Free Republic

Searching old newspapers is one of my favorite pastimes, and I have tried to use them many times to shed light on current events - or to inform readers about how the past is prologue to our very interesting present-day quandaries. Recently, I came across a syndicated column from November 1979 that seemed to point 30 years into the future toward an obscure campaign issue that arose briefly in the 2008 presidential campaign. Though by no means definitive, it provides an interesting insight, at least, into how Chicago politics intersected with the black power movement and Middle Eastern money at...

We live in a weary age of fable. The latest Hollywood mythology is entitled "Truth." But the film is actually a fictionalized story about how CBS News super-anchor Dan Rather and his "60 Minutes" producer supposedly were railroaded by corporate and right-wing interests into resigning. In reality, an internal investigation by CBS found that Rather and his "60 Minutes" team -- just weeks before the 2004 election -- had failed to properly vet documents of dubious authenticity asserting that a young George W. Bush had shirked his duty as a Texas Air National Guard pilot. The fabulist movie comes on...

ARLINGTON -- Bush-Cheney '04 today announced the members of its Debate Negotiations Team.  The team, lead by James A. Baker, III, will represent Bush-Cheney '04 in negotiations of the terms of the presidential debates between President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry and between Vice President Dick Cheney and Senator John Edwards.     "We are honored that Secretary Baker will lead negotiations on behalf of our campaign.  I am confident that he and the other seasoned members of our team will conduct negotiations in a thoughtful manner to ensure a robust debate of the critical issues facing our country," said...

As soon as John Kerry announced his choice of John Edwards as his running mate last week, the contrast was unavoidable. This autumn, Edwards, a telegenic, bubbly lawyer who looks 40, will go up against Big Daddy Cheney, the bald, dour, snarling vice-president whose most recent public pronouncement was to tell a leading Democratic senator to “go f*** yourself”. Edwards is a Southerner from a modest background, but he is also a member of the new class — a multi-millionaire trial lawyer with a fiercely independent career woman for a wife. Cheney is from Wyoming, one of the most beautiful...

Given Jon Kerry's now front running status, I thought it would be important to go back and look at his immediate post 911 comments on Fox News Sunday. He rolled out the classic blame America line and implied we were contributory in provoking attacks by our hostility and policies that alienated people. Here's the interview transcript: SNOW: Senator Kerry, earlier on the broadcast -- I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier. Earlier on the broadcast, Attorney General Ashcroft was talking about a series of changes he thinks we need to do to improve our domestic vigilance. You...

Shocking Video Unearthed Democrats in their own words Covering up the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac Scam that caused our Economic Crisis in 2004. Republicans try to regulate fannie mae and freddie mac without success.

In four Gospels - including the Sermon on the Mount - Jesus neglected to mention the subject of homosexuality. But that hasn’t stopped a handful of self-appointed leaders of the so-called Religious Right from deciding that it is an issue worth the presidency of the United States. In what the Washington Times described as a "stormy session" last week, the Rev. Lou Sheldon, Paul Weyrich, Gary Bauer and eight other "social conservatives" read the riot act to RNC chairman Marc Racicot for meeting with the "Human Rights Campaign," a group promoting legal protections for homosexuals. This indiscretion, they said, "could...

Business mogul Donald Trump told CNN Wednesday House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should have sought to impeach President Bush when she had the chance. In an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Trump said the president and his administration deliberately lied about the Iraq war, and congressional Democrats missed an opportunity to impeach him when the party took control of Congress in 2006. "I was surprised that she didn't do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush," Trump said. "It was almost - it just seemed like she was going to really look to impeach Bush and get him out...

Wednesday, September 1, 2004 The power of the rich Posted: September 1, 20041:00 a.m. Eastern By Walter Williams © 2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc. The truly rich don't deserve all the political hype we hear – they're only a tiny percentage of our population and not that important. According to recent U.S. Treasury statistics, the top 1 percent of income earners have an adjusted gross income that starts around $300,000. While $300,000 or $400,000 a year is nothing to sneeze at, it's a far cry from being rich – it's not even yacht-and-Gulfstream-jet money. The truly rich Americans are those with assets like...

How rich bastards like me rip off taxpayers for millions of dollars Law grinds the poor, and rich men rule the law. -- Oliver Goldsmith Ronald Reagan memorably complained about "welfare queens," but he never told us that the biggest welfare queens are the already wealthy. Their lobbyists fawn over politicians, giving them little bits of money -- campaign contributions, plane trips, dinners, golf outings -- in exchange for huge chunks of taxpayers’ money. Millionaires who own your favorite sports teams get subsidies, as do millionaire farmers, corporations, and well-connected plutocrats of every variety. Even successful, wealthy TV journalists. That’s...

