Free Republic

Press Freedom: The president worries about the "chilling effect" of leak investigations as his attorney general signs the warrant labeling a Fox News reporter as a violator of the Espionage Act. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. 'I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable," President Obama said with a straight face in a speech Thursday at the National Defense University. "Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs." Indeed, investigative reporting should not be a criminal offense — just ask Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose digging unearthed...

IRS Scandal: The inexplicable raid nearly two years ago on a guitar maker for using allegedly illegal wood that its competitors also used was another targeting by this administration of its political enemies. On Aug. 24, 2011, federal agents executed four search warrants on Gibson Guitar Corp. facilities in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., and seized several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. One of the top makers of acoustic and electric guitars, including the iconic Les Paul introduced in 1952, Gibson was accused of using wood illegally obtained in violation of the century-old Lacey Act, which outlaws trafficking in...

Scandal: The rest of us must answer IRS questions under threat of perjury, but the agency's execs can take the Fifth. A Tea Party targeted by the IRS — and the FBI and OSHA and the ATF — thinks that's unfair. We do too. Lois Lerner, chief of the IRS' exempt organizations division when the Tea Party and other conservative groups were targeted for their opposition to President Obama, has invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to be questioned on her earlier testimony, her opening statement or any knowledge she may have of who ordered the targeting, who created the...

Junk Science: Despite no evidence that devastating tornadoes have increased in frequency or intensity due to fossil fuel use, another warm-monger blames the Moore, Okla., disaster on GOP "polluters and deniers." Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., thought the devastation of Moore was a crisis that should not be wasted as he took to the Senate floor Monday to rail against his Republican colleagues for denying the theory of anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming (known by its acronym, AGW). Other Democratic leaders like Al Gore, who profited handsomely off the manufactured hysteria, and President Obama, who promised the sea level would stop rising and...

Benghazigate: The lack of a timeline for what the commander-in-chief was doing the night terrorists murdered our ambassador to Libya and three others is an "irrelevant fact," according to a key White House aide. Playing the role Sunday of former U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who last Sept. 16 went on all five talk shows to parrot the administration line that Benghazi was provoked by a video, was White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer. Following in Rice's footsteps, he announced that the details of where President Obama was and what he was doing that fateful night were an "irrelevant fact." "Fox...

Government Overreach: The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of tax-exempt organizations when the unit targeted Tea Party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for enforcing ObamaCare. As bad as the IRS scandal was, with the taxing body of government using its unequaled authority to intimidate and harass the president's political opposition to aid his re-election, it got worse with the news that the IRS official, Sarah Hall Ingram, who served as commissioner of the Tax-Exempt and Government Entities Division from 2009 to 2012, is now serving as director of the IRS' Affordable Care Act division. Ingram was so...

Scandal In Libya: A new email dump shows that the White House, contrary to public statements, was heavily involved in editing the Benghazi talking points to remove all references to it being a terrorist attack. The limited, heavily redacted package of emails released by the administration Wednesday is noteworthy for what the emails don't say and reflect a concerted effort by the White House and State Department not to get at the truth but to put something together to help President Obama in an election two months out. The email package begins some 67 hours after the Sept. 11, 2012,...

Scandal: Senate Democrats, including supporters of the Disclose Act, provided the names of groups they wanted targeted in a taxpayer-funded witch hunt overseen by an IRS employee and Obama campaign donor. Using the Citizens United case as a pretext, retiring Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., on July 27, 2012, wrote IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman to investigate 12 conservative groups he accused of violating their tax-exempt status and engaging in coordinated political activity. The groups Levin asked to be targeted for special scrutiny were Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, Priorities U.S.A., Americans Elect, American Action Network, Americans for Prosperity, American Future Fund, Americans...

Tax Abuse: As nonconservative groups complain of politically motivated targeting by the IRS, we're reminded it's the IRS that's going to be enforcing one of the greatest expansions of government power in our history. In recent days we've come to know what is meant by the adage that the power to tax is the power to destroy. Our country was born in revolt against taxation used by a tyrant to control and stifle liberty, and this is not the first president to abuse this power. Back in May 2009, Professor Glenn Reynolds, better known to his followers as Instapundit, wrote...

