Free Republic

Ben Affleck: Bush Can Be Hung for 'Leaks' in Plamegate By Josh Hart Apr 9, 2006 Actor Ben Affleck suggested this weekend on 'Real Time with Bill Maher' that President Bush “probably leaked” Valerie Plame's name and so “if he did, you can be hung for that! That's treason!” The would be politician and Democrat went through this exchange according to News Busters that gives a brief and rough transcript on how Mr. Affleck came to this conclusion. *** The panel guests were Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) who was quite humorous as he let loose with some funny four-quotes. Bill...

The ethically-challenged "ethicist" of the New York Times Magazine, Randy Cohen, who writes The Ethicist column has inserted himself into the Henry Louis Gates situation by urging the Harvard professor to sue in order to "pursue social justice." To see where Mr. Ethicist is coming from, let us start off with his laughable money quote in his current column on the subject of lawsuits: Gates should enjoy a cool one and then file suit, assuming he has legal grounds to do so. We Americans are often mocked for being overly litigious, but we are not nearly litigious enough. In the...

WASHINGTON — They came, they met, they drank. They did not apologize. The much-anticipated “beer summit” of President Obama, the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department in Massachusetts took place Thursday night, accompanied by minute-by-minute reporting from the White House press corps, countdown clocks from the cable news networks, and a last-minute addition by the White House in the form of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. After 10 days of near nonstop news coverage of a case that prompted a thousand news stories about race, the men sat down for...

In “The Story: A Reporter’s Journey,” which hit book store shelves Tuesday, April 7, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller revealed in the final chapter that she now believes that she was induced by then-Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald to give false testimony in the 2007 trial of I. “Lewis” Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Given that Fitzgerald’s three-and-a-half year-long investigation and prosecution of Libby riveted the nation’s capital and generated vast news coverage implying, when not outright declaring, that the Bush administration lied the nation into war, one might think that recantation...

After dropping her young daughter with a baby sitter, Taquana Harris rushed to her hostess job at the fashionable Bowery Bar one night last February, her leopard-print evening gown sweeping elegantly through the dark, icy streets of the East Village. Then a strange woman crudely grabbed her by the arm and demanded to know what she had done with the drugs. Within seconds, Ms. Harris recalled, she found herself pinned to the steel grating of a bodega by two plainclothes officers engaged in a neighborhood drug sweep.

t's the film fans have been waiting decades for. And today, the first trailer for the hotly-anticipated Ghostbusters re-boot was finally released. But while many praised the hilarious clip, showing Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones battling New York's supernatural nasties, some have complained that the film is falling back on racial stereotypes. That's because, while the white leads, McCarthy, Wiig and McKinnon, play brilliant engineers, professors and scientists, Jones' character is a simple NYC subway worker.

What I watched for the next two hours was mostly a tragic underutilizing of four of this country's funniest women — Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon as the evil-ectoplasm battlers of the title, fighting to save a New York that is played primarily by Boston — combined with what felt like the world's longest laser-tag game. the main performers rarely get to display their individual idiosyncratic strengths. It's particularly dispiriting to hear McCarthy, one of the most floridly gifted verbal riffers in comedy, have to utter frat-brah catchphrases like "Let's do this." That kind of lifeless,...

Three Dallas police officers were killed and seven others were wounded Thursday night during a demonstration protesting the police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana this week, according to Chief David O. Brown of the Dallas police.

Hillary Clinton, courting young voters and the broader Democratic base, has promised to one-up President Obama on climate change, vowing to produce a third of the nation's electricity from renewable sources by 2027, three years faster than Mr. Obama, while spending billions of dollars to transform the energy economy. A half-billion solar panels will be installed by 2020, she has promised, seven times the number today, and $60 billion will go to states and cities to develop more climate-friendly infrastructure, such as public transportation and energy-efficient buildings. She would put the United States on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions...

Let’s be clear. The global economy is not working for the majority of people in our country and the world. This is an economic model developed by the economic elite to benefit the economic elite. We need real change... We need a president who will vigorously support international cooperation that brings the people of the world closer together, reduces hypernationalism and decreases the possibility of war. We also need a president who respects the democratic rights of the people, and who will fight for an economy that protects the interests of working people, not just Wall Street, the drug companies...

