Free Republic

What do these people have in common?: George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, William J. Casey, Dick Cheney, Tom Delay, Raymond Donovan, William Frist, Lewis Libby, Robert McFarlane, Oliver North, John M. Poindexter, Karl Rove, Kenneth Tomlinson, Caspar Weinberger. Answer: they are all conservative Republicans who have been accused by the liberal press and/or prosecuted for criminal acts under pressures brought by liberal politicians. All of them have been persecuted by the threat of legal action or by actual indictments for political reasons. None have been found guilty although some have had to go through the expense of an appeal...

MI6 plotted to murder Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in a staged car accident in a tunnel five years before Diana, Princess of Wales died in a similar crash, a renegade former spy has told the inquest into her death. Richard Tomlinson, who worked for MI6 in the early 1990s, told the High Court he had seen a two page document, drawn up in 1992, detailing three plans to kill Mr Milosevic. Diana inquest: MI6 plotted tunnel murder One plan was to use a strobe light to blind Mr Milosevic’s chauffeur The first involved using a Serb opposition paramilitary group, which...

MI6 plotted to murder Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in a staged car accident in a tunnel five years before Diana, Princess of Wales died in a similar crash, a renegade former spy has told the Inquest into her death. Richard Tomlinson, who worked for MI6 in the early 1990s, told the High Court he had seen a two page document, drawn up in 1992, detailing three plans to kill Mr Milosevic. Mr Tomlinson said the plan was shown to him by a senior MI6 officer referred to as "A" who argued that a crash in a tunnel would mean fewer...

This was presented just before the beginning of the Super Bowl yesterday, a Fox Sports Super Bowl tradition. Speakers include: Jim Brown, Don Shula, Roger Staubach, Marie Tillman (widow of Pat), Ronnie Lott, Ozzie Newsome, Teddy Bruschi, Paul Tagliabue, Lovie Smith, Steve Largent, Peyton Manning, Tony Dungy and more. Well done and moving.

National Football League rushing champion LaDainian Tomlinson remained upset by New England's post-game victory celebration after ousting San Diego from the playoffs. The Patriots, seeking their fourth Super Bowl title in the past six years, edged the Chargers 24-21 with help from four San Diego turnovers and a missed 54-yard field goal on the final play of an emotional game. Several New England players hurled their helmets into the air and danced on the middle of the field in celebration, incurring a meaningless 15-yard penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct and the wrath of San Diego star rusher Tomlinson. "I would never,...

LaDanian Tomlinson, usually very mild-mannered, became incensed after the Chargers' 24-21 loss to the Patriots yesterday when some New England players began mocking Shawne Merriman's sack dance on the Chargers' logo. "I was very upset," said Tomlinson, who went after some of the New England players. "I would never react that way. I'm a very, very classy person. When you go to the middle of a field and you're doing the dance that Merriman does, that's disrespectful to me and I can't sit there and watch that. It showed no class at all, and maybe that comes from their head...

When the Chargers defense forced a turnover late in the fourth quarter of a 48-20 blowout victory over the Denver Broncos Dec. 10, San Diego running back LaDainian Tomlinson had no intention of reentering the game. The league's leading MVP candidate had already done his work for the day, rushing for 96 yards and two touchdowns to that point. Never mind that the ball sat just seven yards away from another score. Never mind that Tomlinson needed just one more touchdown to break the NFL's all-time single-season record. With the game's outcome secure, the consummate team player was content to...

No Rove influence seen in US public TV boss hiring Tue Dec 13, 6:43 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Corporation for Public Broadcasting's inspector general found no evidence in correspondence that White House adviser Karl Rove or other White House officials tried to influence the hiring of the group's new leader, according to a letter released on Tuesday. CPB Inspector General Kenneth Konz denied a request by three watchdog groups to release documents and e-mails related to a report that found former CPB Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson was motivated by politics when he hired a new president and chief executive...

SUMMARY: If public broadcasting needed fixing, we'd hear about it on NPR and PBS, wouldn't we? They got him! The dirty, no-good, rotten Republican miscreant Kenneth Tomlinson, until recently the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting - they nailed his sorry conservative hind end to the floor! It's a wonder it took so long. A six-month investigation into this right-wing Clinton appointee's mismanagement of the holy temple of enlightened government culminated this past week with an inspector general's report alleging Tomlinson ignored public broadcasting rules and ethics code, which is sort of bad. But his transgressions were believed to...

Kenneth Tomlinson, the former board chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting accused by critics of trying to politicize public television and radio, has resigned from the board, it said on Thursday. Tomlinson, a Republican, quit shortly before CPB Inspector General Kenneth Konz was to publish a report after investigating his activities, including paying outside researchers to check public programming for liberal bias. Critics, including broadcasters and congressional Democrats, accused Tomlinson of trying to advance his own conservative agenda in public broadcasting, which is supposed to be non-partisan.

