Free Republic

Vladimir Putin sought to cast Russia as the moral arbiter of the world on Thursday, as he hit out at America’s “non-traditional values” and its influence across the world. In an annual state of the nation address, the 61-year-old Russian president said his country did not aspire to be “some kind of superpower”. “We do not infringe on anyone’s interests, we do not force our patronage on anyone, or try to teach anyone how to live,” he said. His comments amounted to an oblique rebuttal to the growing international movement against Russia’s restrictive laws on homosexuality. ... Mr Putin defended...

The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday agreed to pay nearly $6 million to a group of police officers who accused their superiors of imposing a secret traffic ticket quota system on the Westside. The settlement, approved unanimously, brings to more than $10 million the amount of taxpayer money spent on payouts and legal fees from the ticket quota cases. But that number could grow because one more officer's case is still pending. The ticket controversy has been a black eye for the Los Angeles Police Department. Ticket quotas are against state law. After the officers’ allegations were made public,...

House Speaker John Boehner went off on outside conservative groups Wednesday morning for pushing against the new budget deal. "They're using our members and they're using the American people for their own goals," he said. "This is ridiculous." Several key conservative groups are against the sequester relief within the new budget deal. "Though conservatives support more spending restraint, the discretionary spending limits defined in the Budget Control Act represent a promise to the American people to marginally slow the growth of government," reads a letter signed by the heads of Heritage Action, the Family Research Council, and the American Conservative...

This will be the skeleton key for unlocking health benefits... To an unbiased observer, it should be clear that 70 – 90% of the civil servants (not including elected officials) in this country are likely ardent supporters and card carrying members of the Democrat party. The next time you are at the DMV, for example, try to identify the person there that is likely to vote Republican or even as an independent; good luck with the exercise. To the point, however, these people know and need not be told what’s in their interest and naturally, it is the continued existence...

It was recently announced that our nation's last primary lead smelter, in business since 1892, the Doe Run facility in Herculaneum, Missouri, is closing its doors at the end of this year rather than meet costly new EPA regulations. On the heels of that announcement, there was widespread speculation that the closure would dry up the supply of lead needed for the manufacture of ammunition. The NRA reported that "it is the only smelter in the United States which can produce lead bullion from raw lead ore." Missouri has the largest lead deposits in the world, and this smelter is...

The Obama administration overruled career Homeland Security officials and expedited visa applications for about two dozen foreign investors for a politically connected Las Vegas casino hotel after repeated pressure from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his staff, according to internal government documents obtained by The Washington Times. The move to overturn what is normally a non-appealable visa decision came despite concerns about “suspicious financial activity” involving some of the visa applicants from Asia, and it ultimately benefited several companies whose executives have donated heavily in recent years to Democrats, the documents show. It also ensnared Mr. Obama’s current nominee...

Link to "an edited version of the introductory chapter of a new e-book, Going Postal, by investigative journalist Peter Byrne." snip "The post office is being killed for political reasons, they assert, pointing out that the corporation with the exclusive contract to negotiate sales for the Postal Service's $85 billion real estate portfolio is C.B. Richard Ellis (CBRE). And that the company is chaired by Richard C. Blum, who is the husband of US Senator Dianne Feinstein and a member of the University of California Board of Regents. CBRE's connection to a politically powerful family with a history of accessing...

Senator Mitch McConnell has been awfully quiet lately. After making it clear in October that he would never again fight Obamacare in the budget or a debt ceiling increase, he has fallen off the face of the earth. Harry Reid pulled the nuclear option in the Senate, yet McConnell has not threatened to hold up the deals on the farm bill or new budget conference. In fact, he hasn’t commented on them at all. He hasn’t even commented on Obama’s Iran capitulation, an issue in which he presumably shares our views. So what is Mitch McConnell doing as the most...

DOVER, Del. (AP) - The state of Delaware is working to set up a task force to help residents with a hoarding problem. As many as 45,000 people in the state are estimated to have problems with hoarding. In advance of the hoarding task force, the state is creating an advisory panel to try to determine stakeholders who may be able to offer input into hoarding issues.

