Free Republic

...there’s no basis for the common claim Obama won through a superb, unprecedented, supremely effective get-out-the-vote effort by the Democrats. Even downcast Republicans have hailed the opposition’s turnout operation as magnificent, but they fail to note that it resulted in far fewer voters showing up for President Obama. - The president drew 7.6 million fewer votes than he did in the hope-and-change election of 2008. - Exit polls showed that Obama got a slightly smaller percentage of the black vote than last time and that turnout was sharply down, delivering at least 1.5 million fewer African-American ballots for the Democrats....

One of Hillary Clinton’s closest advisers told her that Barack Obama should use a deadly hurricane to boost his re-election campaign, a proposal that she agreed to pass on to the White House, a new tranche of emails reveals. Blair and Clinton transcripts reveal global concerns of two buddies Read more Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime friend of the Clintons, sent a memo in 2012 presenting a strategy for turning Hurricane Isaac to the Democrats’ political advantage by contrasting it with President George W Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

During the fallout from her use of a personal email account, Hillary Clinton has attempted to downplay her working relationship with Sidney Blumenthal, but emails released last week show that the two met at her State Department office in 2012. Blumenthal has proved a thorn in the Democratic presidential candidate's side. The former journalist, who worked as an aide in the Bill Clinton White House, frequently emailed Clinton intelligence that he had gleaned from undisclosed sources. In many cases, Blumenthal was advancing the business interests of companies for which he was working. In other emails, Blumenthal would email Clinton political...

When losing ground in a war, it’s not unusual to see an enemy make use of one’s facilities and equipment. The report from Eli Lake at the Daily Beast only surprises because the US has insisted that we are not losing ground in the war against al-Qaeda, and still insists that the decapitation of the Moammar Qaddafi regime was sound policy: A key jihadist leader and longtime member of al Qaeda has taken control of a secretive training facility set up by U.S. special operations forces on the Libyan coastline to help hunt down Islamic militants, according to local media...

A former Department of Homeland Security agent says that an investigation he was conducting into a fundamentalist Islamic group operating in the U.S. may have helped stop San Bernardino jihadi Syed Farook had the government not shut down his probe. During an interview with Fox News' Megyn Kelly on Thursday, Philip Haney said that in 2012 as an agent with U.S. Customs and Border Protection's National Targeting Center, he opened an investigation into a Sunni Islamic group called, Tablighi Jamaat, a subset of the fundamentalist Deobandi movement. But Haney said that just a year into the investigation it was shut...

It is not unusual for President Obama and our allies to communicate on a regular basis, especially with the Turkish Prime Minister in regards to the ongoing situation in neighboring Syria, however the Turkish press and government are bewildered over a photo released by the White House of President Obama talking to the Prime Minister earlier this week: Maybe the President really likes baseball, or maybe he's trying to create the image of Teddy Roosevelt's famous "walk softly and carry a big stick" quote for the fall campaign, but either way it's a massive failure. Why do I say that?...

According to a Wednesday night post on the website Long War Journal by Thomas Joscelyn, a former detainee held at Guantanamo Bay named Ibrahim Qosi has rejoined the world of Islamic terrorism and ascended to a leadership post in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) following his release in July 2012. With this shocking story coming as the Obama administration still hopes to close the prison, the question going forward from a media standpoint is this: Will the media show any interest in this threat to national security and failure on the part of the adminstration? According to Joscelyn, Qoosi...

Investigators believe San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook may have been plotting an earlier attack in California with someone else, two U.S. officials said. One of the officials said the two conspired in 2012 and a specific target was considered. Neither of the officials could say how serious the plotting got. One official said the two decided not to go through with the earlier attack after a round of terror-related arrests in the area. "They got spooked," the official said. The purported plot bolsters assertions law enforcement officials have made since the San Bernardino attacks, saying Farook had been radicalized...

The war on terror, that campaign without end launched 14 years ago by George Bush, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions. On Monday the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting. The prosecution abandoned the case, apparently to avoid embarrassing the intelligence services. The defence argued that going ahead with the trial would have been an “affront to justice” when there was plenty of evidence the British state was itself...

