Free Republic

CLEVELAND -- Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora on Monday accused the U.S. Department of Justice of launching its local public corruption probe two years ago in a conspiracy with Republicans to undermine the Democratic turnout for Barack Obama. • Earlier version of story.Dimora said he and his lawyers will ask the Justice Department and Congress to investigate the motives behind the corruption probe, which became public last July when FBI agents raided the commissioner's home and office and the home and office of political ally Frank Russo, the county auditor. "This is a Republican-driven prosecution," Dimora said during a late-afternoon...

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had successful two-hour surgery today to repair her broken right elbow, her chief of staff said. Mrs Clinton tripped and fell in the State Department's basement on Wednesday ... Mrs Clinton has several foreign trips planned in the coming weeks ...

WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton fractured her right elbow during a fall Wednesday, her chief of staff said. Clinton was on her way to the White House when she fell and injured her elbow, chief of staff Cheryl Mills said in a statement released late Wednesday.

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Clinton was recuperating at home Thursday, figuring out how to send text messages and emails as she nurses a broken right elbow that will require surgery to mend, her spokesman said. "She is at home resting comfortably -- or uncomfortably," said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. "She is working from home. She has already taken some calls, and I'm sure learning … how well you can text with one arm in a sling." Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2009/06/18/2009-06-18_hillary_clinton_takes_a_spill_breaks_her_elbow.html#ixzz0IoZGaEOW&C

State Department says Hillary Clinton has fractured her right elbow after a fall on her way to the White House Wednesday afternoon.

The New Republic, continuing the political world’s odd obsession with the Drudge Report, says its editor, Matt Drudge, has disappeared, or gone into seclusion like some latter-day Howard Hughes. I do not think Drudge has disappeared. I think he is dead. Certainly the Drudge Report, which the New Republic claims gets “20 million hits per day” (a meaningless locution as old-fashioned as the Drudge Report itself) has been on automatic pilot for several years. If he is not dead, he is definitely brain dead. There hasn’t been a breaking story on the site in months. Drudge, once one of the...

On the morning of June 7, 2008, Matt Drudge showed up at the National Building Museum in Washington, where Hillary Clinton was scheduled to give her concession speech. At the entrance, Drudge found his host, Tracy Sefl, a Clinton campaign staffer who, the day before, had offered to meet Drudge at the event. Throughout the campaign, Sefl had served as the Clintons' preferred back channel to communicate with the mercurial operator of the Drudge Report. Both sides benefited from the arrangement: The Clinton camp could push favorable items into the news cycle, and Drudge would receive the inevitable traffic boost...

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, jazz musician and Web designer Charles Johnson has devoted his blog, Little Green Footballs, to exposing Muslim extremism in and outside the United States. His targets have included the Council on American-Islamic Relations, filmmaker Michael Moore, Reuters, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Dan Rather, and the late pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie — who some LGF commenters (not Johnson) call “St. Pancake,” a tribute to the Israeli steamroller that killed her. LGF helped write the lexicon of the self-styled “anti-Jihadist” blogosphere — from “moonbat” (”an unthinking or insane leftist”) to “anti-idiotarian” (”anyone who grasps...

he head of homeland security said Sunday she regrets that some people took offense over a report warning that right-wing extremist groups were trying to recruit disgruntled troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. But Secretary Janet Napolitano added that "a number of groups far too numerous to mention" want to commit domestic terrorism attacks and are looking for new recruits. She told a cable news network the warning report that went out to American law enforcement agencies was consistent with reports that were issued before. "Here is the important point. The report is not saying that veterans are extremists. Far...

A report from Janet Napolitano's Department of Homeland Security is entitled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment." The report is "one of the most shoddy pieces of propaganda I'd ever seen out of DHS," writes Michelle Malkin, who deems it a "piece of crap report." The "Key Findings" section of the report opens with these words: "The DHS has NO SPECIFIC INFORMATION that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence...but the economic downturn and the election of the first African-American president present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment." This document...

