Free Republic

A Texas politician has claimed that he worked with a senior member of Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign to convince Iran to delay releasing its hostages during the crisis of 1979 in a bid to derail Jimmy Carter's re-election bid. Ben Barnes, Texas's former lieutenant governor, has claimed in an interview with The New York Times that John Connally Jr – once a governor of the same state and a high-ranking member of Reagan's election team – took him on a secret diplomatic tour of the Middle East as part of a scheme to damage Carter by convincing Iran to...

WASHINGTON — It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remembers it vividly. His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States.

close Alaska leaders demand Biden administration 'not kill' oil drilling project The Biden administration quietly updated a federal database showing how many unused oil and gas drilling permits it has approved, reducing the number by more than 2,000. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) revised the current number of approved applications for permits to drill (APD) — which oil and gas companies are required to file once they identify a deposit on a lease that can be tapped — down from an estimated 9,000 to less than 6,700. The BLM, a subagency of the Department of the Interior (DOI), blamed...

Peter Doocy: "Fauci told congress the NIH never funded gain-of-function research for coronaviruses in Wuhan but documents published by the intercept suggest that is not true." Jen Psaki: "NIH has never approved any research that would make a coronavirus more dangerous to humans."

Vice President Joe Biden's aides were worried about "the optics" of his son, Hunter, working for a Ukrainian energy company in 2014, but they refused to raise the issue so as to not risk "a scolding" from the elder Biden, according to a report by The New York Times. The aides "enlisted State Department officials to gather facts to determine how to handle the story" of Hunter Biden's work on the board of Burisma Holdings, to which he was appointed that year, the Times reported Sunday. "Hunter Biden's activities struck many of the officials working on Ukraine policy as an...

Anyone with half an ounce of brains immediately knew in 2009 that the Nobel Peace Prize committee was making itself look foolish for giving Barack Obama its top award even though he had only been president for about five minutes. Now the group's former secretary is admitting that the whole thing was a huge mistake. Nobel's former secretary, Geir Lundestad, told the media that he thought giving Obama the award would spur him to great accomplishments. Instead, Obama did nothing of note over the next eight years. Lundestad addressed the foolhardy decision in his recently published autobiography, according to the...

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has responded to a letter dated November 13, 2012 from Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) regarding the agency's ammunition purchases. Sen. Coburn published the response on the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs website yesterday, April 1, 2013. The response, dated February 4, 2013, says that DHS buys ammunition in bulk to "significantly lower costs."

(Reuters) - NBC News' decision to air an edited call from George Zimmerman to police in the moments before he shot Trayvon Martin was "a mistake and not a deliberate act to misrepresent the phone call," according the president of network's news division. The edit in question, which aired on the network's flagship "Today" morning show last week, made it appear that Zimmerman told police that Martin was black without being prompted, when, in fact, the full tape reveals that the neighborhood watch captain only did so when responding to a question posed by a dispatcher. Under growing public pressure...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The most detailed data yet on emissions of heat-trapping gases show that U.S. power plants are responsible for the bulk of the pollution blamed for global warming. Power plants released 72 percent of the greenhouse gases reported to the Environmental Protection Agency for 2010, according to information released Wednesday that was the first catalog of global warming pollution by facility. The data include more than 6,700 of the largest industrial sources of greenhouse gases, or about 80 percent of total U.S. emissions. According to an Associated Press analysis of the data, 20 mostly coal-fired power plants in...

"What has the tea party done for this country?" That’s the provocative question posed by veteran trial lawyer Jere Beasley in the September edition of his monthly newsletter. Beasley, a former Alabama lieutenant governor, said Americans should be alarmed at where tea party members of Congress have taken the country in the past several weeks. He said the country has seen the first downgrade of its credit in U.S. history, a tremendous drop in the stock market and dissatisfaction with Congress is at all-time highs. "I believe it’s time to stand up to the tea party movement and expose it...