Free Republic

Republicans are in jeopardy of losing their grip on Congress in November. With less than four months to the midterm elections, the latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that Americans by an almost 3-to-1 margin hold the GOP-controlled Congress in low regard and profess a desire to see Democrats wrest control after a dozen years of Republican rule. Further complicating the GOP outlook to turn things around is a solid percentage of liberals, moderates and even conservatives who say they'll vote Democratic. The party out of power also holds the edge among persuadable voters, a prospect that doesn't bode well for...

OTTAWA - The meetings of a secretive global think-tank would bring 100 of the world's most powerful and influential figures to Ottawa next month and make an Ottawa hotel the host of deliberations on such weighty issues as the direction of global oil markets and potential military action against Iran. Reports circulating on the Internet say this year's Bilderberg Conference will be held June 8-11 at the Brookstreet Hotel a rumour the hotel would not confirm. But, if a gathering in Ottawa is anything like past Bilderbergs, invitees will be drawn from the pages of International Who's Who, with a...

President Bush's nationally televised address on immigration Monday night was intended as a grand gesture to revive his collapsing presidency, but instead he has plunged the Republican Party into a political centrifuge that is breaking it down into its raw elements, which are colliding into each other, triggering explosions of unexpected and ever greater magnitude. The nativist Republican base is at the throat of the business community. The Republican House of Representatives, in the grip of the far right, is at war with the Republican Senate. The evangelical religious right is paralyzed while the Roman Catholic Church has emerged as...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The multimillion-dollar lobbying effort to repeal the federal estate tax has been aggressively led by 18 super-wealthy families, according to a report released today by Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy at a press conference in Washington, D.C. The report details for the first time the vast money, influence and deceptive marketing techniques behind the rhetoric in the campaign to repeal the tax. It reveals how 18 families worth a total of $185.5 billion have financed and coordinated a 10-year effort to repeal the estate tax, a move that would collectively net them a windfall...

Ten years ago, I wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times urging that Kosovo Albanians be included in the Bosnia peace talks then being held in Dayton, Ohio. I warned that the nonviolent strategy of Kosovo Albanians was endangered by an increasingly impatient population which was beginning to believe that the United States would only recognize their plight if they took up arms. The negotiating team in Dayton completely ignored my warning. The Milosevic regime, however, did not. After the op-ed was translated into Serbian and Albanian and published in local papers, Serb police began rounding up my...

April 12, 2005 -- WASHINGTON — The FBI, as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the Rev. Al Sharpton, secretly videotaped him pocketing campaign donations from two shady fund-raisers in a New York City hotel room and then asking for more, it was reported yesterday. One of the donors was later recorded on a wiretap saying Sharpton may not have reported to the Federal Election Commission tens of thousands of dollars in campaign cash, as is required by the law, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. The FBI launched the probe into Sharpton's fund-raising for his failed 2004 presidential run...

There is a new 527 with an interesting sounding name! http://www.moveonforamerica.org/ The first ad will expose John Kerry’s role in securing freedom and parole for would-be cop killer who escaped a Massachusetts prison during a furlough, just like Willie Horton!!! MoveOnForAmerica.org was created due to the Bush campaign’s largely timid ads against Mr. Kerry, and will air this first ad starting Tuesday Sept. 7th in the Washington D.C. market and in key swing states beginning Monday September 13th. Since the organization is a “non-connected” committee, the ads will run non-stop until Election Day, and are not subject to the McCain-Feingold...

When Edward Shevernadze, the president of Georgia was overthrown in what a CNN dubbed "the Rose Revolution" (on November 22, 2003) I was in Croatia. And just before the "election" of his successor (January 4,2004) Mikhail Saakashvili, the American educated lawyer who was his former Minister of Justice, I was in Serbia. The Balkans, as it turns out, are a perfect place from which to observe the developments in the Caucasus, because the covert operations which are currently being deployed in Georgia, have already been used with devastating effect across all of South-East Europe. There can be no doubt that...

<p>Evidence in the Madrid train bombings points to the participation of a new breed of Islamic holy warrior, unfettered by many of the religious and ideological constraints that defined Islamic terrorism in the past.</p> <p>These Islamist warriors -- schooled in the North African doctrine known as Takfir wal Hijra and trained by Afghan veterans of al Qaeda -- think, recruit and operate differently from traditional Islamist networks. For Europe, that makes the threat particularly acute. The Takfir movement is strongest in Morocco and Algeria, the primary sources of Muslim immigration to Western Europe. Takfiri theorists openly advocate using immigration as a Trojan horse to expand jihad, or holy war.</p>

