Free Republic

The conservative wing of the Supreme Court has brazenly revealed its corporatist agenda; President Obama may have found a populist voice with which to hector Wall Street; having given away Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat to a former Cosmo centerfold, Democrats are preparing to roll over on health insurance reform; and without doubt, Rush Limbaugh is making a complete ass of himself. Yet, for the first time in over a year, I won’t be able to talk about any of this on the radio. Air America, the long-suffering progressive talk radio network that carried my show, is no more. They...

WASHINGTON - Intelligence shortcomings, as we see, have a thousand fathers; secret intelligence triumphs are orphans. Here is the unremarked story of "the Farewell dossier": how a CIA campaign of computer sabotage resulting in a huge explosion in Siberia -- all engineered by a mild-mannered economist named Gus Weiss -- helped us win the Cold War. Weiss worked down the hall from me in the Nixon administration. In early 1974, he wrote a report on Soviet advances in technology through purchasing and copying that led the beleaguered president -- detente notwithstanding -- to place restrictions on the export of computers...

Most of us understand the common polygraph. All it amounts to is a device that crudely records physiological responses. The operator makes a big deal of wiring up the subject, asks a few questions and records the physical response of the body. So, let's say the subject under investigation is like Bill Clinton, an "exceptionally good liar." What would the polygraph operator see? Probably nothing. And, that is exactly why polygraph data are not allowed to be used in court. Clearly, the results are not dependable. In truth, the most important part of a polygraph test is the interview given...