Free Republic

Top Jeb Bush adviser Mike Murphy, who did not even pay attention to Dave Brat's campaign like Breitbart News did, has falsely been claiming that Cantor's embrace of amnesty for illegal immigrants was not the reason he lost last Tuesday. Liberal writer Mickey Kaus had enough of Murphy's nonsense and slammed him on Twitter on Friday evening. Kaus became Brat's de facto press secretary and top advocate on Twitter in the last months of the campaign because Kaus, like Brat, opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants because it would hurt American workers. He mentioned to Murphy that talk radio host Laura...

A spokesman for President Obama rushed to assure House Republicans that Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) didn’t actually lose because of his gestures toward Democrats on immigration reform. “Cantor’s problem wasn’t his position on immigration reform, it was his lack of a position,” Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer tweeted, citing the success of Senator Lindsay Graham (R., S.C.). “Graham wrote and passed a bill and is winning big.” Cantor’s campaign sent out direct mail pieces ahead of the election maintaining that he was ”stopping the Obama-Reid plan to give illegal aliens amnesty,” but challenger Dave Brat accused him of supporting

This weekend, White House national security adviser Susan Rice took a break from her busy schedule of scouring YouTube for blamable videos, and sat down with CNN’s Candy Crowley. You may remember Crowley as the “journalist” who likes helping floundering Democrat Presidents score points in political debates. Crowley wanted to know if, in fact, the United States had negotiated with terrorists in its effort to secure Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s release. The short answer is “yes,” but this is the Obama administration. ...So you never get the short answer. “Point blank,” Crowley asked. “Did the US negotiate with terrorists for his...

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said the U.S. did not negotiate with terrorists in the process of exchanging the transfer of five terrorism suspects for the release of the only American prisoner of war in Afghanistan. “We didn’t negotiate with terrorists,” Mr. Hagel said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And I said and explained before, Sergeant Bergdahl is a prisoner of war. That’s a normal process in getting your prisoners back.” Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was handed over to U.S. special forces by the Taliban Saturday, with the government of Qatar serving as a go-between. Qatar is taking custody of five...

Sometimes I wish I was a radical gay, or a revolting, slick-haired, black race-baiter or drastic Muslim like that angry, rage-boy dude who’s the poster child for all the funny as heck Muslim memes. Why am I forlorn at times with my heterosexuality, my caucasoidness and my evangelicalism? Well … it’s not that I now loathe the ladies, my pigmentation or the five Solas of the Reformation, but it’s primarily predicated upon the fact that as such a critter I can’t get away with squat any longer. Heck, I can’t even use a tone in my voice, unless I’m mocking...

'I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,' the president insisted Yet he used the words 'partner' and 'partnership' 16 times in his speech at West Point, outlining a contradictory foreign policyObama replaced the phrase 'collective action' – in his prepared remarks – with the words 'multilateral action' several timesWorking through NATO and the UN will dominate American foreign policy, Obama said: 'This is American leadership, American strength'

His parents said they were so concerned that they called police. Officers who showed up at Rodger’s doorstep for a mental health check in April, however, found a well-mannered if shy young man whom they concluded posed no risk. They hadn’t seen the videos, and by the time law enforcement had, it was too late: Rodger had gone on a deadly rampage. The sheriff’s office “was not aware of any videos until after the shooting rampage occurred,” Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Kelly Hoover said. Sheriff Bill Brown has defended the officers’ actions, but the case highlights the challenges...

TARP was the absolute height of crony capitalism. Many of the big banks should have gone down, but in the midst of a “Blackberry panic” – as David Stockman puts it – the masters of the masters of the universe lost sight of reality and the nature of markets. Yes, Goldman Sachs would have gone down. But this would have been a GOOD THING. The blood which should have filled the the streets of Downtown Manhattan would have washed the unsustainable leverage clean from the system (for a while.) Giants are meant to fall. It would have been good for...

Do I have any issues with a Tom Steyer using any of his legitimately earned billions of dollars to donate to political causes, candidates, campaigns, and super PACS in which he believes? Absolutely not. Do I have a problem with Tom Steyer smearing other billionaires for doing so, funding a perniciously targeted misinformation campaign full of flat-out falsehoods against the Keystone XL pipeline, and pretending that he has some sort of imagined moral high ground in this arena? Yes, yes I do. Via Politico: Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer insisted Tuesday that heÂ’s not the leftÂ’s version of the Koch brothers....

The Russian government today claimed there are more than 100 American 'mercenaries' from a defense contracting company disguised as Ukrainian troops in the embattled former Soviet nation, a claim the American firm and top U.S. officials deny. ... The latest news relesae from Greystone, as posted on a company blog, is from September 2012, titled "New business in Russia" and simply says the company "provided executive protection services in Russia." In April 2012, the company announced it had been awarded a similar contract in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. ...

