Free Republic

In New York, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein has ordered the release of eight more grand jury transcripts from the famous 1951 spy case that led to the conviction of the husband and wife pro-Soviet spy team of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Reuters reports this story as if there is some cloud of doubt still hanging over the Rosenberg's conviction despite that their guilt is no longer debatable. Yet here is Reuters giving cover to those who stubbornly wish to cast doubt on the U.S. prosecution of the Rosenbergs. It also gives Reuters and U.S. detractors the opportunity once again...

Katyn “deserved revenge”? Created: 25.08.2008 15:09 “Stalin was an efficient leader, not a murderer. The killing of Polish officers in Katyn was a well-deserved revenge,“ will be the new official historical theory taught in Russian schools. Before the opening of the new school year, the Russian Academy of Qualification Improvement and Professional Retraining of Education Employees has released guidelines for teachers regarding the history syllabus in schools. From now on, Russian pupils will be informed that some 22,000 Polish officers were indeed killed by the NKVD in Katyn in 1940, but the act was fully justified and “politically suitable”, reports...

Two known Democratic supporters are outraged at their own party after being solicited to buy tickets to Barack Obama's acceptance speech at Invesco Field next Thursday, CBS4 reports. The seats were distributed for free to the general public. One source directed CBS4 to an unpublicized part of the Obama campaign's Web site where Democratic supporters, reportedly with deep pockets, could buy tickets for $1,000 each. The source told CBS4 he was solicited three times to buy the tickets through the Web site. One source said it was unethical and being kept secret from the public. CBS4 was able to find...

Your must-read of the morning: Miami Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin’s barbecue of a fawning documentary about Helen Thomas. Here’s a taste: Multiple choice quiz: Helen Thomas has been covering the White House for 48 years. Which of the following stories did she break? A. President Kennedy’s plans to invade the Bay of Pigs. B. President Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia. C. The Pentagon Papers. D. The Watergate scandal. E. None of the above, or anything else, either. The answer, of course, is E, though you might not guess it from the fawning HBO documentary Thank You, Mr. President: Helen...

I’m not sure this is even worth mentioning. I’d think nothing of it…except McCain’s top 10 list from the day before is still there. If you remember the list was “The 10 Ten Signs Obama is Overconfident About The Presidential Campaign”: 10. Proposed bill to change Oklahoma to “Oklobama” 9. Offered Bush $20 for the “Mission Accomplished” banner 8. Asked guy at Staples, “Which chair will work best in an oval-shaped office?” 7. The affair with Barbara Walters 6. Having head measured for Mount Rushmore 5. Guy sits around eating soup all day 4. He’s voting for Nader 3. Offered...

'Taking Woodstock' set to start Emile Hirsch, Demetri Martin to star in Ang Lee pic By MICHAEL FLEMING Focus Features will begin production late this month on "Taking Woodstock," scripted by James Schamus and to be directed by Ang Lee. Lee's ensemble cast includes Emile Hirsch, Imelda Staunton and Liev Schreiber. Pic is an adaptation of the memoir of Elliot Tiber, who played a role in helping the historic 1969 music fest unfold on his neighbor's farm (Daily Variety, April 22). Less than a month ago, Focus had been thinking about postponing the start of production over concerns that a...

Black Republican leader Frances Rice runs against the grain of most Democrats when she calls them racist. She doesn’t care. That is her belief and she isn’t backing down. Her “Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican” (Rice article on why MLK was a Republican) billboards angered many on both sides of the aisle. She is still waiting for the Democrats to prove her wrong on the MLK billboards without any challenge to the contrary yet. She is one woman I respect because she admits the truth about her race’s racist history and it’s connection to the Democrat Party without...

July 31, 2008 Where in the World is Obama's Missing Thesis? Ed Lasky Barack Obama wrote his senior thesis at Columbia University on Soviet nuclear disarmament. Inquiring people have sought a copy of this thesis to no avail. Columbia says it cannot be found; Barack Obama says he lost it. How likely is that a person so impressed with himself that he writes an autobiography just a few years later would "lose" his senior thesis? After all, a Presidential Library must be filled. And as Jim Geraghty at National Review and others have noted there are a lot of blank...

The Media Mob has learned that a team of Hollywood insiders is currently working on a screen adaptation of Truth And Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power—the 2005 book by former CBS News producer Mary Mapes, in which she defends the 60 Minutes II story by Dan Rather about President George W. Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard, which ran on CBS in September 2004 and eventually led to her ouster from the network. Who would want to turn "Rathergate" into a feature-length film? According to sources familiar with the situation, Producer Mikkel Bondesen,...

