Free Republic

A Democratic Senator deserves to be in some serious hot water after one of his staffers was caught engaging in a highly inappropriate and explicit act in the halls of Congress. The Spectator broke an explosive story Friday that a young male staffer for Maryland Senator Ben Cardin engaged in multiple graphic sex acts with his older boyfriend in the Hart Senate Office Building. The news site accessed the man’s X account to obtain the footage. Yes, he was showcasing X-rated pornography for the entire world to witness. Here is the report from the Spectator: The so-called hallowed Halls of...

As Americans fight to identify the man who shot and killed of Ashli Babbitt, whose identity has remained hidden from the public, a report from the Spectator suggests that her murderer was a Secret Service agent assigned to the disgraced former Vice President Mike Pence. Many Americans have been led to believe that Capitol Police were responsible for the horrific execution of the unarmed veteran patriot, Ashli Babbitt, during the chaotic event at the US Capitol building on January 6. However, a new report from the Spectator suggests that her killer was a member of the United States Secret Service...

Sources close to and within the intelligence community tell Cockburn that Babbitt was actually shot by a member of then-vice president Mike Pence’s protective detail. The VP’s detail, of course, is provided by US Secret Service, not the Capitol Police. One person asserted to Cockburn over drinks in DC that this is ‘basically an open secret’ in the intelligence community. Law enforcement sources suggested to Cockburn that the Capitol Police Department and Department of Justice have publicly identified the shooter as a Capitol Police officer in order to protect the reputation of the Secret Service. Cockburn also wonders if this...

A 2008 column in the far-left magazine CounterPunch accusing Joe Biden of “loutish sexual advances” in the U.S. Senate has become a lightning rod in the debate over Biden and his former staffer Tara Reade’s allegation of sexual assault in 1993. Biden, in the late Alexander Cockburn view, was an empty and worthless swamp creature, a D.C. insider chosen purely to improve Obama’s electoral odds. Five paragraphs in, Cockburn made an aside about Biden’s character that accused him of harassing women who worked in the Senate, even while he was supposedly grieving over his wife’s death: "Biden is a notorious...

On Wednesday, Cockburn stopped by ‘Sovereignty or Submission: Restoring National Identity in the Spirit of Liberty’, hosted by conservative publications American Greatness and The New Criterion at a private club in Washington. Cockburn heard a wide-ranging discussion about nation states and governance, featuring Spectator columnists Daniel McCarthy and Roger Kimball, as well as the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson, the Heritage Foundation’s David Azerrad, American Greatness editor Chris Buskirk, National Review’s John O’Sullivan, and Hillsdale College and Claremont Institute fellow Michael Anton. Over lunch, Tucker Carlson delivered a keynote speech on what he has learned since Trump’s election. The Fox...

Former congressman Anthony Weiner’s old haunts are coming back into the spotlight once again after he was arrested and sentenced to 21 months in prison for sexting a minor. A list recently released to the public contains information on all of Anthony Weiner’s contacts; names, addresses, work, and so forth. The kicker? All of this information was released straight from Weiner’s laptop, which is currently being held under evidence by the FBI. It’s important to note that we are not trying to “witch hunt” anyone, and this information is not meant for you to do the same. We are not...

Moving from the Capitol, British Navy Rear Admiral George Cockburn, Army Major General Robert Ross, and 150 redcoats marched to the White House. Rocca asked Allman what the Britons' impression of the White House would have been as they walked in the door: "I think that it was a pretty good-sized house, but not a palatial one. No Buckingham Palace. No Versailles. That it was, you know, reasonably well decorated." The biggest surprise? A dinner set for 40. So the British feasted in the White House dining room before burning the mansion down. Here, too, the walls survived. But little...

Radical writer Alexander Cockburn, a longtime columnist for The Nation and editor of the political newsletter CounterPunch, died Friday in Germany at age 71. He had been receiving treatment for two years for cancer, his fellow editor at CounterPunch, Jeffrey St. Clair, wrote on the publication's website. Cockburn, who lived in recent years in Petrolia, Calif., was known for an acidic pen that spared few on either the left or right for policies that he felt were hypocritical or corrupt.

The two Swedish women who have brought sex charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange boasted about their relationship with him days before going to cops. Based on information available on various websites quoting police and court papers, here's an account of what happened. The story goes back to August this year, when Assange was in Stockholm to speak at the invitation of Sweden's Social Democratic Party. The event organizer was 31-year-old Anna Ardin, who has been described as a feminist, leftist, social democrat and opponent of abortion. She has worked at the Uppsala University, handling equality issues for the students'...

