Free Republic

SHANGHAI—As social media helped topple regimes in the Middle East and northern Africa, a senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army publicly warned that an Internet dominated by the U.S. threatened to overthrow China’s Communist Party. Ye Zheng and a Chinese researcher, writing in the state-run China Youth Daily, said the Internet represented a new form of global control, and the U.S. was a “shadow” present during some of those popular uprisings. Beijing had better pay attention. Four years after they sounded that alarm, China is paying a lot of attention. Its government is pushing to rewrite the rules of...

ICYMI: Sen. Cruz Calls on the U.S. Department of Justice to Enforce the Criminal Laws and Investigate Planned Parenthood Every member of Congress must stand together and say under no circumstances should federal taxpayer dollars be sent to an ongoing criminal enterprise WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) today attended the Students for Life of America #WomenBetrayed Rally on the East Front of the U.S. Capitol and delivered the following remarks. Video of Cruz's remarks is available above. "We are here today rallying for life. "The past several weeks we've seen a series of videos come out of...

Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Ben Carson led conservatives in a rally against Planned Parenthood Tuesday, following the publication of three videos detailing the organization's sale of organs harvested from aborted fetuses. "Today the U.S. Department of Justice should open a criminal investigation into whether Planned Parenthood nationally is a criminal enterprise breaking the law," Cruz said on the lawn on the Capitol. But the Texas senator was skeptical this would happen, adding "the Obama Justice Department in acting as little more than a partisan arm of the Democratic National Committee." Cruz is backing Sen. Mike Lee's, R-Utah, attempt...

President Obama said that if he could run for a third term he thinks he would win, while calling for African leaders to adhere to term limits during a historic speech before the African Union. “I actually think I’m a pretty good president. I think if I ran, I could win. But I can’t,” Obama said in Ethiopia on Tuesday. ” There’s a lot that I’d like to do to keep America moving, but the law’s the law.”

The IRS used a “wholly separate” instant messaging system that automatically deleted office communications, according to documentation released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday. The system appears to have been purposefully used by agency officials responsible for the targeting of conservative non-profits, in order to evade public scrutiny. The system, known as “Office Communication Server” or OCS was used by IRS officials, including many in the Exempt Organizations (EO) Unit, which was headed by Lois Lerner. As the Oversight Committee report states, the instant messaging system did not archive any communications, so it is not possible to know what...

Over the last few weeks we’ve seen Republican consultants and pundits publicly fretting about whether Donald Trump will hurt the GOP’s brand. What a joke! When do those people start worrying about what Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and the rest of the GOP’s leadership are doing to the Party’s brand? Just this week-end, McConnell shut down efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, fight sanctuary cities, kill Obamacare and stop Iran from getting nukes because they might get in the way of pushing corporate welfare. At this point, Boehner and McConnell might as well just wear the logos of the corporations and...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has invited President Obama to a debate on the merits of the Iran nuclear deal, also saying Mr. Obama could send Secretary of State John Kerry as a proxy if the president is unwilling to show up. “Since he’s not willing to discuss the substance, I’ll make an invitation right here tonight, which is I will invite President Obama, at any time and place of his choosing, to debate the substance of the Iran deal,” Mr. Cruz said on Monday’s”Hannity” program on Fox News. “Let’s do it in front of the American people anytime in...

A former U.S, intelligence agent sentenced to life in prison for spying on behalf of Israel against the United States will be released later this year, according to multiple reports on Tuesday.

On July 25, 2015, the day after news that a Scott Walker ally had called him a "dumb-dumb,"Donald Trump delighted in dumping on the Wisconsin governor during a campaign speech in Iowa."I read this horrible statement from his fundraiser about Trump. I said, ‘Oh, finally,I can attack,’ "the New York businessman said to laughter in Oskaloosa. "Finally, finally."Trump--second to Walker among Republican presidential contenders in an Iowa poll earlier in the week--criticized him on several fronts. Then he made a claim about the fortunes of Wisconsin’s finances."Wisconsin’s doing terribly. First of all, it’s in turmoil,"Trump said. "The roads are a...

How is Donald Trump still leading in national polls? How has he surged so quickly, and so contrary to the wisdom of pundits, in Iowa and New Hampshire? One of the answers popped up in Iowa on Saturday morning. At 10 a.m., when the line started outside of Donald Trump’s “family picnic” in Oskaloosa, Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) was locked in an argument with a voter in the Des Moines suburbs. As Donald Trump fans feasted on free barbecue, Christie grew so frustrated with a gun rights activist that he told him to “run for president” if he wanted a...

