Free Republic

Road to MoscowBill Clinton’s Early Activism from Fulbright to Moscow By Fedora SummaryDuring the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton’s student protests and Moscow trip generated much controversy, but few answers. While Clinton’s government files from that era seemingly remain unavailable even today, there is at least more information available than in 1992. The public record reveals that Clinton’s social network and views on Vietnam were influenced by a pattern of contact between Communist agents and sympathizers and Clinton’s academic and political associates. This pattern is documented here through an analysis of Clinton’s antiwar activity up through the time he left Oxford...

If they lie, you can’t trust them. That’s a fairly straightforward rule. It is certainly the one that trial lawyers bank on. It is not a hard and fast rule. A person may shade the truth for various reasons: vanity, personal allegiances, financial incentives, etc. Usually, once you figure out the relevant motivation, you can sort out on what matters he is probably credible and what he is prone to lie about. Sometimes, though, the story is so unbelievable, so insulting to the intelligence, that a rational juror knows it is best to discount all of the testimony — or,...

They won’t get very far with “We’re not as bad as they say we are.” After a first term that has been historically abysmal, President Obama stands a good chance of being reelected. How can that be? Here is the blunt explanation: We have lost a third of the country and, as if that weren’t bad enough, Republicans act as if it were two-thirds. The lost third cannot be recovered overnight. For now, it is gone. You cannot cede the campus and the culture to the progressive, post-American Left for two generations and expect a different outcome. So even if...

The group opposes a law curtailing Jew hatred.Breaking news: CAIR, perennial agitator for language purges and “hate speech” regulation, is suddenly the champion of First Amendment free expression. It proves, once again, that Islamists and leftists are just like defense lawyers. A defense lawyer who has a good case can be very persuasive. If the defendant really is innocent, or if the prosecution’s case really is flawed, defense counsel can take one main line of defense and pound away at it relentlessly. That is how doubt is sown, which is the defense lawyer’s objective. A credible story that the prosecutor...

A recent case sheds light on the organization, but most Republicans ignore it. I’m a big fan of the 1 percent. No, not the dastardly 1 percent of Occupy Wall Street myth; I’m partial, instead, to the 1 percent of Congress that takes seriously the threat of Islamic-supremacist influence operations against our government. The people have 435 representatives serving in the House and another hundred in the Senate. Of these 535, a total of 288 are Republicans — 241 and 47 in the lower and upper chambers, respectively. Of these, only five House conservatives — five — have had the...

I’m glad Mitt picked Paul Ryan. Of the finalists who’ve been floated in the last few weeks, he is the best choice. I like him, although as I’ve said before, he’s not quite the Captain Courageous some on our side portray him to be. But he is more serious about dealing with our financial catastrophe than most of the Beltway GOP. As Mark’s never-to-be-missed weekend column illustrates today, that’s not exactly not a high bar, but hey, that’s the hand we’re dealt. Bottom line: I feel better about Romney because he made this choice, and I imagine most other conservatives...

He was correct about the Soviet atomic spies. The whole focus of the Soviet atomic bomb program was to build a copy of the American "Fat Man" implosion device. Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, David Greenglass, Rosenbergs and the other spies provided all of the info on the bomb to the Soviets. The first Soviet atomic bomb called "RDS-1", detonated on 29 August 1949 was an almost exact copy of the American "Fat Man".

I strongly disagree with David French’s analysis. I’m inclined, instead, to agree with commentators ranging from former Reagan Justice Department official Mark Levin to Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz that the affidavit is stunningly weak — “unethical,” as Prof. Dershowitz puts it. In fact, I go further (which, after nearly 20 years of writing and supervising the writing of complaint affidavits, I think I’m qualified to do). This affidavit is not law, it is agitprop: invoking, for example, the explosive term “profiled” but carefully avoiding any discussion of what it means and failing to note that (a) there is no evidence of...

Great article about Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America, by Mark Levin. http://www.newcriterion.com/m/articles.cfm/Dystopia-in-America-7299

The reaction to an accidental Koran-burning was inexcusable. We have officially lost our minds. The New York Times reports that President Obama has sent a formal letter of apology to Afghanistan’s ingrate president, Hamid Karzai, for the burning of Korans at a U.S. military base. The only upside of the apology is that it appears (based on the Times account) to be couched as coming personally from our blindly Islamophilic president — “I wish to express my deep regret for the reported incident. . . . I extend to you and the Afghani people my sincere apologies.” It is not...

Remember when WFAN’s Mike Francesca said that Tim Tebow wouldn’t do Rosie O’Donnell’s Sirius XM radio show at the Super Bowl because he objected to her gay lifestyle? That turned out to be bogus, of course: in fact, Rosie even set up Tebow on a date, according to In Touch magazine. When former Playmate Jenny McCarthy told O’Donnell that she was newly single and “had a crush” on Tebow, O’Donnell introduced her to Tebow and demanded that the two exchange phone numbers. “Rosie jumped up and took Jenny by the arm and walked her over to Tim. She said to...

