Free Republic

Ever since reporters took up Gary Hart's challenge to put a tail on him, then sunk his 1988 presidential candidacy with details of a tryst with an attractive model, the private sex lives of prominent politicians have been considered fair game for the press. The journalistic rationale is that character counts and voters have a right to know about questionable personal conduct because it may tell something about how an individual will perform in office or serve the public interest without fear or favor. Yet most mainstream news outlets continue to grant a reasonable right of privacy to public officials,...

Listening to Fat Ted on C-Span. Retreading his Bork speech. Almost makes me ashamed to be an American.

Democrats — at least those seeking the Democratic nomination for president and those who are desperate for money from extremist Left deep pockets — are trying to "out-Liberal" each other on the Alito nomination, even when it is clear a bipartisan majority of senators intend to make the Judge Alito "Justice Alito" in just a few days. John Kerry, after launching the first international filibuster from the slopes of the Swiss Alps with the help of Ted Kennedy, gave a speech earlier on the Senate floor that rivals Kennedy’s 1987 smear of Judge Bork. Kennedy claimed that in “Judge Bork’s...

CELEB Big Brother prat George Galloway is today exposed in his revolting true colours — fawning before Saddam Hussein’s murderous son Uday. An astonishing video shown in part on the Sun TV Bulletin depicts Galloway, 51, laughing and joking with the evil psychopath during a 20-minute meeting in an Iraqi palace. The Respect party MP, who Sun readers can boot off the Channel 4 show tonight, has sickened viewers with his antics in the BB house. Galloway’s crawling around the tyrannical old Iraqi regime was even more disgusting. He famously met dictator Saddam in 1994 and told him: “Sir, allow...

George Galloway tonight became the fourth person to be evicted from the Celebrity Big Brother house as he admitted he had failed in his aims during almost two weeks of reality TV. The Respect MP attracted 64.7% of the public vote after being nominated alongside fake celebrity Chantelle Houghton and US basketball star Dennis Rodman. As he emerged from the house, a smiling Mr Galloway was met with boos and cheers from the crowd who gathered for tonight's double eviction.

WASHINGTON - A special prosecutor's long-delayed report charges that a coverup at senior levels of the Clinton administration killed a tax fraud case against ex-cabinet member Henry Cisneros, the Daily News has learned. David Barrett's 11-year, $23 million probe, which will be released tomorrow, states in stinging terms that this Clinton coverup succeeded. Cisneros was forced to admit in 1999 that he had made secret payments to a mistress before serving as Clinton's secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Barrett investigated tax fraud charges stemming from those under-the-table payments. Then-IRS Commissioner Peggy Richardson, a close friend of Sen. Hillary Clinton...

The American Bar Association—a liberal organization—conducted an extensive investigation of Judge Samuel Alito’s career as a lawyer and judge and unanimously gave him its highest rating of “well qualified” to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. The ABA interviewed 300 people, including 130 federal judges and numerous lawyers who had argued both winning and losing cases in Alito’s court. It also examined the purported controversies about Alito’s failure to recuse himself from a case involving the Vanguard company, which managed mutual funds he owned shares in (see Sen. Orrin Hatch’s piece on the cover), and his membership in the defunct...

Old blowhards don’t fade away, we learned again last week, they just serve as Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was almost two decades ago that Sen. Joe Biden (D.-Del.) chaired the confirmation hearings that gave America a new verb: to Bork. When President Reagan nominated U.S. Appeals Court Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, it was Biden who led his Democratic committee colleagues Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Patrick Leahy of Vermont in what was then the unprecedented trashing of a nominee of unquestioned professional qualifications and unblemished character. In 1991, in a committee still chaired by...

Democrats confirmed Friday that they will make a last-ditch attempt to slow Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's momentum by delaying the first vote on his candidacy. Sen. Patrick Leahy (news, bio, voting record), D-Vt., said in the waning minutes of Alito's confirmation hearing that unnamed Democrats will "exercise their rights" to put off next week's scheduled Alito vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

This is U.S. Appeals Court Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, a Clinton appointee who gave a glowing endorsement of her colleague, Sam Alito, earlier today, along with six other judges from the appeals court who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to support Alito. Chuck Schumer walked out before the judges started to speak. Teddy Kennedy showed up late, stayed for 10 minutes, then left. Pat Leahy put on a dour face for a short time, and also bailed... if Judge Barry were a screeching liberal moaning about Alito's threat to the female populace, the Dems would have been all ears--and...

Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) recently wrote a scathing commentary for the Washington Post. He took Judge Samuel Alito to task and actually suggested that the judge had serious credibility problems. Some might find this humorous, considering the long record Senator Kennedy has of recreating truth to suit his personal notion of history. For example, how many different versions of the Mary Jo Kopechne story have you heard? Even the senator couldn’t get it straight for years. At any rate, his verbal volleys at Judge Alito seem a bit hypocritical to me, even if I give the senator the benefit...