It is often asserted by Roman Catholic apologists that Protestants must rely on their tradition in order to know which books ought to be included in the Biblical Canon. The argument says that since there is no “inspired table of contents” for the Bible, then we are forced into relying upon tradition to dictate which books belong in the Bible, and which books do not. It was the church of Rome, these apologists alledge, which determined the canon at the Councils of Hippo (393 A.D.) and Carthage (397 A.D.), and it is only due to this, that Protestants know which...

The politicos' mutual stalking has reached unprecedented new levels this year: At least one side has started to spider the other's campaign website to track that campaign pages' precise word changes up to an hourly basis. John McCain's campaign published a side-by-side comparison of Barack Obama's Iraq War policy web pages on Tuesday using a new automated online tracking service called Versionista. The service, which launched two months ago, allows users to track and cache changes to specific web pages up to an hourly basis, depending on the level of filtering requested, says Peter Bray, its creator in Portland, Oregon....

July 08, 2008, 6:00 a.m. WikipropagandaSpinning green. By Lawrence Solomon Ever wonder how Al Gore, the United Nations, and company continue to get away with their claim of a “scientific consensus� confirming their doomsday view of global warming? Look no farther than Wikipedia for a stunning example of how the global-warming propaganda machine works. As you (or your kids) probably know, Wikipedia is now the most widely used and influential reference source on the Internet and therefore in the world, with more than 50 million unique visitors a month. In theory Wikipedia is a “people’s encyclopedia� written and edited...

BELGRADE - They sit like open sores at the heart of this turbulent eastern European nation. Long before international fugitive Miladin Kovacevic revived tensions between the U.S. and Serbia, NATO bombs reduced a row of once formidable government buildings here to hulking shells. The ravaged red-brick and concrete buildings are still standing nearly 10 years after the American-led aerial assault. They represent a wound that, many Serbians say, still runs deep. "Our people look at America like it's an enemy," said Niko Percovic, 30, a reporter based in the northern city of Novi Sad. That is one of the reasons,...

The lyric from the old pop song that proclaimed "Don't Know Much About History," is a label that could well be applied to many Americans. But despite the fact that surveys occasionally tell us that many college seniors place the Battle of Gettysburg as happening sometime in the middle of World War II, the study of history isn't merely for those hobbyists who like to pose as Civil War or Revolutionary era soldiers. Even as we debate the largely unpopular wars being fought with Islamists in Iraq and Afghanistan, the focus of another crucial debate currently raging on the bookshelves...

Updated with suggestions from the previous post and recent events. Under the Bus: * NEW! Move-On.org * NEW! Wesley Clark (sorta) * Grandma Dunham * Rev. Jeremiah Wright * Fr. Michael Pleger * Michael Klonsky * Muslim supporters * babies that survive abortion attempts * 8,000 Members of Trinity Church of Christ * Samatha Power * Obama advisor/Hamas friend Rob Malley * Austin Goolsbee * Tony Rezko * a less than week-old pseudo-presidential seal * bitter, gun toting, religious white people of rural Pennsylvania * Scarlet Johansson Clinging to the Bumper: * Marilyn Katz (former SDS radical, Obama campaign PR...

MEMBERS of the Greatest Generation - especially those with weak hearts - might want to steer clear of an upcoming PBS documentary that suggests the Allied victory in World War II was "tainted" and questions whether it can even be called a victory. Moreover, the documentary, titled "The War of the World: A New History of the 20th Century," asserts that the war could only be won by forming an unholy alliance with a dictator - Joseph Stalin, who was as brutal as the one they were fighting, Adolf Hitler - and by adopting the same "pitiless" and "remorseless" tactics...

Succumbing to an avalanche of criticism, Sen. Barack Obama's campaign has apparently decided to back away from its trial balloon of a new presidential seal. Newsmax’s lead story Monday morning reported on Obama’s new version of the presidential seal, but a campaign spokesman now says it won’t be used again. “That was a one-time thing for a one-time event,” Robert Gibbs asserted to CNN about the rather intricately designed seal that made its debut last Friday. The new seal was unveiled on Obama's podium when he spoke to a group of Democratic governors. The Obama seal did include the American...

Dear Google comrades Sergei and Larry! The Party looks kindly at your attempts to correct and improve history by unobtrusively modifying the Google logo on notable calendar dates. For years you have zealously informed the masses about progressive and useful events like Earth Day or Earth Hour, while purposefully ignoring Memorial Day (no logo change on this reactionary American holiday). Most recently, you enlightened the unwashed about the Spanish artist Velázquez on June 6 without mentioning the Allied Invasion of Normandy on D-Day, a celebration of which would indeed be offensive to National Socialists. ~ The time is ripe for...

