Free Republic

Zell Miller is my favorite Democrat. I started this long-running series here noting Miller's speeches, columns and books in March 2003. Yesterday the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an important column by Senator Miller on the subject that is the current focus of my interest: "Rule can head off dirty tricks at CIA." Senator Miller's proposed rule is of less interest than Senator Miller's observation that the story underlying the saga of Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame is the dirty tricks they have undertaken courtesy of the CIA to defeat the Bush administration. Within the journalistic trade, only Stephen Hayes at the...

Osama bin Laden tried to buy a massive amount of cocaine, spike it with poison and sell it in the United States, hoping to kill thousands of Americans one year after the 9/11 attacks, The Post has learned. The evil plot failed when the Colombian drug lords bin Laden approached decided it would be bad for their business - and, possibly, for their own health, according to law-enforcement sources familiar with the Drug Enforcement Administration's probe of the aborted transaction. The feds were told of the scheme earlier this year, but its existence had never been made public. The Post...

"Imagine if an e-mail had surfaced showing that a top aide to Clinton--say, Sid Blumenthal--had told a reporter about a covert CIA agent." The always fair and balanced Howard Kurtz posed that hypothetical in a column yesterday, and it's a reasonable question. And as it happens, we know the answer. As a matter of fact, a Clinton aide - not a top aide, but a political appointee - did release personal information about one of Clinton's accusers, highly embarrassing information at that: I am referring of course to former Assistant Secretary of Defense Kenneth Bacon's decision to release Linda Tripp's...

MORE than 4,000 people have died as Islamic terrorism has spread across the world over the last decade. Here we highlight some of the worst atrocities: 1. FEB 26 1993: Six people killed by a 500kg bomb beneath the World Trade Center in New York. 2 DEC 11 1994: Explosion on a Philippine Airlines jet bound for Tokyo killed one and injured ten. 3. JUN 25 1996: Nineteen US servicemen killed in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, when their housing complex was blown up by a suicide bomber. 4. AUG 7 1998: American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania attacked in suicide truck...

Major news outlets that largely ignored the controversial comments of the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate last week immediately reported on a fiery speech by White House adviser Karl Rove, giving the story front-page prominence and the lead of newscasts. Early yesterday morning, NBC's "Today" show, the CBS "Morning Show," and ABC's "Good Morning America" all featured the Democratic outrage over Mr. Rove's comments that after September 11 liberals "wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers" while conservatives "prepared for war." Each network's nightly newscasts on Thursday also ran stories on Mr. Rove's speech,...

During the entire course of World War II, only 12 Americans were indicted for treason. All but five were broadcasters charged with aiding the enemy by broadcasting anti-American propaganda. One of those broadcasters was an American known as Tokyo Rose. Another, Mildred Gillars of Portland, Maine, was known as Axis Sally. At her trial, prosecutors charged that her broadcasts were propaganda aimed at convincing soldiers they were fighting for the wrong side. The treason for which she was convicted was a play called "Vision of Invasion." It was designed to scare GIs into not participating in the Invasion of Normandy....

Sen. Richard J. Durbin's comparison of the treatment of al Qaeda prisoners at the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Nazi and Soviet gulag atrocities was sharply criticized by constituents and newspapers in his home state. Mr. Durbin's accusations drew a storm of voter complaints in Illinois, his home state, editorial rebuke by its biggest newspaper and an uneasiness in his party over the potentially damaging political fallout. One state Democratic operative called the charges "inflammatory." The fiercely negative reaction forced Mr. Durbin late Friday to say that he regretted making the comparison, but his remarks remained a source...

Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean, who's taken some heat for his hot rhetoric, kept it cool in a visit to Houston on Friday, quietly pressing the Democratic case to a group of Indian-American physicians. "We are reaching out to groups all over the country like this one," Dean said, adding that he plans to travel to India next winter. "This party is a party that believes in diversity." Dean also is scheduled to headline fund-raisers in Austin, Corpus Christi and Dallas during his Texas visit. "Unlike previously, we are actually going to spend money in Texas," Dean said after his...

