Free Republic

Just when we thought the absurdity that marks every single day of Obama's reign could not possibly be surpassed, we learned that 4 hours (3 hours and 47 minutes to be precise) after the US president vowed to sign a new law banning bulk data collection by the NSA (named, for purely grotesque reasons, the "USA Freedom Act"), the Obama administration asked the secret Fisa surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months....

Pedal Pusher: Peduto sets Pittsburgh on down cycle by Daniel Clark “It isn’t the way it was in 1970,” says Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto. “Not everyone’s dream is to have their own car and use it to get to work.” Actually, you’d have to go back a lot farther than 45 years to find a time that having a car was “everyone’s dream.” The Model T had made that a reality half a century earlier. By 1970, it was just a normal facet of life in a civilized Western nation. Well, we can’t have that, now, can we? Peduto vowed...

Big Apple Mayor Bill de Blasio is a busy guy. He’s got more than enough on his plate already, needing to deal with his city’s skyrocketing crime rate, crushing poverty in the areas that the TV cameras don’t cover and a police force which doesn’t much care for him. Still, he took time out of his busy day on Sunday to talk to John Dickerson on Face the Nation. Strangely, he wasn’t there to talk about Gotham, but rather about Hillary Clinton and her recent calls for expanded early voting around the nation. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio...

The Washington Examiner’s Byron York just confirmed that not only is Baltimore City Attorney Marilyn Mosby attempting to restrict access to Freddie Gray’s autopsy report, an uncommon practice to say the least, but she is also attempting to prevent police from accessing the report. This unusual move has raised eyebrows across the country as those following the case speculate about what the report might contain. Perhaps the most likely revelation would be proof that Gray died not from wounds received from Baltimore police officers taking him into custody, but instead from wounds self-inflicted during his ride to jail in the...

Ex CIA agent explains how to delete the elite!

A few weeks ago I had to go back to DC yet again for the Right Online conference and it involved flying in and out of Reagan, as well as Newark. As usual, I stood in the long lines – even with my previous screening check mark on my boarding passes – and went through all the rituals of unloading some of my things and passing through a detector. When I arrived at the hotel I opened my bag to find the usual TSA greeting card indicating that they had searched my checked baggage, no matter how much of...

Coming soon to a Capitol skyline near you: Giant blimps at 10,000 feet? The woman at the helm of the House Administration Committee thinks the Capitol needs eyes in the sky, after authorities failed to detect Florida mailman Douglas Hughes’ April 15 gyrocopter flight. Chairwoman Candice S. Miller, R-Mich., visited U.S. Customs and Border Patrol ground stations along the Southern border in January and was amazed at the clarity of the Tethered Aerostat Radar System, or TARS. She is suggesting the “sophisticated technology” might suit the Capitol. That would mean giant blimps stretching along the Washington, D.C., skyline at...

Via the Brody File, hard to believe a country that’s 70 percent Christian would acquiesce in a legal regime like that, but then I look at this poll and remember we’ve already reached the point where Christian-owned businesses can be effectively shuttered by the state for politely declining to participate in a gay wedding. It’d be more accurate to say that the effort to brand Christian teachings that undermine progressivism as “hate speech” has already begun in the public sphere, with the fate of the private sphere still undetermined. Based on early indications, though, merely entertaining an opponent of...

“We’re not a smart people,” says Ace, pointing to a similar but now outdated 2012 survey from Gallup.The actual number of gays is around four percent, as best anyone can tell. What’s your guesstimate, America?Fifty-three percent think gays compose at least 20 percent of the population. Huh. I don’t know what’s odder, the fact that this number has grown as the public’s paid more attention to gays over the past 13 years or the fact that guesstimates were already wildly inflated in 2002, before gay marriage had picked up national momentum. Logically, you would think the estimates would have...

I’m old enough to remember an America where Boy Scouts could have water-pistol fights and most Republicans thought gay relationships were immoral. Which is to say, I’m more than a year old.This … may not be the best day to cite research on people’s changing views of gay relationships, given that another recent bombshell study of attitudes towards gays was just debunked as having used faked data. We can trust a pollster as credible as Gallup, though.Can’t we?On the one hand, that sudden spike in GOP support from the low 40s to a clear majority over the past 12...

