Free Republic

Republicans in the New York Senate still seem lukewarm to any change, allowing a bill championed by Assemblyman Dan Quart, a Manhattan Democrat, to languish for months without a vote. And for the first time, a powerful opponent to reform — Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. — is coming out of the shadows and going full-bore to scuttle Democratic efforts. It’s an odd look for a self-styled progressive prosecutor like Vance. Outside of a few reactionary — and baldly hypocritical — Republicans in the statehouse, Vance stands more or less alone in his public opposition. For two years now,...

Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein is being accused of groping a 22-year-old Italian model on the opening weekend of his Radio City “New York Spring Spectacular,” police sources said Monday. The model told cops that the Oscar-winning Hollywood producer sexually abused her after coaxing her to his Manhattan office on the pretense of talking business, sources told the Daily News. The woman told cops that Weinstein — a married, 63-year-old father of five — groped her private area and her breasts around 6 p.m. Friday in his third-floor office at the Tribeca Film Center on Greenwich St., the sources said. “He...

Political-memoir names: so cliche that they're bound to repeat. Hillary Clinton's upcoming memoir, which is expected to look back at her time as secretary of State, now has a name: Hard Choices. Which is an okay title! She no doubt had to make some tough decisions while at State, and has at least one big decision to make coming up in the next year or so. But the former Cabinet member and possible future presidential candidate may have been better served by a different title—like, say, Tough Decisions. Because Hard Choices has already been used. By another former secretary of...

ABC News has learned that Richard Holbrooke, the US Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, has died. On Friday, Holbrooke was rushed to the hospital with a torn aorta. He went through more than 20 hours of surgery. Earlier this evening, speaking at the US State Department, President Obama sang Holbrooke's praises and called him "a tough son of a gun." Holbrooke, 69, was a former ambassador to the United Nations and served as chief negotiator at the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. The New Yorker's George Packer wrote a nice story about Holbrooke last year,...

Secret diner in Washington Holbrooke and Thaqui planned terror Less than a week before the clashes in Kosovo and Metohija occurred, a group of Albanian lobbyists from USA held a meeting at which they decided to help Kosovo Albanians to force international community to give independence to Kosovo. 'Blic' got this information from well-informed sources in the US. As 'Blic' further finds out this informal meeting was held at the initiative of David Philips, deputy director of the Center for preventive action within Council for international relations in New York. The meeting was held at his home with light diner....

The Rockefellers and Iran: Jay Rockefeller’s Reversal and the Iranian-American LobbyBy Fedora In 1979, Rockefeller representatives launched an unsuccessful operation to lobby the Carter administration in support of the Shah of Iran, who was seeking safe haven in the wake of a coup by Islamic revolutionaries. Codenamed Project Alpha, the operation was spearheaded by Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, with support from oil lobby lawyer John McCloy. Although Project Alpha won the support of National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, it met opposition from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and failed to win...

AMERICANS will certainly have 9/11 in mind when they vote today. But they should keep another date in mind, too — one almost exactly a quarter-century ago: Nov. 4, 1979. A clear path runs to 9/11 from the day of the raid on the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the seizure of American hostages. The 1979 embassy attack came at a time when the administration of President Jimmy Carter was trying to prop up the new Khomeinist regime in Tehran. Carter had decided to support Khomeini in the context of the so-called "Green Belt" strategy developed by National Security...

When the Americans go to the polls on Tuesday they would do well to remember two events that have altered their lives forever. The first was the raid on the US Embassy in Tehran, and the seizure of American hostages on Nov. 4, 1979. The second was the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks against New York and Washington. The embassy seizure showed that Americans were no longer safe outside their homeland and that even diplomatic immunity would not protect them. The 9/11 attacks showed that the Americans were no longer safe even in their own homeland, and that no amount of...