WASHINGTON, June 17 (UPI) -- U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., says right-wing media misrepresented comments he made about abuse of terror suspects, which he compared to Nazi abuses. Durbin late Tuesday read what he said was an e-mail message from an FBI agent regarding alleged prisoner abuse. Durbin said if it didn't identify the source of the information "you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime." Several high-ranking Republicans responded Thursday. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said, "The danger the loose comments such as that, comparison which have no...

Mark Steyn Quran desecration crock a win for Jihad spin docs June 12, 2005 BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's kleptocrat strongman, destroyed a mosque the other day. It was in Hatcliffe Extension, a shantytown on the edge of Harare razed by the "police." Mugabe is an equal-opportunity razer: He also bulldozed a Catholic-run AIDS center. The government destroyed the town in order to drive the locals out into the countryside to live on the land stolen from white farmers. Quite how that's meant to benefit any of the parties involved or the broader needs of Zimbabwe is...

Claim that the Holy book was defiled by US guards at Guantanamo Bay has incensed Muslims AT LEAST nine people were killed yesterday as a wave of anti-American demonstrations swept the Islamic world from the Gaza Strip to the Java Sea, sparked by a single paragraph in a magazine alleging that US military interrogators had desecrated the Koran. As Washington scrambled to calm the outrage, Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, promised an inquiry and punishment for any proven offenders. But at Friday prayers in the Muslim world many preachers demanded vengeance and afterwards thousands took to the streets,...

Character assassination apparently has become the Democrats' stock-in-trade these days on Capitol Hill. Witness Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who departed from his prepared text to denounce one of President Bush's judicial nominees — a victim of Democratic filibustering — by saying the judge has "a problem" based on "his confidential report from the FBI." Reid wasn't offering up any details — which his office seems to think lets him off the hook. Because the problem is that those FBI background reports, as Reid himself conceded, are "confidential." And Senate rules prohibit a member from publicly disclosing confidential information —...

Boy, this confirmation battle over John Bolton, the president's plain-spoken nominee for U.N. ambassador, is really heating up. Sen. Barbara Boxer, the Democratic Party's comely obstructionist, has charged that Bolton needs ''anger management lessons.'' I don't know about you, but nothing makes me want to hurl a chair through the window and punch someone's lights out like being told I need anger management lessons. So I was interested to hear about the kind of violent Boltonian eruptions that had led Boxer to her diagnosis. Well, here it comes. (If you've got young children present, you might want to take them...

Philadelphia (CNSNews.com) - Longtime nationally syndicated journalist Jack Germond called the struggle over the fate of Terri Schiavo a "grotesque, ridiculous exercise" on Friday, adding that the "nutty story" is a result of the "growing, staggering, frightening influence of religious organizations" in American politics. Germond, author of the book "Fat Man in a Middle Seat: Forty Years of Covering Politics," made the comment during a speech entitled, "How Religion Bends Politics" during the 31st National Convention of American Atheists being held this weekend. A self-proclaimed atheist, Germond also said the life-or-death battle over the brain-damaged Florida woman had become a...

THE man who created the lava lamp, that beacon of psychedelia that mesmerised generations of would-be hippies, has died aged 82. Edward Craven Walker, inventor and dedicated nudist, continued to manufacture new versions of the hypnotic lamp throughout the 1990s as a new audience discovered its swirling charms. Mr Walker invented the lamp in 1963 after discovering that the wax in a glass column rises with the heat of the bulb to create a constantly changing pattern. The lamp became a fashion hit with trendy Britons and, at a later stage, hippies, who sought conscious-raising powers by staring at the ...

50% Clinton, 37% Lazio As the New York senate race gets closer to general election day, more New Yorkers plan to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton than Rick Lazio. In a recent Portrait of America (POA) telephone survey of likely voters, Hillary’s lead grows to 50%; Lazio holds on at 37%. Hillary is up by a 5% margin since our July poll; Lazio remains consistent with 37% to 38% of votes. Hillary is viewed favorably by 50% of the electorate, up 5% from the July POA survey. Lazio’s favorables have dropped to 35% from 42%. Hillary’s unfavorables have declined to ...