Libya: At least a dozen rewrites of the Benghazi talking points were made, with all references to al-Qaida and prior attacks removed at the direction of the secretary of state's office. The astonishing thing about the administration's Benghazi cover-up is that it actually thought it could get away with it. But each lie has been successfully peeled away, from the protest that never happened, to the irrelevant filmmaker who was blamed, to the intelligence community whose talking points were used as a cover for incompetence and malfeasance. Now White House and State Department emails obtained by ABC News, some first...

Scandal In Libya: The secretary of state in the most transparent administration in history has her chief of staff warn a Benghazi whistle-blower to not spill the beans on Benghazi to a U.S. congressman. In the course of the career of Hillary Clinton's husband, William Jefferson Clinton, there were handlers delegated to deal with what were famously called "bimbo eruptions," past dalliances that might impede his political career. Now on her own politically, Mrs. Clinton apparently has her own handlers, paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, to deal with what we'll call "Benghazi eruptions." Those who know the truth and...

The Scandal In Libya: Testimony by the Benghazi whistle-blowers presents clear evidence of shameful political manipulation of the truth seven weeks before an election and a willingness to let four Americans die to maintain a campaign narrative. What difference at this point does the truth about Benghazi make? In an emotional opening statement at Wednesday's hearing of the House Oversight Committee, Eric Nordstrom, a regional security officer of the U.S. Mission to Libya from September 2011 to July 2012, answered that question with voice cracking and a simple declarative sentence: "It matters to the friends and family of Ambassador Stevens,...

Benghazi: Congressional Democrats will go all-out to protect their likely 2016 presidential nominee. They won't ask why a 10-man SWAT team was sent to arrest a filmmaker while pleas for help in Benghazi were ignored. On Sept. 14, 2012, three days after the terrorist attack on our diplomatic mission in Benghazi that claimed their lives, the bodies of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were returned to America in a "transfer of remains" ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base, Md. Charles Woods, Tyrone's father, recalls that as the bodies of the four Americans arrived at Andrews,...

The Scandal In Libya: On the night Bengazi burned and four Americans died, forces ready to deploy were told to stand down and our secretary of state cut out of the loop her department's counter-terrorism bureau. Few people know who Gregory Hicks and Mark Thompson are, but then nobody knew who John Dean was when he testified at the Watergate hearings and blew the Nixon administration and its coverup out of the water. "I thought it was a terrorist attack from the get-go," says Hicks, the U.S. deputy chief of mission in Libya on that fateful night. "I think everybody...

War On Terror: Eight months after the Benghazi attack, the FBI begs for help by releasing photos of three suspects, reports surface about an al-Qaida link and the State Department's review panel is under investigation. Ahead of highly anticipated hearings set for Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee featuring testimony from State Department whistle-blowers — of which a clueless President Obama professes no knowledge — the FBI has released photos of three people who were at the U.S. consulate when it was attacked last Sept. 11 — pictures that were available on Day One. But of course...

PC Amok: Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III, responding to pressure to change his team's name, tweeted: "In a land of freedom we are held hostage by the tyranny of political correctness." Washington Redtails, anyone? The problems of poverty, unemployment, crime and failing schools having been solved, the Washington, D.C., council is considering a nonbinding resolution by David Grosso, an "independent" at-large councilman, demanding that Redskins owner Dan Snyder change the team's name to the "Redtails." This presumably would honor the Tuskegee Airmen, the black fighter pilots who wrote tales of heroism across the skies above World War II battlefields. As...

PC Amok: A congressman asks why emails describe supporters of traditional marriage as members of hate groups while the Pentagon vets a religious tolerance guide with a group that compares Christian evangelism to "rape." When Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel recently appeared before Congress, he was grilled by Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., about an email sent by an officer at Fort Campbell, Ky., to three dozen subordinates, warning them to be on the lookout for soldiers connected with "domestic hate groups." Among the groups listed in the 14-page email by Lt. Col. Frank Rich, the Second Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment Commander...

