Free Republic

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that members of Congress were briefed by the Obama administration on how the rest of the $1.7 billion ransom payment to Iran was accomplished. The transfer took place in late January with $400 million in cash being flown from Geneva to Tehran, after which, several Americans held in Iranian prisons were released. Yesterday, after months of demands from Congress for information on how the remaining $1.3 billion was transferred to Iran, the administration came clean and admitted the entire amount was paid in cash.

Benghazi Hero Says “We’ve Seen Drone Video” Obama, Hillary Knew It Wasn’t a Protest and Lied– Hillary Clinton watched the attack live by drone video then went out the next day with Barack Obama and blamed a mysterious YouTube video no one had ever seen. On Thursday Benghazi hero John Tiegen set the record straight. Benghazi hero John Tiegen spoke with Deirdre Bolton Thursday on ‘Risk and Reward’. Tiegen told Bolton he has seen the drone video of the Benghazi attacks. “They need to release them.” The live video the night of the attack proved their was no protest. Hillary...

Herds of African immigrants are being housed in shelters in the Mexican border town of Tijuana while they await entry into the United States under what appears to be a secret accord between the Obama administration, Mexico and the Central American countries the Africans transited on their journey north. A backlog of African migrants is overwhelming limited shelter space in Tijuana and Mexican officials blame the slow pace of U.S. immigration authorities in the San Isidro port of entry for granting only 50 asylum solicitations daily. Details about this disturbing program come from Mexico’s immigration agency, Instituto Nacional de Migracion...

WASHINGTON, Aug 30 - U.S. President Barack Obama shortened the prison sentences of 111 convicts serving time for drug-related offenses in his second round of clemency grants this month, the White House said on Tuesday. Obama has now granted a total of 673 commutations during his presidency, more than the number granted by the 10 previous presidents combined, as he seeks to reform the criminal justice system, it said. For some of the convicts, the commutations mean they will serve only half of their original prison sentences. For instance, Sly Stallone Aikens of South Carolina, serving a sentence of 36

The first family of refugees arrived in Missoula this week, marking the beginning of the re-opened International Rescue Committee office efforts to make Missoula home to over 100 refugees over the next year. Missoula IRC office director Molly Short-Carr says the family is doing well and just beginning to figure out how to use household appliances like their stove, and which foods they can substitute to make meals they are familiar with. The family of six is from the Congo where they fled a civil war before 2005. Since then, they lived in refugee camps in Rwanda, Tanzania or Uganda....

The United Nations could take over control of the Internet on October 1, when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) passes from U.S. administration to the control of a multilateral body, most likely the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU). While the administration and its defenders have denied that the UN will have authority over ICANN, the Wall Street Journal‘s L. Gordon Crovitz points out that ICANN will need to be run by a state agency in order to retain its antitrust exemption, which makes it almost certainly that the UN will step in to take control.

An internal proposed strategy from George Soros’s Open Society Justice Initiative calls for international regulation of private actors’ decisions on “what information is taken off the Internet and what may remain.” Those regulations, the document notes, should favor “those most supportive of open society.” The Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) is part of the Open Society Foundations, Soros’s secretive network of political organizations. According to the organization’s website, “The Open Society Justice Initiative uses law to protect and empower people around the world, supporting the values and work of the Open Society Foundations.”

New analysis from the Washington Post removes any doubt that the anti-Obama Birther movement was started in 2007 and 2008 by Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and her Democrat supporters. As Breitbart News reported earlier this month, other left-wing media outlets, like Politico and the Guardian, had already traced the Birther movement back to Democrats and Ms. Clinton. Using his wayback machine on Wednesday, the Post’s David Weigel took an in-depth look at the origins of the false rumors that President Obama is a practicing Muslim who was not born in a America. Weigel’s reporting contains the final pieces of a...

The Obama administration does not believe that a special prosecutor is necessary to investigate the Clinton Foundation, according to White House press secretary Josh Earnest. He suggested that those who were calling for a special prosecutor were impugning the character of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. “I just think it’s hard for anybody to make a very persuasive case that somehow there hasn’t been enough investigating,” Earnest said during the White House press conference today. President Barack Obama, he said, had “complete confidence” in the independent career prosecutors of the Justice Department and the F.B.I.

This week the conservative media is noticing that even the president’s cheering section at the New York Times is wising up to Obama’s mistakes in Syria, Libya, Iran, and more. But I think that the disaster of the president’s foreign policy is the least of his problems. I think the real mistake is the president’s ruthless attempt to push the liberal agenda to the max during the last eight years. I see why the president returned the bust of Churchill to the Brits. He just doesn’t believe: In victory or magnanimity. And now I have the founder of the Democratic...

