Free Republic

Did Ronald Reagan secretly give the FBI names of people he suspected were communists when he was a movie star and Hollywood labor chief in the 1940s? This allegation resurfaced in the media just before Thanksgiving when the San Jose Mercury News, which published excerpts from Reagan's FBI file to great international acclaim in 1985, ran a column revisiting its original story about Reagan the snitch. It implies that Reagan was a shadowy operator in cahoots with the notorious FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, orchestrating their next Hollywood Red scare. The answer? Maybe. But Reagan was hardly betraying friends and...

This far left newspaper doesn't only engage in espionage. Read about the not-so-secret Ex-Nazi collaborators and shareholder partners of Haaretz.On Friday, April 16, the New Israel Fund held a big party in a Tel Aviv nightclub. Much of the Israeli Left was on hand. Outside the party a large group of students from the Im Tirtzu Zionist student group held a protest against the New Israel Fund and denounced it for being an anti-Israel radical group that funds anti-Israel propaganda. The New Israel Fund claimed its event was to celebrate Israeli Independence Day. Im Tirtzu claims that the Fund financed...

SAN FRANCISCO — Wall Street has called the end of an era and the beginning of the next one: The most important technology product no longer sits on your desk but rather fits in your hand. Enlarge This Image Jim Wilson/The New York Times The moment came Wednesday when Apple, the maker of iPods, iPhones and iPads, shot past Microsoft, the computer software giant, to become the world’s most valuable technology company. This changing of the guard caps one of the most stunning turnarounds in business history for Apple, which had been given up for dead only a decade earlier,...

Auburn, NY -- Three days before Christmas, Auburn Police Chief Gary Giannotta laid down the law for his command staff. At the closed meeting Dec. 22 in the department basement, Giannotta gave this ultimatum: Tell your patrol officers to write more vehicle and traffic tickets — at least one each per shift — or there will be repercussions for those who don’t.... Threatening to punish employees who fail to make a ticket quota violates state labor law. Tuesday, the Auburn police union took Giannotta to task for his proclamation, and two college criminal justice experts questioned the ethics of his...

Army officials plan to prevent media from covering Sarah Palin's appearance at Fort Bragg on Monday, saying they fear the event will turn into political grandstanding against President Barack Obama. Fort Bragg spokesman Tom McCollum told The Associated Press on Thursday that Army officials had decided to keep media away from Palin's book promotion at the North Carolina base. SNIP McCollum said the Army did not want the event to become a platform for Palin supporters to express political opinions "directed against the commander in chief."

Frank Rich: Only Stalinists Use Words Like "Stalinist" One of Jesse Walker's most interesting observations in his already-classic October piece on "The Paranoid Center" is that, in a direct inversion of Richard Hofstadter's theory, the establishmentarians who try to scare us about the terribly dangerous fringe end up aping the tactics and even language of the people they so loathe. New York Times columnist Frank Rich, whose commentary about the political right this year has been among the very stupidest in a remarkably dull-witted season, manages to go one step further: In an op-ed on New York's Dictrict 23 congressional...

White House senior adviser David Axelrod says that the demonstrations in Washington, D.C., Saturday do not represent the views of the broader public when it comes to health care reform.

RUSH: You want to hear the table of contents in the Max Baucus bill? This is the one everybody's all excited about now, Gang of Six in there, three Republicans, three Democrats. Remember, now, Baucus announced yesterday part of his plan is a fine of up to 3,800 bucks on citizens via the IRS if you don't have health insurance. It's going to be mandatory just like automobile insurance is. ... "Section I: Health systems savings." There are four chapters. "Ensuring appropriate payment. Capturing productivity gains. Reducing geographic variation in spending, and modifying beneficiary contributions." "Section II: Options for Modifying...

Links to the first three Alinsky blogs: Part I: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and MePart II: Hell On EarthPart III: Boring From WithinThe epigraph for the first chapter of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals which explains that "The Purpose" of the rules is from the book of Job: "The life of man upon earth is a warfare..."For Alinsky and his Machiavellian radicals, politics is war. No matter what they say publicly or pretend to be, they are at war. They are at war even though no other factions in the political arena are at war, because everyone else embraces the System which...

