Free Republic

<p>"The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know," said Harry Truman, who made it his task to absorb a lot of it. Many people who have not followed his example are not averse to using what little they do know, with the inadvertent effect of exposing how much they have to learn.</p>

James C. Goodale, the so-called “father of reporters’ privilege” and the author of a new book called Fighting for the Press (CUNY Journalism Press, 255 pp., $20), was in his office at the Debevoise & Plimpton law firm, where he’s a partner, comparing Barack Obama to Richard M. Nixon. “Nixon and Agnew were like listening to a Fox News program all day long, every day,” he said. “In their eyes, the Eastern establishment press were against them and they were against it and they were going to destroy it as best they can.” But, he said, “Obama has all these...

RUSH: This Obama comparison to Nixon, you hear it now and then. In fact, it was asked about at the press conference this afternoon with the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason said, "How do you feel about comparisons by some of your critics of this week's scandals to those that happened under the Nixon administration?" OBAMA: I'll let you guys engage in those comparisons, and you can go ahead and read the history, I think, and -- and draw your own conclusions. My concern is making sure that if there's a problem in...

Richard Nixon is back in the news. Commentators, pundits, and bloggers are comparing the scandal-plagued Obama administration’s record to Tricky Dick’s. Faced with a rising tide of Nixon-themed questions, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney responded, “people who make those kind of comparisons need to check their history.” A quick history check shows one thing: Richard Nixon was a much better president than Barack Obama.

Although the Obama administration has been hit by three scandals in a matter of days – new revelations about Benghazi, the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative groups, and the Justice Department seizing Associated Press phone records – the White House scoffed at comparing President Barack Obama with President Richard Nixon. At Tuesday’s White House press briefing a reporter asked, “President Obama has been compared to President Nixon. How does he feel about that?” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said he did not have a reaction from the president to relay on that matter, but also dismissed the premise of...

.....Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have spent six years expanding presidential powers at the expense of Congress and the judiciary, from authorizing domestic wiretapping to limiting habeas corpus and changing bills through signing statements. Democrats, in control of both chambers of Congress for the first time in 12 years, are determined to reclaim what they can. And the U.S. Attorneys case gives them powerful new ammunition.SNIP Hearings will be held, subpoenas issued, new investigations launched.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney denied that President Obama’s administration bears any comparison to that of Richard Nixon, who resigned in the face of impeachment. “The people who make those kinds of comparisons need to check their history,” Carney told reporters when asked about Nixon comparisons. “It is a reflection of the sort of rapid politicization of everything that you have that kind of commentary.” Time’s Joe Klein wrote that the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups for inappropriate scrutiny put Obama “on the same page as Richard Nixon” — perhaps because the Nixon articles of impeachment included the charge...

This recent passage plus the morphing gif was discovered in a recently found book claimed to be written by Nostradamus. Leaders of different eras of a future global empire More Dissimilar yet the same, More Similar Than Different. One speaks, stands from the left, black as the evening sky. His counterpart speaks from the right, The color of snow, cold as ice, brilliant, bright, white. Both speak with a the tongue of the serpent, Who could hardly speak any differently,yet strangely their actions, motives make them perfect dopplegangers in their entwined fates.

In September 1989 the New York Times magazine published an excerpt of "The IRS: A Law Unto Itself," a book by former Times reporter David Burnham. Burnham detailed how the Internal Revenue Service had misused its power in an attempt to stifle political dissent: During the Johnson and Nixon Administrations, the focus of the I.R.S.'s effort at political control was individuals and organizations demonstrating for civil rights and against the American presence in Vietnam. . . . On June 16, 1969, Randolph W. Thrower, I.R.S. Commissioner during the Nixon Administration, wrote a memorandum for the record about a meeting he...

More serious than Watergate 'because 4 Americans did in fact die' To this day, it is not known what role President Richard Nixon played in the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, but the tape recordings from the White House confirm he and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman discussed using the CIA to slow down the FBI investigation. It was the cover-up, as history records, that eventually brought about Nixon’s resignation in disgrace. Now, Congress is investigating an alleged cover-up of the terrorist attack Sept. 11, 2012, on the U.S. foreign service facility in Benghazi, Libya, amid predictions from prominent voices...

