Free Republic

War On Terror: As the Ebola disease spreads in Africa and detainees from that continent are apprehended, the question must be asked: What if terrorists already willing to die try to bring the disease across our porous southern border? The Ebola outbreak that has killed at least 672 people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone could land in the U.S., according to John O'Connor, a spokesman for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "It's true," he says, "that anyone with an illness is just one plane ride away from coming to the U.S." Indeed, a Liberian man infected...

Politics: Give us your poor, your tired, your future Democrats waiting to be registered. That's what some in the party are saying as they urge the president to pursue immigration goals even if it hurts in the '14 midterms. In other words, damn the political torpedoes and full speed ahead in the fundamental demographic and political transformation of America. "You'll always have members whose political vulnerability they tie entirely to immigration," said Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz. "We didn't make progress when we were in the majority because we were being protective of those (members) on immigration reform. At some point...

Border Crisis: A new report shows the vast majority of unaccompanied minors aren't unaccompanied at all, have family members inside the U.S., are not victims of human trafficking and thus can be deported immediately. Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois and other Democrats have repeatedly made the argument that Republicans shouldn't complain about the current border invasion since it was a 2008 law that automatically entitles minors from noncontiguous countries to asylum hearings before they face deportation. Gutierrez and his liberal colleagues in Congress and the media should read the law to find out what's in it. As the Center for...

Scandal: The tangled web of IRS deceit unravels a bit more with news recycled backup tapes of lost emails still exist and statements before a federal judge that Lois Lerner's hard drive was irreparably damaged were untrue. Deliberately destroying evidence pertaining to the investigation of possible criminal activity is a crime. So is lying about it to Congress and the courts as part of a cover-up of that activity. On July 11, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton, at a hearing examining a lawsuit against the IRS by the targeted conservative group True the Vote, told Obama administration lawyers he...

Scandal: The endless stream of IRS visitors to the White House and the involvement of campaign donors in the Tea Party-targeting scandal belie the claim by the head of the agency that there is no White House involvement. The first thing investigators often ask in pursuit of criminal activity is who would benefit. That the Obama administration, burned in 2010 by the rise of the Tea Party and by the Citizens United decision, would benefit from the IRS' targeting and harassment of Tea Party groups spawned by grass-roots opposition to big government in general and ObamaCare in particular is beyond...

Scandal: The IRS canceled a contract with an email storage contractor weeks after Lois Lerner reported lost personal files and before other IRS officials had their hard drives crash as Tea Party-targeting investigations began. Timing is everything, the saying goes, and sometimes the timing of events is also very curious, as in the case of the lost emails of Lerner and at least six other officials at the very same time the IRS canceled its contract to back up and preserve those emails as required by federal law. Lerner's computer supposedly crashed in June 2011, an alleged event the IRS...

Scandal: An internationally accredited information-technology asset-management firm says the IRS has some explaining to do as our patience is taxed with tales of even more convenient computer crashes. Private-sector organizations as vast as the Internal Revenue Service typically have redundancy built into their information technology systems, as secure record keeping is the key to managing their businesses and staying in business. Such records, if nothing else, are often required to be kept by law, and often by the IRS itself. As we have noted, Lois Lerner's lost emails from the critical period when the IRS was serving as a political...

War On Terror: The fanatical Islamist group torches an 1,800-year-old church built before the founding of Islam and forces the Christian residents of Mosul to convert, pay a tax, leave or face execution. This is what the West faces. 'From Boston to Zanzibar, there's a worldwide war on Christianity," Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul said at the Values Voters Summit last October, an annual conservative gathering. The number and intensity of attacks was so great, he said, that it's "almost as if we lived in the Middle Ages." That was an era when the swords of Islam had conquered much...

Border: Doctors and nurses at an alien detention camp are threatened with arrest if they talk about the risk of contagion from the influx of unaccompanied children into the U.S. Give us your poor, your tired, your infected. Last weekend, at least two confirmed cases of the swine flu virus were detected in minors being held in two separate detainment facilities in South Texas, a stark reminder that the conditions created by President Obama's orchestrated invasion of the U.S. are ripe for viral outbreaks that jeopardize the health of American citizens. It was reported last week that at least one...

Immigration: With medical professionals overwhelmed by border chaos, illegal aliens are being sent across the U.S. without basic health screening, raising the prospect of epidemics of diseases once thought eradicated. As unaccompanied minors from Central America who have flooded across President Obama's open borders are dispersed nationwide from Nebraska to Illinois to Massachusetts, concerns have arisen that the nation's health has been put at risk by poor and even absent medical screening. An internal Department of Defense memo obtained by ABC News reports that the director of refugee health at Health and Human Services "has identified a breakdown of the...

