Free Republic

Reason Magazine has long associated themselves with the Ron Paul campaign, if not officially endorsing him. Their Hit & Run blog has served as the heart of rational Paul apologetics, and in their skilled hands, that has proven essential to his campaign. Now, as the magazine has Paul on its cover, its new editor has the unpleasant task of looking a little more closely at the candidate, and Matt Welch finds it an unpleasant journey. Has Paul really disassociated himself from, and "taken moral responsibility" for, these "Ron Paul" newsletters "for over a decade"? If he has, that history has...

The candidates for South Dakota's lone U.S. House seat debated again Sunday night, and, for the most part, refrained from direct attacks and addressed questions from citizen panelists. The forum, at the South Dakota Public Broadcasting studios in Vermillion, was broadcast on radio and television. It featured five panelists and audience members asking questions of Democrat Rick Weiland, Republican John Thune and independents Stacey Nelson and Kurt Evans. Most of the questions dealt with economic matters. One panelist, noting that the net worth of the three richest people in the nation is three times the value of all of South...

(Editor's note: Following are the answers given by Kurt Evans, an independent candidate from Wessington Springs who is seeking a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Evans is one of four candidates, including Stacey Nelson, Milbank, an independent affiliated with the Reform party; John Thune, Pierre, a Republican; and Rick Weiland, Madison, a Democrat.) * What are two pieces of legislation that you want to introduce if elected?One of my priorities would be legislation to end U.S. support for the United Nations. The U.N. is, in my opinion, irredeemably corrupt. It is using its worldwide propaganda machine to promote...

If ever there was a candidate who seemed tailor made for talk radio, it is Patrick J. Buchanan... Yet having won in New Hampshire, Mr. Buchanan has suddenly been rebuffed by the nation's most prominent talk-radio hosts ... "I'm amazed at how outspoken a lot of them are," said William Adams, publisher of Talk Daily, a newsletter that reports on the nation's most popular radio hosts... The most dramatic break has been between Mr. Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh ... Now, as radio's archconservative, he is refusing Mr. Buchanan a conservative's label. "Pat Buchanan is not a conservative," he announced on...

Giuliani: I'm really not a Republican. I ran as a Liberal - which really confuses people.

My staff and I agreed that we needed to focus on the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which appeared to be running out of control. By the time we came to the subject, investigation by the General Accounting Office (GAO) and congressional committees had already indicated that the White House used the INS to further its political agenda. A blatant politicization of the agency took place during the 1996 presidential campaign when the White House pressured the INS into expediting its "Citizenship USA" (CUSA) program to grant citizenship to thousands of aliens that the White House counted as likely Democratic...

TWA FLIGHT 800 was DOWNED in 1996 by a MISSILE, not the fuel tank! HOW MANY JOBS WERE LOST DUE TO CLINTON COVERUP?? 2002 - The GOVERNMENT COVER-UP is STILL GOING ON! TWA Flight 800 shot down on July 16, 1996. On July 15 a communiqu‚ was issued by Islamic jihad connected to Iraq. It read: "The mujahideen [holy warriors] will deliver the ultimate response to the threats of the foolish American president. Everyone will be amazed at the size of that response. Their time is at the morning-dawn," which corresponded to dusk in New York when TWA Flight 800...

ATLANTA - Richard Jewell, the former security guard who was erroneously linked to the 1996 Olympic bombing, died Wednesday, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said. Jewell, 44, was found dead in his west Georgia home, GBI spokesman John Bankhead said.

Saddam's Shadow Africa Energy & Mining June 18, 1997 Copyright 1997 Indigo Publications Africa Energy & Mining June 18, 1997 SECTION: MINING; DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO; N. 207 LENGTH: 787 words HEADLINE: Saddam's Shadow BODY: It's not only diamonds and base metals that interest big mining companies and the latter are not alone in being interested in Katanga. In the delegation that the United States sent to Kinshasa on June 2 under its ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, the state department's African affairs department was represented by Marc Baas, director for Central Africa. (Susan Rice, director for African...

Two weeks back, the Chinese military shocked America by shooting one of China's aging satellites out of the sky with a ground-based missile. As it happens, no American played a greater role in the success of that shoot-down than the much-discussed chairman and founder of Stonebridge International, Samuel "Sandy" Berger. I do not know whether the results pleased Berger, but I cannot imagine a better advertisement for his subsidiary, Stonebridge China. Berger knows these circles well. During the Clinton years, according to the New York Times, he served as "the point man for the White House's China policy." That policy,...