(CNSNews.com) - As part of a settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Collins Inc. of Clinton, Iowa has agreed to a “re-lamping” of its facility with low-mercury fixtures at a projected cost of $76,952. The re-lamping will be a greater expense than the civil penalty to be paid. “A re-lamping project involving the replacement of high-mercury fluorescent fixtures and bulbs with low-mercury fluorescent fixtures and bulbs at its facility with a projected eligible cost of $76,952.00,” The EPA settlement says. The “re-lamping” will cost more than the $31,379 administrative civil penalty paid by Collins Inc., a manufacturer of metal...

Here's the link.

This month, I spoke at an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal with some of its survivors at the National Press Club. While much of the discussion looked back at the historic clash with President Nixon, I was struck by a different question: Who actually won? From unilateral military actions to warrantless surveillance that were key parts of the basis for Nixon’s impending impeachment, the painful fact is that Barack Obama is the president that Nixon always wanted to be. Four decades ago, Nixon was halted in his determined effort to create an “imperial presidency” with unilateral...

A U.S. Justice Department document that says America can le­gally order the killing of its citizens if they are believed to be al-Qaida leaders uses the devastating and illegal bombing of Cam­bo­dia in the 1960s and ’70s to help make its case. American broadcaster NBC News first reported on the “white pa­per”—a summary of classified mem­os by the U.S. Justice Depart­ment’s Of­fice of Legal Council—on Monday. The 16-page paper makes a legal case for the U.S. government’s highly controversial use of un­manned drones to kill suspected terrorists, including some U.S. citizens. In making its argument, the docu­ment brings up the...

Last year, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney attacked the Democratic convention platform for its “shameful” decision to omit a reference to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. But in a sign of how U.S. politics have changed in 40 years, President Richard Nixon complained in 1972 of the Democrats’ “dishonest” platform language declaring the city Israel’s capital. Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, agreed with his condemnation during a previously unreported taped conversation from June 29, 1972. “To make Jerusalem the capital of Israel is not the platform of a major American national party,” Henry Kissinger told Nixon. “That is...

Few presidents in modern times have been as interested in gun control as Richard Nixon, of all people. He proposed ridding the market of Saturday night specials, contemplated banning handguns altogether and refused to pander to gun owners by feigning interest in their weapons. Several previously unreported Oval Office recordings and White House memos from the Nixon years show a conservative president who at times appeared willing to take on the National Rifle Association, a powerful gun lobby then as now, even as his aides worried about the political ramifications. “I don’t know why any individual should have a right...

It is not without a bit of irony that, in the 40 years since the explosion of the Watergate story, Bob Woodward would again be under attack from the White House for trying to tell the truth. But this time the attack is coming from a Democrat. While Barack Obama may not share the Nixon pedigree, he and his White House are the closest thing to the Nixon regime of any that we have seen since then -- both in the extent of their paranoia and their willingness to suppress the truth and push the boundaries of law. In my...

I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do with this: Tricky Dick, Slick Willie and the Wordle Wizard           H/T Instapundit Since it’s on Facebook I guess you could just “like” it. Butt it might be more fun to assign WaPo Pinocchios to see who wins.   Butt if we’re just going to award prizes to Presidents for fibbing, I know who I’m putting my money on:     You can’t really blame BO for his seemingly contradictory statements and actions. It’s a lot harder to remember what you’ve said when you’re just reading it.     If you have to...

(CBS News) Just weeks after the 100th anniversary of President Richard Nixon's birth, a new exhibit at his presidential library is raising eyebrows. It contains newly declassified documents that reveal Nixon's correspondence with President Bill Clinton, and a surprisingly warm relationship between the two. The correspondence includes a personal, handwritten letter from Nixon congratulating Clinton on surviving a tough primary and general election to win the White House. That letter was the beginning of an unlikely union between the former Republican president and the newly elected Democratic chief executive.

memory hole reminder The first documentary evidence that Vietnamese communists were directly steering John Kerry’s group Vietnam Veterans Against the War has been discovered in a U.S. archive, according to a researcher who spoke with WorldNetDaily. Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2004/10/27207/#615wufvA5oZXKuWK.99

At a ceremony commemorating the late U.S. President Richard M. Nixon’s 100th birthday, politicians, a military official and Nixon’s eldest daughter on Sunday remembered him as an underappreciated president and a foreign policy genius. Nixon, the Cold War-era Republican stalwart who opened U.S. relations with communist China, was the only American president to resign from office, leaving the White House in disgrace over the Watergate scandal. “He looked at (the world) as a world with 200 countries and 200 leaders, and he studied every one of those leaders, and he knew most of them,” said Bruce Herschensohn, a friend and...