It has become a truism that House Republicans have voted dozens and dozens of times -- at least 50 in all -- to repeal Obamacare. They have been obsessed with repealing the Affordable Care Act, President Obama told a Democratic National Committee meeting in Washington last month. You know what they say: 50th time is the charm. Maybe when you hit your 50th repeal vote, you will win a prize. Maybe if you buy 50 repeal votes, you get one free. We get it. For more than a year, Democrats and their advocates in the press have been ridiculing the...

The father of aviation engineer Mohd Khairul Amri Selamat, who was on board the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, refuted the possibility that his son would have anything to do with the plane's disappearance. Mr Selamat Omar, 60, was agitated when the question was posed to him, and openly declared that "my son would have done no wrong". "No authority contacted me to say they will be searching my son's house. "Even if they do, we have nothing to hide. They can come search the house if need be," he said.

Politics: The GOP victory in a Florida congressional district that was carried by President Obama as well as by the Democratic candidate in a gubernatorial race is being explained away by Democrats and their media toadies. Democratic spin doctors claim it wasn't exactly a case of Sink or swim in Florida-13, since the district had long been represented by a Republican. But fact is, Obama carried the purple district twice, and so did defeated congressional candidate Alex Sink when she ran for governor in 2010. Had Republican David Jolly lost the seat, Democrats would be chirping that it proved that...

If you listen to the chattering class in Washington, D.C., Hillary Clinton is a virtual certainty for the 2016 Democratic nomination, and the front runner in the next presidential race. But in private, rumors persist that the former Secretary of State may not even be capable of making it to Iowa and New Hampshire. Clinton, these skeptics often say, will not run for president again because of health concerns. These ubiquitous rumors of her health have been fueled in part by the supermarket tabloids. The National Enquirer wrote in 2012 that Clinton had brain cancer, something a spokesman dismissed then...

Barack Obama was hailed as America's first gay president by Time Magazine, but friends of the Obama clan in Kenya, who recently visited Beijing and spoke with the Dallas Blog, claim that President Obama is not a homosexual and actually enjoys some special relationships with a few women. They spoke with such candid frankness to a conservative blogger, because they feel betrayed by Barack. "We helped get Barack into the White House and he couldn't have done it with our help, but he has done nothing to help us after getting elected in 2008," a friend of the Obama clan...

Kathleen Sebelius: No job loss under Obamacare By: Lindsay Kalter February 18, 2014 07:40 AM EST Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says there is “absolutely no evidence” that the Affordable Care Act will drive down employment, despite a report from the Congressional Budget Office released Feb. 4 predicting fewer people would be working. “There is absolutely no evidence, and every economist will tell you this, that there is any job-loss related to the Affordable Care Act,” Sebelius told reporters in Orlando, Fla., on Monday. “Part-time physicians are actually down since 2010, not up. The number of full-time workers...

For nearly three years, the Democratic approach to the political unpopularity of President Obama's health care law was denial. Deny it played a significant role in the party's historic midterm losses in 2010. Insist, in the face of contradictory evidence, that as more voters experienced the benefits of the law, the more popular it would become. Deny it would be a major issue at all in the 2014 midterms. The latest version of the argument points to polling showing that voters don't want to repeal the law but prefer to see it fixed—perfectly in line with the newly adopted positions...

'Culture of Encounter': An Opportunity to Deny Christ? 'Engaging in dialogue does not mean renouncing our own ideas and traditions, but the claim that they alone are valid or absolute.' ~ His Holiness Pope Francis, on the Feast of St Francis de Sales Herein lies the Francis enigma, that the Successor of St Peter gives the impression that the Catholic Church does not necessarily contain the fullness of truth and inerrancy in Her teaching. Is this not precisely what the Devil, through his agents, and his whisperings, proposes to mankind in this century, as in previous centuries, that there can...

For nearly a decade, an awkward debate has raged about the U.S. military's nuclear force: Did top Air Force officials really choose "00000000" as a code that could enable the launch of a nuclear missile? Ten years later, in a document obtained by Foreign Policy, the U.S. military told Congress that it never happened. But is the Pentagon telling the truth? Bruce Blair, a nuclear security expert and former launch officer , says no. Blair, now a scholar and author at Princeton University, first raised the idea in a piece published in 2004. He accused the Air Force of circumventing...

Link only: http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2013/1204/Norman-Rockwell-family-calls-Deborah-Solomon-s-Rockwell-bio-fiction