Free Republic

The New York Times is once again under attack. This time, though, the attack is not related to its coverage of Iraq or to Jayson Blair or Judith Miller or even that ridiculous front-page piece it did on the Clintons' marriage -- an article that caused eyestrain from trying to read between the lines -- but to its stock price. Wall Street thinks it is too low. The phrase "Wall Street thinks" is a tsunamic oxymoron because Wall Street, by and large, does not think. Instead, it is ruthlessly reptilian, instinctively striving only for profits, which means money, which means...

Newton officials are calling their refusal to allow FBI agents access to library computers without a warrant during a terrorist threat last week “their finest hour.” Law enforcement officials say it’s a “nightmare.” Police rushed to the Newton Free Library after tracing a terrorist threat e-mailed to Brandeis University to a computer at the library. But requests to examine computers Jan. 18 were rebuffed by Newton library Director Kathy Glick-Weil and Mayor David Cohen on the grounds that they did not have a warrant. Cohen, defending the library’s actions, called the legal standoff one of Newton’s “finest hours.” “We showed...

The only thing standing between Joe Biden and the presidency is his mouth. ... snip The tragedy is that Biden, who is running for president, is a much better man and senator than these accounts would suggest. But his tendency, his compulsion, his manic-obsessive running of the mouth has become the functional equivalent of womanizing or some other character weakness that disqualifies a man for the presidency. It is his version of corruption, of alcoholism, of a fierce temper or vile views -- all the sorts of things that have crippled candidates in the past. It is, though, an innocent...

ALMATY, Kazakhstan (AP) Kazakhstan needs to chill out and leave Borat alone, an international media watchdog group says. Reporters Without Borders is criticizing Kazakhstan for going too far in its war over the words of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, best known in the U.S. as the title character of the satirical "Da Ali G Show." The leaders of the Central Asian ex-Soviet nation, fuming over Cohen's brutally satirical portrayal of an ignorant Kazakh journalist, pulled the plug this week on his Web-site use of a Kazakh Internet domain name. That move led the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders to issue...

ETROIT, Aug. 29 — For nearly a year, the three foreigners picked up at an apartment here a week after the Sept. 11 attacks seemed like just another group of Arab men caught up in the government dragnet. They languished in prison while facing charges that seemed minor; federal agents had actually been looking for the previous occupant when they raided the apartment.But at least one thing appears to have separated the Detroit trio from hundreds of other Arabs swept up by the government in the last year: a cooperative witness. A fourth Arab man who once lived with...

NEW YORK As if responding to the escalating battle with famed TV personality Borat Sagdiyev, a character on HBO's "Da Ali G Show," the Kazakhstan government today published a four-page advertising section in The New York Times. The section, titled, "Kazakhstan in the 21st Century," carried testimonials to its oil production, its democracy, education system, and purported "power and influence" of women. The feud has been simmering for the past year, after Borat and his frank depictions of life in his homeland (where, he claims, gypsies are still hunted for sport and women rank somewhere below farm animals in the...

Russ Gilbert has been named vice president of Interactive for Air America Radio, including the network and its flagship station WLIB AM New York. The announcement was made by Air America President Gary Krantz. .... “I'm looking forward to working with the incredible talent at Air America to take www.airamericaradio.com to the next level,” said Gilbert.

Liberal yakker Al Franken blasted the man who founded his Air America radio network as "a crook" on Monday - even as he laughed off the financial scandal that continues to dog his broadcast. After weeks of on-air silence about an $875,000 loan that Air America finagled from a Bronx community group that serves poor kids and Alzheimers patients, Franken was finally forced to discuss the scandal when a caller asked him to explain. "Here's the deal," the Air America host said. "The first guy who was chairman of the board of Air America - Evan Cohen - was a...

The New York Sun takes on the Air America story today and advances it by leaps and bounds, talking with the president of the non-profit which had its money taken by Air America founder Evan Cohen. It turns out that Cohen didn't just get money for the netlet, but also managed to get plenty for his own pockets as well while sitting on the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club board: Initially, members of the executive committee viewed Mr. Cohen fondly because he had thrown a tremendously successful fund-raising affair for Gloria Wise in Manhattan last year. They recalled being...

LINK TO VIEW THE INDICTMENT Hillary Campaign Finance Director Indicted Rosen charged with fudging numbers for 2000 Hollywood fundraiser JANUARY 7--The finance director for Hillary Clinton's 2000 U.S. Senate campaign was indicted today on federal charges of filing bogus financial reports with the Federal Election Commission. According to the below indictment, David Rosen reported the false numbers in connection with a "Hollywood tribute" honoring Clinton. Investigators allege that a "wealthy individual" paid more than $1.1 million to underwrite the Clinton gala and that those payments were delivered through "several corporate entities controlled by him." While that whopping sum should...