For five years, he was known as the leader of the Free World. But for the first several years of his life, Richard Milhous Nixon had a more modest title: farm boy. Wednesday will mark the date, 100 years ago, of a winter day so cold that Hannah Nixon was advised it would be better to bear her fifth son at home than risk traveling in the chill to a hospital. That was the day a small, kit-constructed home surrounded by citrus trees saw the birth of the man who would become the 37th president of the United States.

Watergate Judge John J. Sirica aided the prosecution in pursuing the White House connection to the Democratic headquarters break-in by providing the special prosecutor information from a probation report in which one of the burglars said he was acting under orders from top Nixon administration officials, according to once-secret documents released Friday by the National Archives. One newly public transcript of an in-chambers meeting between Sirica, the U.S. District Court judge in charge of the case, and then-Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in July 1973 shows the judge revealed secret probation reports indicating that E. Howard Hunt had cited orders from...

The cover up is worse than the original crime. When the president conspires with others in government to lie to the American people and claim "national security" as a defense, the congress has a duty and precedent to get to the truth. Lying to the America people and ordering subordinates to lie in a cover up attempt is historically recognized as high crimes and treason and IS definitely an impeachable offense. When the president of the United States commits high crimes and treason and then lies to the American people and conspires to hide it from congressional investigators and claims...

Officially, JFK won by 112,000 votes. However, in Alabama, people voted for individual Electors, not for candidates. Six of Harry Byrd's Electors won, but all of them voted for JFK. Thus, all popular votes cast for Byrd's Electors were awarded to JFK.

What kind of president would Mitt Romney be? And what should we expect from Barack Obama's second term? To answer these questions, I'll draw on the work of Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek, who has argued that presidents' fortunes depend on how they establish their political legitimacy in the particular circumstances under which which they assume power. In this essay, I'll discuss the prospects for a Romney presidency; in the next, I'll discuss the second term of an Obama presidency.

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — George S. McGovern, a proud liberal who argued fervently against the Vietnam War as a senator from South Dakota and suffered one of the most crushing defeats in presidential election history against Richard Nixon in 1972, died before dawn Sunday. He was 90. A spokesman for McGovern's family, Steve Hildebrand, told The Associated Press by telephone that McGovern died at 5:15 a.m. Sunday at a hospice in Sioux Falls, surrounded by family and lifelong friends.

Well,isn’t this just the last thing we need: a bunch of Republicans trying to make a big election about a bunch of small, non-optimal stuff?  Take Benghazi, for example;suddenly–and “conveniently” just ahead of the Foreign Affairs Debate–the drumbeat of “cover-up” surrounding the colossal screw-up tragedy at our embassy has begun. You can practically hear the rumble all up and down the Potomac: “What didn’t he know, and when didn’t he know it?” The implication, of course, is that - just like Nixon’s Watergate - BO is presiding over a massive cover-up of the truth about Benghazi. Except that no Americans...

Right now the RCP Averages are showing an odd situation. Mitt Romney leads nationally by one point, but trails in the Electoral College by a 294-244 count. Moreover, electoral vote number 270 (right now, Wisconsin) favors President Obama by a two-point margin. While I believe that an electoral vote/popular vote disconnect of this magnitude is unlikely, it certainly is possible that we’ll see another split between the two, especially if the popular vote is decided by less than a point. If that happens, Americans will once again receive a civics lesson in how presidents are really chosen. In particular, we’ll...

PIERRE, S.D. (AP) -- Longtime former U.S. Sen. George McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate who lost to President Richard Nixon in a historic landslide, has moved into hospice care near his home in South Dakota, his family said Monday. "He's coming to the end of his life," his daughter, Ann McGovern, told The Associated Press.

The election of 1972 was a contest between the liberal media and the silent majority. President Nixon won a landslide victory for re-election that year carrying every state in the union except Massachusetts by running against the elite liberal media which, in turn, did everything short of illegal activities to defeat him.The media exacted its revenge in 1973 with the Watergate witch-hunt which essentially overturned the election. The election of 1980 saw much the same dynamic with Ronald Reagan defeating the incumbent liberal President Jimmy Carter and his media lackeys. Vice President George Bush did it again in 1988 when...

