Free Republic

VAN BUREN, Ark.--To any reporter, it was the kind of story that doesn't come along often in a career--an alleged 1978 sexual assault involving William Jefferson Clinton, then attorney general of Arkansas. From the viewpoint of Juanita Broaddrick, it has been a trial and concern ever since reports began emerging in the 1992 presidential campaign, through the Paula Jones...

Convicted leftist terrorist Susan Rosenberg must be counted among the unlikeliest candidates ever to be awarded a university teaching post. Just four years ago, Rosenberg was serving out the 16th year of a 58-year sentence for the possession of more than 700 pounds of explosives and a stockpile of illicit weapons. Moreover, the onetime member of a leftist terrorist outfit called “The Family” was also a suspect in a 1981 robbery-gone-awry that left three people dead in Nyack, New York. However, next January students at Hamilton College, a small liberal arts school in upstate New York, will know Susan Rosenberg,...

In the outpouring of praise for William D. Cohan's new book "The Price of Silence"—a work, remarkably enough, being celebrated as a model of evenhandedness, scrupulous objectivity, etc.—one essential has gone overlooked. Namely, the central point of this tale about the Duke lacrosse case and accusations against three players of rape and assault at a house party. It takes no close reading to see that the book is meant to recast the story so as to nullify the outcome Americans thought they knew—

Leonard Weinglass, an attorney who represented clients in high-profile political cases ranging from the Chicago Seven in the 1960s to the so-called Cuban Five in recent years, has died in New York City. He was 77. Colleague Michael Krinsky says Weinglass died Wednesday night of pancreatic cancer.

The distance between the president and the people is beginning to be revealed The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president's earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill. There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama's pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from...

Obama's policies and personnel are "alien" to America and not what we expect from a President of the United States!Dorothy Rabinowitz's latest column at the Wall Street Journal caused a big splash Wednesday on the Talk Radio circuit. It's worth reading in it's entirety. Here's an excerpt: The Alien in the White House The distance between the president and the people is beginning to be revealed. By Dorothy Rabinowitz Wall Street Journal JUNE 9, 2010 ...A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard...

The distance between the president and the people is beginning to be revealed. The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president's earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill. There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama's pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from...

The story of the Amiraults of Massachusetts, and of the prosecution that had turned the lives of this thriving American family to dust, was well known to the world by the year 2001. It was well known, especially, to District Attorney Martha Coakley, who had by then arrived to take a final, conspicuous, role in a case so notorious as to assure that the Amiraults' name would be known around the globe. The Amiraults were a busy, confident trio, grateful in the way of people who have found success after a life of hardship. ... ... Gerald Amirault spent nearly...

The Amiraults were a busy, confident trio, grateful in the way of people who have found success after a life of hardship. Violet had reared her son Gerald and daughter Cheryl with help from welfare, and then set out to educate herself. The result was the triumph of her life—the Fells Acres school—whose every detail Violet scrutinized relentlessly. Not for nothing was the pre-school deemed by far the best in the area, with a long waiting list for admission.

It didn’t take chaotic town-hall meetings, raging demonstrators and consequent brooding in various sectors of the media to bring home the truth that the campaign for a health-care bill is, to put it mildly, not going awfully well. It’s not hard now to envision the state of this crusade with just a month or two more of diligent management by the Obama team—think train wreck. It may one day be otherwise in the more perfect world of universal coverage, but for now disabilities like the tone deafness that afflicts this administration from the top down are uninsurable.

The president shouldn’t worry about the protestors disrupting town hall meetings. He should worry about the Americans who have been sitting at home listening to him. It didn’t take chaotic town-hall meetings, raging demonstrators and consequent brooding in various sectors of the media to bring home the truth that the campaign for a health-care bill is, to put it mildly, not going awfully well. It’s not hard now to envision the state of this crusade with just a month or two more of diligent management by the Obama team—think train wreck. It may one day be otherwise in the more...

The single constant in the eternal election remains the media, whose activist role no one will seriously dispute. To point out the prevailing (with honorable exceptions) double standard of reporting so favorable to Mr. Obama by now feels superfluous -- much like talking about the weather. The same holds true for all those reports pointing to Mr. Obama's heroic status outside the United States -- not to mention the cascade of press analyses warning that if he fails to win election, the cause will surely be racism. None of this means that the media's role will go unremembered -- who...

