Free Republic

Civil-rights investigations in Ferguson and Staten Island? No, what denizens of St. Louis and New York City ought to be worried about right now is . . . the crime wave overtaking Seattle. If you don’t understand why, then you probably thought Obamacare was about covering the uninsured. Like its health-care “reform” campaign, the Obama Left’s civil-rights crusade is about control – central control of state law enforcement by Washington.

NOVEMBER 22, 2014 Alinsky Does Amnesty The only limit on the president’s power that he recognizes is political expediency. By Andrew C. McCarthy That assertion is not an epithet — well, not primarily. True, I would not describe someone I admired as an “Alinskyite.” Saul Alinsky was a loathsome figure — a radical statist who whose toxic brew of thoroughgoing deceit and brass-knuckles extortion (“direct action”) has become a part of mainstream politics. But in tying the president to the seminal community organizer whose theories and tactics so influenced him, my purpose is more to decode than to insult him....

NOVEMBER 20, 2014 No, ‘Prosecutorial Discretion’ Does Not Justify Obama’s Lawless Amnesty Obama’s planned action perverts the meaning of the legal doctrine. By Andrew C. McCarthy Can the president make fraud and theft legal? How about assault? Cocaine use? Perjury? You’d have to conclude he can — and that we have supplanted the Constitution with a monarchy — if you buy President Obama’s warped notion of prosecutorial discretion. Tonight, Mr. Obama will unveil his executive order granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. According to news accounts, the criminal-law doctrine of prosecutorial discretion is the foundation of the president’s legal...

n writing Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, I had a purpose: Explain that the capacity of Congress to oust a lawless president is central to the Framers’ design of our governing system. Because executive power is awesome, and intended to be that way, certain abuses of it can be discouraged only by the credible threat that Congress will remove the president from power — or, if discouragement fails, can be remediated only by the president’s actual removal. That is why Madison believed that the inclusion of impeachment in Congress’s arsenal was “indispensible” to preserving the Constitution’s...

Absent the credible threat of impeachment, Obama will pardon millions of illegal aliens. There is high anxiety over President Obama’s impending unilateral amnesty order for millions of illegal aliens. How many millions? The estimates vary. On the low end, 3 to 8 million, assuming some correlation to the potential beneficiaries of the president’s already existing amnesty decrees (including DACA or Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals). On the high end, as many as 9 to 34 million, factoring in likely categorical expansions of amnesty and their ramifications over the next several years. The nation overwhelmingly objects to Obama’s immigration lawlessness, but...

Pretending to be guided by “science” rather than practicing politics in service of their post-American agenda, Obama administration officials persevere in the irresponsible suggestion that Ebola cannot be transmitted through the air – i.e., that it requires physical contact with an infected person that results in exposure to bodily fluids. It should go without saying that because viruses mutate, responsible scientists would never claim that the “science” about them is “settled.” But quite apart from the dynamic circumstances, government scientists are obviously concerned about air transmission in the here and now, even as the spin-meisters claim it cannot happen. Aaron...

Ron Klain and Solyndra The administration’s point man on a solar fraud is now in charge of Ebola. By Andrew C. McCarthy NRO October 20,2014 Ron Klain is a sharp-elbowed Democratic political operative with no medical expertise. Tapping him as “Ebola czar” may not be the president’s best move when, as it is, no one can believe a word the Obama administration says. And that’s not just because Mr. Klain is yet another lobbyist recruited despite Mr. Obama’s vow that his administration would shun lobbyists. Klain was also a central player in the president’s Solyndra fraud, which soaked taxpayers for...

Why is he always telling them what he’s not going to do? This has become a constant refrain among President Obama’s Republican and conservative critics. And it is an excellent question. Why does the president tell jihadists from the Islamic State and al-Qaeda that the American campaign against them will be strictly limited to aerial bombing (sporadic, at that) and absolutely, positively will not involve the introduction of U.S. ground forces? The theory behind the question is bulletproof: the only way you can hope to keep bad actors in check, to discourage them from acting roguishly in pursuit of their...

New evidence pried from the government under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) proves the point I have posited here at Ordered Liberty: The federal government willfully intervened on behalf of al Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki on October 10, 2002, undoing his arrest on felony fraud charges when he was detained at JFK International Airport in New York, and allowing him to walk away with a Saudi handler. As I argued over two years ago, the government’s story to the contrary – viz., that it was moved by sheer coincidence on the eve of Awlaki’s arrival to pull the plug...

We’re being had. Again. For six years, President Obama has endeavored to will the country into accepting two pillars of his alternative national-security reality. First, he claims to have dealt decisively with the terrorist threat, rendering it a disparate series of ragtag jayvees. Second, he asserts that the threat is unrelated to Islam, which is innately peaceful, moderate, and opposed to the wanton “violent extremists” who purport to act in its name. Now, the president has been compelled to act against a jihad that has neither ended nor been “decimated.” The jihad, in fact, has inevitably intensified under his counterfactual...