The election of 1972 was a contest between the liberal media and the silent majority. President Nixon won a landslide victory for re-election that year carrying every state in the union except Massachusetts by running against the elite liberal media which, in turn, did everything short of illegal activities to defeat him.The media exacted its revenge in 1973 with the Watergate witch-hunt which essentially overturned the election. The election of 1980 saw much the same dynamic with Ronald Reagan defeating the incumbent liberal President Jimmy Carter and his media lackeys. Vice President George Bush did it again in 1988 when...

Bravo!Via Politico: Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, likened President Barack Obama to President Richard Nixon on Thursday, slamming Obama for having “an enemies list.”“Not since Richard Nixon have we seen a president who puts together an enemies list and has a whole team pursuing it,” Issa said on Fox News’s “Fox and Friends.” “That’s what’s happened in this administration. It’s sad. It’s not the America I want to see going forward. I sincerely hope that after the election, regardless, the American people will have made a statement that they won’t tolerate this.”Issa’s remarks came in the...

In 1969, at the height of the student protests against the Vietnam war, President Nixon held a private conversation with the wife of an American serviceman while he was visiting the Pentagon. The discourse was overheard by a reporter and was recounted in Before the Fall: an Insiders View of the Pre-Watergate White House by William Safire. Nixon expressed how much he admired men like the women's husband: I have seen them. They are the greatest. You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen. The boys that are on the College campuses today are the luckiest people...

Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence By William L. Silber Bloomsbury, 454 pages, $30 On Sunday evening, Aug. 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon announced that the United States would no longer sell gold to other governments at $35 per ounce—the dollar would no longer be convertible into gold at all. Although no one quite realized it at the time, the era of fixed change rates was over. In memos and briefing books, Mr. Volcker, an undersecretary at Treasury, had been arguing for an end to gold convertibility. He had persuaded his boss, Treasury Secretary John Connally, and Connally, in turn, had...

Amid the triumphant success of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's successful moon-walk in July 1969, NASA and President Richard Nixon's White House breathed a heavy sigh of relief that he didn't have to deliver a speech to the nation entitled 'In Event of Moon Disaster'. The speech and a memo were prepared in the event that the two Apollo 11 astronauts did not manage to reconnect with their command module piloted by Michael Collins and could not return safely home to Earth. The memo laid out a list of instructions for President Nixon, among which was the tragic task of...

On this day in 1974, President Richard M. Nixon resigns in the wake of the Watergate burglary scandal. He was the first president in American history to resign. In a televised address, Nixon, flanked by his family, announced to the American public that he would step down rather than endure a Senate impeachment trial for obstruction of justice. Since 1972, Nixon had battled increasing vociferous allegations that he knew of, and may have authorized, a botched burglary in which several men were arrested for attempting to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee...

Last week, U.S. Congressman Allen West looked the part of a college professor giving a lecture as he took the stage at the Lifelong Learning Center on the campus of Florida Atlantic College in Jupiter. At his second town hall meeting of the day, West gave a Power Point presentation without the often-distracting fanfare caused by protesters showing up wherever he appears. The room was not without distractions, however, and West handled them in a lighthearted manner, even having a little fun with the audience. But the subject matter during the presentation, and questions following, were no laughing matter.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) -- Seven attorneys general trying to block the federal health care law's requirement for contraception coverage saw their lawsuit dismissed Tuesday by a federal judge who said they didn't have standing to file it. U.S. District Court Judge Warren K. Urbom ruled that the states failed to prove they would suffer immediate harm once that part of the law is enacted. The Nebraska federal judge also noted that President Barack Obama's administration has agreed to work with religious groups to try to address their concerns. The lawsuit was challenging a rule in the law that requires contraception...

Reflections on the Vice-Presidency, as Mitt Romney considers his options… It is said that, just before he died, President Dwight Eisenhower said “I only made two mistakes as president, and both of them are sitting on the Supreme Court." He was mistaken. His biggest mistake was selecting Richard Nixon as a runningmate, because without those eight years as a vice president, it is inconceivable that ornery Senator Richard Nixon could have won the presidency. Only this credential from 1953 to 1961 could have facilitated that elevation. The same could be said of many presidents. The most important appointment – the...

Dave Spence was hard to miss in the Missouri capital's "Salute to America" parade. Wearing shorts in the 98-degree heat, the Republican businessman from St. Louis County zigzagged down High Street, energetically shaking hands, then jogging to catch up with the RV plastered with his billboard-sized photo. Not so noticeable was his rival in the Aug. 7 gubernatorial primary, Bill Randles of Kansas City. In jeans and a white polo shirt, Randles waved politely while walking down the center of the street alone. His wife Bev handed out candy along the curb while a volunteer followed in the couple's SUV....

