Free Republic

A federal judge ordered the FBI Thursday to disclose more details about how it handled its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s secret email account. U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg said court papers describing the grand jury subpoenas the FBI obtained to compel information from Mrs. Clinton’s Internet service providers can be made public. In doing so, he overruled objections by the Trump administration that had insisted making the information public would violate grand jury secrecy rules. “After reviewing the document in camera, the Court concludes that it largely rehashes information already made public, thus obviating any need for secrecy,” the...

And here I bet you thought that the Hillary Clinton email scandal was over, didn’t you? No such luck. The Daily Caller has a report on a puzzling development this month in the ongoing investigation. New York Attorney Ty Clevenger filed a Freedom of Information Act request in March of last year for a number of the Clinton emails which were under scrutiny. Now, seventeen months later, he’s finally gotten his answer. Nope. The FBI is refusing to turn them over. The reason? Because the petitioner failed to demonstrate a sufficient public interest in making the documents public. I’ll give...

FBI officials are claiming a lack of public interest justifies their decision to keep Hilary Clinton’s very controversial archived records from being released to the public. “We have determined you have not sufficiently demonstrated that the public’s interest in disclosure outweighs personal privacy interests of the subject,” says the August 28 letter from David Hardy, the FBI’s record manager. “I’m just stunned. This is exactly what I would have expected had Mrs. Clinton won the election,” Clevenger told the Washington Times. “It looks like the [Barack] Obama Administration is still running the FBI,” Clevenger added. “It is incumbent upon the requester to provide documentation...

Sharyl Attkisson, the former CBS reporter and independent journalist, has a long history of getting under the government’s skin. In her book Stonewalled, she detailed many of the battles she encountered when attempting to expose the truth in the tradition of the Fourth Estate and how unpopular stories tended to wind up being discounted or silenced. Later, her Nosy Nellie ways attracted the interest of the Department of Justice, though they have thus far failed to file any actual charges against her. This week, Attkisson tells the story of how she finally sought to obtain her own FBI file and...

Those of the Left rarely like to admit or acknowledge that they are of the Left. Witness their repeated vacillations on what they call themselves. It was “progressive” – until people figured out what that meant and loathed it. So they bastardized the classical definition of "liberal" – until people found out what they meant by that and loathed it. So they are now back to "progressive" – hoping that no one remembers how much they loathed it the last go 'round. So too is it with the Leftist grievance groups. The assemblages that exist aren’t really to promote their...

Video at link courtesy of The Blaze's Naked Emperor News.

Matt Lasar of Ars tells us not to worry about the Fairness Doctrine being revived, only to go on and cite several lawmakers who have said they’d like to revive it. Meanwhile, over at the American Spectator, somebody called “The Prowler” seems to have all sorts of unnamed sources on the Hill telling him the Fairness Doctrine will be revived any day now.Who knows what to believe. But let’s keep our eye on the real issue here. The danger is not that the Fairness Doctrine gets back on the books in the same form; it’s that versions of it sneak...

Does the Fairness Doctrine Still Roar? by: Bethany Stotts, May 01, 2008 America continues to face obstacles to free speech touted in the name of the “public interest.” While well-intentioned by some, the encouragement of paternalistic government intervention in the broadcast of news and other media threatens the same repressive consequences as the now defunct Fairness Doctrine. A recent conference, “Does the Red Lion Still Roar?,” debated the ongoing legacy and relevance of the 1969 Supreme Court case Red Lion Broadcasting Corporation v. Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The unanimous court ruling upheld the FCC’s authority to impose “equal time” and...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger faces a lot of heat for proposing drastic budget cuts that slash services for children, the poor and the elderly while allowing thousands of criminals back on the streets to prey upon children, the poor and the elderly. Some even question how the governor can so glibly suggest closing state parks while maintaining an increasingly costly and aggressive public relations operation to promote himself. The governor surely has a lot to answer for in how he's handled the state budget, which has been filled to overflowing by years of booming property values. But with his outlandish proposal...

OP-ED COLUMNIST The Public Interest will cease publication next month. This may not seem very important, since the magazine has never had more than 10,000 subscribers. But over the past 40 years, The Public Interest has had more influence on domestic policy than any other journal in the country - by far. It didn't discover as much truth as Moses did during his four decades of wandering, but it did pretty well. Like many great magazines, it ended up serving a cause other than the one for which it was created. In 1965, when Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick...

You don’t need to be a physician, a nutritionist, or even have a fancy degree to understand why humans eat meat. Just check the teeth in your mouth. There are 20 of them devoted to eating meat, but only 12 for fruit and vegetables. If you are inclined to examine the human body further, you will discover, as Dr. Max Ernest Jutte, MD, pointed out in 1936, "the stomach is a carnivorous organ designed primarily to digest lean meat, and that the small intestine, pancreas, and liver are mainly herbivorous and designed to digest vegetables, fruits, fats, and farinaceous (starch)...

SACRAMENTO — Some of California's most influential business interests — including Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and EDS — were given easy access to a state commission as it met privately to recommend sweeping government changes, according to disclosure reports and interviews. Public interest groups, in contrast, complained Friday that they were largely excluded from the five-month study, ordered by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. A Microsoft sales official met with a top aide that Schwarzenegger appointed to the California Performance Review, and former Michigan Gov. John Engler, now working for Electronic Data Systems, spent about an hour with the review team because "we wanted...

Mark Twain famously said that everybody talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it. The same could be said for taxes in the United States. Sometimes there’s a little tinkering around the edges. This year, for example, Tax Freedom Day fell on April 11th. Established by the Tax Foundation as a barometer measuring the overall tax burden, Tax Freedom Day is the date Americans have earned enough to pay all their taxes for all levels of government for the year. This year’s indicator is three days earlier than it was last year and three weeks earlier than...

Statements by some trial lawyers that they are all but ready to oppose emerging measures to overhaul the state's dreadful workers' compensation insurance system seem to show intent to derail this critically important legislation -- even before a bill has been drafted. Obstinacy harms almost everyone when dealing with complex, contentious legislation like workers' compensation reform. The system as it exists is indefensible. Period. It must be changed. Now. At this critical juncture, no interested party -- trial lawyers, treatment providers and their professional associations, unions, non-represented workers, business groups, insurance companies -- should be taking absolutist positions. With that...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Two public interest groups that want to block sales of fluorescent zebra fish — the nation's first biotech household pet — sued the federal government Wednesday. The lawsuit asks a federal judge to order the Food and Drug Administration (news - web sites) and the Department of Health and Human Services (news - web sites) to halt sales of the trademarked GloFish until the government regulates the genetically modified animal. The normally black-and-silver zebra fish glow bright red under black or ultraviolet light thanks to a gene transplanted from a sea anemone. Sales of the Florida-grown fish...

<p>SACRAMENTO - Richard Katz, one of Gov. Gray Davis' top advisers, has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees the past two years from clients that have had business before the governor's office on issues that Katz handles, state records show.</p>

Why is a popular--and healthy--meat substitute under such relentless attack? Tony Soprano has nothing on the Center For Science In The Public Interest. Fresh from deep-sixing Olestra, Procter & Gamble's noncaloric fat substitute, it's now trying to whack a popular and healthy meat substitute called Quorn , from U.K.-based Marlow Foods Ltd. , a unit of AstraZeneca . Made from a fungus called "mycoprotein," it's used in 90 imitation beef and chicken products and is Europe's top-selling meat alternative. No matter that Quorn received approval from the Food & Drug Administration early this year, after a rigorous five-year process. "This...