Friday, former Massachusetts chemist Annie Dookhan pleaded guilty to all 27 counts of falsifying nearly 40,000 criminal drug cases, effectively upending the Massachusetts criminal justice system. Dookhan admitted to filing false test results, mixing drug samples together, and lying under oath about her job qualifications. She claimed that she committed her crimes to boost her job performance and was sentenced on Friday to three to five years in prison, plus probation. Though many of the stories reporting Dookhan’s conviction focus on her alone, problems extend beyond one ambitious chemist. Dookhan’s “dry labbing” is just one part of a structure that...

KIEV, Ukraine — Protesters in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, toppled the city’s main statue of Lenin on Sunday and then pounded it into chips with a sledgehammer as a crowd chanted and cheered. The destruction of the statue was a cathartic moment in the biggest day of demonstrations so far against President Viktor F. Yanukovich’s turn away from Europe. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians filled the streets of Kiev on Sunday, first to hear speeches and music and then to fan out and erect barricades in the district where government institutions have their headquarters. Carrying blue-and-yellow Ukrainian and European...

Why Americans Are So Angry The Economist Dec. 8, 2013, 4:07 PM Flag Burning Obama protestFlickr/Kevin Skahan A protester burns an American flag during a rally against President Obama in Oakland July 23, 2012. �   BELIEVE the polls, and Americans have decided that they live in Italy: hobbled by dishonest leaders and such endemic corruption that only fools would trust strangers. Grim findings have been coming thick and fast. Most Americans no longer see President Barack Obama as honest. Half think that he “knowingly lied” to pass his Obamacare health law. Fewer than one in five trust the...

Barack Obama spoke at the National Christmas Tree lighting Friday in Washington DC. He told the audience the Christmas was both timeless and universal – “No matter what God you pray to.”

On the basis of information brought to light by NLPC, Nigerian-born physician Dorothy Ogundu was arrested yesterday. She is charged with multiple counts of grand larceny, forgery and falsifying business records by the New York state Attorney General. Ogundu ran a Queens, New York Health clinic for which Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) secured $380,500 in federal funds. She is a prominent Meeks supporter, and until yesterday, a fixture of the Queens political scene. After reviewing Meeks' earmarks in 2011, NLPC decided to take a closer look at Angeldocs, Inc., which operates the Aki Life Health Center located in Queens, New...

*snip* Coroner to Officer Schadle: "What was his state when he came back, because I understand that you were putting him in?" Schadle: "He had just attacked a deputy at the hospital, he was still sketchy." Coroner: "Sketchy, what does that mean?" Schadle: "He was kind of fidgety, resisting, angry." Coroner: "So, you just sat him in there?" Schadle: "Put him on a bed in there, got the cuffs off of him, left the cell closed the door." Coroner: "And so, he was probably in there about how long?" Schadle: "Probably, 2:30 to 2:40 a.m., somewhere around there is when...

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis on Thursday ordered the formation of a team of experts to address the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church, in his first major step to tackle a crisis that has plagued it for two decades. The group will consider ways to better screen priests, protect minors and help victims in the face of charges the Vatican has not done enough to guard the vulnerable or make amends.

A couple decades ago I was talking with a Christian friend about the vicissitudes of life, and about the maddening corruption and treachery we saw all around us. “This world is hopeless,” my friend said conclusively, in spiritual summary of what we’d discussed. I recognized his attitude as a core feature of orthodox Christian doctrine, which assesses a fallen world, full of sin, and resignedly accepts that fallen man is simply incapable of improving conditions. Incapable, that is, beyond temporary intervals of marginal revival and renewal, however worthwhile and glorious. Hoping for some kind of man-made, permanent solution to evil,...

Rep. Jim McDermott on Wednesday downplayed a report from a Treasury Department watchdog that warned the government subsides that are supposed to help Americans purchase health care under the Affordable Care Act are vulnerable to fraud. Speaking on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” Mr. McDermott, Washington Democrat, said that he has not had time to read the audit, but said that it is no surprise that government programs are subject to fraud. “Medicare is subject to fraud. Taxpaying is subject to fraud. The IRS is subject to fraud, and what you do is as you discover things, you developed mechanisms to catch...