The first adjective that comes to mind for "liberal" may be "touchy-feely." The best adjective for a Stalinist might be "murderous." That's a pretty big difference. I would never want to mistake a well-meaning liberal for a nasty Stalinist. At the same time, I hope we don't fail to spot any Stalinists who might be looking for mischief and pretending to be liberals. Certainly the mainstream media aren't interested in the difference.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Democratic National Committee released a sharply-worded statement Tuesday accusing Republicans of colluding with "K Street Lobbyists" to incite "angry mobs" of extremists to disrupt health care town halls in congressional districts around the country. Full statement as released by DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse: The Republicans and their allied groups – desperate after losing two consecutive elections and every major policy fight on Capitol Hill – are inciting angry mobs of a small number of rabid right wing extremists funded by K Street Lobbyists to disrupt thoughtful discussions about the future of health care in America taking...

What a bunch of hypocritical fools these leaders are in the Democratic Party...They are giving us a warning, yet forget their own history...

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, opening line of 1984 Sixty years ago, Eric Arthur Blair (a.k.a. George Orwell) published his final book, 1984, months before his death. Other writers pictured the future in utopian terms—a golden age of bliss and enlightenment. Not Orwell. His dystopian novel pictured a bleak world where government was out of control. As different from his earlier Animal Farm as Finding Nemo is from Moby Dick, Orwell’s 1984 conjured terms that are still in use today: doublethink, newspeak, thought police and Big Brother. Even Orwell's...

The Department of Defense has withdrawn a training manual question that linked protesters across the United States to terrorism, but there's evidence coming to light that describing Americans as terror suspects, or "low-level" terror suspects, is routine. reported just days ago that the U.S. Department of Defense had included in a training course a question that defined protesters as terrorists.According to the letter from the Northern California ACLU, the DoD's "Annual Level 1 Antiterrorism (AT) Awareness Training for 2009" tells department personnel "that certain First Amendment-protected activity may amount to 'low-level terrorism.'" Specifically the training "Knowledge Check 1" asks, "Which...

Unemployment in Illinois is at a 25-year high, with the statewide rate climbing to 10.1 percent in May from 9.4 percent in April. According to data released Thursday by the Illinois Department of Employment Security, total non-farm payrolls dropped by 17,400 jobs in May. This marked the eighth straight month of job losses, though the agency noted that the pace of losses is easing. There are now 671,400 unemployed people in Illinois, the biggest number since June 1983. The state has lost 290,800 jobs since the beginning of the recession. The hardest-hit industry in May was manufacturing, which shed 9,500...

It strikes me as simply unwise to entrust such a significant portion of the debate around a policy that will impact American lives, potentially forever, to just one organization with such an imbalance in their political views.

"My grandfather paid for Carlisle Chevrolet from his labors. My father paid my grandmother for Carlisle Chevrolet through his efforts. It took me nearly 20 years to pay my parents for Carlisle Chevrolet. It took GM and Chrysler a mere 24 hours to take Carlisle Chevrolet from me."

If you're an anti-abortion activist, or if you display political paraphernalia supporting a third-party candidate or a certain Republican member of Congress, if you possess subversive literature, you very well might be a member of a domestic paramilitary group. That's according to "The Modern Militia Movement," a report by the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC), a government collective that identifies the warning signs of potential domestic terrorists for law enforcement communities. "Due to the current economical and political situation, a lush environment for militia activity has been created," the Feb. 20 report reads. "Unemployment rates are high, as well as...

Senator seeks Bush-era "truth commission" Mon Feb 9, 2009 2:05pm EST By Randall Mikkelsen WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. "truth commission" should probe Bush administration policies including the promotion of war in Iraq, detainee treatment and wiretapping without a warrant, an influential senator proposed on Monday. Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, called for the commission as way to heal what he called sharp political divides and to prevent future abuses. He compared it to other truth commissions, such as one in South Africa that investigated the apartheid era. "We need to come to a shared understanding...

Mike Massie got his first shotgun at the age of 10. Guns have been in Massie’s life since he was 5 years old and trudging along beside his father carrying an unloaded shotgun. His children know how to handle weapons; he even purchased his nephew’s first shotgun when the boy was just one month old. That’s why the Lynchburg resident is worried about what will happen to gun-control laws when President-elect Barack Obama takes office next month. “I feel that I have the right to bear arms legally to defend myself, my family and my property,” Massie said. “I don’t...