The history teacher, who teaches at a Jewish school in Marseille, was attacked by three individuals shouting anti-Semitic abuse. The suspects were on two scooters and one of them was wearing an ISIS t-shirt. The three attackers are still on the run according to Le Monde. One of the men showed the man a picture of Mohamed Merah, an Islamist terrorist who killed seven people in France in 2012.

Barack Obama went to Oklahoma to promote the Keystone pipeline in 2012. Obama said he was “making the pipeline a priority.” But it was just another lie. Obama also took credit for the oil boom in America.

In an explosive report we learn that ever since 2012, the United States has been spying on Israel in order to prevent the Jewish State from attacking suspected Iranian nuclear sites, according to Friday’s Wall Street Journal. The White House had sent an additional aircraft carrier to the region after learning that Israeli aircraft had flown into Iranian airspace in what U.S. officials feared was a test run for an attack on Iran’s Fordow plant. The carriers had attack aircraft on board prepared to respond to any Israeli attack on Iran.

Richard Hoagland, the acting U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, discussed with Code Pink and anti-Israel activists what he said was classified information, during an October 3 meeting with the groups in Islamabad. Code Pink, a liberal anti-war organization known for disrupting Republican and conservative public events, uploaded a video of the meeting to an Internet video sharing website on Oct. 5. Realizing what he had said, Hoagland told the activist gathering: “I probably just, you know, got into big trouble with what I just said.”

A member of Hillary Clinton’s staff at the Department of State emailed classified information about the government in Congo to a staffer at the Clinton Foundation in 2012, according to a copy of the correspondence obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, sent the email to the Clinton Foundation’s foreign policy director, Amitabh Desai, on July 12, 2012. The message, which was originally obtained by the group Citizens United through a public records request, is partially redacted because it includes “foreign government information” that has been classified as “Confidential” by the...

WASHINGTON — Looking back, John C. Kiriakou admits he should have known better. But when the F.B.I. called him a year ago and invited him to stop by and “help us with a case,” he did not hesitate. Only an hour into what began as a relaxed chat with the two agents — the younger one who traded Pittsburgh Steelers talk with him and the senior investigator with the droopy eye — did he begin to realize just who was the target of their investigation. On Jan. 25, Mr. Kiriakou is scheduled to be sentenced to 30 months in prison...

When the nuns first hit the road in 2012, their mission was to collect stories of economic oppression in protest of the Paul Ryan budget — in defiant response to Pope Benedict XVI's startling decision to launch an investigation into the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella group that represents more than 80 percent of religious sisters in the United States. The investigation was an outright attack on women's role in the Church and was referred to as "a crackdown on American nuns." Their alleged transgression was spending too much time on social justice issues, and promoting "certain radical...

In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base. “At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s...

Critical infrastructure operators in the U.S. continue to face a hailstorm of hacks. Federal documents obtained by USA Today through a FOIA request revealed that hackers infiltrated the Department of Energy's computer system over 150 times between 2010 and 2014. As the department overseeing the country's power grid and nuclear weapons stockpile, the Energy Department is an attractive target for overseas cyber spies seeking to uncover vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is warning critical infrastructure providers of a malicious spear-phishing campaign in which hackers use bogus emails to infiltrate users' networks. The campaign has targeted government facilities and...

The Republican Party will continue to lose presidential elections if it comes across as mean-spirited and unwelcoming toward people of color, Donald Trump tells Newsmax. Whether intended or not, comments and policies of Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates during this election were seen by Hispanics and Asians as hostile to them, Trump says. “Republicans didn’t have anything going for them with respect to Latinos and with respect to Asians,” the billionaire developer says. “The Democrats didn’t have a policy for dealing with illegal immigrants, but what they did have going for them is they weren’t mean-spirited about it,” Trump...

PRINCETON, NJ -- Shortly after announcing his official candidacy, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has emerged as rank-and-file Republicans' current favorite for their party's 2012 presidential nomination. Twenty-nine percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents nationwide say they are most likely to support Perry, with Mitt Romney next, at 17%.