Free Republic

Election 2016: The State Department is dragging its feet with unusual delays in releasing records pertaining to presidential contender Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state. Some requests are up to four years old. It's not as if the Associated Press and others that filed the Freedom of Information Act requests were asking for Clinton's private diaries or the encryption codes used by the State Department. Among the requests are such seemingly innocuous things as schedules, appointment, travel records, where and when she traveled, and who she traveled and met with. There are items, however, that a 2016 presidential candidate...

Hypocrisy: Those boycotting Indiana over gay wedding pizzas have no problem doing business with an Iran that hangs gays, stones women and wants to wipe Jews off the face of the Earth. And the Hoosier State doesn't even want nukes. Righteous, if somewhat selective, indignation is a hallmark of liberals, whether ensconced in Congress or corporate America, currently up in arms over the version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) enacted in Indiana and allegedly giving business owners a license to discriminate against gays. Former Hewlett-Packard CEO and potential presidential contender Carly Fiorina punctured Apple CEO Tim Cook's balloon...

Justice: A Marine veteran has been held captive in Iran since August 2011, when he was taken prisoner while visiting family and charged with spying. Does President Obama hear his plea for unconditional freedom? With the exception of deserters like Bowe Bergdahl, those who put on a uniform and serve their country seem like afterthoughts to this administration, if they're thought of at all. Just ask Andrew Tahmooressi, the Marine sergeant allowed to languish 214 days in a Mexican jail for the crime of missing a highway exit. Or now, Amir Hekmati of Flagstaff, Ariz., a Marine vet who sits...

Scandal: The Justice Department says Lois Lerner, who used her IRS office to target the Tea Party, didn't waive her Fifth Amendment rights before Congress and won't be prosecuted for contempt over her missing emails. Until former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is called to testify under oath before Congress about her multiple private email accounts on a personal server kept in her Chappaqua, N.Y., home, she won't get a chance to plead the Fifth Amendment as former IRS official Lois Lerner did in May 2013 before the House Oversight Committee regarding her division's targeting of Tea Party groups.

Energy: New federal regulations on fracking on public land ignore a study documenting that methane found in well water is unrelated to the location of hydraulically fractured oil and gas wells. When the Obama administration recently released its new regulations on fracking — regulations that it said were needed to keep up with the advance and success of the decades-old technology to meet public safety needs — the Independent Petroleum Association of America and Western Energy Alliance immediately filed suit, saying that the new regs were based on "unsubstantiated concerns" that lacked any scientific basis. "Hydraulic fracturing has been conducted...

Climate Change: President Obama's proposal to cut U.S. emissions by 28% over 10 years as America's contribution to a global climate treaty will devastate our economy while doing nothing to reduce temperatures. The "Clean Power Plan" that the Obama administration submitted Tuesday to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change met an end-of-March deadline for contributions to a treaty in the final stages of negotiations. But the proposal, known to climate negotiators as an Intended Nationally Determined Contribution, isn't new. Obama announced the goal of reducing emissions by 28% below 2005 levels by 2025 as part of a joint climate...

Scandal: RNC Chairman Reince Priebus reminds us of the similarity between the 18-1/2-minute gap that doomed a presidency and an email server wiped clean by a lawyer who served on a Watergate committee staff. Hillary Clinton should know better, know that the cover-up is often worse than any crime, for she once worked as a member of the impeachment inquiry staff for the House Judiciary Committee investigating the "third-rate burglary" at the Watergate Hotel that doomed Richard Nixon's presidency. The end came when tapes of presidential conversations were found and became public knowledge with one tape containing that famous 18-1/2-minute...

Terrorism: An Illinois National Guardsman sought to fight with Islamic State as his cousin plotted to kill scores at an Illinois National Guard facility. If they had succeeded, would President Obama call it workplace violence? President Obama's "JV" terrorist team has metastasized to the point where its franchisees have spread across continents and oceans, with the FBI investigating ISIS-related activities and plots in all 50 states, including a very dangerous one in the commander in chief's home state of Illinois. One of those FBI investigations involved the arrest Wednesday of Hasan Edmonds — a supply specialist with the Illinois National...

mailgate: Spokesperson Jen Psaki now says that the State Department has no record of Hillary Clinton signing Form OF-109, and it could find no record of Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice signing it either. Why check that? 'We have reviewed Secretary Clinton's official personnel file and administrative files and have no record of her signing the OF-109," Psaki said Tuesday, not bothering to explain why that seemingly simple check wasn't done earlier. Of course, there's no evidence or statement from Hillary that she did not sign the form, though Psaki added, "I think we are fairly certain she did not...

mailgate: The refusal of State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki to answer a simple yes or no question — did Hillary Clinton sign separation form OF-109? — is proof of a cover-up of a felony by the former secretary of state. You'd think that if Clinton didn't sign separation form OF-109 or was not asked to, the State Department and Team Hillary would have just said so. After all, it would be easier to deflect questions about getting special treatment than acknowledging the committing of a felony by essentially lying under oath with the false claim that you have returned all...

olitics: The danger of foreign influence-buying through foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation is seen in millions of dollars of donations from Issam Fares, a Lebanese politician and billionaire enemy of Israel. In the case of Hillary Clinton, the adage that the past is prologue is both a truism and a warning of possible things to come. Just as Johnny Chung famously compared the first Clinton White House to a subway turnstile in which you put money to gain access, the Clinton Foundation is looking to be that turnstile on steroids, with dangerous implications for both American and Israeli security....