The Obamacare insurance marketplace is even more vulnerable to security breaches since the administration “fixed” Healthcare.gov, according to a cyber security expert. Health and Human Services (HHS) released a progress report on Sunday following its self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline to repair the website, saying that the “team has knocked more than 400 bug fixes and software improvements off the punch list.” The administration said that the “site capacity is stable at its intended level,” though the site continued to crash on Monday. The eight-page report made no mention of the website’s numerous security flaws, which experts say put Americans’ personal...

Denmark, New Zealand, Finland, and Sweden are the four least corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International's 2013 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). The U.S. is listed as the 19th least corrupt country. Somalia, North Korea, and Afghanistan are the most corrupt. The CPI ranks countries and territories based on how corrupt their administrative and political institutions are perceived to be on a scale from 0 (highly corrupt) and a 100 (very clean). Denmark and New Zealand both scored a 91 while Finland and Sweden both scored 89. Over the last 20 years, New Zealand has developed into a...

In Part 1 of my series on the Common Core State Standards being infused into 45 state public school systems, I revealed how the feds spent $350 million of taxpayer money, giving grants and waivers to muscle states and local school districts to accept the standards. And that was after 2009, when feds awarded, in the Department of Education's words, "governors approximately $48.6 billion ... in exchange for a commitment to advance essential education reforms ... including: college- and career-ready standards (aka CCSS)." In Part 2, I showed how the feds are injecting their progressive agenda into curricula taught to...

WARSAW, Poland — A Roman Catholic priest in central Poland was sentenced Monday to 8 ½ years in prison after being convicted of sexually abusing five boys. It was the toughest punishment given to a priest in Poland in a child sexual abuse case. Priests are considered to be top moral figures by most people in the predominantly Catholic nation, where the church has helped preserve national identity and supported independence efforts under decades of communism. Previously, priests were generally treated with leniency and handed small or suspended sentences.

It's coming up on three years since the Milwaukee Archdiocese declared bankruptcy. Archbishop Jerome Listecki has spent $11 million on lawyers' fees trying to limit the amount of money paid to the more than 500 people who say they were sexually abused by local Catholic clergy. Recently, insurance companies started buying back policies they sold to the archdiocese as a way of limiting liability.

the NFL has performed 'an aggressive review' of the play in question, where Tomiln appeared to intentionally get in the path of Baltimore kick returner Jacoby Jones on a could-be touchdown, forcing Jones to alter his route and run towards a Pittsburgh defender. Steelers coach Mike Tomlin was caught by television cameras Thursday night with a big smile on his face after his positioning on a third-quarter kick return from Ravens receiver Jacoby Jones — in which Tomlin had part of his right foot on the field as he watched the return on the video board with his back to...

A year after arriving in Los Angeles, the youngest archbishop in the U.S. Catholic Church had a schedule and an agenda befitting a presidential candidate. Roger Mahony raced around the city in a chauffeured sedan, exhorting labor leaders to support immigrant rights and rallying hundreds against a proposed prison in Boyle Heights.

When government pays for something, it gets more of it. For the past five years, Congress has been pushing “emergency” subsidies for long-term unemployment, and, not surprisingly, we’ve been getting more joblessness — a fact some have been working overtime to conceal. When President Obama took office, there were 2.7 million who had spent at least three years jobless. Now, 4.1 million fall into that category, demonstrating that government “help” isn’t always an improvement. Yet congressional Democrats still want more. On Tuesday, they demanded House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp bring up legislation to extend unemployment benefits indefinitely....

The human species began as the hybrid offspring of a male pig and a female chimpanzee, a leading geneticist has suggested. The startling claim has been made by Eugene McCarthy, of the University of Georgia, who is also one of the worlds leading authorities on hybridisation in animals. He points out that while humans have many features in common with chimps, we also have a large number of distinguishing characteristics not found in any other primates. Dr McCarthy says these divergent characteristics are most likely the result of a hybrid origin at some point far back in human evolutionary history....