Social Injustice: Turns out conservative crusader Andrew Breitbart was correct when he exposed a multibillion-dollar redistribution scheme to African-American farmers based on largely dubious claims of discrimination. If there's a patron saint for government watchdogs, it's Breitbart, who was well into exposing at the time of his early death one of the most egregious examples of wealth redistribution in the name of social justice: the Pigford case. A handful of black farmers who arguably were discriminated against in their dealings with the Agriculture Department were exploited by a racial grievance industry empowered by a government and a president out to...

Welfare: Not content with having more Americans on food stamps than people in Spain, the Obama administration is ringing the dinner bell for illegal aliens. We'll feed you and not check your status. As we wrote last July, just as food stamp use has skyrocketed here under President Obama, so have marketing efforts to Hispanics under a partnership with Mexico. We dubbed the program "Fat and Furious" after the administration's gun-running program that also seemingly had worthy goals but had unclear motives and pernicious effects. "USDA and the government of Mexico have entered into a partnership to help educate eligible...

Federal Power: Homeland Security's procurement officer is grilled in Congress on why federal agents who rarely fire weapons need several times more bullets annually than an Army officer. Who or what are they shooting at? Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz on Thursday asked Nick Nayak, DHS' chief procurement officer, a question we and others have been asking: Why has the Department of Homeland Security been buying so much ammunition? Dismissed as a concern only of right-wing conspiracy theorists, the reported amounts as high as 2 billion rounds have varied and been explained not as a one-time purchase but a bulk buy...

Energy: As the EPA snipes at the State Department's approval, Canada's natural resource minister says failure to approve the pipeline would seriously jeopardize our energy relationship and do nothing to save the earth. Joe Oliver, not amused by the continued delays in perhaps the most shovel-ready project since the pyramids, said Wednesday that rejection by the U.S. of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline "would represent a serious reversal in our long-standing energy relationship." This critical energy infrastructure project is also perhaps the most studied and approved. After a reroute at the behest of environmentalists allegedly concerned about the sensitive Ogallala...

Scandal: A congressional report shows security cuts before the Benghazi attack were approved by the secretary of state and that White House talking points describing the events were edited to protect the State Department. The "progress" report by House Republicans will no doubt be dismissed as a partisan political document. But it effectively records administration efforts to ignore the threat of terrorism before the attack on our diplomatic mission in Benghazi, to cover up administration culpability afterward and to sweep aside responsibility for the deaths of four Americans to make the administration look caring and competent. Despite then-Secretary of State...

States: The governor from a thriving free-enterprise state travels to the U.S. counterpart of Greece and Cyprus with an invitation: Come to where folks are friendly to business. Texas' Rick Perry arrived in Illinois Monday to lure businesses away from a state that we and other's have dubbed "America's Greece" — beleaguered by debt, punished by regulations and subject to ever-rising taxes — to one that's leading the pack in job and economic growth. Taking umbrage at Perry's visit was Chicago Mayor and former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. He took the occasion to taunt the governor with...

Asian Security: As Korea festers, our friends in Beijing have deployed near Taiwan a powerful missile designed to take out U.S. aircraft carriers as Beijing strengthens its ability to prevent U.S. forces from aiding Taiwan. When North Korea announced the 1953 Armistice was considered null and void and threatened renewed missile tests, the U.S. rushed naval assets to the region, including two destroyers equipped with the Aegis anti-missile defense system. We presumably would do so if things heated up between Beijing and its claimed "lost province," Taiwan. That option became increasingly problematical when news of China's deployment of an anti-ship...

Media Bias: There's palpable dismay at outlets such as MSNBC and Salon that the Boston Marathon bombers were radicalized young men from Chechnya and not angry white males from the vast right-wing conspiracy. Shortly after Monday's tragedy in Boston, David Sirota of Salon Magazine penned a piece titled "Let's hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American." His hopes were dashed when the suspects turned out to be Muslim brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose family origins are in Chechnya, the rebellious Russian region that is a breeding ground for terrorists. In 2002, about 40 armed Chechen separatists took...

