Free Republic

As new owner Jeff Bezos begins his tenure as the head man for the Washington Post, Wonkblog editor Ezra Klein is reportedly making plans to exit the paper after being denied funding for a pet project. Klein built a media presence on the Internet, newspapers, and TV as a "wonk" at a young age. Now, he apparently wants to expand his reach in the media with an extensive new website that he wanted the Washington Post to fund.

Kevin Lewis Crouch walked into a tow lot in Northeast Washington on Tuesday afternoon and asked about a green car. But D.C. police said the 22-year-old man quickly pulled a gun on the tow truck driver who was trying to help him and demanded money. The driver began to run but tripped and fell, police said, and Crouch struck him twice in the head with the butt of his gun. The driver then heaved his wallet against a fence in the lot on Kenilworth Avenue. As Crouch went to grab the wallet, police said, the driver climbed into his white...

Businesses near the White House were riddled with bullets in a two-block drive-by shooting this weekend, prompting a Secret Service investigation. Two of those bullets entered the window and hit the walls inside Brewood Engravers & Printers at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, just a block from the White House, in a shooting that occurred at approximately 2:30 AM early Saturday morning. The office building entrance, next door to the shop, also has a window boarded up. The Caribou Coffee at the corner of 17th and Pennsylvania, right across the street from the White House — and normally, a large Secret...

Washington, they say, is Hollywood for ugly people. It’s also debate club for the logically impaired. The past year included its share of fallacies, sophistries, oversimplifications and utter absurdities. But a few prominent arguments committed the worst offenses against rational thought. Below are the three worst arguments made in Washington in 2013. These weren’t illogical brain freezes or odd beliefs spouted by backbenchers. These arguments were deliberately devised, promulgated and repeated by prominent politicians, which makes them all the more embarrassing. 1. “If we can save only one life…” The demagoguery started early in 2013, as Democrats tried to push...

IT WAS astonishing to hear President Obama, in the preamble to his end-of-year news conference last week, cite Syria as one of his foreign policy successes. “[J]ust as we’re strengthening our position here at home, we’re also standing up for our interests around the world,” Mr. Obama said. “This year we’ve demonstrated that with clear-eyed, principled diplomacy, we can pursue new paths to a world that’s more secure, a future where Iran does not build a nuclear weapon, a future where Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles are destroyed.” Unfortunately, the White House press corps was not as struck by this boast...

Tea party activists are pushing back hard against Speaker John Boehner for attacking conservative groups that are opposed to bipartisan budget legislation approved this week by the House, claiming he has “declared war on the Tea Party” with his blunt criticism. In a fundraising email to supporters, Tea Party Patriots referred to the Ohio Republican as a “ruling class politician” who only pretends to be a conservative while remaining a “tax-and-spend liberal,” The Hill reported Friday. The group, which supported efforts to defund the Affordable Care Act, accused Boehner of passing a “back-room budget deal which increases discretionary spending, does...

On the “Free For All” page in Saturday’s Washington Post devoted to letters to the editor, three locals smacked the Post for failing to note the 72nd anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks on December 7. None of the letters as printed made the point that the Post has “flooded the zone” with lots of coverage and special sections this year for the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington and then the JFK assassination. So what about the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor in 2011? What did that draw? No zone-flooding. No special sections. No articles in...

One of President Obama’s top Secret Service agents has died in an apparent suicide. Rafael Prieto, 47, was a married father who had confessed to cheating with a Mexican woman for nearly six years, a secret under investigation for allegedly violating agency rules that require disclosure of relationships with foreign nationals. A member of the Secret Service for more than two decades assigned to the agency’s most prestigious post as the President’s protective detail, Prieto was found inside a car parked in a Northwest Washington, D.C. apartment complex garage last week, dead of what authorities believe to be carbon monoxide...

Mike Shanahan was reportedly ready to quit because of Daniel Snyder’s favoritism of Robert Griffin III The Washington Redskins are an absolute mess right now, with every day bringing a leaked story of discontent to top the previous one. Here's a pretty wild one: Coach Mike Shanahan reportedly had cleaned out his office before last season's wild-card game against Seattle because he was ready to quit as soon as the season ended. Why was Shanahan ready to go? Because of owner Daniel Snyder's coddling of quarterback Robert Griffin III. That report comes from ESPN.com. A team spokesman in the story...