War On Terror: The head of U.S. Southern Command has warned lawmakers that IS is radicalizing converts and other Muslims in Latin America and could train and send them north via human traffickers. Gen. John Kelly issued his warning in a hearing Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee on defense appropriations for fiscal 2016. He's concerned that in addition to the Iranian terrorist puppet Hezbollah being active in Latin America, the Islamic State is promoting and recruiting for jihad against the United States in the region. "Last year, IS adherents posted discussions on social media calling for the infiltration...

Transparency: Hillary Clinton insists she did everything by the book, that she broke no laws and heeded all regulations. That book is obviously not the State Department records management handbook. The government's book says that you don't get to keep materials, classified or unclassified, in your personal possession and then get to sift through them at your leisure to decide which ones the government that paid you gets to see. All documents are the property of the government. The State Department determines which ones are returned to you. As Shannen W. Coffin, a contributing editor at National Review and senior...

Scandal: Selective editing of her emails by Hillary Clinton staffers have left "months and months" of gaps of missing emails, including those from her trip to Libya from which an iconic picture has gone viral. We have all seen the photo of Hillary Clinton flying on a C-17 to Libya in October 2011 using a hand-held device to presumably check or send emails, perhaps about her trip, the situation in Libya, or maybe, just maybe, communicating with a foreign Clinton Foundation donor. We don't know because, as House Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy noted on CBS' "Face The Nation" last Sunday,...

elma: After ignoring the battle that ended slavery under the first Republican president, President Obama at the 50th anniversary of Democrats' blocking the Selma bridge says, "We're the slaves that built the White House." The parts of American history that this president chooses to commemorate and what he says about them speaks volumes about his view of America and American history. His America is not only unexceptional, it is perpetually and deeply racist, an overbearing world bully with no right to lecture the world about morality, democracy or freedom. He reminded us over the weekend that despite any progress since...

limate Change: Gina McCarthy, head of the EPA, can't answer basic questions about global temperatures, climate models or numbers of hurricanes. She didn't know being a global warming zealot requires knowledge of math. If the science of climate change was "settled," you'd think one of the generals in the war on global warming would have memorized the numbers that point to our planetary doom from a menace the administration says is a greater threat than terrorism. But McCarthy was asked some pretty simple questions Wednesday at a Senate hearing Wednesday on her request for $8.6 billion to help fight the...

Scandal: Which is worse — keeping classified information in a personal journal at home or doing government business and transmitting classified data on a private email account managed from the Clinton family home? This adds a new level of premeditated secrecy and deceit to the actions of the presumptive 2016 Democratic presidential nominee. It also adds a new level of hypocrisy to the most transparent administration in history's pursuit of former CIA Director and commander of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus. Petraeus, who had an extramarital affair with biographer Paula Broadwell, pleaded guilty, after a lengthy...

Scandal: The former secretary of state's use of a personal account to exclusively conduct government business and to protect her political future in violation of the law ought to disqualify her from the presidency. 'Witch hunts" sometimes find a witch, and those who dismissed the establishment of the House Benghazi Select Committee, chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., as just another witch hunt are eating their words. The existence of a personal account that Hillary Clinton used to conduct government business as secretary of state was discovered by the committee and reported by the New York Times. Clinton's use of...

ities: The problem with socialism, Margaret Thatcher once noted, is you eventually run out of other people's money. In progressive Chicago, that's hit home as Moody's has cut its credit rating to two grades above "junk." Chicago's finances are staggering under the weight of an unfunded pension liability that Moody's Investors Service has estimated at $32 billion, eight times the city's operating revenue. Chicago has a $300 million structural deficit. And Illinois law requires the city to up its 2016 contributions to its police and fire pension funds by $550 million. "This is an unfortunate wake-up call for anyone still...

Scandal: Documents from Judicial Watch show that Hillary Clinton's closest advisers knew from the onset, before she launched an inflammatory video lie, that Benghazi was a terrorist attack for which Ansar al-Sharia claimed responsibility. 'Mrs. Clinton, name an accomplishment," Carly Fiorina, former Hewlett-Packard CEO and prospective 2016 GOP presidential candidate, asked Thursday at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Last year, when ABC's Diane Sawyer asked the former secretary of state that question, Mrs. Clinton changed the subject, not even bothering to mention dodging sniper fire in Bosnia. Nor is she likely to mention Benghazi, a place now synonymous with...