Benghazi: As new whistle-blowers emerge and Congress tells CIA staffers to lawyer up, a grieving father demands to know how and why his son died and why no one in the administration wants to talk to him. As long as we're on the subject of finding the terrorists responsible for killing U.S. citizens on American soil, the father of a former Navy SEAL killed in Benghazi last September was on Capitol Hill Wednesday to urge support of a special committee to investigate the attacks. As we search for answers on Boston, we still have no real answers on Benghazi seven...

War On Terror: As the administration slashed the domestic bombing prevention budget by 45%, a top military IED expert warned such devices were coming, and an al-Qaida chieftain advocated their use within U.S. borders. check this later today to see if we knowYes, it's too early to know if the bombing of the Boston Marathon was an act of foreign or domestic terrorism. But it's worth noting that one of the three devices in the May 2010 Times Square attempted bombing, for which the Pakistani Taliban took credit, was a pressure cooker bomb similar to those used to kill three...

Overreach: The gun control bill lets doctors put your name in the national criminal background check system without telling you. Can the government say you're crazy and take your guns? It's already happening. The road to deeper gun control seems like another road paved with good intentions. Since many recent mass shootings have involved shooters with varying degrees of mental impairment, the desire to keep guns out of the genuinely mentally ill seems to be a worthy goal. Yet it is being exploited with definitions so vague and undefined, and with controls so lax, as to become not a means...

Big Brother: The government we entrust our medical records to under ObamaCare has its EPA sharing confidential data on farmers with green groups and the IRS reading your email. Smile and wave at the EPA drone. The Environmental Protection Agency has acknowledged that it released personal information on potentially thousands of farmers and ranchers to environmental groups, violating their privacy rights and acting in collusion with private groups with private political agendas. In Nixonian fashion, the EPA has provided these environmental groups with the dossiers of farmers it has gathered to help them create an enemies list of potential polluters....

Bat Man: A Chicago store owner beats off two armed thugs with a baseball bat as Missouri illegally shares concealed carry records with feds and New York matches private health records with gun permits to take firearms. President Obama, who campaigns for gun control between concerts at the White House and golf outings with Tiger Woods, once famously used the metaphor that in politics if they bring a knife to a fight, you bring a gun. On Tuesday, in the gun-controlled murder capital of Chicago, the president's hometown, store owner Luis Quizhpe, an Ecuadorean immigrant, had no gun, but he...

Media Bias: A basketball coach who shoves and curses at his players merits constant coverage by a media also transfixed by Newtown. But a Philadelphia doctor on trial for murdering a woman and seven babies? It's ignored. Those who get their news from the three major networks have probably not heard of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, now on trial in Philadelphia, charged with seven counts of first-degree murder and one count of third-degree murder for killing seven babies who survived abortions and a woman who died after a botched pain-killer injection. Everybody has heard of Mike Rice, the disgraced former Rutgers...

Family: An MSNBC contributor revisits the statist notion that while you gave birth to your children and feed and clothe them, they are only on loan to you by their true parent — a benevolent and all-knowing government. Melissa Harris-Perry, an African-American professor at Tulane, has endorsed the concept of human ownership by the state, something we thought history would teach her is a bad thing, saying in a promo for MSNBC that "we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong...

Defense: As the Army removes crosses from an Army chapel in Afghanistan that offends Muslims, a training instructor lists evangelical Christianity and Catholicism as examples of religious extremism. It has been said that there are no atheists in foxholes, but like so many things askew in our politically correct modern-day universe, there are apparently some. An atheist U.S. soldier made a formal complaint about the steeple and crosses on a chapel located at Forward Operation Base Orgun-E. "We can confirm that those items were removed from the chapel," said a spokesman for the ISAF Joint Command. "These items were removed...