BET founder Bob Johnson, despite his consistent support of Hillary CObama’s election as President during a segment on Wednesday’s "American Morning." "I believe that if Senator Obama leads this country the way he ran the primary, it will become a historic event for African-Americans, probably greater than the Emancipation Proclamation, which was signed in 1863."linton, placed an unequivocal importance on Barack

Hello Everyone - As you can probably tell I am not a regular poster here. I logged in because I think I have found something important and it needs to be shared. As you know, Barack Obama's church - Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago - used to sell hundreds of videos on its website of the sermons of his kooky Afro-centric preacher Jeremiah Wright. When a few of these finally saw the light of day in March the video section of the site was scrubbed and pulled down. You can see the scrubbed version online now (http://www.tucc.org/store/index.cfm?action=catbrowse&catid=40). All...

Here's an interesting exercise: do you see anything wrong with this statement from the NY Times? Mr. Wright, however, emerged from retirement in April and spoke at the National Press Club, offering deeper and broader criticism of the United States and using mocking language. Among other things, he opined that the United States government may have had a hand in creating the AIDS epidemic. Beldar does: This paragraph is one of the most egregious examples I've ever seen of lying by omission. What made Wright's comment so outrageous was not his suggestion that the government "had a hand in creating...

Which is it Barack? Are you a moron or a liar? Or both? On Monday you claimed your Uncle (not further identified) help liberate Auschwitz. Since it was the Soviets who liberated Auschwitz, that left people wondering who your communist uncle was? So your campaign scrambled to get out the word–No, he meant his great uncle and he meant Buchenwald rather than Auschwitz. There, that settled it. So I have one question–how in the hell did your uncle get to Buchenwald. Was he in a row boat? Looks like Great Uncle Charlie was in the Navy. Service records for Charles...

This week's minor controversy about Barack Obama's claim that an uncle liberated Auschwitz was quickly put to rest by his campaign. They conceded that it was a great uncle whose unit liberated Buchenwald, 500 miles away. But other, much more troubling, episodes have provided a revealing glimpse into a candidate who instinctively resorts to parsing, evasions and misdirection. The saga over Rev. Jeremiah Wright is Exhibit A. In just 62 days, Americans were treated to eight different explanations. First, on Feb. 25, Mr. Obama downplayed Rev. Wright's divisiveness, saying he was "like an old uncle who sometimes will say things...

Here are the enlistment records of Charles W. Payne, brother of Madelyn Payne, great uncle of Obama: Charles W. Payne, born 1924, enlisted 10 Nov '42, Navy, 6293977 REgistered, order #12019, Kansas City, Wyandotte Co., Board #4 So, Obama's great uncle liberated Buchenwald from his ship somewhere in the Pacific?

DEMOCRAT Barack Obama admitted he was wrong to say his uncle helped liberate the Nazis' Auschwitz concentration camp after Republicans said Soviet troops freed the camp. Senator Obama's campaign said the candidate meant to say that his great-uncle, Charlie Payne, had helped liberate a part of the Buchenwald camp, not Auschwitz. "Yesterday he mistakenly referred to Auschwitz instead of Buchenwald in telling of his personal experience of a soldier in his family who served heroically," said campaign spokesman Bill Burton. Mr Burton said in the statement that Obama's great uncle served in the 89th Infantry Division that entered Germany in...

"Brad Blakeman, a very charming, intelligent spinmeister in Florida depicted in the film. He was, by his own account, the man at least partly behind "Sore Loserman," "Surrender Gorethy," "The Gorinch Who Stole the Election,"

What Obama's campaign released via first link above states he served in the Infantry. I assume it's possible the records are wrong, or he changed branches. But I'm unaware of that as a standard practice. Perhaps it happened during WWII for manpower reasons? Otherwise, Obama's Great Uncle would seem to have done most of his marching and liberating while at sea.

"In World War Two we didn't have the concept of post traumatic stress syndrome. People had to basically handle it on their own," he said. Referring to an uncle who had been one of the first U.S. troops into Auschwitz, the concentration camp, Obama said: "The story in the family is he came home and just went up in the attic."

“My grandfather marched in Patton’s army, but I cannot know what it is to walk into battle like so many of you,” he told a small group of veterans here Obama also spoke about his uncle, who was part of the American brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz.