Both time and events have dimmed those defining moments that early on revealed the difference between the two presidential aspirants. Not only did the financial crisis arrive but so, in her uproarious way, did Sarah Palin. Tuesday's debate between two candidates paralyzed by caution altered nothing. It was a relief, of course, not to hear about Sen. McCain's record as a "maverick" --a word that would, in a merciful world, be banned from public discourse for the next decade. It was too much to expect Barack Obama to spare us further recitals of the McCain-Bush connection. The single constant in...

NEW YORK - Victor Rabinowitz, a lawyer who represented leftist causes and clients such as Alger Hiss, the Black Panthers, Fidel Castro and Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin, has died at 96. Rabinowitz died Friday at his Manhattan home, his longtime law partner, Michael Krinsky, said Tuesday. In a 1996 memoir, "Unrepentant Leftist," Rabinowitz said that he had been a member of the American Communist Party from 1942 — when the United States and the Soviet Union were wartime allies — until the early 1960s because it seemed the best way to fight for social justice. Rabinowitz was the last...

<p>The law does some foolish things, it doesn't do crazy things, Floyd Abrams informed a "60 Minutes" audience Sunday. The First Amendment expert and champion of individual rights had in mind, specifically, the arguments of civil libertarians and others now objecting to airport security measures or other special scrutiny focusing on Arab male passengers. "It would be crazy," Mr. Abrams observed, "not to consider what people look like when we're looking for people who may be involved with hijackings."</p>

The Duke rape hoax is redolent of past decades' phony child-abuse cases. No one could have imagined, when the story began last March, how soon and completely that bit of shorthand--"the Duke University scandal"--would be transformed. Scarcely 10 months after, the term is now almost universally understood as a reference to the operations of Michael Nifong, the Durham County district attorney (pictured nearby), whose abandonment of all semblance of concern about the merits of the rape and assault accusations against three Duke University students was obvious from the first. So was his abundant confidence while broadcasting comments on the guilt...

Two days into the JonBenet Ramsey/John Karr media deluge, a mid-fortyish male in line next to me at a food shop groaned at the day's newspaper headlines. "Now," muttered this stranger--though he wore a baseball cap with bill turned backward, which suggested a few things about him one could know right off--"now we're not going to hear about anything but this damned story for the next six weeks." I sympathized, forbearing to tell him that it would have plenty of competition, what with the networks set to embark on round-the-clock wallowing in the Katrina anniversary.

A good illustration of the collusion between axe-grinding victims and the cynical media that exploit them appeared after one of last year's presidential debates: a placard was crassly put up in "spin alley" to direct reporters to "9-11 widows" who were eager to provide them with quotes disparaging George Bush for not making the right noises during the debate. Cindy Sheehan and the media's manipulative use of her brings this episode back to mind. We're witnessing a replay of the media's cynical catering to the 9-11 widows, dubbed the "Jersey Girls," which began with great interest but then trailed off...

A solemn handful of plaintiffs surrounded New York Civil Liberties Union head Donna Lieberman last week as she announced the agency's latest lawsuit--this one targeted at new procedures allowing for the random inspection of bags carried onto the subways. This will not come as a surprise--the agency has had an exceptionally busy few years, since 9/11, campaigning against expanding police powers, increased surveillance and other antiterror measures, all of which, the NYCLU and likeminded watchdogs regularly inform us, pose a greater danger than any that might come from the terrorists themselves. How Americans of normal intelligence respond to this reasoning...

...Among other lessons of 9/11, we have learned the cost of squeamishness that prevented closer scrutiny of young Arab men entering the country even when their behavior raised suspicions.... [A]n airline ticket-taker recalls being stunned by the strange look on the face of customer Mohamed Atta--particularly the unsettling fury the man exuded. Still, he could not bring himself to raise any alarm: indeed, when he heard later that the plane Atta was on had been one of those that crashed in the terror attacks, the agent felt terrible. Terrible because he had been suspicious of the passenger and thought he...