Free Republic

A mysterious $250,000 donation used to bankroll a political committee controlled by a potential candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, John Edwards, highlights a gap in federal laws requiring reporting of political contributions. In June, a closely held company gave a quarter of a million dollars to the One America Committee, a so-called 527 organization affiliated with Mr. Edwards, who became the Democrats' vice presidential nominee in 2004 after making a spirited but ultimately unsuccessful bid for the presidential nomination. A report that the committee filed with the Internal Revenue Service identified the donor as Oak Spring Farms,...

FIVE YEARS have now passed since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and what have our universities been doing? I can tell you about Harvard, and the answer is not reassuring. Harvard has just welcomed the former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami to give a little talk. Harvard thinks this is free speech, but in fact the university has allowed itself to be used as a platform for sweet-talk in the service of a regime that hates, and wants to bamboozle, America. Note, too, that Harvard professor Stephen Walt and a Chicago professor have just written an exposé of the Israeli lobby's...

Sen. John F. Kerry yesterday blasted the Bush administration for war and homeland security policies that he said leave Americans more vulnerable to attack. Kerry’s remarks came in a Faneuil Hall speech on the eve of tomorrow’s five-year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. In his fourth speech this year at the venue, Kerry accused the administration of using the tragedy that killed about 3,000 Americans to justify the war in Iraq. “It is immoral to treat 9/11 as a political pawn (to) excuse the invasion of Iraq,” Kerry said. “They were attacked and killed not by Saddam...

Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon on Wednesday would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening. The proposal is in the last 10 pages of an 86-page bill devoted mostly to military commissions, and it is a tangled mix of cross-references and pregnant omissions. But legal experts say it adds up to an apparently unique interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, one that could allow C.I.A. operatives and others to use many of the very techniques disavowed by the Pentagon — including...

The mid-tern elections are fast approaching, and already anti-gun forces are attempting another John Kerry-like charade. If hunters and shooters had not noticed,liberals have recognized that you are a formidable voting block they need to fool in order to succeed at the polls on a regular basis - despite the fact that their true philosophy is counter to much of what hunters and shooters believe in terms of animal rights and firearm ownership. This is why, during the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry professed to be pro-gun ownership and pro-hunting. The problem for Kerry was as soon as he talked...

"The rap on Mitt Romney is that he's scripted,safe, skin-deep.But if you saw your dad endure what his did, you might watch what you say,too. There, you said it.There's no taking it back. Maybe the regret formed in your mind even before the last syllable of the Godforsaken comment had left your lips. Maybe you thought nothing of it until 12 hours later, when a voice woke you out of your REM rebound, demanding to know,"What in the hell were you thinking?"Either way, it was too late. We've all said something at some point in our lives that we desperately...

WASHINGTON -- The terrorist attack foiled by British authorities prompted a battle of words yesterday between a pair of presidential contenders from Massachusetts, with Governor Mitt Romney lashing out at Senator John F. Kerry for suggesting that the war in Iraq has harmed the nation's security. Kerry, the Democrats' 2004 presidential nominee, seized on news of the disrupted plot as a ``stark reminder" that Osama bin Laden remains at large and said it shows that Al Qaeda has ``grown in strength" since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. ``Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda have succeeded in isolating the United...

It takes chutzpah, as they might say in Haifa, to declare that Hezbollah and Israel wouldn’t be fighting now if John Kerry were president. Kerry, who did declare that, apparently has more chutzpah than nuance, as it turns out. “If I was president, this wouldn’t have happened,” said the senator from Massachusetts. “The president has been so absent on diplomacy when it comes to issues affecting the Middle East. … We’re going to have a lot of ground to make up (in 2008) because of it.” Because of Bush’s focus on Iraq, Kerry said, the president failed to address threats...

Authorities this afternoon implored members of Boston’s Brazilian community to seek medical attention if they were treated by a couple charged with running an unlicensed cosmetic surgery clinic out of their Framingham basement after a 24-year-old woman died Sunday following liposuction. Middlesex County District Attorney Martha Coakley urged Brazilians and others who may have been treated by Luiz Carlos Ribeiro to see a licensed doctor and call police, saying that patients who come forward would not be charged with a crime. Luiz Carlos Ribeiro, 49, and his wife, Ana Maria Miranda Ribeiro, 49, pleaded not guilty today in Framingham District...

Testing lines for 2008, Democrats with presidential ambitions accused President Bush and the Republicans of making a mess of the economy and Iraq while arguing that Democrats offer the best hope for a rising middle class that's preferred the GOP. "They're not taking care of America. They're bankrupting our country and failing to address the problems," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said Monday, citing skyrocketing gas, college and health care costs. Speaking to the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist think tank, she and three other yet-declared presidential candidates argued that Republicans have ignored the very people who make up much...