Sen. Teddy Kennedy (D.-Mass.) was voted overwhelmingly the "biggest windbag" on the Judiciary Committee in yesterday's AlitoBlog.com poll. With 500 votes cast, Kennedy received 69.6% of the vote -- far outpacing his nearest rival, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D.-N.Y.), who finished with 18%. Sen. Joe Biden (D.-Del.), a likely presidential candidate in 2008, had 6.4% to finish third. The committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Patrick Leahy (Vt.), despite his prominent role during the hearings, placed fourth with 2.4%. Sen. Dianne Feinstein had 1.9% for a fifth-place finish. The other two Democrats, Senators Herb Kohl (Wis.) and Russ Feingold (Wis.), received no votes....

Among Sen. Teddy Kennedy's many complaints about Samuel Alito, the one that caught the attention of Republicans today was his assertion that Alito is a racist. "In Alito's 15-years on the bench, Judge Alito has not written one single opinion on the merits in favor of a person of color who alleged race discrimination in the workplace." Moments later, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R.-Ala.) took Kennedy to task, leaving the liberal Massachusetts senator shaking his head. Sessions cited three cases in which Alito demonstrated that "all Americans receive equal protection of the laws, regardless of race." Among them: U.S. v. Kithcart:...

In the first day of weeklong confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., told Judge Samuel Alito to expect tough questioning, saying the record of the U.S. Supreme Court nominee "troubles me deeply." Eighteen committee members gave their opening statements, followed by a statement by Alito. Questioning will begin tomorrow. Kennedy pointed to controversy over President Bush's decision to order the National Security Agency to wiretap conversations between terrorists overseas and citizens in the U.S. "In an era when the White House is abusing power, is excusing and authorizing torture, and is spying on American citizens,...

More than a week after the story was exposed as a hoax, Sen. Ted Kennedy has yet to apologize for touting false claims from a University of Massachusetts student who said officials from the Department of Homeland Security visited his home and repeatedly interrogated him after he tried to obtain a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's "Little Red Book." In mid-December, the unidentified student instigated the hoax by describing the phony grilling to reporters for the New Bedford Standard-Times. The story appeared on Dec. 17, the day after the New York Times reported that the Bush administration was monitoring the phone...

"The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press, 1999) provides a tally of the "politically correct" mass murders, the deaths from firing squads, man-made famines, gassing, hanging, concentration camps: China, 65 million deaths; USSR, 20 million; Vietnam, North Korea and Cambodia, 5 million; Africa, 1.7 million; Afghanistan, 1.5 million; Eastern Europe, 1 million; Latin America, 150,000 deaths." From Mises.Org It may have all started with Mary Jo in July of 1969 - and ended with Chappaquiddick, and I think we all know about that. Or, did it start with Kennedy's father, Joe, who had trouble understanding good old American...

"It is regrettable that Senator Kennedy has chosen Veteran's Day to continue leveling baseless and false attacks that send the wrong signal to our troops and our enemy during a time of war. It is also regrettable that Senator Kennedy has found more time to say negative things about President Bush then he ever did about Saddam Hussein. If America were to follow Senator Kennedy's foreign policy, Saddam Hussein would not only still be in power, he would be oppressing and occupying Kuwait." - Scott McClellan, White House Press Secretary Sen. Kennedy On Iraq Sen. Kennedy Said Saddam Hussein Was...

HYANNIS, Mass. Senator Edward Kennedy attempted to rescue six men who had become trapped by high tide on a jetty off Hyannisport yesterday. The Cape Cod Times reports that Kennedy eventually left the rescue to Hyannis firefighters. The senator was walking his two dogs on the shore at 11:15 a-m when he spotted the men cut off from shore by the rising waters. They had been fishing on a jetty that begins at the tip of the Kennedy compound. Tides rose over the patchy rocks, make it difficult to walk back to shore. Kennedy and a friend tried to rescue...

THE US obesity problem might be more serious than previously believed and most adults in the United States were at risk of becoming overweight or obese, US researchers said today. In a government study that followed 4000 participants over 30 years, researchers found that 90 per cent of men and 70 per cent of women were overweight or later became overweight. "National surveys and other studies have told us that the United States has a major weight problem, but this study suggests that we could have an even more serious degree of overweight and obesity (cases) over the next few...

Of our efforts to expose Air America's sleazy Enron-like corporate behavior, is it safe to assume conservatives are united in support? To a point, yes. There certainly are some, though, who'd rather not see this investigative effort become too successful. That's because the liberal radio network's programming has gone so far off the deep left end, it's now a GOP gold mine. By the same token, would Republicans want Rep. Jim McDermott of Seattle, or Sen. Ted Kennedy defeated? While having no impact on national political trends, the moonbat wing of the Democrat party provides a bounty of choice quotes...