Free Republic

WASHINGTON - The judge in the CIA leak case ruled Thursday that if Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald feels that admitting certain classified documents at the upcoming trial of I Lewis "Scooter" Libby can jeopardize national security, Fitzgerald can then move to dismiss the perjury charges against Libby. Judge Reggie Walton cannot automatically allow classified materials to be admitted at trial. He first must go through a series of closed hearings under CIPA regulations. CIPA, the Classified Information Procedures Act, protects and restricts the discovery of classified information in a way that does not impair the defendant's right to a fair...

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

NBC's senior diplomatic correspondent Andrea Mitchell is claiming that her comments have been deliberately distorted in reports covering a 2003 interview where she said Valerie Plame's identity had been "widely known" before her name appeared in a Robert Novak column. "The fact is that I did not know did not know [Plame's identity] before the Novak column," she told radio host Don Imus on Thursday. "I said it was widely known that an envoy had gone [to Niger]," she insisted. "I said we did not know who the envoy was until the Novak column." But the actual exchange in question...

Elected Officials: A Zogby poll conducted on April 6.2005 showed 80% of likely voters feel that non-terminal patients should not be DENIED food and water. Also 56% of likely voters feel Michael Schiavo should have given over his GUARDIAN RIGHTS, considering that he has a girl friend of 10 years and 2 children with her. I wonder what the poll would show if the public were aware of the Guardian Statutes violated by Greer, and Michael, with the knowledge of his attorney, George Felos. > Elected Officials, I suggest you hire a coach to help you obtain courage, in order...

A left-wing witch hunt on campus The notion of left-wing political bias in the universities is widely pooh-poohed on the left as so much right-wing propaganda—a smokescreen for an attempt to push a conservative agenda on college campuses. Sure, conservative professors may be a rare breed; but that, we are told, is only because the academy is all about intellectual openness, tolerance of disagreement, robust and untrammeled debate, and all those other intrinsically liberal values that conservatives presumably just don't get. For a rather dramatic test of this proposition, one need look no further than Southern Illinois University at Carbondale,...

WASHINGTON -- MoveOn.org, the left-wing activist group leading the fight against Rep. Tom DeLay, has claimed there is a Republican clamor to replace him as House majority leader that does not actually exist. "Now," said an e-mail dispatched by MoveOn, "some Republicans in Congress are speaking out against DeLay." In fact, however, no Republican in Congress has criticized DeLay publicly, not even on an off-the-record basis. The e-mail also declares unequivocally that "DeLay illegally used corporate funds in support of his plan to redistrict Texas." Actually, DeLay has not been convicted, tried or even formally accused of breaking the law.

After accusing Secretary of State nominee Condoleezza Rice of trafficking in "falsehoods" during hearings last week before the Sen. Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Barbara Boxer is the new hero of the Howard Dean-Michael Moore wing of the Democratic Party. However it appears that Boxer may have indulged in a few falsehoods of her own while questioning Dr. Rice. To justify her tough grilling, the Golden State Democrat repeatedly invoked war casualties from her home state, saying they amounted to 25 percent of the 1,400 GI's killed in the fighting. But after checking with the website Casualties.org, OpinionJournal.com says that's not...

Blog-Gate Yes, CBS screwed up badly in ‘Memogate’ — but so did those who covered the affair By Corey Pein “The drama began when CBS posted forged National Guard documents on its Web site and, that same evening, an attentive ‘Freeper’ (a regular at the conservative FreeRepublic.com Internet site) named Buckhead raised suspicion of fraud. From there, intrepid bloggers Powerlineblog.com and Little Green Footballs, the Woodward and Bernstein of Rathergate, began to document the mounting signs of forgery.” — Chris Weinkopf in The American Enterprise Online “The yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took [CBS’s 60...

When I was linking to CBS News for my Stupefy Me report earlier today (directly below), I came across this gem of a story (FR THREAD ON THE CBS ARTICLE: Blogs: New Medium, Old Politics NEW YORK, Dec. 8, 2004). It appears that CBS News not only is striking back at the blogs and bloggers that took out Dan Rather and embarrassed their entire organization, but they are also supporting censorship of us rascally citizens. Internet blogs are providing a new and unregulated medium for politically motivated attacks. With the same First Amendment protections as newspapers, blogs are increasingly gaining...

The owner of Nonviolence.org, Martin Kelley, said he got an interesting phone call yesterday from a CBS News publicist for--you guessed it--Dan Rather's "60 Minutes Wednesday", the same program that carried the infamous bogus memos. "Yesterday I got a call from a publicist for CBS News's 60 Minutes. They're running a story tonight on 'Deserters,' U.S. military personnel who have fled to Canada rather than serve in Iraq. She was requesting that I talk up the program on Nonviolence. In nine years of publishing the peace site, I can't remember ever getting a call from a publicist before. I've talked...