Ahead of me might be someone who's desperate to be modern and pay with their Starbucks app. They wave it at the scanner. It doesn't work. They wave it again. It still doesn't work. Then they poke at their phone. They wave it again. Finally a beep. My regular baristas, Kurshina and Marie, have patience coursing through their veins. I, however, mutter through gritted gums: "Wouldn't it have been easier to pay cash?" It seems that such a scenario might have played a part in one of the more spectacular customer service angerfests of the year. This one was at...

Fascist Bill O’Reilly started a poll last week on The O’Reilly via his websites asking viewers/readers if they agreeded with Pamela Geller and the ADFI draw Mohammed cartoon poll. O’Reilly has done nothing but slam Geller for her daring attempt to use free speech at a private ADFI event.

The more we read of the escapades or listen to the remarks of William Jefferson Clinton, the less it seems he wants his wife to be president. Even the court eunuchs at the Washington Post are starting to worry. Now naturally, Bill cannot come out and say as much, not even to himself in the small hours of the morning. But the way he’s behaving under fire — “I gotta pay our bills!” – does the talking for him. As attractive as a Third Clinton Presidency may be in fantasy, I’d wager the reality of being First Man gives Bill...

It's quite astonishing to watch what is unfolding in America today as our media engages in self-censorship while acting as apologists for the actions of Islamic terrorism. By doing this, the media not only sacrifices the freedom of speech that is essential to our pluralistic society, but it also promotes the fear that jihadists seek to instill by dictating what is and isn't "off limits" to debate. This is already happening with news reporters such as Ayman Mohyeldin of NBC now calling for special speech protections for Islam in the wake of Sunday's terrorist attack in Garland, Texas. Pamela Geller...

Circling the Drain in Baltimore Commentary for 3 May 2015 The NSA has made a coloring book for kids. Why not? Our intelligence community has been catering to adult children for the last fifty years. Political correctness at the NSA, as with the CIA, long ago reached a level incompatible with national security. The NSA even has an Earth Day mascot/cartoon character. As a provocation, political correctness is a scheme for neutralizing and discrediting America’s most important institutions. Long ago James Burnham explained that latter-day liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide. And who, in the end, will fight for...

Everyone in Moscow tells you that if you want to understand Russia's foreign policy and its view of its place the world, the person you need to talk to is Fyodor Lukyanov. Lukyanov is the chair of Russia's Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, as well as the editor-in-chief of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, which are something like the Russian equivalents of America's Council on Foreign Relations and Foreign Affairs — though the Russian versions are considered much closer to the state and its worldview.

Just because you’re not interested in politics doesn’t mean politics isn’t interested in you. Americans seem to have forgotten this dictum. A brand-new poll, taken in the form of an online survey, was just issued by the Pew Research Center. It paints a melancholy picture about the abysmal state of knowledge the U.S. public possesses on public affairs – the more so when you reflect that self-selection was probably present. In other words, you probably are brighter than Joe Sixpack if you could be bothered to take the test in the first place. Most people knew who Martin Luther King...

Muslim agitation, attrition, the litigation jihad accompanies all counter terror programs in these United States. We are constantly being told, scolded, admonished and clubbed with the now well worn meme that “only a tiny minority” “a radical few” Muslims engage in jihad. And yet we never see Muslim organizations supporting, encouraging cooperation and applauding any counter terror efforts.Why is that? Based on everything we are constantly being told about moderate Muslims – this is an impossibility. And yet this impossibility is our constant companion.Is it any wonder there is a stream of young Muslims from these communities and mosques flocking...

Campaign Canards: Don’t fall for these electoral fallacies by Daniel Clark Now that candidates are officially entering the 2016 race, it’s only a matter of time before political pundits and historians start regurgitating every factoid, tidbit and dose of conventional wisdom there’s ever been about presidential campaigns. Unfortunately, most of them will be wrong. In particular, here are some of the most stubborn electoral fallacies that we can expect to hear repeated over the next 18 months: * The New Hampshire primary results are very important. – From a fundraising standpoint, there may be some truth to that, but the...

 One day a fun loving “partier” and then transformed into someone more closely resembling a devout Muslim when he returned. That is according to his friend. Rogerio Franca, who lived near the Tsarnaev family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told jurors Tamerlan was a partier before his trip to Russia but transformed into someone more closely resembling a devout Muslim when he returned. ‘Most of the time he was drunk, most of the time he was high,’ Franca said of Tamerlan before his transformation. Afterward, his neighbor Franca said he saw Tamerlan in downtown Boston and he appeared ‘different’ – he grew...