My regular readers know that I patrol South-Central Los Angeles. Recently I saw this flyer which, as you can imagine, piqued my curiosity: (click pictures for larger versions) This document was distributed by a group called the Black Riders Liberation Party, an offshoot of the Black Panther Party started by this man: Whom they call Taco: The Black Riders Liberation Party was formed in 1996 by Bloods and Crips in the California Youth Authority college class. As their political understanding grew, especially being inside the belly of the beast, they were able to see up close how oppressive and dehumanizing...

SEOUL, Oct. 12 (Yonhap) -- North Korea has already manufactured several nuclear weapons and is ready to deploy these in the event of a war, a high-ranking North Korean defector claimed on Thursday. Hwang Jang-yop, a former secretary of the Workers Party of Korea and one of the North's top theorists, said the reclusive nation signed a pact with Pakistan in 1996 on the transfer of uranium-based nuclear technology

WASHINGTON - Federal officials are investigating how National Archives documents of interest to Indians suing the Interior Department were found discarded in a trash bin and a wastebasket. The discovery came to light on Sept. 1, when Archives staff noticed federal records in one of the trash bins behind the National Archives Building near the Capitol. They notified the Archives' inspector general, Paul Brachfeld, whose staff recovered the documents. They found at least a portion of the documents were Bureau of Indian Affairs records dating to the 1950s, according to Jason Baron of the Archives' Office of General Counsel, in...

The following text is a fatwa, or declaration of war, by Osama bin Laden first published in Al Quds Al Arabi, a London-based newspaper, in August, 1996. The fatwa is entitled "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places." ..... But your most disgraceful case was in Somalia; where- after vigorous propaganda about the power of the USA and its post cold war leadership of the new world order- you moved tens of thousands of international force, including twenty eight thousands American solders into Somalia. However, when tens of your solders were killed in...

Revelations in the Peoria Journal Star earlier this week that the Peoria/Champaign area is one of seven in the United States on a terrorist “circuit” were frightening. “Terrorists enter the United States in San Francisco and Los Angeles, then move to Phoenix, then Denver," reported Phil Luciano of the PJS. "From there some head to Peoria and Champaign. Some terrorists remain in those communities, while others head on to New York City" (emphasis added). Luciano was provided this information by Peoria County Sheriff Mike McCoy, who received it at a recent FBI conference held in Springfield. Names of larger cities...

This is a reference thread with links to previous FR threads discussing the arrest of a suspect, John Mark Karr, in the decade-old cold case concerning the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, plus case resources for continued commentary on investigation of the crime.

SCATTERED AMONG the loose papers and bound files unearthed last week at the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad was "letter no. 140/4/5," labeled "Confidential and Personal" and addressed to "The President's Office--Secretariat." The letter concerns George Galloway, a pro-Saddam member of the British Parliament, who founded a charity known as the Mariam Appeal, ostensibly to aid Iraqi children suffering under U.N. sanctions. The missive, from the Iraqi Intelligence Service, is a request that money be funneled directly to Galloway. It reads in part: His projects and future plans for the benefit of [Iraq] need financial support to become a motive...

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen won't let go of the mystery: Just where did the Cuban government get up to $3.9 billion it funneled through a Swiss bank over seven years. Was Havana simply, as it claims, banking its income from tourism and remittances that Cubans abroad send to their relatives on the island? Or was dirty money involved? Ros-Lehtinen, the Cuban-born Florida Republican, wants to know, and she has been badgering officials of the United Bank of Switzerland (UBS) and the U.S. Federal Reserve for answers. ''That's an awful lot of money,'' Ros-Lehtinen told The Herald. According to the latest answers...

(AP) ATLANTA Richard Jewell's fortunes changed in a split second. The security guard was initially hailed as a hero for spotting a suspicious backpack in a park and moving people out of harm's way just before a bomb exploded during a concert at the 1996 Summer Olympics. Then the media called him a suspect and he became a public spectacle. As the 10th anniversary nears of the July 27 blast that killed one and injured 111 others, the episode is still fresh in Jewell's mind. "The heroes are soon forgotten. The villains last a lifetime," Jewell told The Associated...

Per http://www.sweetness-light.com/ Excerpt: Lest we forget, our good friends in China sold C-802 missiles to Iran in 1996 and subsequently. The Clinton administration announced they wouldn’t call for sanctions, since they didn’t see this as a destabilizing action on the part of China and Iran: Testifying in April, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Robert Einhorn said the law "does provide for a substantial list of actions" against anyone providing Iran or Iraq with destabilizing numbers or types of conventional weapons, or assisting them in the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. The administration has maintained since March 1996 that China’s...