Climate Deceit: Tom Steyer — the left's answer to the Koch brothers — says he has repented his fossil-fuel sins "based on the scientific evidence" to save the planet and the Democrats. And just what evidence would that be? please give this another read. it has been severely cut/edited from its original formBillionaire Steyer, having made a fortune extracting fossil fuel from the earth, confessed his guilt July 14 in Politico. "The more I learned about the energy and climate problems we currently face," he said, "the more I realized I had to change my life." So now he intends...

Crime: A core constituency asks: If the president is concerned about unaccompanied children from Guatemala fleeing deplorable conditions and violence, what about fatherless children here burdened by gang violence with nowhere to flee? Some 748 of the unaccompanied children from Central America have found their way to the Chicago area, Fox News reports, far from our open border and virtually unannounced to local residents or their political leaders who are unaware of exactly where the children were sent or being kept. Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., told Fox last Friday that he was unaware of the exact locations of the facilities...

Border: Democrats and our attorney general once favored the forcible return of alien minors to their country of origin, but that was when the country was Castro's Cuba and the horrible condition they fled was communism. Eric Holder made a very emotional plea the other day when he announced the Obama administration program "Justice AmeriCorps," intended to provide emergency legal representation to the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors flooding across our open southern border from Central America. "How we treat those in need, particularly young people who must appear in immigration proceedings, many of whom are fleeing violence, persecution,...

Big Government: The EPA is now claiming the authority to bypass courts and, on its own, garnish the paychecks and attach the assets of those it accuses of violating its rules. And, as with the IRS, its hard drives also crash. The Environmental Protection Agency's insatiable lust for power has now gone beyond being the pen and the phone for President Obama's climate change, bypassing both the Constitution and the Congress in enacting rules and regulations that the American people and their representatives did not enact or even support. Through an announcement in the Federal Register, the agency is claiming...

Immigration: The general in charge of U.S. Southern Command says America's porous southern border poses as much a threat as any foreign power, with gangs and terrorist groups hiding among the tidal wave of illegals. If Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, keeps warning about the crisis at our southern border, he may soon join the long list of generals and admirals sacked by this administration as it decimates the military. "In comparison to other global threats, the near collapse of societies in the hemisphere with the associated drug and (undocumented immigrant) flow are frequently...

Energy: As a big Dem donor talks of pipeline terrorism, new federal reports warn that killing Keystone XL will overburden rail transport of oil and result in more frequent and deadlier environmental disasters. Environmentalists who claim that the Keystone pipeline from Canada represents an unprecedented environmental threat ignore that the pipeline would pose no greater danger than the more than 50,000 existing miles of safely operating pipeline already crisscrossing the U.S. They also ignore the very real and growing environmental danger in the only viable alternate for transporting oil — by rail. Keystone would not only carry oil from Canada...

National Security: Federal law prohibits any person — repeat, any person — from providing material assistance to terrorists, including human assets. But that's what the president did in releasing five Taliban commanders. When iconic interviewer David Frost asked former President Nixon about the legality of his actions in the Watergate affair, Nixon said "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." That's an attitude seemingly shared by the current occupant of the Oval Office. As former congressman and Afghanistan veteran Allen West points out, President Obama signed into law only months ago the National Defense Authorization...

Scandal: Newly obtained emails on Benghazi show then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was coached by a key White House aide to lie and ignore the facts known and reported on the ground to make the administration look good. The question of how the video story was concocted out of whole cloth, by whom and why, and why it was trumpeted by Rice, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama himself with such fervor at the United Nations has remained unanswered until now. That the White House's main concern in the wake of an attack in which four Americans were murdered...

Benghazi Cover-Up: The administration's tangled web of deceit now includes lying about prior lies as the White House press secretary tries to cover up its cover-up of why four Americans died in a terrorist attack. No, that was not Winston Smith, the rewriter of history working for the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's classic novel "1984," tap-dancing once again before a no-longer-sycophantic White House press corps. Rather, it was that master storyteller, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. Carney shamefully continued to insist that when then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice went on five Sunday talk shows days after the 2012...

Scandal: A Democratic member of the House intelligence committee called Sunday for his party to boycott the newly announced select committee that will probe the Benghazi terrorist attacks, calling it "a colossal waste of time." Almost as soon as "Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi" had fallen from the lips of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — a reprise of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's "What difference at this point does it make?" — Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., told Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" that he thinks the planned select committee to investigate the 2012 Benghazi attack is a "colossal waste...