Free Republic

The Germans are in a frenzy over the disclosure that the National Security Agency (NSA) tapped Angela Merkel’s private telephone, along with the telephones of three-dozen other world leaders. It’s an embarrassment of the second magnitude, and all Barack Obama knows about it is what he reads in the newspapers. “Senior government officials” tell The Wall Street Journal that the spooks didn’t tell the president about the wiretaps “because it wouldn’t have been practical to brief him on all of them.” (He was working on his hook shot and couldn’t be disturbed.) It’s hard to imagine that the Germans believe...

<p>President Obama's aides went to extraordinary lengths to uncover the identity of a senior official who was using Twitter to make snarky comments about White House staffers.</p> <p>Jarrett, an old Chicago friend of both Barack and Michelle Obama, appears to exercise such extraordinary influence she is sometimes quietly referred to as “Rasputin” on Capitol Hill, a reference to the mystical monk who held sway over Russia’s Czar Nicholas as he increasingly lost touch with reality during World War I.</p>

Tax-paying, hard-working families aren’t letting White House shutdown politics stop them from enjoying America’s beauty. They’re defying the orange cones at Mount Rushmore. They’re breaching the barrycades at Zion National Park. And now, the Badlands of South Dakota. Noelle Bruno tweets that she and her family made it through Mount Rushmore despite the White House obstacles:

National Park Service officials cited the government shutdown as the reason for ordering an elderly Nevada couple out of their home, which sits on federal land. "Unfortunately overnight stays are not permitted until a budget is passed and the park can reopen," an NPS spokesman explained to KTNV. Ralph and Joyce Spencer, aged 80 and 77, respectively, own their home, but the government owns the land on which it sits. "I had to be sure and get his walker and his scooter that he has to go in," Joyce Spencer told the local news outlet. "We're not hurt in any...