Ted Cruz continued his verbal assault on last week’s historic Supreme Court decisions on Monday, saying the justices who ruled in favor of Obamacare and gay marriage “rewrote the Constitution.” “They joined a team, they put on bright-blue Obama jerseys and they rewrote the law,” the U.S. senator from Texas told Yahoo News’ Katie Couric during a live sit-down interview from Yahoo’s New York City studios. “Those decisions are a threat to our democracy.” Cruz slammed Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion in the Obamacare case on behalf of what the 2016 Republican presidential hopeful called “five...

Faded, former-media darling Katie Couric hosted Republican Senator Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for a full-hour to discuss a wide range of issues Monday. The left-wing anchor, who is now perched at a place called Yahoo!, introduced Cruz as a historic candidate — potentially the first American president to be born in Canada. Later in the interview, she questioned Cruz on his citizenship. The look on Couric’s smug face when he correctly reminded her that it was the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008 that birthed the anti-Obama Birther movement, is priceless. It all starts at right around the 25 minute mark....

TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Who do you think started the birther movement against Obama? You know the birther movement, the claim that Obama was not born in Hawaii, that he was rather born in some Muslim country somewhere. And that he was not qualified, according to the Constitution, to be president, 'cause he's not born of American parents anywhere, and he was not born in the United States. Who started that movement? (interruption) Well, you're pretty damn close. It was Hillary Clinton that started the movement. It was the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008 that started the movement. That whole thing was...

When Walter R. Cates tells people what he’s become, incredulously they respond, "You’re a what!" From the moment he took his first breath 63 years ago, Cates has been three things: "I’ve always told people I was born black, Baptist and Democrat." Now he’s a Republican. He recently switched parties, officially announcing it Thursday during a Buckeye Republican Club luncheon. Cates is one of the most recognizable and influential leaders in Columbus. As former president of the local NAACP chapter in 1973, he sued the Columbus school district, police and fire divisions for discrimination and forced them to change. Cates,...

Video of BHO a few scrolls down. He definitely did not look presidential in this 1995 video http://universalfreepress.com/breaking-shocking-1995-video-surfaces-of-barack-obama-revealing-who-he-really-is/#

September 6, 2004 -- WASHINGTON — The long knives are out for Democrat John Kerry's campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, as infighting rages while his slumping campaign struggles to come back against President Bush. "You'd think they could find a man to throw overboard one of these days," zinged Republican strategist Mary Matalin, a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney on NBC's "Meet the Press." She said Democrats blamed 1988 loser Michael Dukakis' stumbles on campaign manager Susan Estrich and Al Gore's 2000 fumbles on campaign chief Donna Brazile, and "now they're trying to blame poor Mary Beth Cahill"...

Most Americans haven’t forgotten the bald-faced lies the Clintons told about Bill’s affairs and molestations along with the sheer savagery of the attacks their surrogates launched against these women. For example, we all remember Bill Clinton perjuring himself by saying, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Of course, Bill was lying which helped lead to the House voting to impeach him. The Senate attempted to follow suit and although 50 Senators voted for impeachment, they didn’t reach the 67 vote threshold needed to send Clinton home in disgrace. What you may not remember was the...

Talk about bad timing. Echo Lake Entertainment is set to release its independent film, Truth, the story of former CBS anchor Dan Rather’s self-destruction. It’s based on the 2006 book Truth and Duty: The Press, The President, and the Privilege of Power by Mary Mapes, the discredited CBS producer. Mapes documents and defends Rather’s 2004 attempts to use the forged “Killian documents” to portray former President George W. Bush as someone who shirked duty in Vietnam.

An explosive new report about “deadbeat politicos” revealed Friday that civil rights activist and MSNBC celebrity the Rev. Al Sharpton owes the federal government tens of thousands of dollars in fines and $880,000 in debt from his ill-fated 2004 presidential campaign. And that’s on top of the $4.5 million Sharpton owes in back taxes.

James Risen, an Investigative Journalist, and veteran New York Times Reporter, is now another name on the list of Journalists being prosecuted by the Obama Administration. Risen, whose reporting on warrantless wiretapping was published in 2006, is now facing jail time for the same material that earned him a Pulitzer Prize. According to Democracy Now, Risen’s original story was supposed to be published in the New York Times prior to the Presidential election in 2004. However, the report was not published until 2006, because Risen was under “government pressure,” due to the fact that his article could have had an...