ALBANY — Democratic Rep. Carolyn McCarthy’s Long Island district is on the chopping block as state leaders begin redrawing congressional boundaries, the Daily News has learned. State Senate and Assembly negotiators are looking at merging McCarthy’s Nassau County district into a Nassau-Queens district now held by fellow Dem Gary Ackerman, sources close to the planning said. McCarthy’s current district “collides” with Ackerman’s, making it a perfect candidate for merger, insiders said. The lines are expected to be drawn in a way that favors Ackerman in a potential primary. McCarthy, 68, was first elected in 1996, three years after her husband...

The Editors shortchanged them. I respectfully dissent from National Review’s Wednesday-evening editorial, which derided Newt Gingrich as not merely flawed but unfit for consideration as the GOP presidential nominee. The Editors further gave the back of the hand to the bids of two other prominent conservatives, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann — a judgment that is simply inexplicable in light of the frivolousness of its reasoning and of the Editors’ embrace of Jon Huntsman, a moderate former Obama-administration official, as a serious contender. The editorial surprised me, as it did many readers. I am now advised that the timing was...

Likud MK Ofir Akunis, who sponsored the bill to limit foreign funding to Israeli human rights organization, stood behind Senator Joseph's McCarthy's actions in the 1950s. Speaking on Sunday on the "London and Kirshenbaum" television show on Channel 10, Akunis said McCarthy – who in the 1950s presided over a committee that investigated Americans suspected of harboring Communist views – said "was right in every word, the fact is - there were Soviet agents."

Binyam Mohamed is back in the news. You may remember him as the al-Qaeda operative who was slated to help would-be “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla conduct a second wave of post-9/11 attacks, targeting American cities. You also may not remember him. After all, the Obama administration quietly released him without charges. Well, there’s a new chapter in this sordid tale. Mohamed is living large — taxpayer-funded large — in Great Britain. For that, we can thank the Lawyer Left’s stubborn insistence that enemy war criminals are really run-of-the-mill defendants. Actually, make that run-of-the-mill plaintiffs. Unlike Padilla, who actually got into...

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) touted “common ground” measures to spur job creation in the GOP weekly address on Saturday. The California lawmaker – a former small business owner – took to the airwaves promoting several areas in which he says there is bipartisan agreement. “By finding ways to support small business and promote entrepreneurship, we can rev up our economy and grow the jobs we need," he said. "And this shouldn’t be an exercise of partisan gamesmanship or credit-claiming." Noting that the Congress approved three trade deals for the president’s signature last week, McCarthy says that there are...

ANDREW C. McCARTHY Christie’s ‘Crazies’ Sharia is not a figment of our imagination. This “sharia-law business is crap . . . and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies!” So blustered Chris Christie. Bluster is the New Jersey governor’s default mode. It has certainly served him well. When directed at surly advocates of New Jersey’s teachers’ unions — who, after all, deserve it — bluster can apparently make a conservative heartthrob out of a pol whose bite is bipartisan moderate, however titillating his bark may be. The style is so effective that Christie seems to be trying it out on...

He is an enemy combatant, so treat him as one. An Iran-backed Hezbollah commander who killed American soldiers in cold blood has been in U.S. custody for four years. Most Americans would see this as a good thing. For the Obama administration, it is a vexing dilemma. This highlights, yet again, why the country can’t afford a second Obama administration. Ali Mussa Daqduq has been a Hezbollah operative for almost 30 years. He is the hardcore. When he joined back in 1983, the “Party of God” (hizb Allah) was just getting its start as Iran’s forward militia in Lebanon, announcing...

Congressional leadership reacted on Friday after House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio., ended debt limit talks with the White House.House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.:"Tonight, months after we had begun negotiations with President Obama, Vice President Biden, and the Administration, Speaker Boehner and I are ending discussions with the White House and beginning conversations with Senate leaders in the hopes of finding a solution to the debt limit debate in order to avoid default. Throughout the months of discussions, we have worked to identify real spending cuts, binding budget reforms, structural changes to save our entitlement programs, and significant debt reduction....

They choose a pivotal moment in the Gunwalker investigation to announce a gun-control bill.A handful of Democratic lawmakers in Congress and a fish cop held a press conference Friday to announce a new gun control proposal, the “Stop Gun Trafficking and Strengthen Law Enforcement Act.” The proposed law has no chance of passing, and seems orchestrated as a Democratic response meant to draw attention away from the still-developing “Gunwalker” scandal: U.S. Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD), ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) will join other members and a...