to agree that in cases where one is appointed trials should be separated from investigations in terms of both personnel and geography. *** The Libby case reflects poorly on both the inquisitor and the judge and has resulted in a true and literal miscarriage of justice. The prosecutor investigated until he had helped generate a crime where none was before. The judge excluded witnesses and evidence until the "crime" reached a mass where a DC jury could legitimately seem to find...

America's vital traditions of free speech, association and debate are under assault.     Al Gore bristles at anyone who raises inconvenient truths about climate alarmism. Greenpeace calls us "climate criminals." Grist magazine wants "Nuremberg-style war crimes trials" for climate disaster skeptics, probably followed by hangings, since burning at the stake would release greenhouse gases.     Climate catastrophist Ross Gelbspan told a Washington, D.C., audience: "Not only do journalists not have a responsibility to report what skeptical scientists have to say about global warming. They have a responsibility not to report what those scientists say."     Sen. Barbara Boxer, California Democrat, shamefully treated physician-scientist-author...

If you read this, you need a lot of time. OK folks. After this you are going to think I am nuts. My reply will be the same reply that Major General McCauliffe gave the Germans at Bastogne: NUTS!! Right back at you. I had a teacher in High School. He was a good teacher and I liked him a lot. One day we got into an debate. He told the class that if you had a continuum with Communism on the left and Capitalism on the right and Socialism in the middle, he said that Communism and Capitalism is...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 — A liberal gay rights group said Wednesday that one of its employees, acting anonymously, had created the Web site that first published copies of unusually solicitous e-mail messages to teenagers from former Representative Mark Foley, which led to his resignation. A spokesman for the group, the Human Rights Campaign, said it first learned of its employee’s role this week and immediately fired him for misusing the group’s resources. The scandal surrounding Mr. Foley, a Florida Republican, has been a burdensome distraction for members of his party in the month before the midterm elections, and some Republicans...

Senior Israel Defense Forces officers expressed dissatisfaction yesterday with the announcement by Chief of Staff Dan Halutz that he had recently instructed the Field Security Directorate at the General Staff to keep track of their telephone conversations. According to a report in Haaretz yesterday, Halutz instructed the Field Security Directorate to provide him with the telephone logs of the generals, their department heads and their secretaries, in order to crosscheck whether they have had contacts with journalists. [ . . . ] According to the disgruntled officers , the chief of staff's action "stinks of McCarthyism" . . .

    Ann Coulter, 'Four Witches'3, One 'Bitch'4 + The New McCarthyism of the LeftI'LL SEE ANN COULTER'S 'BILL CLINTON RAPE CHARGE'1 AND RAISE HER 'ONE HILLARY CLINTON'2 ~A FOREWORD~ by Mia T, 6.10.06 illary 'LISTENING TOUR'-'KNOWNOTHING-VICTIM' clinton did something Wednesday she rarely does5: Open her mouth and actually take a stand. New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton lashed out at Ann Coulter for a "vicious, mean-spirited attack" on a group of outspoken 9/11 widows.... Perhaps her book should have been called 'Heartless.'" the senator said.... The New York Democrat and former first lady said she found it "unimaginable...

Moves Signal Tighter Secrecy Within C.I.A. By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI WASHINGTON, April 23 — The crackdown on leaks at the Central Intelligence Agency that led to the dismissal of a veteran intelligence officer last week included a highly unusual polygraph examination for the agency's independent watchdog, C.I.A. Inspector General John L. Helgerson, intelligence officials with knowledge of the investigation said on Sunday. The special polygraphs, which have been given to dozens of employees since January, are part of a broader effort by C.I.A. Director Porter J. Goss to re-emphasize a culture of secrecy. As the inspector general, Mr....

Journalists and historians have often referred to Senator Joseph McCarthy's "list" as if it were a precisely defined entity. It was not, however. Certainly one would put his "numbered" list of eighty-one cases, given in a Senate speech of February 20, 1950, as the prime candidate for being McCarthy's "list." But McCarthy himself quickly added several dozen more names to this list in communications to a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (commonly referred to in the press as the "Tydings Committee" from its chairman, Senator Millard Tydings). The Tydings subcommittee in its "State Department Employee Loyalty Investigation" inquired...

Listening to Fat Ted on C-Span. Retreading his Bork speech. Almost makes me ashamed to be an American.

It was during the second day of questioning that Sam Alito's wife broke down, wept and left the room after hearing Sen. Kennedy imply that her husband was a bigot. What was Kennedy's evidence? In 1985, Sam Alito belonged to Concerned Alumni of Princeton. He had joined to protest the ouster of ROTC from campus. Alito was neither an officer nor active, but like future Sen. Bill Bradley, he joined. What were CAP's sins? Headed by National Review publisher William Rusher, CAP had a magazine called Prospect that carried an essay opposing affirmative action and regretting that Princeton had ever...

A new Joseph McCarthy biography: Senator Joe McCarthy is one of the strongest pro-American figures in the history of the United States. Despite many attempts by socialists to demonize McCarthy and "McCarthyism" with revisionist history, McCarthy's achievements shine through the propaganda. At a time when America was threatened by a murderous, backward, anti-freedom ideology of Soviet communism, Joseph McCarthy was a champion of capitalism and Democracy. Even when his career was threatened because of his vocal anti-communist speeches, McCarthy did not back down from the cause of freedom. For the courage Senator McCarthy showed in sticking to his American principles,...