Have We Heard of Obama's Uncle Before? A key update to this post, in which Obama describes "his uncle, who was part of the American brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz." From a Chicago Tribune profile of Obama's mother: The education of Obama the would-be politician didn't begin, of course, until after his birth in 1961, in Honolulu. But the parental traits that would mold him — a contrarian worldview, an initial rejection of organized religion, a questioning nature — were already taking shape years earlier in the nomadic and sometimes tempestuous Dunham family, where the only child was a...

John Hagee, the controversial pastor who has endorsed John McCain, argued in a late 1990s sermon that God sent Hitler to help the Jews get to the promised land (Israel, not Auschwitz). Why did God allow the Holocaust to happen? According to a report in the Huffington Post by Sam Stein, Hagee's answer was: "Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel." The report raises several questions. Did God have to be so rough in his methods? Instead of putting the Jews on trains to Auschwitz,...

Obama preached to his flock yesterday and what he said would surprise many people with a little knowledge of history (a class Obama clearly flunked). He said that the Soviet Union collapsed because we negotiated with them.....stop laughing, let me finish.....and that Iran really isn't that big of a threat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew5qP2oPdtQOk, history lesson. The USSR collapsed because their economy collapsed. That collapsed because they tried to keep up with Reagan and the defense build up along with the "star wars" program. Then he goes on to say Iran and the US have common interests? Is he freakin insane? We neither...

Wikipedia is billed as the world's largest encyclopedia, but is it also the world's largest propaganda tool for smearing conservatives and promoting leftist views?

This needs to be widely distributed.I can't post the video clip so you will have to go the the link. It's a clip of John McCain appearing on Des Moines' WHO radio last July, when on-air talent Jan Mickelson played him Tom Harkin's comments from earlier that month, recorded on the floor of the Senate: And if we leave, there will be a bloodbath in Vietnam. All of the people who supported us will be slaughtered in the streets. Well, it didn't happen.

A Hardball epic . . . Message to Chris Matthews: when ripping a guest for his lack of historical knowledge, try to avoid making a history mistake of your own in the same segment. It happened on this afternoon's Hardball. After lambasting a guest for not knowing his Neville Chamberlain history, Matthews surmised that the attack on the USS Cole in October, 2000 happened under . . . President Bush. View video here.

AS A CHILD, Peter Leeson was pirate-obsessed. He cherished the ruby-eyed skull ring he got at Disney World, after riding Pirates of the Caribbean. He took up a collection of coconut pirate heads. He lapped up the pirate themes in "Goonies." And when he grew up to be an economics professor, and started studying pirate society, he found a new excuse for admiration. Pirates, it turns out, were pioneers of democracy. Presidential candidates, take note: Long before they made their way into the workings of modern government, the democratic tenets we hold so dear were used to great effect on...

A Roman Catholic Dogma Originating with Heretics and Condemned as Heretical by 2 Popes in the 5th and 6th Centuries. By William Webster The Roman Catholic doctrine of the assumption of Mary teaches that she was assumed body and soul into heaven either without dying or shortly after death. This extraordinary claim was only officially declared to be a dogma of Roman Catholic faith in 1950, though it had been believed by many for hundreds of years. To dispute this doctrine, according to Rome’s teaching, would result in the loss of salvation. The official teaching of the Assumption comes from...

New film takes Da Vinci Code conspiracy theories and shaky evidence to new heightsJoseph Brean, National PostWhen Ben Hammott discovered the apparent tomb of a Knight Templar at the bottom of a hole in a cave in the countryside of southern France, he thought he had discovered the final resting place of Mary Magdalene, and so he did what any amateur treasure hunter in this age of the Da Vinci Code would have done. He returned with a Hollywood director, lowered a pole into the tomb with "some sticky stuff on the end," removed the shroud from the body, plucked...

Martin Luther (1483-1546) is one of the most important persons in history. He fearlessly opposed Roman Catholic teachings and practices that ran counter to what is found in the Bible and early Christianity. His rebellion against Rome was the greatest single event leading to the Reformation and the establishment of Protestantism. Ironically, the Reformation, with its emphasis on scripture and rejection of long-standing tradition, led to schisms within Protestantism itself. In many cases, this was because some Protestant leaders emphasized some things, while others emphasized different ideas. John Calvin, for example, emphasized the concept of predestination, an idea also advanced...

Four score and seven years ago … No, wait, my mistake. Two score and seven or eight days ago, Barack Obama gave the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address, or FDR's First Inaugural, or JFK's religion speech, or (if, like Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books, you find those comparisons drearily obvious) Lincoln's Cooper Union speech of 1860. And, of course, the senator's speech does share one quality with Cooper Union, Gettysburg, the FDR Inaugural, Henry V at Agincourt, Socrates' Apology, etc.: It's history. He said, apropos the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that "I could no more disown...