Let us now address the greatest American mystery at the moment: what motivates the supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump? I call it a “mystery” because the working-class white people who make up the bulk of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers for the candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers. On their opinion pages, these publications take care to represent demographic categories of nearly every kind, but “blue-collar” is one they persistently overlook. The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe...

Takeout food? Yeah! That's just the ticket! It's about as good excuse as consumerism to explain the economic woes of Venezuela. A few weeks ago reporter Nicholas Casey of the New York Times almost completely avoided any mention of socialism and placed the blame for Venezuela's economic woes on a vague "consumerism" during an interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air as chronicled in Newsbusters by Clay Waters. Since that "consumerism" excuse seems to have been widely mocked, Casey went to bat with an even more laughable excuse, comparing Venezuela's economic woes to someone who has been ordering takeout food for years...

PEJA, Kosovo — FIRST, a three-part quiz: Which Islamic country celebrates as a national hero a 15th-century Christian who battled Muslim invaders? Which Islamic country is so pro-American it has a statue of Bill Clinton and a women’s clothing store named “Hillary” on Bill Klinton Boulevard? Which Islamic country has had more citizens go abroad to fight for the Islamic State per capita than any other in Europe? The answer to each question is Kosovo, in southeastern Europe — and therein lies a cautionary tale. Whenever there is a terrorist attack by Muslim extremists, we look to our enemies like...

The world’s largest viking ship has arrived in North America after crossing the North Atlantic Ocean on a journey from its homeport in Haugesund, Norway. The Viking ship, named Draken Harald Hårfagre, set sail from Norway with its approximately 32 crew members in late April and made stops in Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland, Canada, before making its way through the Saint Lawrence Seaway to Toronto for the Tall Ships Challenge Great Lakes 2016 festival this weekend. Future stops for the Viking ship include Chicago, Green Bay and Duluth, before heading to U.S. east coast with stops in New York City...

Should she win the presidency, Hillary Clinton would quickly try to find common ground with Republicans on an immigration overhaul and infrastructure spending, risking the wrath of liberals who would like nothing more than to twist the knife in a wounded opposition party. In her first 100 days, she would also tap women to make up half of her cabinet in hopes of bringing a new tone and collaborative sensibility to Washington, while also looking past Wall Street to places like Silicon Valley for talent — perhaps wooing Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook, and maybe asking Tim Cook from Apple to...

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in an interview broadcast Sunday that two of the country’s most prominent newspapers are in an “all-out war” against Donald Trump. During a radio interview with John Catsimatidis, Gingrich blasted the news outlets, saying they are lying about the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. “Both The New York Times and The Washington Post have been in an all-out war to try to redefine Donald Trump,” he said. Gingrich pointed to a Times article that portrayed Trump as often being inappropriate with women. The report relied on testimony from dozens of women who have interacted with...

The New York Post released a special preview of tomorrow's cover page, where they dubbed Hillary Clinton "Grillary".

NEW YORK – Ten years ago, the New York Times reported on a growing underground subculture in the black community known as Down Low, comprised largely of men who secretly engage in homosexual activity while living “straight” lives in public. It’s within that subtext that opposition researchers for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign began investigating rumors that Rev. Jeremiah Wright was running a “matchmaking service” for members of his Trinity United Church of Christ known as the Down Low Club, which included Barack Obama. Over the past several months, WND investigators have interviewed a number of members of the church...

In the aftermath of the Democratic National Convention, the party's nominee, Michael S. Dukakis, has expanded his lead among registered voters over Vice President Bush, the probable Republican nominee, according to a Gallup Poll... Fifty-five percent of the 948 registered voters interviewed in the poll said they preferred to see Mr. Dukakis win the 1988 Presidential election, while 38 percent said they preferred to see Mr. Bush win. The poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points... This represented a shift in Mr. Dukakis's lead from the 47 percent to 41 percent advantage he...

Just what will it take to cut off US funding for Palestinian terror? That question has taken center stage amid the wave of murderous “lone wolf” attacks against Israeli civilians, egged on by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Thursday, a Palestinian killed a sleeping 13-year-old girl in the West Bank. The next day, another opened fire on a car, killing a dad and wounding his wife and two kids. –– ADVERTISEMENT –– Since September, the terror spree has left 40 dead and 430 injured. And every one of the terrorists — or their families — gets a hefty reward from Abbas’...