Just a day after allegations reemerged that Donald Trump raped his ex-wife, Ivana Trump, the bombastic billionaire’s former spouse played down the controversy, saying that the two are still “the best of friends.” *snip* “Donald and I are the best of friends and together have raised three children that we love and are very proud of. I have nothing but fondness for Donald and wish him the best of luck on his campaign,” she said. “Incidentally, I think he would make an incredible president,” Ivana Trump, who divorced her husband in 1992, added.

The Daily Beast took a predictable swipe at Donald Trump yesterday by generating some “breaking news” which is actually a decades old and long abandoned story from Trump’s high profile divorce from his former wife, Ivana. The “story” in question, which Ivana Trump herself refuted shortly after it initially broke, related to comments she made during their divorce where she said she “felt violated” during a particular sexual encounter. Business Insider offers a brief history of where this tired old chestnut originated. When the allegations first surfaced in 1993 Ivana Trump issued a statement clarifying that she didn’t mean the...

A lawyer and spokesman for current Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump issued a series of vulgar threats to a reporter on Monday, while falsely claiming that it was legal for a husband to rape his wife in New York. Michael Cohen, special counsel for the Trump Organization, threatened Canadian-American reporter Tim Mak of the Daily Beast with untold legal consequences in response to an article that resurfaced allegations that Trump had raped his then-wife Ivana. ... The Daily Beast story repeated details of a deposition relayed by a Trump biographer, who described the mogul as forcing himself on his then-wife...

Michael Lutz, the Wisconsin whistleblower and former prosecutor who alleged that the union-operative wife of “John Doe” prosecutor John Chislhom was behind the targeting of conservative activists that recently was thrown out by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.... Is dead in what police are terming an apparent suicide....Lutz, 44, a former Milwaukee police officer, suffered an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound “while in the presence of Menomonee Falls tactical officers after a brief tactical situation,” the medical examiner’s office said in a release issued Sunday. Lutz was pronounced dead in the 12300 block of W. Mill Road in Milwaukee at 4:05 a.m.,...

The American political class has failed the country, and should be fired. That is the clearest message from the summer surge of Bernie Sanders and the remarkable rise of Donald Trump. “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.” Yet the stagnation of workers’ wages as the billionaire boys club admits new members, and the hemorrhaging of U.S. jobs under...

By Joel Leyden Israel News AgencyJerusalem, Israel --- July 27, 2015 ... Former Arkansas governor and 2016 GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee recently stated that: “The Iran nuclear deal is marching the Israelis to the door of the oven.” Huckabee added: “What’s ‘ridiculous and sad’ is that President Obama does not take Iran’s repeated threats seriously. For decades, Iranian leaders have pledged to ‘destroy,’ ‘annihilate,’ and ‘wipe Israel off the map’ with a ‘big Holocaust.’ ‘Never again’ will be the policy of my administration and I will stand with our ally Israel to prevent the terrorists in Tehran from achieving...

MSNBC host and NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell stated that when she spoke to intelligence officials at a security conference, “nobody can give an explanation for why a cabinet secretary would have a private email system other than to thwart inquiries, FOIAs” on Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Mitchell said that it’s possible that the impact of Clinton’s emails on her campaign has been underestimated. She continued, “Look, you have two inspectors general, and they are referring to this to the Justice Department. Now, you can try to confuse it, and there’s been a lot of...

...[Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.)] says they asked whether they could see those agreements. He says IAEA officials replied, “ ‘Oh no, of course not, no, you’re not going to get to see those.’ And so everybody on our side of the table asked, ‘Has Secretary Kerry seen these?’ ‘No, Secretary Kerry hasn’t seen them. No American is ever going to get to see them.’ ” It turns out that only the two parties — the IAEA and Iran — get to see the actual agreements (though you can see a picture of Iranian and IAEA officials holding up what appear...

Friday, Senator Ted Cruz gave a powerful floor speech shining a light on the corrupt deal struck by Senate Republican leadership to allow the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank.  No doubt you’ve seen a few key quotes in the media or read a couple of the most buzzworthy lines on Twitter or Facebook or in an email forwarded to you by a conservative friend.  But if you haven’t read the entire speech or watched the full video through to the end you haven’t gotten the full impact of what Senator Cruz said.  The news media has focused on Cruz calling out Senate Majority...

This new poll finding, courtesy of CNN, is not all that surprising, but it is very illuminating of the demographic challenges the GOP faces right now: A big majority of Republicans believes that the government’s main focus on immigration should be not just on stopping the flow of illegal immigrants, but also on deporting those already here. The poll asks: