Free Republic

Leading Senate Republicans are preparing to launch a coordinated and wide-ranging probe into Russia’s alleged meddling in the U.S. elections and its potential cyber threats to the military, digging deep into what they view as corrosive interference in the nation’s institutions. Such an aggressive approach puts them on a direct collision course with President-elect Donald Trump, who downplays the possibility Russia had any role in the November elections — arguing that a hack of the Democratic National Committee emails may have been perpetrated by “some guy in his home in New Jersey.” The fracture could become more prominent after Trump...

Speaking at the Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day ceremony, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack on Wednesday, the admiral made pointed remarks at the San Francisco 49ers quarterback whose claim to fame is his decision to kneel through the national anthem in a show of solidarity with Black Lives Matter. "You can bet that the men and women we honor today, and those who died that fateful morning 75 years ago, never took a knee and never failed to stand whenever they heard our national anthem being played," Harris said. That line brought the crowd roaring to its...

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s latest political scandal has all the makings of a thriller in which the decisions of the president, lonely and isolated, are influenced by a longtime friend, right down to personnel and policy moves, even what to wear. Making it even more twisted is that the friend’s father, a cult leader, used similar Rasputin-like control on President Park Geun-hye’s father when he held the top office until he was assassinated in part because of that unhealthy relationship. Toss in some Viagra, visits to a detox clinic under a pseudonym, a deadly ferry sinking and mass...

President-elect Donald Trump honored the first American to orbit the Earth on Thursday, a little more than an hour after Glenn’s death was announced. The former Ohio senator died Thursday at age 95 after a prolonged illness. In his remarks, sent out via his Twitter feed, Trump hailed Glenn as an inspiration to generations of “explorers.” “Today we lost a great pioneer of air and space in John Glenn,” Trump wrote...

In January 2014 President Obama referred to ISIS, one of the most vicious terror armies to ever exist, of being a "JV team." “The analogy we use around here sometimes,and I think is accurate, is if a JV team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” Obama told the New Yorker at the time. After that comment the group marched from Syria to Iraq, taking large swaths of territory, pillaging and raping along the way and slaughtering thousands. Now with just a month left in his presidency, President Obama is saying he was surprised by the capability of...

Brietbart had an article about this speech, here http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/12/07/obama-urges-soldiers-to-question-trumps-authority-criticize-our-president/ I read it and thought maybe they were being hyperbolic about what Obama had said. So I forced myself to read the speech. They weren't being hyperbolic. Herewith the important excerpts, with my translation in CAPS. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/12/06/remarks-president-administrations-approach-counterterrorism We have to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 2003 invasion that have helped to give rise to the organization that became ISIL in the first place. LET’S REMEMBER ONE OF MY FAVORITE LINES FROM THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS OF MY PRESIDENCY: IT’S ALL GEORGE BUSH’S FAULT. No foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JloeOsgwju4

A senior U.S. military official says North Korea now has the capability to launch a nuclear weapon. But the official says that while the U.S. believes Pyongyang can mount a warhead on a missile, it's not clear that it can hit a target.

Steve Bannon, Mr. Populism? The high priest of Breitbart? The man who co-wrote a piece earlier this year slamming Romney as a sort of parasite on America’s working class and a walking, talking symbol of everything that was wrong with the Republican establishment? Perhaps nothing is more symptomatic of the GOP establishment’s death drive than their continued embrace of the presidential aspirations of a man who shrank the party in 2012…

A pilot may have been suffering from "mental overload" when he crash-landed, killing three members of Osama Bin Laden's family, an inquiry has found. The jet overshot the runway at Blackbushe Airport in July 2015 and crashed into a car auction site. The Air Accidents Investigations Branch (AAIB) said emergency warnings prior to landing may have "saturated the pilot's mental capacity". The pilot and three passengers survived the crash but died in a severe fire. Bin Laden's half-sister, Sana Mohammed Bin Laden, her mother, Raja Bashir Hashim, and his brother-in-law, Zuhair Hashim, were killed, along with pilot Mazen Al-Aqeel Da'jah...

Paula Broadwell, the woman whose affair with then-CIA director David Petraeus cost him his job, has accused him of having her 'thrown under the bus' over their illicit relationship. The former intelligence officer said she felt 'betrayed' by Petraeus after news of their affair broke in 2012. 'I was in such a state of mental shock and quickly spiraled into a depression,' she told Vanity Fair.

