Free Republic

Few events in government are as consciously theatrical as a Supreme Court confirmation. The senators are grandly arrayed in the front of the room, lacking only togas to convey their sense of austere dignity. The audience is huddled in the rear and between them is the nominee, sitting at a large desk — facing a motley crew of crouched photographers — alone, though carefully rehearsed. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, who years ago called such hearings “a vapid and hollow charade,” helped ensure they were exactly that this week. She also once said of the hearings a “repetition of platitudes...

(CNSNews.com) - On Dec. 5, 1996, the government relations office of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) privately provided the Clinton White House with the unreleased draft of a policy statement ACOG was preparing to put out on intact dilatation and extraction (D&X) abortion -- the procedure used in a partial-birth abortion. Having reviewed the draft of the ACOG statement, then-Associate White House Counsel Elena Kagan wrote an internal White House memo declaring that the statement would be a “disaster” for the Clinton administration if it were publicly released. This was because the statement as drafted contradicted the...

Tens of millions were swept up in the gulag, shipped off to exile, forced labor, and often death. The victims included ethnic minorities and the intelligentsia, but also, less well known, the so-called kulaks. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who documented the Soviet penal system in "The Gulag Archipelago," wrote of the nearly 2 million kulaks deported between 1930 and 1931: "This wave poured forth, sank down into the permafrost, and even our most active minds recall hardly a thing about it." ... As the "resettlement" of the kulaks continued, millions of other "undesirables" joined them in internal exile. Yagoda's "grandiose plan" to...