The U.S. Senate actually did vote for the security fence along the Mexican border -- before it voted against it. The Senate overwhelmingly supported it in May, 83-16. But by Thursday it overwhelming refused to pay for it, 71-29. Those in favor of building but not funding included most of the Republican leadership, The Washington Times reports. Is one John Kerry not enough? The transformational anarchy continues. There is strong bipartisan support inside the Beltway to allow Mexico, and perhaps soon Canada, to merge with the U.S. and transform into some sort of Greater America where the Amero will be...

(On Friday, June 23, we held our fifth Prospect breakfast, this one featuring conservative activist Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. Among the guests were Michael Tomasky, Ezra Klein, and Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect; columnist Marie Cocco; Ellen Ratner of Talk Radio News Service; Ari Berman of The Nation; Michael Scherer and Walter Shapiro of Salon.com; Amy Sullivan of The Washington Monthly; and Mark Schmitt of the New America Foundation.) ......... (Grover Norquist) "The modern Reagan Republican Party, the modern conservative movement, if you want to know what it’s going to do … imagine a table and...

US Senator Joe Lieberman, who's in the midst of a tough Democratic primary fight, is hated by many members of his own party. In fact, his "friend" and partner in the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore, recently declined a request from the Lieberman campaign to endorse the moderate senator from Connecticut. Gore gave reporters some malarkey about his personal policy of not endorsing candidates, but it wasn't that long ago that he threw his weight behind Howard Dean with a surprising endorsement prior to the media circus "Dean Machine" collapsing. When Lieberman ran and lost as Gore's candidate for Vice...

When Cambridge recently renewed its status as a sanctuary city for all immigrants, including undocumented ones, the news barely caused a stir around here. But the move has made the city a target for an immigration control group based in Washington ,which is starting a national campaign urging undocumented immigrants to flood into the Massachusetts city. ProjectUSA is raising money to pay for a billboard in northern New Jersey that it hopes will be the first of many across the country. The proposed billboard would read: "Attention: Illegal Aliens. Cambridge, Mass. is a sanctuary city. For help getting there,contact projectusa.org/NJ-mass...

(AXcess News) New York - When Democrat Sen. Hillary Clinton was booed by her party's base at the "Take Back America" conference, it was the result of her saying the US must finish the job in Iraq and not announce a withdrawal date. However, Clinton voted "Yes" to a resolution demanding that troops begin withdrawal of US troops this year and that the Commander-in-Chief should submit a plan for total withdrawal -or a "redeployment," as several Democrats call leaving Iraq. Clinton also opposed any criminal investigation of the New York Times and defended their right to print the story regarding...

WASHINGTON -- The comic career of Senator Jean-Francois Kerry is picking up steam, or gas, as the case may be. This inveterate windbag is, according to the New York Times, reopening the Swift Boat controversy of 2004 that did such damage to his presidential prospects when hundreds of the Vietnam War veterans who served with him deflated his reckless boasts of military gloire. He has undertaken this quixotic mission claiming that he can repristinate his military record despite the Swifties' evidence against it. Then the delusory senator from Massachusetts seems to think he will be a shoo-in for the presidency...

Folks, I was shocked! SHOCKED when I read an Associated Press news story that, in essence, told readers that the Democrat Party is cautioning their left-wing actvists to "cool it," and start sounding as if they are normal Americans instead of the Stalinist mob we've all come to know and love. Well, perhaps not love, but at least we know them and their Stalinist tactics. When I first read the article, I figured some conservative hacked onto AP's website and planted this story of the Democrat Party's plan of deception. But it was a genuine AP news story. Perhaps the...

Senator John Kerry has been comparing the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and indicating that they are very similar; his conclusion is its time to get out. Not for the first time, Kerry is dead wrong. There are indeed similarities, but — not withstanding what we read and see in the media — there are important differences as well. Let me offer a blunt appraisal. It is not regarded as polite to mention it — almost no one does — but most of the grunts in Vietnam were draftees; in Iraq, they all volunteered. On the Vietnam Memorial in Washington...

Why is it so hard to believe John Kerry? The Massachusetts senator is finally taking the anti-war position that people who know him well expected him to embrace long ago. The position is welcome, if long overdue; unfortunately, it doesn't dispel doubts about the thinking that got him to this place. Kerry now labels his 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq invasion a mistake and is calling for U.S. troop withdrawal by the end of the year. His position -- for now -- is as crisp today as it was meandering during the last presidential campaign. Had he taken such...

"This Lieberman-Lamont race is becoming exceptionally important, because it's the most high-profile of a series of clashes between two different ways of doing politics. The bear ad, and the ad man named Carter Eskew who is the consultant behind it, unwittingly reveals a lot about what's going on in both DC and in Connecticut. Looking into how Carter Eskew does business will illustrate the stakes of the Lamont-Lieberman fight. Eskew isn't just your every day ad man; he's a partner at the Glover Park Group, a high profile lobbying and communications shop in DC that includes him and ex-Clintonites such...