The American people are discovering what many political analysts have understood for some time: Obama’s default political tactic is dishonesty.   On Thanksgiving day, CNN reported a new low for the president’s approval numbers in the key swing state of Ohio. The president fell to a stunning 34% approval (a 6-point drop since June) and a devastating 61% disapproval. It doesn’t require much digging to understand the reason for Obama’s free fall: the predominantly negative opinion of Obamacare (35%/59%) and, more importantly, the collapse of the president’s credibility. The poll found 57% deem the president dishonest/untrustworthy, while only 39% trust him.Politico...

With the roll out of Obamacare being as disastrous as possible for the Obama administration, one group was given a $1 million grant to help lead a rebranding effort with hopes of salvaging the law in the eyes of the American people. Families USA (FUSA) — an organization that describes itself as a “national nonprofit, non-partisan organization dedicated to the achievement of high-quality, affordable health care for all Americans” — was given a $1.1 million grant by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on October 4, 2013, to gather “success stories” of Americans dealing with Obamacare and distribute them to the...

According to a report in The New York Post, President Barack Obama allegedly responded to a letter he received from a Texas school teacher who was concerned about the negative impact the Affordable Care Act may have on the president’s political position by referring to conservative Americans as “tea baggers.” “This bill has caused such a divisive, derisive and toxic environment,” wrote Thomas Ritter, a fifth-grade teacher at Sally B. Elliott Elementary in Irving, Texas. “The reality is that any citizen that disagrees with your administration is targeted and ridiculed.” Ritter added that he was afraid to write the president...

When I was a teenager, my mother broke her own rule of never buying someone else’s trouble and purchased a used car. We were quite excited because it was beautiful and sleek, and it was a convertible. The salesman said the car was practically new and was the deal of the century. Before long, it was discovered that the engine was completely shot, and the car was essentially a beautiful piece of junk. The salesman did not know my mother, and in the end, gladly refunded her money and took the car back. This kind of story is, of course,...

Author’s Note: This column is a continuation of my previous column “Bribery and Extortion,” which serves as an extended review of Peter Schweizer’s excellent new book Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets. In the wake of the tragic December, 2012 shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, Vice President Biden criticized more than just the gun industry. He also criticized the video game industry. He argued specifically that video games contribute to a national culture of violence. He stated immediately that he didn’t know what the government was going to do about it. Nonetheless, he said,...

It was all staged. The young man who heckled Obama from the stage yesterday during his speech is an illegal alien… And, he was invited to the speech by the White House. Ju Hong, the heckler, was invited by the White House to the speech. National Review reported: Yesterday’s heckler at Obama’s pro-amnesty speech in San Francisco was Ju Hong, an approved guest of the White House and an illegal alien from South Korea who recently graduated from UC Berkeley. People who still say illegal aliens “live in the shadows” obviously don’t know this guy: He’s on Twitter and LinkedIn,...

Apparently lazy and dishonest people aspire to work for the government. Also stray hobos are likely to steal pies from your windowsill. College students who cheated on a simple task were more likely to want government jobs, researchers from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania found in a study of hundreds of students in Bangalore, India. Note the “simple task” part. We’re not just talking dishonest here, but lazy. Like go off to play golf after using a teleprompter to deliver a speech lazy.

Many Americans, including Democrats, are very disgruntled with President Obama. But the real blame for many of our current messes lies beyond Mr. Obama. It’s amazing how for years people should have seen the warning signs. They saw the unscrupulous ways that Mr. Obama conducted foreign and domestic policies. They saw how he pitted classes and races against each other. They saw how he squandered people’s money on adventurous programs, such as Solyndra, not to mention his and his wife’s expensive vacations. And of course they saw how he favored Muslims over Christians; and Arabs over Israelis. That is to...