SEPTEMBER 20, 2014 The Islamic State . . . of Saudi Arabia Between beheadings, they’ll help train the “moderate” Syrian rebels. By Andrew C. McCarthy Andrew C. McCarthy The beheadings over the last several weeks were intended to terrorize, to intimidate, to coerce obedience, and to enforce a construction of sharia law that, being scripturally rooted, is draconian and repressive. And let’s not kid ourselves: We know there will be more beheadings in the coming weeks, and on into the future. Apostates from Islam, homosexuals, and perceived blasphemers will face brutal persecution and death. Women will be treated as chattel...

The beheadings over the last several weeks were intended to terrorize, to intimidate, to coerce obedience, and to enforce a construction of sharia law that, being scripturally rooted, is draconian and repressive. And let’s not kid ourselves: We know there will be more beheadings in the coming weeks, and on into the future. Apostates from Islam, homosexuals, and perceived blasphemers will face brutal persecution and death. Women will be treated as chattel and face institutionalized abuse. Islamic-supremacist ideology, with its incitements to jihad and conquest, with its virulent hostility toward the West, will spew from the mosques onto the streets....

When you are dealing with an administration whose officials look you in the eye and tell you the Muslim Brotherhood is a “largely secular” organization, it’s tempting to laugh off the idiocy spouted by President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry about how the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam. We should resist the temptation, though, because there is a dangerous purpose behind the laughable assertion. Obviously, Bing West and Daniel Pipes are correct that the terrorist group is entirely Islamic. As I’ve been arguing here more times and for more years than I care to...

The beheading of yet another Western journalist, Steven Sotloff, has ignited another round of commentary suggesting that the Islamic State is the worst terrorist network ever. There is value in this: The current jihadist threat to the United States and the West is more dire than the threat that existed just prior to the 9/11 attacks, so anything that increases pressure for a sea change in our Islamic-supremacist-enabling government’s policies helps. Nevertheless, the perception that the Islamic State is something new and different and aberrational compared with the Islamic-supremacist threat we’ve been living with for three decades is wrong, perhaps...

For those of us who’ve been raising alarms about both the jihadist threat and the national-security vulnerability created by the Obama administration’s non-enforcement of the immigration laws, this is not a surprise — particularly less than two weeks before September 11. But it is nonetheless jarring to read. Judicial Watch has just put out this statement: Islamic terrorist groups are operating in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez and planning to attack the United States with car bombs or other vehicle born improvised explosive devices (VBIED). High-level federal law enforcement, intelligence and other sources have confirmed to Judicial Watch...

AUGUST 23, 2014 Eric Holder, Racial Profiler The Investigation of Darren Wilson Is Solely Based On His Race. By Andrew C. McCarthy Why has a federal civil-rights murder investigation arisen out of the tumult in a St. Louis exurb? There is only one plausible reason: Eric Holder is guilty of racial profiling. To be clear, we are not talking here about whether there was justification for the shooting of a young black man, 18-year-old Michael Brown, by a young white police officer, 28-year-old Darren Wilson. Was the shooting a legitimate exercise in self-defense by an officer under attack? Was it...

Our barbaric jihadist enemies – the ones President Obama repeatedly assured us he had “decimated” and put on “the path to defeat” – are now stronger than ever. Not stronger than they have been in years, or decades – stronger than ever. They have seized a country-size swath of territory (and growing). They have just beheaded an American journalist – which is the sort of thing they do as a matter of routine but has obviously, and finally, gotten our attention. Not to worry, though: The Obama Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation. I’m sure ISIS is quaking. The...

Why has a federal civil-rights murder investigation arisen out of the tumult in a St. Louis exurb? There is only one plausible reason: Eric Holder is guilty of racial profiling. To be clear, we are not talking here about whether there was justification for the shooting of a young black man, 18-year-old Michael Brown, by a young white police officer, 28-year-old Darren Wilson. Was the shooting a legitimate exercise in self-defense by an officer under attack? Was it an overreaction for which Officer Wilson should suffer serious civil and criminal consequences? Such questions can only be answered by a thorough...

Jimmy Carter and Mary Robinson have jointly penned a characteristically appalling op-ed in Foreign Policy magazine assigning primary blame to Israel for the war in the Middle East. The key to ending the violence, they contend, is for the United States and the European Union to recognize the Hamas terrorist organization as a legitimate “political force.” Equally laughable is Carter and Robinson’s contention that, by its agreement to the unity government, Hamas should be vicariously understood as assenting to the “technocratic” government’s agreement to the three Quartet conditions: “nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and adherence to past agreements.” In reality, as...

What happens when the president who has politicized law-enforcement to a degree unprecedented in American history meets a terrorist responsible for killing Americans he has recklessly failed to protect, decimating his pretensions about “decimating” al-Qaeda? What happens is: You get the most politicized terrorism indictment ever produced by the Justice Department. Behold United States v. Khatallah, Case No. 14 Crim. 141, quietly unsealed in a Washington courtroom last Saturday while the country dozed off into summer-vacation mode. Ahmed Abu Khatallah, of course, is the only suspect apprehended in connection with the Benghazi massacre, a terrorist attack on a still-mysterious U.S....