Free Republic

In my last column I assessed the Republican governors and former governors who may run for president in 2016. Now I turn to the legislators and the rest of the field. Other prospective Republican presidential candidates for 2016 include four young national legislators who will dominate the party in the first quarter of the 21st century. Two of the national legislators, Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, have a surprising amount in common: Both have Cuban backgrounds, both arose from the tea party boom of 2009 and ’10, and both represent powerful states in the Electoral...

President Obama on Saturday condemned the "barbaric murder" by al Qaeda of U.S. hostage Luke Somers in Yemen during a rescue attempt by U.S. forces. "On behalf of the American people, I offer my deepest condolences to Luke’s family and to his loved ones," he said in a statement. "As this and previous hostage rescue operations demonstrate, the United States will spare no effort to use all of its military, intelligence, and diplomatic capabilities to bring Americans home safely, wherever they are located. And terrorists who seek to harm our citizens will feel the long arm of American justice," he...

Baghdad - Iranian military commanders deployed in Iraq played a key role in recent victories against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) fighters throughout the country, according to Iraqi security officials and Shia militia leaders. Iran was the first country to respond to the Iraqi government's calls for international help in the battle against ISIL, which overran vast swaths of the country's north and west this summer and were advancing towards the capital. Dozens of Iranian military commanders - including Qassim Sulaimani, the head of Iran's elite Quds Force - have joined Iraqi security forces in battlefields north...

Joe Scarborough isn't exactly the voice of movement conservatism, but with Joe away today, Mika Brzezinski took advantage to flood Morning Joe's first hour exclusively with guests supporting President Obama's executive-order amnesty. The first two guests were Javier Palomarez, head of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and Ray Suarez of Al Jazeera [ex of NPR]. A bit later, Latina Dem Rep. Linda Sanchez put in an appearance. No Republican or conservative was given a chance in the first hour to decry the President's diktat. At the top of hour two Mika finally let Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller appear....

The winner and loser of the lawsuit between Al Jazeera America and former Current TV CEO Al Gore is yet to be determined, but ratings comparisons between the two show a clear winner. After buying Current TV in early 2013, and debuting over the summer that year, Al Jazeera has lost almost half of Current TV's audience.

This letter is being sent to you on behalf of the Qatar Awareness Campaign Coalition. The purpose is to inform you and the public of the activities of Qatar, the country which owns Al Jazeera America, the network which was established following your sale of CurrentTV to Al Jazeera for $500 million in 2013. As cited below, in fact, you and your business partner, Mr. Joel Hyatt, engaged in two major transactions with Qatar: first the purchase of Newsworld International in 2004, from which you launched CurrentTV; secondly, the selling back of the station to Qatar to broadcast Al Jazeera...

Ms. Malika Bilal and Ms. Femi Oke Al Jazeera English PO Box 23127 Doha – Qatar Dear Ms. Bilal and Ms. Femi Oke: This letter is being sent to you on behalf of the Qatar Awareness Campaign Coalition. The purpose is to inform you and the public of the activities of Qatar, the country which owns Al Jazeera, the network on which you are co-hosts of the program, The Stream. We urge to you read the information below, which includes evidence that Qatar is arguably the preeminent sponsor of terror in the world today. It is a benefactor of the...

To the American Public: In light of the wars and violent turbulence that currently engulf the Middle East and parts of Africa, a coalition of concerned citizens, journalists, and activists are launching a campaign to expose a most infamous and pernicious sponsor of Islamic terror: the Gulf state of Qatar. Qatar, (pronounced “cutter,” or "gutter"), is, per capita, the richest country in the world ($93,352 in 2013). This is partly due to the fact that they control the third largest natural gas reserves in the world, the North Dome field in the Persian Gulf. It is also because Qatar has...

Focus on police bias obscures meaningful debate on structural racism that perpetuates racial injustice and inequality. In the wake of the death of Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager shot by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 9, the public has heard quite a bit about the town, its residents and their supposed violence. But about half an hour drive west of Ferguson, along a highway straddling the Missouri River, you will come to what may seem a planet away: St. Charles County. St. Charles is a “Whitopia” — a predominantly white county that has posted 6 percent...

Leaders of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood group and allied clerics said on Saturday that they are departing Qatar, where they had sought refuge following the ouster of Egypt’s Islamist President Mohammed Morsi and the crackdown on his supporters. Their presence in Qatar had severely strained Doha’s relations with Egypt as well as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, all of which view the more than 85-year-old Islamist movement as a threat. The expulsion threatens to further isolate the group, which rose to power in Egypt through a string of post-Arab Spring elections but suffered a dramatic fall from grace during...