Climate Change: The man who once compared coal trains to Nazi boxcars headed to crematoria leaves government service to fight what he calls the "pipeline to disaster" and promote his brand of climate quackery. In 2007, Dr. James Hansen testified before the Iowa Utilities Board not in his capacity as a government employee but, in his words, "as a private citizen, a resident of Kintnersville, Pa., on behalf of the planet, of life on Earth, including all species." Hansen told the board, "If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains...

National Security: The administration moves an advanced missile defense system to Guam because it knows a single low-yield nuke detonated at high altitude could send America back in time a hundred years. The announcement Wednesday by the Defense Department that it would soon deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System (THAAD), a missile defense system inherited from the Bush administration, to Guam underscores the seriousness of the threat from North Korea, whose actions, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel rightly said, "present a real and clear danger." This move comes after the Obama administration reversed its previous scuttling of Bush administration...

Global Gun Control: Despite a prior Senate rebuff, President Obama will likely sign and push a treaty embraced by the world's oppressors and thugs who fear armed citizens. The treaty's prior rejection by the Senate 53-46 in a nonbinding test vote as part of the budget debate in a body where a two-thirds vote to ratify is required would seem to doom the United Nations pact endorsed by the Obama administration. However, the president will likely sign it and, as is his custom these days, try to enforce key provisions by stealth, executive order and by "common-sense" regulations and restrictions....

Justice: A murdered Chicago teen's mother attends the president's speech on gun control, not knowing federal gun-crime prosecutions have in fact dropped on his watch — with the Windy City bringing up the rear. Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, the mother of murdered 15-year-old Chicago teen Hadiya Pendleton, was one of 20 mothers who lost children to criminal violence who were at the White House last Thursday to hear President Obama speak once again on the need for gun control. Obama met with her and some of the others in a small group before his formal remarks and told them "how serious this...

War On Terrorism: We have a medal for those who remotely operate drones, but the Pentagon claims awarding the victims of the 2009 shooting with Purple Hearts would jeopardize the shooter's chance at a fair trial. We recently noted that the Obama administration's shameful designation of the Nov. 5, 2009, rampage at the Army base in Killeen, Texas, by Major Nidal Hasan as "workplace violence" had denied survivors benefits they would have been entitled to had the attack been properly labeled an act of terror. For example, Staff Sgt. Shawn Manning was shot six times but was denied benefits that...

Diplomacy: After a reprieve from international regulation of our guns, another sovereignty-grabbing U.N. treaty, a pet project of our secretary of state, is still being pushed to declare the oceans the common heritage of mankind. In the pre-dawn hours last Saturday, the U.S. Senate approved by 53-46 a measure "to uphold Second Amendment rights and prevent the United States from entering into the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty." But a seemingly harmless cousin, the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), remains on the table, with its champion, former Sen. John Kerry, now our secretary of state. Kerry gave a speech...

Marriage Decline: The disintegration of the nuclear family — particularly in the African-American community — and the rise in fatherless homes have greater societal implications than gay marriage, yet few pay attention. The debate over gay marriage has taken center stage with two cases, one involving California's Proposition 8 which bans it, and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) which bars federal agencies recognizing the validity of same-sex marriages in the states where they are legal, now before the U.S. Supreme Court. We have argued that the civil purpose of marriage is not and never has been to reaffirm the...

Benghazi Scandal: A Virginia congressman says the witnesses to an act of war on sovereign U.S. territory are being held incommunicado in a Washington, D.C., hospital by their own government. Free the American 30. When 52 Americans were seized and held hostage by the foreign government of Iran and held for 444 days, it was a national embarrassment that helped bring down a presidency and spawned a late-night news program, "America Held Hostage," which would become ABC's Nightline. The Sept. 11, 2012, organized and planned terrorist attack on our diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, is a similar national embarrassment, an...

Racism: Facing a billion-dollar budget shortfall, the Chicago Public Schools' plan to close 54 schools, mostly in black and low-income neighborhoods, forces many students to cross gang boundaries to get a mediocre education. Facing a billion-dollar budget shortfall, the Chicago Public Schools' plans to close 54 schools, mostly in black and low-income neighborhoods, forcing many students to cross gang boundaries to get a questionable education. Shuffling children around like so many deck chairs on a sinking ship, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) announced the closings as a cost-cutting move, with CPS officials arguing that money being spent to keep underutilized...