    On Wednesday's Mark Levin Show:A House Congressional panel has voted to place Eric Holder in contempt of Congress regarding the Fast and Furious investigation.Also, President Obama has cited executive privilege and refuses to hand over evidence or documents regardingwhat he knew or when he knew it.Mark applauds the Republicans for standing up and delivering a blow to the tyranny that is going on, and urges them to keep at it. Mark explains the history of executive privilege, as well as the power of Congress versus the power of the Executive. It is clear that Eric Holder is at...

I’ll indulge in some measure of fiendish joy by suggesting to my left-leaning San Francisco neighbors that Barak Obama and Richard Nixon may soon share adjoining pages in history books. Disposing of partisan puffery, and being a member of no major political party, my partisanship is simply nonexistent, the country has almost witnessed the unfolding of a White House cover-up. I say this because some members of the mainstream media and the Obama re-election committee (am I being redundant?) have avoided reporting on the Fast and Furious gun running operation. For NBC Nightly News viewers, allow me to recap the...

"Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein now claim, in a Washington Post piece, that President Nixon was “far worse than we thought,” and accuse him of conducting five “wars”: against the anti-war movement, on the media, against the Democrats... The facts of Watergate have been wildly exaggerated. Neither in financing techniques nor in the gamesmanship with the other side was the Republican campaign of 1972 particularly unusual. And it was puritanical compared with what appears to have been the outright theft of the 1960 election for Kennedy over Nixon by Chicago’s Mayor Daley and Lyndon Johnson."

The White House asserted executive privilege Wednesday over some gun-trafficking-probe documents sought by congressional Republicans, throwing into uncertainty a possible vote to sanction Attorney General Eric Holder with contempt of Congress. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was meeting Wednesday morning to discuss the contempt fight. The panel's chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), said the committee was evaluating the White House's assertion. In a letter to Mr. Issa, Deputy Attorney General James Cole said the president had asserted the privilege to block the documents from being released, but he held out the possibility of negotiating an agreement over...

Barack Obama’s administration is the most corrupt ever to occupy the White House declared Watergate burglar and retiring radio talk star G. Gordon Liddy. With tomorrow marking the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break in, Liddy was speaking today in an interview on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on New York’s WABC Radio. Liddy was the chief operative for the White House Plumbers unit that existed during Richard Nixon’s presidency. Klein asked Liddy: “You lived through and in fact were a part of different presidential administrations. … Looking now at Barack Obama’s previous four years, have you ever seen a White...

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Woodstein for our purposes) now claim, in a Washington Post piece, that President Nixon was “far worse than we thought,” and accuse him of conducting five “wars”: against the anti-war movement, on the media, against the Democrats, on justice, and on history. In evaluating such a volcanic farrago of pent-up charges, the facts must be arrayed in three tiers: the facts of Woodstein’s activities and revelations; the facts of the Watergate case and related controversies; and the importance of Watergate in an appreciation of the Nixon record.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: So the media is telling us it's been a bad week for President Obama. I'd rather look at it through a different prism. It has been not just a bad week, it has been a bad three-and-a-half years. Not for Obama, but for us. Every week is a bad week for America, with Barack Hussein Kardashian in the White House. Every year is a bad year for us. It has been a bad three-and-a-half years. And as much, ladies and gentlemen, as I am dedicated to the educational and informative task of teaching people about the destructive...

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, arguably the two most famous newspaper reporters in American history, did something on Sunday they haven't done in 36 years: They shared a byline in the Washington Post. Woodward and Bernstein, who are on a mini-publicity tour surrounding the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-ins, published a joint opinion essay for the Post's Outlook section about what they've learned since first reporting on the scandal: President Richard Nixon, who was forced to resign in the wake of Watergate, was "far worse than we thought."

Judy Shelton, an economist not on a university payroll, has sought to satiate this widespread curiosity in her book, Fixing The Dollar Now: Why U. S. Money Lost Its Integrity And How We Can Restore It... ... our first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton—widely thought to be, with some justification, an advocate of a strong, central government. “To emit an unfunded paper as the sign of value ought not to continue a formal part of the constitution, nor ever hereafter to be employed; being, in its nature, pregnant with abuses, and liable to be made the engine of imposition...