The lower Manhattan skyline featuring the ill-fated Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1992 [AP] A secret 9/11 history exists - one that the few who know it say names at least one foreign country that provided support to some of the 19 hijackers on their murderous mission 13-years ago on Thursday. Twenty-eight pages from an official 2002 report detailing foreign-government assistance to the September 11 attackers remain classified. Determined 9/11 family members and sympathetic congressmen are pushing hard, however, for the long-awaited release of the missing history of one of the United States' greatest tragedies. The controversial...

The Arabic website of the Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera reportedly published an extraordinarily offensive piece this week mocking the beheaded U.S. journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley. The piece questioned the authenticity of the two videotaped beheadings, suggesting that both men and their killers were straight out of “Hollywood” casting and that their murders were “unconvincing.” The report was flagged and translated by the competing regional news network, Al Arabiya: Appearing insensitive to the feelings of the victim’s family, the report – published under the “reports and interviews” section of the pan-Arab channel’s Arabic website on Thursday –...

A British journalist working for Al Jazeera was held against his will while trying to get an interview at London’s Finsbury Park Mosque, which formerly was run by the notorious Al Qaeda cleric Abu Hamza, recently convicted on multiple terror charges. In an article Sunday, journalist Ben Flanagan documented his visit along with video footage filmed on his cell phone, and shows how he was locked in a room and not let out until police came. …

The NRA and Tea Party haven't said a word. Can we just conclude that they don't care about black people? On August 5, a man named John Crawford was playing with a toy rifle in an Ohio Wal-Mart. Someone called 911, and police showed up and shot him in the chest. He died. On August 9, a man named Michael Brown was walking in the street in Ferguson, Missouri, when a police officer stopped him. According to the friend that was with him, Brown put his hands up to show that he was unarmed. The officer shot him in the...

Joyce Rouse is an enthusiastic woman. Perhaps more well-known by her stage name, Earth Mama, Rouse is a singer/songwriter whose music combines what she calls her passion for the Earth with themes of spirituality. Born a Lutheran and now a Quaker, Rouse first became acquainted with women religious and the eco-spirituality movement when she began the master’s program in earth literacy at Saint-Mary-of-the-Woods College in Indiana. Since then, she says the Catholic sisters have taken her under their wing, sharing her music around the world and in their own contemplative practices. And from her booth in the exhibitor hall at...

Last January, Al Gore took a boatload of scientists, donors, and celebrities to Antarctica to talk about climate change. Richard Branson, James Cameron, Ted Turner, Tom Brokaw, and Tommy Lee Jones joined more than 100 other paying guests — Gore’s handpicked best and brightest — on the National Geographic Explorer, an ice-class 367-foot cruise ship, to see “up close and personal” the effects of a warming planet, courtesy of the former vice president’s environmental nonprofit, the Climate Reality Project. Singer Jason Mraz, another passenger aboard Gore’s Antarctic voyage, would later describe the trip on his blog as “a kind...

The former Vice President comes into New York on a well-timed wave of publicity If the cynics are right, and Al Gore’s real aim in refusing to kill off talk of a run for President in 2008 is to publicize his film, then this week could hardly have gone any better. In the days leading up to his April 25 appearance at the Tribeca Film Festival, Bill Clinton casually mentioned on Larry King Live that Mr. Gore might run; Britain’s Sunday Telegraph reported that two unnamed former Gore staffers were assembling a secret campaign; and finally, the day before his...

The Press vs. Al GoreHow lazy reporting, pack journalism and GOP spin cost him the election One month after formally kicking off his presidential campaign, Vice President Al Gore paddled down the Connecticut River in New Hampshire on July 22nd, 1999, spreading his green theme of protecting the environment and pausing for a photo op. His message was quickly drowned out, though, when the Washington Times' Bill Sammon reported that local authorities had granted Gore a special favor when they released nearly 4 billion gallons of water from a nearby dam into the drought-stricken river in order to keep the ...

“It is now clear that Al Gore is insane," John Podhoretz wrote in his New York Post column last week, after Gore's recent anti-Bush administration tirades. "I don't mean that his policy ideas are insane, though many of them are. I mean that based on his behavior, conduct, mien and tone over the past two days, there is every reason to believe that Albert Gore Jr., desperately needs help. I think he needs medication, and I think that if he is already on medication, his doctors need to adjust it or change it entirely." John is not a physician, but...

This is a worthy topic for continued congressional exploration. In short, the video and accompanying narrative dissect how, at his Friday Capitol Hill appearance touting a scheme to ration energy while in the process rewarding business who helped write the scheme: Al Gore obfuscates, downplays and refuses to discuss the role that CEOs have played in crafting his Cap-and-Trade C02 trading schemes and carbon swapping systems.Al Gore tries to put a lid in Congressional committee testimony on a little reported but vitally important subject in the global warming, carbon-tax ‘debate’- the new derivatives bubble in the emerging green-energy credit-swap market….The...