Free Republic

NEW YORK (Reuters) - For months, the U.S. State Department has stood behind its former boss Hillary Clinton as she has repeatedly said she did not send or receive classified information on her unsecured, private email account, a practice the government forbids. While the department is now stamping a few dozen of the publicly released emails as "Classified," it stresses this is not evidence of rule-breaking. Those stamps are new, it says, and do not mean the information was classified when Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential election, first sent or received it. But the details included in...

The woman featured prominently in three of the Planned Parenthood sting videos says she’s unsure whether the women’s health organization should be shut down in light of the massive political controversy she helped ignite. Holly O’Donnell, a 24-year-old from Northern California, said in a little-noticed conservative radio podcast that she is “pro-life” and personally opposes abortion, but also calls it “every woman’s choice.” She said she participated in the videos as a whistleblower because she wanted to expose practices that she considers trafficking in fetal body parts — yet she still has praise for some of Planned Parenthood’s work. “I...

Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush has been forced to abandon a rally early because of a protest from Black Lives Matter. The former governor of Florida was in Las Vegas for a town hall meeting on Wednesday when he answered a question on racial inequality. An advocate in the crowd of around 150 then started to chant their slogan, so he quickly ended his speech and left the venue without making a final statement or shaking hands with members of the audience. The music he plays when he walks off stage is heard in the background of a video as...

The spotlight wasn’t on him, but Jeb Bush remains the smart money choice. The former Florida governor was solid, if nervous, making no blunders and giving primary voters no reasons to be turned off. He was cool, while Donald Trump was mortifyingly hot, especially amid early questioning on past sexist comments. Bush was measured compared with other more theatrical rivals like Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee. As Trump pandered (probably successfully) to his base by bashing the media and undocumented workers, Bush at least sought to broaden his by toning down his pro-immigration image. Donald Trump...

Scott Walker. Now with extra "splainin' to do. Thanks to a legal filing by Cindy Archer, former top aide to then Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, we now have more information on how the first John Doe Probe was born. It turns out that the John Doe Probe became necessary because of the lack of cooperation and obstruction by Walker's own office. We have known that it started with an investigation into money missing from the accounts of Operation Freedom which provided services to families of veterans. This money, formerly handled by an American Legion Post, was ordered to be...

Things got very awkward on Thursday when Chris Matthews asked DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz what the difference was between the modern Democratic Party and Socialism. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was completely stumped. She couldn’t answer the question. We haven’t seen that dazed look since Rachel Dolezal was busted as a fraud. Because, as we all know, there is no difference between today’s Democrat Party and radical Socialism. On Sunday DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was again asked to explain the difference between the modern day Democratic Party and Socialism. Again She failed. “You know Chuck it is always fun to...

For Jon Stewart, this certainly isn’t the high note he wanted to go out on. The guy who prides himself on speaking truth to power, as the anti-establishment, take-to-both-sides-hero for millennials everywhere… reduced to a stenographer for a sitting president so thin-skinned about any and all criticism that he needs to dictate his own comedy. As originally reported in Politico by Darren Samuelson, the outgoing Daily Show host met with President Barack Obama twice in the past four years but failed to let anyone know about it. It was only then that Stewart — who loves to play the “I’m...

On The Daily Show, President Obama blamed Republicans for the IRS scandal: “You’ve got this back office, and they’re going after the Tea Party. Well, it turned out, no, Congress had passed a crummy law that didn’t give people guidance in terms of what it was they were trying to do. They did it poorly and stupidly. The truth of the matter is that there was not some big conspiracy there. They were trying to sort out these conflicting demands. You don’t want all this money pouring through non-for- profits, but you also want to make sure everybody is being...

Nothing like a little crap on your comix page. See it at the source link above.

Amazon backed Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in his fight against The New York Times Monday, saying there is “no evidence” his book sales are driven by “strategic bulk purchases.” The Cruz campaign accused The NYT Friday of lying when it said his new book, “A Time For Truth,” did not make the bestseller list because a bulk of its sales came from “strategic bulk purchases.” Cruz and his publisher, HarperCollins, said Friday the books were not sold in bulk. “A Time For Truth ranked high on the other publishing industry bestseller lists including Nielsen Bookscan (#4), a subscription service that...