Bullet Buys: Fifteen members of Congress have written a letter to the Department of Homeland Security demanding to know why the federal agency is buying so many rounds of ammunition. We'd like to know too. Fifteen members of Congress have sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security demanding to know why the federal agency is buying so many rounds of ammunition. We'd like to know too. Freshman California Republican Doug LaMalfa and 14 of his House colleagues, who signed on to his March 5 letter, are asking the Department of Homeland Security to explain why it is buying...

Bad Data: As yet another Solyndra looms, a new government report shows that by the government's own broad definition of a green job, more can be found in a coal mine than near a solar panel. The second annual Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report on "Employment in Green Goods and Services," released Tuesday, will be the last, allegedly a casualty of the same sequestration that claimed the White House tours and may doom the Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn. That is probably a good thing, for if it were published as a book, it would deserve...

U.S. Rights: As the world body meets this week to hammer out an agreement to restrict international arms trade, our Secretary of State commits us to pushing a treaty that may also restrict our Second Amendment rights. Last Friday, the day of the week when unpopular or controversial announcements are traditionally made, Secretary of State John Kerry announced U.S. support for the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), a final version of which is being hammered out in New York beginning this week. Certainly the ATT is controversial. Touted as a means of getting a handle on an international arms...

Missile Defense: The administration beefs up our Alaskan-based interceptors it once downgraded in response to North Korea's threat, while ending the final phase of the Europe-based defense against Iran it once supported. We welcome the Obama administration's decision to place an additional 14 ground-based interceptors (GBI) at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., by 2017, as well as a second TPY-2 phased-array X-band long-range missile defense radar system in Japan following North Korea's deployment of a new road-mobile missile. We are reminded that if President Obama hadn't scuttled President Bush's plans, these added interceptors would already be...

Benghazi: The House GOP has threatened to subpoena the survivors of the Benghazi terrorist attack, those who know the truth, and hold up the nomination of our murdered ambassador's replacement. It should do both. The Obama administration is fond of using a familiar tactic, the shield of an "ongoing investigation," to cover up its malfeasance in the deaths of Americans serving their country. It was used to hide the truth regarding the administration's Fast and Furious gun-running operation to Mexican drug cartels, which resulted in the deaths of agents Brian Terry and Jaime Zapata. They are using it again concerning...

Religion: The change that swept Eastern Europe in the 1980s and fueled the collapse of the Soviet Union may find itself repeated by a new pope with similar disdain for the authoritarian governments of his region. When Cardinal Karol Wojtyla stepped out on the balcony of St. Peter's in 1978 as Pope John Paul II, Soviet communism still stood astride Eastern Europe and his native Poland. He would be the moral force helping to lead half a continent out of the human bondage of totalitarianism. Argentina's 76-year-old Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis I, is no stranger to —...

Nuclear Power: Buoyed by data showing that outside the immediate area, radiation dangers remain small, Japan's pro-nuclear prime minister seeks to restart other shut-down reactors to restart a stagnant economy. It has been two years since the March 11, 2011, Honshu quake and tsunami that killed nearly 19,000 people, smashed Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima plant, and put the brakes on the worldwide commercial use of nuclear power. Days after the quake — which registered at 9.0 on the Richter scale and was equal to about 336 million tons of TNT, a quake so powerful it shifted the position of...

Budget: Over a hundred jobs are at Homeland Security, which is letting criminal aliens go despite billions unspent from last fiscal year, with hundreds more jobs available at an Interior Department that warns of park closings. 'We're doing our very best to minimize the impacts of sequester. But there's only so much I can do," DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said. With regard to the release of illegal aliens from detention in anticipation of cuts due to sequestration, "I'm supposed to have 34,000 detention beds for immigration. How do I pay for those?" Well, Madam Secretary, like other federal departments and...