<p>Tonight it is, March 23, 2005, over five days since Theresa Marie Schiavo commenced her ordeal of purposeful and legally sanctioned dehydration and starvation. We await a decision from the three judge panel from Eleventh Judicial Circuit as to her fate, as her family struggles with seeing Terri's physical health deteriorate.</p>

The inane and bitter Richard Cohen spewed forth a few days ago and -- shockingly -- he wrote of the Democratic movement rustling through the Mideast: '...something momentous is stirring: democracy, freedom, independence. Something. Or, as an Arab acquaintance just e-mailed me from the region, "I can smell the winds of change in the air wherever I go." ...' A gracious and glowing concession to the Reaganesque moves of the administration? Of course not. '...Given what's happening, it's understandable that many eyes have shifted to Washington with a new sense of appreciation. Could it be that the neocons were right...

What's become of Teresa Heinz Kerry? Preceding its Women Who Make a Difference Awards Dinner on March 1, the National Council for Research on Women is featuring "a conversation with Teresa Heinz," chairwoman of Heinz Family Philanthropies and, up until Election Day, the highly visible better half of Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry. "Teresa Heinz will speak to her commitment to women's economic security, including Social Security and retirement," writes the council, not bothering to mention her married name in several references. "I just checked, and she no longer uses her [entire] last name; only during the [presidential] campaign did she...

It is rare to have books exploring the legacy of a presidential administration still in its first term. It is rarer still to have the number of insider accounts that Americans have access to in 2004. “These books appear to be painting history before our eyes,” said Charlotte Abbott, news editor of Publishers Weekly. “No one in the industry of publishing can remember a time since Watergate when so many political books have come out and the public has been interested – and a lot of those Watergate titles came out after.” One of the reporters who first exposed Watergate,...

Remember Kosovo? By Cliff Kincaid | December 28, 2004 Clinton's policy was not to bomb those terrorists but to support them and bomb the Christian Serbs. AIM put together a list of the most underreported or buried stories of 2004, and one of them was the resurgence of anti-Serb, anti-Christian violence in Kosovo. Dozens were killed and more Christian churches were destroyed there. Kosovo got some attention near the end of the year when newspapers covered the fact that a former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the KLA, became prime minister in a new Kosovo-based government. A story in...

WHEN Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician, collected his post from the letterbox on Wednesday he got an unpleasant surprise. Among the bills and junk mail was a letter addressing him as “ugly dog”. It told him he would soon be beheaded. It was an unnerving way to start the day. Only 24 hours earlier Theo van Gogh, the film maker who had often attacked radical Muslims, had been riding along on his bicycle when a Muslim fanatic first shot and then butchered him on a busy street with the nonchalance of an abattoir worker.

WASHINGTON, Nov 28, 2003 (AP WorldStream via COMTEX) -- A top U.S. intelligence analyst who supervised the production of the U.S. government's key prewar findings on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs says he believes those conclusions were sound, even though many have not been validated. Stuart A. Cohen, the vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, a body of senior intelligence analysts which advises CIA Director George J. Tenet, argued in an article Friday that with all the evidence the U.S. government possessed, "no reasonable person could have ... reached any conclusions or alternative views that were profoundly different...

Posted on Sun, Oct. 31, 2004 Bin Laden videotape sways some voters, but not others By Larry Eichel and Sandy Bauers Inquirer Staff Writers For Robert Blose, a retired steelworker who lives in Kutztown, seeing Osama bin Laden on TV yesterday was all it took to end his days as one of Pennsylvania's remaining undecided voters. "I'm going to vote for President Bush," said Blose, 61, "because I think he's the better person to protect us. I'm sure a lot of other people are going to feel the same way. It makes a difference." But in nearby Reading, another undecided...

I do not write the headlines for my columns. Someone else does. But if I were to write the headline for this one, it would be "Impeach George Bush." Of course, I realize there's no chance Congress would impeach the president at this point or under almost any circumstance. It somehow reserves its outrage for lying about sex under oath and not, as now seems clear, the making of war under false pretenses. Say what you will about Bill Clinton, no one died in the White House pantry.

...A new National Intelligence Director with a staff of several hundred will ride herd over the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, the FBI and the Pentagon.... ...[I]f this "reform" passes, a President might no longer get the competing views from the Pentagon because its intelligence arms will have been wrested away from the Defense Secretary to report to the same new national director. Such a move... runs the risk of separating intelligence from the war fighters who need it. One genuine success of recent years has been the integration of real-time intelligence with commanders on the battlefield.... The intelligence changes......