As she addressed the National Council of La Raza––the largest Hispanic advocacy organization in the country––today, Hillary Clinton called out Donald Trump for his “appalling” comments on illegal immigrants. Clinton previously connected Trump’s immigration views to his GOP rivals’ and today, she told her audience that Trump is demonizing “people who love this country, work hard, and want nothing more than a chance to build a better life for themselves and their children.” She expressed outrage that Trump “doubled down” instead of apologizing and said, “Basta! Enough!” And her campaign really wanted to hammer all of this home today:

It wasn’t like we didn’t see this coming but it’s certainly arriving faster and harder than even some of the more conservative estimates would have predicted. Now that gay marriage (or just any old marriage if you prefer) is a “constitutionally assured right” in the United States, Left side proponents are taking their victory laps. But at the same time they’re going to stick to the established talking points of telling everyone not to worry… nothing bad is going to happen to anyone else. You’re just not adjusted to the New and Improved Post-Homophobic Christianity. (From the Daily Beast) The...

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog, Have you ever come across someone on the Internet that you suspected was a paid government troll? Well, there is a very good chance that you were not imagining things. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now have solid proof that paid government trolls are using “psychology-based influence techniques” on social media websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Documents leaked by Snowden also reveal that government agents have been conducting denial-of-service attacks, flooding social media websites with thinly veiled propaganda and have been purposely attempting to warp public...

The symptoms of the prion disease are beginning to become so obvious that even some of our more prominent pundits are beginning to notice them. For example, even former Karl Rove life-coach Ron Fournier has noticed the severe lack of Abraham Lincolns in the current GOP presidential candidates. And noted climate-denialist and baseball drone George Effing Will has staked out the bold position that many of these candidates have gone so far around the bend that they've crossed some kind of termination barrier. It is, therefore, especially disheartening that Cruz, who clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and who is...

In the week after nine people were shot dead at Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina, six churches with predominately black congregations in five Southern states have burned. Three of the fires are being investigated as arson.(excerpt)

The conservative pundit tells CNN Republicans will become "relics" if they don't evolve on same-sex marriage.Conservative pundit S.E. Cupp got emotional on CNN Friday afternoon in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage equality, which she urged the Republican party to accept. Tears welling, lip quivering and all, Cupp — a longtime supporter of same-sex marriage, though not always for the most progressive reasons — begged the GOP to evolve on the issue, lest conservatives begin to be viewed as “relics.” “Those people there are not pariahs, they’re patriots,” Cupp said of same-sex couples. ”And wherever you stand...

[...] Bristol Palin announced via her blog that she is pregnant. The 24-year old already has a son after choosing life in 2008 and becoming a teen mother. Now, she’s expecting again and once again she is unmarried. And? [...] Let’s call it what it really is. This is just another case of the haters waiting for someone they already hate to have a problem so they can go after them full throttle. They’re loaded for (mama grizzly) bear. [...] Others are upset about how Palin’s pregnancy could affect a potential run for office by her mother. Really? We’ve elected...

President Obama is keen to introduce tough new laws which will force the KKK and other extreme right-wing groups to disclose the identities of their members, Daily Mail Online can disclose. [...] Among the ideas being looked at is legislation forcing extreme right wings groups and violent organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan to provide identities of supporters and members.

On June 24, National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis asked park superintendents to work with their partners and bookstore operators to voluntarily withdraw from sale items that solely depict a Confederate flag. The National Park Service press release can be found here. "We strive to tell the complete story of America," National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis said of the agency's reputation for telling difficult parts of our history. "All sales items in parks are evaluated based on educational value and their connection to the park. Any stand-alone depictions of Confederate flags have no place in park stores."...

As the mainstream media takes a boisterous victory lap over the Supreme Court’s declaration of nationwide same-sex marriage, the Washington Post took the extra step of invoking the divine. Wonkblog’s Ana Swanson wrote: Senior White House official Betsey Stevenson, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, captured what looked like a sign from the heavens on Friday at 11 a.m. Stevenson snapped a photo of a rainbow that had appeared over the White House.