Left-wing Mexican senators celebrated the start of the Christmas season by beating a piñata of U.S. President-Elect Donald J. Trump while chanting “faggot” and other expletives. In this case, the assembled group echoed the chant, “chinga tu madre”, calling for the President-Elect’s mother to be violated sexually. Many senators whistled the insult in lieu of saying the exact words.

Remember when Trump supposedly blundered into a diplomatic minefield he had no comprehension of by taking a phone call from the President of Taiwan? The same media that his dismissed his presidential run as comedy were dead certain that disaster lay ahead in a complex and delicate diplomatic relationship. So committed are Trump haters to the idea that he cannot possibly have outsmarted them that they never bother to consider that a plan may be at work. Average Americans understand that the devastation of our manufacturing sector is in large part the result of that delicate diplomatic balance, and the...

Paris (AFP) – French far-right leader Marine Le Pen proposed Thursday that the children of illegal immigrants should be refused public school places as part of tough proposals to restrict state services. “I’ve got nothing against foreigners but I say to them: if you come to our country, don’t expect that you will be taken care of, treated (by the health system) and that your children will be educated for free,” Le Pen said. “That’s finished now, it’s the end of playtime,” she told an audience at a conference organised by a polling group in Paris. Opinion polls suggest the...

The Syrian army's advance in Aleppo slowed on Thursday but a victory was still firmly in sight after President Bashar al-Assad vowed that retaking the nation's second city would change the course of the six-year civil war in his favor. Lightning gains in recent days in which government forces and their allies recaptured Aleppo's historic Old City lost some momentum in the face of stiff rebel resistance but the Syrian leadership was confident. Assad has long sought to seize divided Aleppo which would put him in control of Syria's major cities, the south, central spine and western flank bordering the...

Hundreds of British police officers have been accused of engaging in the sexual abuse of victims, according to a report by UK top police watchdog ordered by then-Home Secretary Theresa May earlier this year. The statement by lead researcher Mike Cunnigham branded the findings the “most serious form of corruption.” According to the study done by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), during the 24 months to March 31, 2016, there were 436 allegations of abuse of authority for sexual gain “received, or received and finalised,” by police forces in England and Wales, including instances of multiple allegations against...

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned countries from Europe and beyond on Thursday to beware of an increasing “danger of authoritarian populism.” Kerry spoke at a meeting in Hamburg of foreign ministers from the 57-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The group, chaired by Germany this year, includes European Union countries, the U.S., Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Central Asian nations and others. In “too many places” in the OSCE region, he said, there has been “a rise of authoritarian thinking, accompanied by backsliding on human rights, restrictions on independent media, a spike in acts of intolerance and hate...

Ukraine's Antonov aircraft maker suggested US President-elect Donald Trump should order Air Force One from Ukraine, a message on the official Twitter page of the company said, TASS reports. "Maybe it would be better to consider an Antonov aircraft as Air Force One?" the tweet said. The state-run Antonov aircraft building plant is Ukraine's only developer and manufacturer of cargo and passenger aircraft. The company is best known for such aircraft as AN-32, AN-148, AN-158, AN-74, AN-124, AN-70 and AN-225. The company did not specify which aircraft exactly they would like to propose to the new President of the United...

The Syrian army’s Tiger Forces, Liwa al-Quds, the National Defense Forces, Hezbollah and other pro-government formations have been continuing adavance against al-Qaeda linked militants (Jaish al-Fatah/Fatah Haleb) in the Syrian city of Aleppo. Government forces are dveloping the offensive in the areas of Zebdiyah and Bostan al Qasr. There are also reports that Liwa al-Quds and Hezbollah have made significant gains in Sheikh Saeed. But they have to be confirmed. All “ceasefire proposals” sent by militants yesterday were reportedly rejected.

Russia's only and therefore mightiest carrier by default, the Admiral Kuznetsov, transited the Mediterranean last month to great controversy. The ship was accused—rightly so—of moving into position to support the bombing of the Syrian city of Aleppo. Aircraft from the carrier were spotted over Aleppo the first day it began air operations over Syria. Since then Kuznetsov has lost two of fifteen fighters of its assigned air wing to accidents, and flight operations have been suspended at least once. A Russian television news report shot on the carrier itself attempts to portray the ship as a hive of activity but...