Free Republic

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...