May 02, 2008, 0:00 a.m. We're Not in Philly AnymoreJeremiah Wright is now disowned, and Barack Obama is forever discredited. By Charles Krauthammer “I can no more disown him (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown my white grandmother.� — Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 18Guess it’s time to disown Granny, if Obama’s famous Philadelphia “race� speech is to be believed. Of course, the speech was not just believed. It was hailed, celebrated, canonized as the greatest pronouncement on race in America since Lincoln at Cooper Union. A New York Times columnist said it “should be required reading in classrooms across...

Earlier this month, the makers of Absolut Vodka issued a public apology for running an ad with an early 1830s map of North America with the words "In an Absolut world" emblazoned across the front. The retraction came as a result of a threatened boycott initiated by conservative talk radio and Web sites. Who was Absolut apologizing to and why? The ad itself ran in Mexican magazines and was aimed at an international audience. I would never have even come across it had it not been brought to my attention by this controversy. The complaints seem to range from concern...

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com — A tough new video montage shows footage of Clinton from 1992 through 2008 from her first 60 Minutes interview to her lies about sniper fire, NAFTA, and Iraq. At this point, Hillary Clinton has no one left to lie to.

LOS ANGELES, April 10 (UPI) -- The son of the man who directed the 1959 Hollywood film classic "Ben-Hur" said he is producing a new version of the story as a $30 million TV miniseries. David Wyler, son of director William Wyler, is producing the remake with Alchemy TV, Variety.com reported Thursday..... http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Entertainment/2008/04/10/ben-hur_headed_for_tv_miniseries_remake/2178/

Sen. Clinton served on Wal-Mart's board of directors from 1986 to 1992, when she was first lady of Arkansas. During her presidential campaign, she has faced some criticism over Wal-Mart's labor record and the lack of women in upper management.There is footage in the archive of Mrs. Clinton joining Mr. Walton, Wal-Mart's founder, on a stage at the 1991 opening of a store in Rogers, Ark. "I'm so proud of this company and everything it represents," Mrs. Clinton said. "It makes me feel real good about what we've been able to do."Mr. Walton responded: "You're a great associate, Hillary." Turning...

During his first run for elected office, Barack Obama played a greater role than his aides now acknowledge in crafting liberal stands on gun control, the death penalty and abortion– positions that appear at odds with the more moderate image he’s projected during his presidential campaign. The evidence comes from an amended version of an Illinois voter group’s detailed questionnaire, filed under his name during his 1996 bid for a state Senate seat. Late last year, in response to a Politico story about Obama’s answers to the original questionnaire, his aides said he “never saw or approved” the questionnaire. They...

Addressing civil rights activists in Selma, Ala., a year ago, Sen. Barack Obama traced his "very existence" to the generosity of the Kennedy family, which he said paid for his Kenyan father to travel to America on a student scholarship and thus meet his Kansan mother. The Camelot connection has become part of the mythology surrounding Obama's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. After Caroline Kennedy endorsed his candidacy in January, Newsweek commentator Jonathan Alter reported that she had been struck by the extraordinary way in which "history replays itself" and by how "two generations of two families -- separated...

A year ago, Barack Obama addressed a group in Selma, AL commemorating the 1965 voting rights march. He credited the event with giving his parents the idea that they could have a child. The result was him--Barack Obama, Child of Destiny. The only problem is he was born in 1961. "What happened in Selma, Alabama and Birmingham also stirred the conscience of the nation...This young man named Barack Obama...came over to this country. He met this woman...(who) had a good idea there was some craziness going on because they looked at each other and they decided...it might...be possible for us...

'Misspoke' is rapidly on it's way out the door as a fake excuse for minor hyperbole on one end of the extreme and out and out lying on the other. The archive capability of today's technology means that your past sins, real or "misspoke" are there for all the world to see. Every action, every word, every printed stated or thought is accessible as a cross reference against current ones. It shouldn't be a danger to anyone who's memory matches their actions. It's a huge danger for those whose memory about their actions are made up to suit the moment...

Sometime between April 2006 and today, the church Barack Obama has attended for 20 years, Trinity United Church of Christ, quietly edited the “About Us” page of their web site, removing their statement of commitment to “the Black Value System written by the Manford Byrd Recognition Committee chaired by Vallmer Jordan in 1981.” Here’s the page from 2006, saved by the Internet Archive: Trinity United Church of Christ - About Us. And here’s the current page: Trinity United Church of Christ - About Us. The section that was removed: Trinity United Church of Christ adopted the Black Value System written...