In the run-up to its meeting in late June 2005, the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was subjected to extraordinary pressure by the liberal media, left-leaning interest groups like Common Cause, Action for Children’s Television, “media watchdog” Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy, and a gaggle of sixteen Democratic senators who called for the resignation of CPB’s chairman, former Reader’s Digest editor-in-chief Ken Tomlinson. Their purpose was to prevent CPB from naming Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, Patricia Harrison (a former Republican National Committee chairwoman), as the new president and CEO...

Jul. 28--The chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting pledged yesterday to continue his campaign to bring ideological balance to government-funded programming, saying he will not bow to pressure from opponents who dispute his charges of liberal bias. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, in a meeting with editors and reporters at The Washington Times, also defended his use of tax dollars to study the political leanings of the guests on some PBS and NPR programs, stressing that his call for balance is in public broadcasting's best interest. "This is something the public broadcasting community is going to have to come to grips...

War waged over public broadcasting July 21, 2005 BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST Sen. Arlen Specter, a busy man with multiple duties, was understandably unprepared July 11 as he chaired a rare Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing about public television. When he asked whether there was an opening statement for him to read, the subcommittee staff director replied there was none but handed him questions. Therein lies a behind-the-scenes story about public air wars in Washington. The hearing's purpose was to grill Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, Corporation for Public Broadcasting board chairman, about hiring two consultants in his campaign against liberal bias...

WASHINGTON, June 30 - A researcher secretly retained by the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to monitor liberal bias in public radio and television set his sights on several media personalities, including Bill Moyers, Tucker Carlson, Tavis Smiley, David Brancaccio and Diane Rehm, according to documents made public Thursday. Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, released 50 pages of what he called the "work product" of Fred Mann, a researcher who has been connected to conservative journalism centers and who was hired by the corporation's chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson. Mr. Dorgan pronounced the work "a little nutty"...

It's time to take the public out of the Public Broadcasting Service. That is, it's time to cut taxpayer-funded broadcasting loose and let it compete.... Conservatives have long charged PBS with liberal programming bias. Now liberals are claiming that congressional Republicans are trying to influence programming and personnel. Those charges got louder with the naming Thursday of former GOP co-chair Pat Harrison as president and chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.... This came after 16 Senate Democrats — including New York's Chuck Schumer and both Jon Corzine and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey — called for the dismissal...

HERE'S the difference between this year's battle over public broadcasting and the one that blew up in Newt Gingrich's face a decade ago: this one isn't really about the survival of public broadcasting. So don't be distracted by any premature obituaries for Big Bird. Far from being an endangered species, he's the ornithological equivalent of a red herring. Let's not forget that Laura Bush has made a fetish of glomming onto popular "Sesame Street" characters in photo-ops. Polls consistently attest to the popular support for public broadcasting, while Congress is in a race to the bottom with Michael Jackson. Big...

Sixteen Democratic senators called on President Bush to remove Kenneth Y. Tomlinson as head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting because of their concerns that he is injecting partisan politics into public radio and television.... They included Charles E. Schumer of New York, Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, Jon Corzine and Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey, Bill Nelson of Florida, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California. Also on Tuesday, Democratic lawmakers joined other supporters of public broadcasting, including children and characters from PBS children's programs, to protest House Republicans' proposed cuts in...

A researcher retained secretly by the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to monitor the "Now" program with Bill Moyers for political objectivity last year, worked for 20 years at a journalism center founded by the American Conservative Union and a conservative columnist, an official at the journalism center said on Monday. The decision by the chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, to retain the researcher, Fred Mann, without the knowledge of the corporation's board, to report on the political leanings of the guests of "Now" is one of several issues under investigation by the corporation's inspector general. At the request...

Opening a new battle with the White House, Senate Democrats on Wednesday abruptly blocked the approval of President Bush's nominee for a top public diplomacy job, charging that the administration had injected partisan politics into the drive to improve the United States' image overseas. The nominee, Dina Powell, the White House personnel director, had been expected to win broad approval to become deputy under secretary of state for public diplomacy, to be the second-in-command to Karen P. Hughes in charge of repairing the United States' reputation, especially in the Muslim world. But in what was to have been a routine...

The growing controversy over the Bush administration’s attempts to alter the perceived liberal bias in PBS programming has led one media insider to urge: Consider pulling the plug on the network. In his Media Matters column in the Los Angeles Times, David Shaw asks, "Do we really want or need PBS anymore?" Shaw points out that when PBS’s parent, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was created in 1967, television was largely dominated by three commercial networks, while today we live in a "500-channel universe." "But politics, not the availability of more alternatives, is the primary reason to question the continued...