Free Republic

Retired Navy Adm. Stansfield Turner, the iconoclastic director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1970s who significantly reorganized its clandestine ranks and helped usher in a new technological age at the agency, died Jan. 18 at his home in Seattle. He was 94. His secretary, Pat Moynihan, confirmed the death but did not disclose the cause. An Oxford-educated Rhodes scholar, Adm. Turner was long considered to be one of the Navy’s sharpest analytical minds and brashly confident leaders. He was a four-star admiral and commander of NATO forces in Southern Europe when he was tapped in 1977 by...

A federal judge slapped a would-be terrorist, who plotted to blow up the Herald Square subway station, with 30 years behind bars yesterday - heeding calls from prosecutors who said the young radical was "perfectly willing to have people die." Shahawar Matin Siraj, 24, was convicted in May of conspiring to place an explosive device inside a garbage can or under a bench in the crowded West 34th Street subway station, which sits just beneath Macy's flagship department store. He wanted to bomb the station in retaliation for war abuses against Iraqis. "The defendant's role was central . . ....

Of all the Democratic complaints about the presidential election, the most interesting and ironic came from Lawrence O'Donnell, a leading party strategist and former aide to Sen. Pat Moynihan. He complained on MSNBC that, "The segment of the country that pays for the federal government is now being governed by the people who don't pay for the federal government." Mr. O'Donnell added for good measure, "Ninety percent of the red states are welfare client states of the federal government." It hardly seems either consistent or politically "on message" for Democrats to talk about "welfare client states" when describing Social Security...