Free Republic

Thursday evening in Chicago, black grassroots activists fed up with manipulation of their suffering by city leadership turned out to protest a fundraiser for President Obama held by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Illinois Speaker of the General Assembly Michael Madigan. According to the protesters, Emanuel, Madigan, and Obama pretend to try to help their community but do nothing to curb the funneling of money and contracts to corrupt community organizations and union-controlled worksites that won’t hire black labor. The protest began in the lobby of the building where the fundraiser took place and proceeded with a march past City Hall,...

NEW YORK — The families of people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks have been invited to military installations in four states to watch pretrial hearings in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for five men charged with planning or assisting the terrorist strike. The hearings, which begin Monday, are closed to the public, but relatives who register in advance can watch on closed-circuit television at forts in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland and New York City. The suspects on trial before the military commission include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Jerusalem District Court Judge Miriam Mizrachi on Thursday, declined to honor a request from MK Talab el-Sana, who was seeking to have the court compel Google to block access to the controversial video “Innocence of Muslims” on its YouTube channel, as it has done in a number of Arab countries. Joining el-Sana in filing his petition were the mayors of a number of Arab municipalities and religious leaders. Attorneys for Google, which owns YouTube, explained the company is not responsible for content that is published on the YouTube video sharing site, third party content. It was further explained the company...

According to American journalist Richard Silverstein, who spoke with the BBC, he received a classified document leaked by a senior IDF officer to a former senior minister, a document that is a synopsis of a high-level briefing between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak addressing the planned assault against Iran. Silverstein adds there are those who will dispute the legitimacy of the document he has in hand, but he remains convinced as to the authenticity of the document. Silverstein broke the story on his blog on August 15, 2012, describing an Israeli assault against Iran’s nuclear program...

Those wondering why the Department of Justice has refused to go after Jon Corzine for the vaporization of $1.6 billion in MF Global client funds need look no further than the documents uncovered by the Government Accountability Institute that reveal that the now-defunct MF Global was a client of Attorney General Eric Holder and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer’s former law firm, Covington & Burling. There’s more. Records also reveal that MF Global’s trustee for the Chapter 11 bankruptcy retained as its general bankruptcy counsel Morrison & Foerester--the very law firm from which Associate Attorney General Tony West came to...

Here’s an inconvenient truth: New York is greening the wallet of Al Gore. Embattled city Comptroller John Liu has delivered a $16.56 million contract to the former vice president’s environmentally friendly investment firm, Generation Investment Management, to help manage hundreds of millions of dollars in city pension funds, The Post has learned. ... “There’s a lot of pressure on pension funds to be environmentally sensitive. Gore’s name and stature in the pension-fund community is invaluable — particularly for Democrats. He’s Al Gore!” said Bill Sannwald, a corporate governance and ethics professor at San Diego State University.

I just want to ask for your prayers for FReeper F16Fighter who is attempting to go through a serious illness all alone. He is in a tremendous amount of pain and fear because it is a debilitating condition that has worsened over the past few months. He will be seeing a specialist next week but is not very optimistic. If his strident and opinionated posts have ever captured your attention...if his offbeat sense of humor has ever made you laugh...if his opposing views have ever made you angry...please lift him up in prayer. I ask God to bless him with...

Dear FReepers, I wanted to say hello to all my friends out there, especially the usual suspects; arasina, Peach, Rokke, Long Cut, and all the rest. I received an email from arasina with a few messages in it from some of you, and it touched me to find that I am still on the minds of some of you, without assuming that all those thoughts are good ones. Fact is, my last month on Free Republic was an example of what happens to someone falling into depression. For a number of reasons, personal and professional, I became unhappy with my...

Thread #2 while Rumsfeld is continuing testimony.

How Arabs are reacting to Bush's State of the UnionWalid Phares, PhD (archive) January 26, 2004 Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. State of the Union addresses have developed two audiences: one in America and the other in the Middle East. In that latter region of the world, the White House words are resounding with both hope and hatred in all quarters between the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. Never before, have American presidential speeches meant so much to so many in the Arab world and in the wider Middle East. Many people fear them, many others despise them, but...

THE MEDIA Americans want facts and flagsBy Mark Jurkowitz, Globe Staff, 7/14/2003 The American public may want its coverage of the war on terror straight down the middle, but it wants it delivered by people who share its patriotism. That's the finding of a new Pew Research Center survey of 1,200 Americans and their media habits and views. It comes amid an ongoing debate within journalism circles about whether embedded reporters, flag logos on TV screens, and the undiscovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq suggest American news organizations were too jingoistic or complacent in their coverage of the war...

Matt Drudge's Dressing Down By Lloyd Grove Washington Post The ladies of "The View" apparently were highly displeased yesterday morning when guest co-host Ann Coulter brought her pal Matt Drudge into the dressing room before the show. The aggrieved television personalities -- who later gave Coulter a hard time on the air for everything from her right-wing political views to her micro-miniskirt -- were "View" regulars Meredith Vieira, Star Jones and Joy Behar.

Geraldo's Nuptials By Lloyd Grove Washington Post Mazel tov to 59-year-old Fox News star Geraldo Rivera -- who will wed his 28-year-old girlfriend, television producer Erica Levy, at New York's historic Central Synagogue on Aug. 10, The Post's Christine Haughney reports. "You can't be my age and getting married and not be an optimist," Rivera, the son of a Jewish mother and Puerto Rican father, told us yesterday. He noted that he had been to the altar four times previously and had four children to show for it. "I don't know, maybe there will be one more with Erica," he...

Thomas SowellThe recent deaths of journalists in Baghdad are more than just personal tragedies. Both the chances that these journalists have taken and the indignant reactions by the surviving journalists are a sad sign of a growing lack of realism in our times, especially among the intelligentsia in the media and in academia. More than a century after General Sherman said, "War is hell," it still seems to come as a great shock to some people when journalists get killed in the middle of a battle zone. The fact that they were warned beforehand by American authorities that no special...

By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, March 31, 2003; Page C01 John Roberts, the CBS newsman traveling with the 1st Marine Division, is fed up with "all this armchair quarterbacking from people who aren't here." In an interview from Iraq, where he whispered because members of his unit were sleeping nearby, Roberts sounds exasperated with those who are ripping the Pentagon's embedding program for journalists. "Let them try not showering for a week, sleeping out in the desert, living through sandstorms, being under fire -- I don't see these people out there. All they do is criticize."

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- So far as I have been able to ascertain, I am the only syndicated columnist to take issue with the Republican majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee now claiming that President George W. Bush's nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Miguel Estrada, is Hispanic. According to my sources and to mounting evidence that I have accumulated, Estrada is actually Japanese. I revealed this startling finding in this space in mid-February; and you can be sure that the humorless Sen. Patrick Leahy, ranking Democrat on the committee, is even now preparing a...

<p>Martin Sheen's politicking against the war on terrorism may have cost him a lucrative endorsement contract.</p> <p>Sheen and his son Charlie starred in a spot for Visa's Check Card which was cited as one of the top TV commercials of 2002. But it was abruptly canceled last week.</p>

I have recently come to a crossroads of thought and posting here seemed appropriate. I've been a lifelong Conservative. I love our President and I have been supportive of his efforts toward disarming Saddam. I don't have any relatives or children going into battle. But I'm SCARED of this WAR. I have read and read and read...news stories, editorials and rants from all sides. I have listened and watched. It seems to me that I cannot really get a calm, straightforward answer to my question without an abundance of rhetoric. I don't want to hear about what Clinton did or...