Corruption in parts of the Pakistani community is “endemic” and a growing problem that politicians have underestimated, the Government’s chief legal adviser has said. Dominic Grieve QC, the Attorney General, said ministers should “wake up” to the threat of corruption in public life, which he attributed to “minority communities” that operate a “favor culture”. … Mr. Grieve said he was referring to “mainly the Pakistani community”, but added that other minority communities had similar problems. His remarks could affect Britain’s relations with Pakistan. In 2010, David Cameron refused to apologize after he accused the country of “exporting terror”. …

Former ATF agent accused of embezzling SEATTLE — A former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent accused of embezzling nearly $20,000 when he worked for the federal agency was indicted Thursday. A federal grand jury in Seattle indicted James Contreras, 51, of Maple Valley, Wash., on an embezzlement count and 30 counts of making false statements, the U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco said. The U.S. attorney's office in Seattle is recused from the case. While Contreras worked as an agent and supervisor at the ATF office in Seattle, he's accused of embezzling money from a cash fund...

The progressive activist organization Media Matters for America funded the group that reportedly crafted President Obama’s false claim that Americans can maintain their “choice” of doctors and insurance plans. The little-known Herndon Alliance has been behind the marketing of Obamacare since the inception of the legislation. The Herndon Alliance is “the most influential group in the health arena that the public has never heard of,” reported Politico in 2009.

It happens rarely. A taxpayer challenging the constitutional basis for the income tax wins in court, defeating the Internal Revenue Service, such as in the case brought by the late Tom Cryer, who was acquitted on a charge of failing to pay $73,000 to the government. Now three members of Congress want to make that result the norm through a bill that would repeal the 16th Amendment, effectively canceling federal income taxes.

DENVER — The state Independent Ethics Commission has voted to proceed with an ethics complaint filed against Gov. John Hickenlooper.

College students who cheated on a simple task were more likely to want government jobs, researchers from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania found in a study of hundreds of students in Bangalore, India. Their results, recently released as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, suggest that one of the contributing forces behind government corruption could be who gets into government work in the first place. For instance, “if people have the view that jobs in government are corrupt, people who are honest might not want to get into that system,” said Rema Hanna, an...

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington. The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated. And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington. The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated. And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

Yesterday, the House Homeland Security Committee published a video on their Youtube page highlighting a portion of the committee questioning Roberta Stempfley, acting assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Cyber-security and Communications, who confirmed at least 16 attacks on the Affordable Care Act’s portal Healthcare.gov website in 2013. Roberta Stempfley highlighted one successful attack that is designed to deny access to the website called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack is designed to make a network unavailable to intended users, generally through a concerted effort to disrupt service such as repeatedly accessing...

The Obama administration has directly conceded for the first time that 'in many cases,' health insurance plans offered through government exchanges are more expensive than plans consumers bought before the Affordable Care Act became law – even when government subsidies are figured in. In a letter to state insurance commissioners, Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight director Gary Cohen wrote on Thursday that one reason for the new Obamacare measures the president announced Thursday is that millions of consumers receiving cancellation letters from their insurers are learning the Affordable Care Act options are in fact less affordable. 'Although affected...

See the corruption, your gut instincts are correct.

Senior Navy civilians investigated in alleged scheme to defraud military for $1.6 million Federal authorities are investigating three senior Navy intelligence officials as part of a probe into an alleged contracting scheme that charged the military $1.6 million for homemade firearm silencers that cost only $8,000 to manufacture, court records show. The three civilian officials, who oversee highly classified programs, arranged for a hot-rod auto mechanic in California to build a specially ordered batch of unmarked and untraceable rifle silencers and sell them to the Navy at more than 200 times what they cost to manufacture, according to court...

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, brother and son of the former presidents Bush, is considering a run for president, but only if Gov. Chris Christie fails to gain nationwide traction, Politico reports this morning.

Earlier this week, former President Bill Clinton advised President Obama to "honor the commitment" he made and to allow Americans to keep their health care plans, if they like them. That was a central promise Obama made when he sold Obamacare, but one that turned out not to be true when Obamacare began to be implemented last month. "So I personally believe, even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got," Clinton in an interview released Tuesday. Now President Obama...