When a drum containing radioactive waste blew up in an underground nuclear dump in New Mexico two years ago, the Energy Department rushed to quell concerns in the Carlsbad desert community and quickly reported progress on resuming operations. The early federal statements gave no hint that the blast had caused massive long-term damage to the dump, a facility crucial to the nuclear weapons cleanup program that spans the nation, or that it would jeopardize the Energy Department’s credibility in dealing with the tricky problem of radioactive waste. But the explosion ranks among the costliest nuclear accidents in U.S. history, according...

In the case of King v. Burwell, decided by the Supreme Court in June of 2015, President Obama won the day by convincing six justices that Obamacare would collapse if he lost. The case involved the so-called "individual mandate," which imposes a financial penalty on those who neglect to buy health insurance. To many observers, the wording of Affordable Care Act seemed to impose the financial penalty only in states where a state exchange had been set up, not in states where the federal exchange operated by default. At that time, only 16 states (and the District of Columbia) had...

OBAMA RETURNING FROM SUMMER VACATION http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-08-21-08-26-06

Every satire has a ring of truth... If not for Jamaican Usain Bolt, the United States would've walked home with every gold medal that wasn't nailed down in Rio. USA doubled the score against the rest of the world in nearly every event save for ping-pong. Isn't that great, Mr. President? We've trounced them fair and square. USA doubled the score against the rest of the world in nearly every event save for ping-pong (and that's not satire). "Micro aggression is the term we use in Liberal circles. Now I have no choice except to beg the world to forgive...

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is reaching out to the African-American community these days, and in a new interview with Newsweek, at least part of that community is reaching back. Chicago rapper, actor, and White House invitee Common doesn’t seem to be persuaded by Trump’s newfound concern for black voters, if this interview is any indication: “America wouldn’t be taking a step back… we’d be taking 12 steps back [if Trump becomes president],” the Chicago-born musician and activist tells Newsweek. “It would be returning to some of the mentality of racism we’ve seen in the mid-Sixties, in the civil rights...

OAK BLUFFS, MA—Carrying a 47-over-par performance to the 18th tee at Farm Neck Golf Club during his vacation on the island of Martha’s Vineyard Thursday, President Obama told golfing buddy Larry David that he was determined to “get one back,” sources reported. After utilizing his 10th and final mulligan on an errant slice, the commander-in-chief hit a solid drive down the fairway from the red tees on the 435-yard par 5, leaving approximately 275 yards left to the front of the green. Then “the best couple of 3-woods [he has] ever hit,” along with a very lucky bounce, put him...

Under the guise of providing increased “security” for “critical infrastructure,” the Obama administration is plotting to insert itself and the federal government into the American elections process. While voting is constitutionally the responsibility of state and local officials, Obama's Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson, pointed to the alleged threat of cyberattacks to justify the latest proposed usurpation of power. The controversial scheme was floated amid growing national concerns, fueled in part by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump's warnings of a “rigged” election, that America's electoral system might be vulnerable to major manipulation. Critics and experts, though, warned that the White...

American truckers, and the big rigs they drive, are literally the lifeblood of this nation, transporting food, raw materials and finished goods from one end of the country to the other and back again, delivering what is needed where it is needed when it is needed on a daily basis. But those truckers just had a major roadblock placed in their way, courtesy of President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, and the consequences for not only the trucking industry, but America as a whole, could be devastating. According to The Daily Caller, the EPA just announced on Tuesday that it...

President Barack Obama said in his weekly address today that he had set aside “more than 265 million acres of public lands and waters” as national parks and monuments, which is “more than any administration in history.” Among the national monuments he created, Obama said in his weekly address, was “Stonewall.” This monument commemorates riots that took place in 1969. Citing Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks, leading into his citation of Stonewall, Obama said: “As President, I’m proud to have built upon America’s tradition of conservation.” The president said in his June 24 proclamation [1] creating the “Stonewall National Monument:”...

The Pentagon failed to account for $6.5 trillion in its financial statement, a recently-recovered Inspector General’s report on the 2015 fiscal year said. It reveals the audit of the Department of Defense was “materially misstated.” The army failed to provide “accurate, complete, timely and well-supported” documents that could have explained the use of trillions of dollars in quarterly and yearend adjustments. The US military made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year, but could not provide anything that would detail what it spent the money on. There were a total...