As Clinton's deputy domestic policy advisor, Kagan helped formulate the Democratic equivalent of what became, in the subsequent George Bush years, the assertion of unitary executive power. There's zero evidence that Kagan would do anything to redress the right-wing tilt of the Supreme Court and plenty that she might exacerbate it. In her confirmation hearings as solicitor general, she entranced the right with her proclamations in favour of the 'War on Terror'. Kagan is the worst possibility thus far to surface, but the other potential nominees are scarcely inspiring. There’s the mainstream liberal Diane Wood, who sits on the Federal...

The global warming jamboree in Copenhagen was surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled in 325 AD for the Council of Nicaea to debate whether God the Father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and the Holy Ghost. Shortly before the Copenhagen summit, the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the Web more than a thousand e-mails either sent from or received at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, headed by Dr....

Washington's Double Vision: al-Qaida, Iran and Global Islamo-fascism Paul Rogers The United States needs to keep the focus on al-Qaida while targeting Iran. It isn't easy. There's no escaping Iraq. Two incidents in recent days bear heavily on the unending conflict in that country. More broadly, they reveal how the United States administration's definition of its "war on terror" (or "long war") reflects entrapment in a way of thinking that requires it constantly to press the real world into the service of a partisan, dangerous, and self-defeating ideology. First, the four coordinated truck-bombings of 14 August 2007 which targeted the...

General David Petraeus, expressed long-term interest in running for the US presidency when he was stationed in Baghdad, according to a senior Iraqi official who knew him at that time. Sabah Khadim, then a senior adviser at Iraq's Interior Ministry, says General Petraeus discussed with him his ambition when the general was head of training and recruitment of the Iraqi army in 2004-05. "I asked him if he was planning to run in 2008 and he said, 'No, that would be too soon'," Mr Khadim, who now lives in London, said. General Petraeus has a reputation in the US Army...

beat the devil by Alexander Cockburn We should never be more vigilant than at the moment a new dogma is being installed. The claque endorsing what is now dignified as "the mainstream theory" of global warming stretches all the way from radical greens through Al Gore to George W. Bush, who signed on at the end of May. The left has been swept along, entranced by the allure of weather as revolutionary agent, naïvely conceiving of global warming as a crisis that will force radical social changes on capitalism. Alas for their illusions. Capitalism is ingesting global warming as happily...

The same top Bush administration neoconservatives who leap-frogged Washington’s foreign policy establishment to topple Saddam Hussein nearly pulled off a similar coup in U.S.-China relations—creating the potential of a nuclear war over Taiwan, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell says. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel who was Powell’s chief of staff through two administrations, said in little-noted remarks early last month that “neocons” in the top rungs of the administration quietly encouraged Taiwanese politicians to move toward a declaration of independence from mainland China — an act that the communist regime has repeatedly warned...

Would you expect a former writer for the Village Voice and The Nation to be harshly critical of soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore and his band of not-so merry manmade global warming alarmists? Neither would I. Yet there it was in the leftwing newsletter CounterPunch, written by editor Alexander Cockburn. *****Critical Update: Cockburn's article published by The Nation. Entitled “Hot Air, Cold Cash; Who are the Merchants of Fear?,” the piece absolutely eviscerated all those advancing the theory of anthropogenic global warming for what Cockburn believed to be financial and political gain (emphasis added throughout): No response is more predictable than the...

In a couple of hundred years historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet's rapid downward slide. Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church sold indulgences like checks. The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in "carbon credits" is in formation. Those whose "carbon footprint"...

The article by Andrew Cockburn entitled "True Colors: Divided Loyalties in Puerto Rico," published in the March 2003 issue of the National Geographic Magazine, which has a world-wide readership of over seven million, has sparked much commotion in Puerto Rico and the United States. In his article, the author, who based his damaging characterization of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans on interviews with members of pro-independence, anti-U.S., and Leftists sectors, portrays Puerto Ricans as a bunch of drug addicts, alcoholics, and disloyal to the U.S., who live at the expense of the U.S. taxpayers, and that the economy of the...

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- In 1996, Jim Jordan, campaign manager for Democrat presidential contender Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), was press secretary for Tim Johnson during his challenge to then-incumbent Sen. Larry Pressler (R-SD). The long, negative campaign resulted in the end of the South Dakota Republican's 22 years in Congress. During the campaign, Pressler was dogged by questions about his health, since his father suffered with Alzheimer's disease. But the most damaging attack was delivered by James Abourezk, the man Pressler replaced in the Senate in 1978. Abourezk brought Alexander Cockburn, author of "Washington Babylon" to speak to a Sioux...

Publication of The Case for Israel has made me the target of vicious personal attacks. A systematic effort to discredit the book, and me, has been undertaken by a well-organized group of Israel bashers led by Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, and Alexander Cockburn. As soon as the book reached the bestseller lists and began to get good reviews around the country, this triumvirate went to work. They had a model for their attack going back 20 years. The mode of attack is consistent. Chomsky selects the target and directs Finkelstein to probe the writings in minute detail and conclude that...