The state Supreme Court gave Rush Limbaugh an extra month Wednesday to argue prosecutors illegally seized his medical records as part of a probe into whether he sought multiple prescriptions for painkillers. Florida's high court extended Limbaugh's deadline for filing his written arguments from Dec. 20 to Jan. 20, but said that date is final. Limbaugh argues prosecutors violated his privacy when they seized his medical records. The state 4th District Court of Appeal ruled against Limbaugh, but last month it asked the Supreme Court to consider the case. The DCA wants the Supreme Court to decide whether patients should...

WASHINGTON - House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's legal expense fund accepted improper contributions from two registered lobbyists in 2001 and this week returned the checks, totaling $3,500, fund trustee Brent Perry said Tuesday. House rules prohibit lobbyists from making contributions to a member's legal defense fund. The Tom DeLay Legal Expense Trust has raised more than $900,000 since its creation in 2000, said Perry, a Houston attorney. The reimbursement was prompted by Public Citizen, a Washington-based watchdog group, which combed through DeLay's fund and identified the improper contributions. Asked why it took the fund so long to return the checks,...

Earlier this year, Tom DeLay correctly diagnosed the disease that infects his congressional majority. "If 1994 was the year we stopped thinking like a permanent minority," DeLay told Republicans gathered for a February party retreat in Philadelphia, "2004 is the year we start thinking like a permanent majority: unified, aggressive, rightfully confident of victory." DeLay, of course, thought permanent-majority status would be a good thing for the GOP, but nine months later he's become the symbol of a party corrupted by its lock on power. When House Republicans voted last month to allow members who have been indicted to keep...

Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person's genitals "can result in pregnancy," a congressional staff analysis has found. Those and other assertions are examples of the "false, misleading, or distorted information" in the programs' teaching materials, said the analysis, released yesterday, which reviewed the curricula of more than a dozen projects aimed at preventing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease....

The Washington Post is running this story today about how misleading abstinence-only education is. The claim is that abstinence-only curricullum contain mis-leading, distorted, and sometimes flat-out false facts. Some of their examples of this are: Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person’s genitals “can result in pregnancy,” a congressional staff analysis has found. Okay, so what’s wrong with any of...

GUEST OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Los Angeles Say that an I.R.S. agent leaks a politician's income tax return to a newspaper reporter, an act that is a federal felony. The newspaper may have a First Amendment right to publish the information, especially since it bears on a matter of public interest. The government, meanwhile, is entitled to punish the agent, to protect citizens' privacy and ensure a fair and efficient tax system. To punish the agent, prosecutors may need to get the leaker's name from the reporter; but if the reporter refuses to testify because of a "journalist's privilege" to protect confidential...

Rather deserves respect By Ray Richmond There was a telling moment in a telephone interview I conducted with Dan Rather a little more than a year ago in conjunction with the 75th anniversary of CBS. "I'm not a large part of the legacy (of CBS)," Rather offered. "But whatever part of it that I am and have been, I'm very proud of. At the same time, I'm humbled by the fact that I know that I'm undeserving. I know that I'm still working to be worthy of it." Anyone who knew Rather will tell you this wasn't false modesty. He...

NEW YORK Feeling a bit lost lately? You should, at least according to a compendium posted today at Jay Rosen’s popular PressThink Web log, because the biggest loser on Election Day was not John Kerry but the mainstream media. Daniel Henninger, writing in The Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal, put it this way: "It is often said that the only sure winner in American politics is the media. Amid GOP victory parties or the ruined dreams of the Kerry candidacy, the one constant is that the media marches on. Maybe not this time. Big Media lost big." "I was interested...

What the Republicans did, cleverly, was to establish effective "memes" in the minds of the public and the pundits... Bush became the "winner" of a dead heat, in the midst of an incomplete recount, when a premature victory was declared on her own unnecessary deadline by his Florida campaign co-chairwoman, who also held the crucial post of secretary of state... [I]t was clearly a shameless ploy to slam the door before the election escaped. A meme was born. The other effective GOP meme was the mantra, "we counted, and counted again, and then a third time." These words were chanted...

Between the end of the Republican National Convention and Election Day, the Houston Chronicle spent roughly 50,000 words on President George W. Bush and his campaign for re-election. Perhaps most impressive, one of its own columnists had major news to break on the race. He just didn't, umm, break it to the Chronicle. Russ Baker, a New York-based freelance journalist and contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review, had been circling the reporting waters around President Bush for several months, dialing up hundreds of possible sources for material on the commander in chief. "I just didn't think we really knew enough...