WASHINGTON–D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray compared the District of Columbia’s lack of autonomy and voting rights to the struggles Nelson Mandela endured, explaining Friday that residents connect so much with the South African leader because “we have not achieved full equality in this city.” “When we can’t have the authority to be able to spend our own money, and all our local laws need to go to the national legislative body in order to be approved, when we experience taxation without representation every day, when we don’t have a voting member of the national legislative body, I think the people can...

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), speaking at a forum on women leadership on Wednesday, said immigration is a woman issue, because the male has either been deported or the father “is not present.” “I think that folks who have dealt with refugees and immigrant families see how much it impacts women, because so often many times, the male is not there. Either he’s been deported or the dad is not present. And immigration is really a woman issue. It’s a family-centered issue,” Ros-Lehtinen said at the forum sponsored by Politico. …

The Redskins, as everyone who isn’t the media by now knows, got their name from their Native American players back in the day. Some of the surviving WW2 Navajo code talkers may know that, because unlike liberals, they weren’t born yesterday.

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) says increasing access to health care and lowering health care costs are at the heart of his bill that stands as an alternative to Obamacare. “We drafted this bill with a working group of members of the Republican Study Committee, which I chair,” Scalise told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto on Wednesday. He said momentum is building for the American Health Care Reform Act, which is being taken “very seriously.” “It’s a very concise bill. It’s less than 200 pages long. It’s not the 2,700-page bill that Obamacare is,” Scalise said. “And also we have over 100...

A day after he questioned President Obama’s decision to unwind a major tenet of the health-care law and said the nation’s capital might not go along, D.C. insurance commissioner William P. White was fired. White was called into a meeting Friday afternoon with one of Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s (D) top deputies and told that the mayor “wants to go in a different direction,” White told The Washington Post on Saturday. White said the mayoral deputy never said that he was being asked to leave because of his Thursday statement on health care. But he said the timing was hard...

The D.C. city government has named Chester A. McPherson as the new acting insurance commissioner, days after the former commissioner was fired following his statement against the White House’s administrative fix on cancelled insurance plans. McPherson, the acting commissioner, had been the deputy commissioner of market operations at the Department of Insurance, Securities and Banking since August 2011. The city announced McPherson’s appointment in a press release and said he would begin immediately but made no mention of predecessor William A White’s departure.

The insurance commissioner of Washington DC was fired a day after criticizing President Obama's plans to fix problems with the Affordable Care Act, the Washington Post reported -snip- Some regulators were also skeptical, among them DC commissioner William White, the Post said. According to the paper, White issued a statement Thursday saying the president's fix "undercut the purpose of the exchanges." By the next morning, the Post reported, the statement had been removed from the web, and by Friday afternoon, DC officials fired White.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Republicans blocked another of President Barack Obama's picks for one of the nation's top courts on Tuesday, the latest skirmish in a nominations battle that has intensified partisan tensions in the chamber. The vote derailed Obama's selection of Georgetown University law professor Cornelia Pillard to fill one of three vacancies on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The roll call was 56-41 in favor of ending GOP procedural delays that have blocked Pillard from winning confirmation — four short of the 60 votes Democrats needed.

On November 1, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decided Gilardi v. HHS ruling against the controversial "birth control mandate" instituted under Obamacare. People of faith from around the nation have waited for an answer on this question, with nearly 75 similar cases pending in federal courts. While this decision is a major victory for religious liberty, the issue will likely face another round at the U.S. Supreme Court. Under the Affordable Care Act, employer-paid health insurance plans (for companies with over 50 workers) must offer free "preventive care" which subsequent guidelines define as "all FDA-approved...

In his whole re-election campaign, Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) has invited only one sitting out-of-state officeholder to campaign with him: New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez (R), who joined Christie at eight campaign events Monday, including a rally in heavily Hispanic Union City. In many ways, Martinez is the perfect complement to Christie, amplifying his strengths as a politician. She is relatively young (54) and a moderate who maintains strong popularity in a blue state. She has worked closely with a legislature held by Democrats and bucked her party by taking the Medicaid expansion in Obamacare. Perhaps most importantly, she's almost...

Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder is scheduled to meet with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell before NFL leaders meet with team name opponents. A person knowledgeable about the situation said there wasn't any indication that Snyder has moved from his position against changing the team's name, the Washington Post reported Monday.