Free Republic

National Security: Beijing is moving fast on a maneuverable, hypersonic glide vehicle designed to evade America's defenses, including the Aegis ballistic missile system guarding our carrier battle groups. On Aug. 7, China conducted a second test of its hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV), known as the WU-14, yet another example of its relentless pursuit of high-tech weaponry as the United States abandons what the administration dismisses as Cold War weaponry. The first test, conducted in January, saw China's HGV reach speeds in the vicinity of Mach 10, about 10 times the speed of sound. In the latest test, according to Internet...

Malignant Neglect: The president talks about Ferguson, Mo., but not about a Chicago weekend where three dozen people were shot, seven of them killed, including a 16-year-old black girl who wanted to be a doctor. To his credit, President Obama was more judicious than usual talking about the shooting of Michael Brown outside St. Louis. He did not say the police acted stupidly. He actually made a rare attempt at acknowledging individual responsibility when he said that when young black men "commit a crime, they need to be prosecuted, because every community has an interest in public safety." One of...

Second Amendment: An African-American single mom on her way to a birthday party for one of her kids faces 10 years in prison for straying into the Garden State carrying a firearm in her purse licensed in Pennsylvania. Shaneen Allen is less well-known than Michael Brown, the man shot by police in Ferguson, Mo., and it's doubtful Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton will pay her a visit anytime soon. They're busy elsewhere. A mother exercising her Second Amendment right not only to keep but to bear arms to protect her family is of little interest to them. Allen is a...

Gun Control: A federal judge rules that the AR-15 and similar weapons commonly used in self-defense "fall outside Second Amendment protection as dangerous and unusual arms," and we have no right to keep or bear them. Nobody looted the gun shop and tattoo parlor that share a storefront in a strip mall less than 10 minutes from Ferguson, Mo., where riots followed the police shooting of Michael Brown. According to the local Riverfront Times, the owners of County Guns and Tattoo Studio arrived with friends to protect their businesses. One owner carried a rifle and pistol and wore a vest,...

Immigration: The states aren't told how many unaccompanied children are being unloaded on them, when they're coming or where they are. But the federal government says that they're as entitled to an education as the children of U.S. citizens. Just in time for the new school year, the Education Department issued a fact sheet on Monday reminding school systems and their administrators that they are required to enroll and educate, at taxpayers' expense, the estimated 69,200 unaccompanied minors who have flooded across our open southern border, a number some predict will balloon to 150,000 by year's end. We have referred...

Leadership: As our space program, once an example of American exceptionalism, now sits mainly in museums, Beijing's ambitious program takes another leap forward toward an eventual return of man to the moon. As the world unravels, efforts to leave it don't seem very newsworthy, and efforts by our strategic rivals to do what we did decades before seem redundant and almost irrelevant to more immediate concerns. Yet China's space program does matter, as it's part of that country's dream of world leadership and, yes, domination. It represents a commitment to world leadership that we have lost under this administration. Beijing...

War On Terror: Having ignored Iraqi pleas for air strikes in ISIL's infancy, when the terrorists could have been decimated, the administration ignores the Kurdish peshmerga plea for the same American weapons that ISIL has. Watching the modest airstrikes on ISIL forces, we are reminded of Secretary of State John Kerry's promise that any military action in Syria would be "unbelievably small." As it turned out, it was also nonexistent, and the carnage continues in the country where ISIL formed and trained under our watchful and indifferent eyes. The targeted airstrikes ordered by President Obama last week near the Kurdish...

Immigration: Two illegal immigrants charged with killing an off-duty U.S. Border Patrol agent had been arrested and deported before. Now the agent's family faces a humanitarian crisis all its own. Javier Vega Jr. was shot to death Sunday in front of his wife, his two kids and his parents while they were fishing in Santa Monica, Texas. His alleged assailants are illegal aliens who have crossed our porous southern border with Mexico repeatedly and have, between them, been arrested and deported half a dozen times. Remember Agent Vega's name, for it's unlikely to fall from the lips of President Obama...

Nuclear Threat: Beijing's strategic military buildup continues with the unveiling of a road-mobile missile capable of delivering up to 10 atomic warheads anywhere in America. Time to show some flexibility, Mr. President? While President Obama was playing the back nine, and as it was confirmed that the Russians had developed a cruise missile, the R500, which violates 1987's Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty, the Chinese were busy as well. They now have a mobile intercontinental nuclear missile with no other purpose than to make war against the U.S. The announcement of the DF-41's existence was not exactly approved by the Chinese...

First Amendment: Government's assault on religious liberty has hit a new low as the IRS settles with atheists by promising to monitor sermons for mentions of the right to life and traditional marriage. A lawsuit filed by the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) asserted that the Internal Revenue Service ignored complaints about churches' violating their tax-exempt status by routinely promoting political issues, legislation and candidates from the pulpit. The FFRF has temporarily withdrawn its suit in return for the IRS's agreement to monitor sermons and homilies for proscribed speech that the foundation believes includes things like condemnation of gay...

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...