On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security distributed a counterterrorism assessment to local law-enforcement types entitled, "Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment." The nine-page paper has many on the right questioning what is going on in Washington. The assessment reads like a sophomore's bad political science essay in, for example, noting that right-wing extremism "may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration." "This is an very unfortunately named document," Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Sara Kudon told me. No lie. The...

Don’t you just love this DHS report on “right winged extremism?” Is this not just grand??!! Another day! Another disgusting attack on Americans! I guess what we are headed for here, according to this report, is a one party system! From the report: “Many rightwing extremists are antagonistic toward the new presidential administration and its perceived stance on a range of issues, including immigration and citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms ownership and use…”Libertas

According to a recent report by your federal government, it is quite likely that our government now considers you or someone you love to be a right-wing extremist and the equivalent of a hate group member: Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue,...

NEW YORK (AFP) — Critics of President Barack Obama's handling of the economy are planning nationwide "tea parties" Wednesday -- and not for the sake of polite conversation. Coast-to-coast demonstrations against Obama's big-spending economic stimulus package are promised for the day that is also the deadline for filing federal income tax returns. Whether Republicans -- in disarray since losing the presidential election last year -- can deliver is open to question. Pro-Republican organizers say they are plugging into widespread popular anger at Democrat-led Washington.

Playboy Magazine got its undies in a bundle over the nation wide Tea Party protests held last Friday that were inspired by CNBC's Rick Santelli's free market rant of February 19. As Noel Sheppard noted on March 1, the skin mag published a piece claiming that Santelli was part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to protest Obama's socialist policies. It turns out, however, that the story has been proven false and in response Playboy has mysteriously removed the piece that first raised the question of the grand conspiracy. Happily, the facts have won over on Playboy forcing it to pull...

I was interviewed by several journalists last week about Rick Santelli’s Rant — my exact quote was it had a “Faux” feel to it. (I haven’t seen it in print yet) What was so odd about this was that Santelli is usually on the ball; we usually agree more often than we disagree. He’s been responsible for some of the best moments on Squawk Box. But his rant somehow felt wrong. After we’ve pissed through over $7 trillion dollars in Federal bailouts to banks, brokers, automakers, insurers, etc., this was a pittance, the least offensive of all the vast sums...

.."Al Franken was taking on the vast right-wing conspiracy before other people even admitted it existed," she told a crowd of 2,000 supporters on the University of Minnesota campus, urging them to give her rival, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, a filibuster-proof margin in the Senate. "Al Franken, with your help, can be our 60th vote."

It could be time to break out those old "Proud Member of the VRWC" coffee mugs collecting dust at the back of your kitchen cabinets. The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy rides again! Hillary invoked the VRWC yesterday at a campaign event in Minnesota for Al Franken in his race against incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman. David Shuster had the report during MSNBC's 4 PM EDT hour today. View video here.

WASHINGTON – Billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, formerly No. 1 on Bill Clinton's enemies list as the so-called "marionette" of the "vast right-wing conspiracy," met with the former president for two hours this week, offering to help him with his global initiative. Scaife, who personally funded many of the investigations of the Clinton administration that led to the president's impeachment, last April formerly endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a daily newspaper he owns. That endorsement came just before the Pennsylvania primary, which Hillary Clinton won, and just after Scaife met with her. Scaife's...

Bill Clinton met Wednesday for more than an hour with Richard Mellon Scaife — the principal financier of conservative research and articles about Clinton scandals — at the former president’s Harlem Global Initiative offices, according sources familiar with the meeting. Scaife requested the meeting to discuss Clinton’s global initiative work and possible ways the two might work together on charitable and humanitarian projects. Still, the meeting came as a shock to Clinton loyalists there to witness Scaife’s arrival. “I must say, it was amazing to be in the office and see the vast right wing conspiracy walk right past you...