<p>Now that he's escaped the fever swamps of the Democratic primaries, John Kerry seems to be taking economics more seriously. His new plan at least admits that U.S. corporate taxation is a problem, even if in the end he'd make things worse.</p>

<p>Give President Bush's critics credit for versatility. Having spent months assailing him for doing too much after 9/11 -- Iraq, the Patriot Act, the "pre-emption" doctrine -- they have now turned on a dime to allege that he did too little before it. This contradiction is Mr. Bush's opportunity to rise above the ankle biting and explain to the American public what a President is elected to do.</p>

Serb Arrest Points to Coup Against Djindjic16 March 2002 Summary Profiles:MOMCILO PERISIC - Deputy Prime Minister of Republic of SerbiaNEBOJSA PAVKOVIC - Yugoslav Army Chief of Staff Yugoslav military security service personnel arrested Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Momcilo Perisic March 14 on charges of espionage. The move was likely part of an effort by Serb nationalists to depose pro-Western Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. Djindjic will probably be able to foil the plot, if he can survive the weekend. Analysis On the evening of March 14, Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Momcilo Perisic was having dinner with John Neighbor, an official...

THE HAGUE (Reuters) - Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic vigorously challenged testimony by the first witness in his war crimes trial in a testy face-to-face confrontation Tuesday between two communist-era veterans. The ousted Serb strongman was at loggerheads with ethnic Albanian politician Mahmut Bakalli almost from the outset of a four-hour cross-examination on the sixth day of Europe's biggest war crimes trial since World War Two. Milosevic challenged Bakalli's account of a Serbian campaign to impose "apartheid" on Kosovo's Albanian majority in the 1990s. Prosecutors say this was a prelude to "ethnic cleansing" by Milosevic's forces in the southern Serbian ...

THE HAGUE CHRISTOPHER BLACK is a dedicated seeker of international justice. But the kind of justice the Toronto lawyer seeks makes him as many enemies as friends. His latest quest is to defend Slobodan Milosevic. The former strongman of Serbia is acting as his own counsel at a war-crimes tribunal here, where he faces 66 charges. But Black is in his corner nonetheless. He insists it's still an open question whether the scowling, silver-haired figure in The Hague tribunal's Courtroom Number One will appoint a lawyer. "Milosevic never said he would not have counsel," Black explains. "He always said that ...

THE man who presided over a decade of terror in the Balkans took the stand to rage at a hostile world yesterday, the innocent victim of an international conspiracy against his country. Indignant, vehement, jabbing his finger at the international war crimes tribunal bench through an uninterrupted four-hour tirade, Slobodan Milosevic said he had been a righteous and peace-loving ruler faced by the “neo-Nazi, neo-colonialist” force that was Nato; his country destroyed by a German-led plot. Wearing a tie in the red, white and blue colours of Serbia and banging on his desk, he cast himself in the role of ...

Neil Clark raises a lone voice for a man whose worst crime was to carry on being socialist I always remember my first visit to Belgrade, in the summer of 1998. As an unreconstructed socialist, completely out of step with the spirit of the age, I had spent most of the Nineties trying to escape, as best I could, to a place where it was still 1948. So imagine my delight when I arrived in Belgrade and found a city that seemed miraculously to have escaped all the horrors of global grunge.Bookshops, self-service restaurants and state-owned department stores abounded: a ...

UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 8 (Reuters) — Kosovo's new United Nations governor said today that his main goal was to begin transferring his administrative powers to the Yugoslav province's interim government elected in November. But it is too soon to begin talking about whether Kosovo will end up independent from Belgrade, said Michael Steiner, a German diplomat and Balkans expert who is scheduled to take up his new duties as governor next Thursday. "We have to set the train in motion," he said in his first meeting with reporters since his appointment was announced three weeks ago. "We have to transfer ...

Skulking Mladic considers surrender TOM WALKER AND ALEX TODOROVIC, BELGRADE ONE of the men most wanted by the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague, Ratko Mladic, has barricaded himself into the basement of his Belgrade home to escape bounty hunters. America has offered a £3m reward for the arrest of the so-called Butcher of Bosnia, who is accused of genocide. He is said to fear that groups of disaffected soldiers and police may stage a violent kidnap attempt. As Serbia’s reformist government approaches an international deadline to hand over indicted war criminals or lose multi-million-pound reconstruction and aid ...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UPI) -- The leading congressional expert on Russia's small portable nuclear weapons told United Press International that the FBI has stepped up its investigation of whether al Qaida or other terrorist groups have acquired these deadly devices from Russian stockpiles. Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., chairman of the Research and Development Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, said Tuesday that he was briefed by the FBI late last week and that the investigation of whether terrorist groups have weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear devices, is now a top priority at the bureau after years of indifference. ...