About 100 journalists from one of China's most progressive newspapers, the Beijing News, have walked out to protest against their editor's sacking. The highly unusual move follows the ousting of editor-in-chief Yang Bin and two senior editors, as Communist Party officials moved to rein in the paper. The paper appeared on Friday, but many stories were taken from the Xinhua news agency rather than its own journalists. Analysts say the row highlights a growing struggle over controlling news. Papers like the Beijing News have been publishing stories to attract readers and advertising revenues, leading to disputes with Communist Party censors,...

DANNY OCEAN DEFENDS THE RATHER NETWORK By Ann Coulter 33 minutes ago The most cosseted, self-indulgent, worthless people in the universe are worried their suffering has been downgraded. For 50 years Hollywood drama queens have churned out plays, movies, TV shows, books, poems, allegories, museum exhibits, personal testimonials, dioramas, interpretive dances, wood carvings, cave paintings, needlepoint wall hangings and scatological limericks about their victimization at the hands of a brute named Joe McCarthy. Schoolchildren who will learn nothing about George Washington, Thomas Edison or Paul Revere are forced to read chapter and verse about the black night of fascism (BNOF)...

Joe McCarthy hated The Capital Times and The Capital Times hated Joe McCarthy. The red-baiting Republican senator from Wisconsin used to refer to this newspaper as "the Pravda of the Prairie" - and in the Cold War era when he was running roughshod over civil liberties, McCarthy's attempts to portray this newspaper as a tool of the Soviet Union were dangerous accusations indeed. They were, as well, untrue. The man who ran The Capital Times during the McCarthy era, William T. Evjue, was not "the red editor" that the senator so feverishly denounced. Rather, Evjue was a journalist in the...

As the CIA leak investigation comes to a conclusion, America’s media have started to sell the public the man in the middle of the maelstrom, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Tonight, CBS News jumped on the bandwagon in a report filed by Jim Axelrod for “The Evening News” (video link to follow). Like many such reports in the past week, Axelrod began by trying to dispel the notion that politics are in any way involved in this episode: “44-year-old Pat Fitzgerald, an intense and, by all accounts, apolitical prosecutor who's pursued mob bosses, crooked politicians, and Osama bin Laden like a...

Hoisting Themselves on a Borrowed Petard: The Left and the New McCarthyism Written by Dustin Hawkins Wednesday, October 26, 2005   Has anyone seen Joseph McCarthy lately?  You can see him, first, in a new liberal fantasy movie directed by liberal fantasist George Clooney.  There you can get the Hollywood version.  Or you can see him, or "McCarthyism," taking form in the Democratic Party. Of course, Joseph McCarthy himself wasn't even guilty of McCarthyism, but more on that later. Indeed, Joseph McCarthy was an actual American, with actual evidence against actual Soviet spies and communist sympathizers.  This was no joke, except...

In "The Age of Anxiety," Haynes Johnson makes a depressing observation: "Although McCarthy and the leading players of his time… have long since passed from the scene, McCarthyism remains a story without an ending." ...McCarthyism... has become an all-purpose incantation, referring to everything from genuine political repression to folks not buying a singer's records.... Calling someone a McCarthyite has become a form of McCarthyism. ...Mr. Johnson ignores the genuine threat that communist spies posed to the U.S.; he elides the justified anticommunist efforts of the 1930s and 1940s with the abuses of McCarthyism; and he compares McCarthyism with modern-day conservatism....

There are few facts on display in "Good Night, and Good Luck," actor George Clooney's liberal version of CBS-TV news commentator Edward R. Murrow's 1953 feud with Joe McCarthy, the fiercely anti-Communist senator from Wisconsin. The movie, which opened yesterday, presents the feud as an emotional battle of political rhetoric, with the loser, of course, being Sen. McCarthy. The real historical facts, however, are not so clear. "Good Night, and Good Luck" opens with Murrow giving a speech in the late 1950s warning about the confusion of TV news with entertainment. Cut to 1953 at the height of McCarthy's war...

Apparently, it means you'll have to think: Clooney, who has just directed Good Night and Good Luck, which is about CBS television news in the 1950s, said he grew up with three network broadcasts, all professional operations that allowed him to judge what was going on in politics and in Vietnam. Now, with the onset of cable television and "130 different channels", the quality of news was "fractured", with each network, like Fox, playing to audiences with "specific belief patterns". Viewers had to switch channels continually to discover what was going on in the world. You mean like when the...

London 15.09.05 | The existence of systematic political prosecution in Venezuela, as established in article 7 of the Rome Statute, has been been argued for some time now. Apologists of Hugo Chavez maintain that it is nonsense, just another cry wolf allegation against the 'democratically elected' leader. Many people have complained about the existence of a list, compiled by chavista assemblyman Luis Tascon with a group of collaborators, that is widely utilised by government officials at all institutional levels to deny passports, contracts, IDs, employments, benefits, etc. The creation of said database was ordered by Hugo Chavez himself, who in...