Free Republic

The chill in relations between the US and Russia grew still frostier yesterday as President Vladimir Putin's foreign minister told the White House to start behaving like "grown-ups". Sergei Lavrov chided the US administration two days after President Barack Obama scrapped a summit with Mr Putin when Russia granted asylum to Edward Snowden, the fugitive US spy.

In warning about possible al Qaeda attacks against Americans overseas, U.S. officials may have provided too much detail about intercepted chatter and the source of the information, and that may make it more difficult to get such tips next time, former and current intelligence officials say.(snip) Intelligence officials are dismayed that the administration provided so much detail on what prompted the closings, and that the disclosures could work against obtaining new information. Militants are now likely searching for the sources of the information to both the U.S. and Yemeni officials, and almost certainly will kill anyone they suspect of working...

The Federal Aviation Administration is missing key information on who owns one-third of the 357,000 private and commercial aircraft in the U.S. — a gap the agency fears could be exploited by terrorists and drug traffickers.The records are in such disarray that the FAA says it is worried that criminals could buy planes without the government's knowledge, or use the registration numbers of other aircraft to evade new computer systems designed to track suspicious flights. It has ordered all aircraft owners to re-register their planes in an effort to clean up its files.About 119,000 of the aircraft on the U.S....

Let me engage in the kind of idle speculation that infuriates the Air Line Pilots Association. News sources keep reporting that weather wasn’t a factor in the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 at San Francisco International last Saturday. I think they’re wrong. Weather was very much a factor. In bad weather this accident wouldn’t have happened. In bad weather, chances are a computer would have flown every element of the instrument approach, not the pilots. The airmen would have concentrated on their instrument scan, there being nothing for them to see in the blustery murk outside. If target airspeeds...

Egypt has been rocked by protests that some say are the largest in history and has unseated its second leader in three years. It’s a bit difficult for us to imagine ousting a president in such a way—so what do the events in Egypt mean to Americans? The Obama Administration has bungled the entire Egyptian revolution, Heritage experts say, and that will have lasting consequences. President Obama backed the administration of Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, who was just ousted by the protesters and the military. As Heritage expert James Phillips noted, “Egyptian protesters have been carrying...

The U.S. military has erected a 64,000-square-foot headquarters building on the dusty moonscape of southwestern Afghanistan that comes with all the tools to wage a modern war. A vast operations center with tiered seating. A briefing theater. Spacious offices. Fancy chairs. Powerful air conditioning. Everything, that is, except troops.

Days after delaying health insurance requirements for employers, the Obama administration has decided to roll back requirements for new state online insurance marketplaces to verify the income and health coverage status of people who apply for subsidized coverage. Until now, the administration had proposed that exchanges verify whether new applicants receive employer-sponsored insurance benefits through random checks. It also sought to require marketplaces to verify each enrollee's income status. But final regulations released quietly on Friday by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) give 16 states and the District of Columbia, which are setting up their own exchanges,...

The Obama administration delaying the start of the employer mandate part of ObamaCare this week is not the first snag in implementing the president’s signature health care law. Other parts of the 2010 law have already been delayed or discarded, including a requirement that businesses fill out an IRS form for any purchases over a year exceeding $600. Congress repealed that in June 2011. “It was extremely onerous (and) raised very little revenue,” says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Congressional Budget Office director and chief economic policy adviser to Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain during his 2008 presidential campaign. Amanda Austin,...

Washington is riven by conflict and deep-seated division. It is rare indeed when both sides can agree on anything consequential. Therefore it is incredibly heartening that there is now bipartisan agreement that the implementation of Obamacare is a mess. Republicans have long maintained this, but now the Obama administration has lent its implicit assent with its astonishing decision to delay by a year the law’s employer mandate. This is what the administration calls, via a blog post by the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for tax policy that announced the decision, “Continuing to Implement the ACA in a Careful, Thoughtful Manner.”...

Well, it could be worse. Voters could take in all of the scandals and controversies swirling around the White House lately — IRS, NSA, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, State Department cover-ups and obstruction of IG probes, and so on — and assume that the issue is corruption rather than incompetency. In that sense, Josh Kraushaar’s analysis might be good news, relatively speaking: The administration is facing a crisis of competence. At a time when trust in government is already at an all-time low, the events of this past week illustrate the limits of this president’s power. The White House seems...

The embattled mayor of Pennsylvania's financially crippled capital of Harrisburg was ousted on Tuesday when she lost the Democratic primary to the owner of an independent bookstore. Mayor Linda Thompson's loss to Eric Papenfuse comes after a tumultuous term in which her outbursts and statements caused a loss of confidence in her administration. Papenfuse is likely to win the general election in this heavily Democratic city in November, but he must still face off against independent candidate Nevin Mindlin.

President Obama's Press Secretary Jay Carney bristled at the suggestion the Administration is embroiled in three major scandals. “What scandals?” Carney demanded to know. “The President has been giving his utmost to this country and now people are trying to package a run of bad luck into a series of scandals? It's unfair.” The “run of bad luck,” as Carney sees it, is “a media that is paying undue attention to relatively minor screw-ups by low level employees. Rather than being lauded for his efforts to employ a broader range of the 'differently- abled,' the President is now pilloried for...

Thomas Pickering - the former UN ambassador who along with former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen prepared the Accountability Review Board report on the State Department's handling of the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya - says he didn't think it was necessary to interview former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "because in fact we knew where the responsibility rested." BOB SCHIEFFER: And good morning again. Ambassador Thomas Pickering is the one who led the State Department's investigation into how those Benghazi attacks where handled. Mr. Ambassador, you and I have known one another as you had...

Obamacare is “working fine,” President Obama said yesterday in his press conference. It’s made health insurance “stronger, better, more secure than it was before.” There are just a few slight details left to be implemented, but we shouldn’t worry about those, according to the President. Right. There’s nothing to worry about, which is why Members of Congress are trying to exempt themselves and their staffs from Obamacare. In reality, health insurance premiums are rising, and states—meaning taxpayers—are staring down some astronomical expenses. A new study from the Government Accountability Office cites Obamacare and Medicaid costs as budget busters for states...

So, about that "we'll never come take your guns thing." From The Blaze: On April 1st, a legal gun owner in upstate New York reportedly received an official notice from the state ordering him to surrender any and all weapons to his local police department. The note said that the person’s permit to own a gun in New York was being suspended as well. The gun owner contacted attorney Jim Tresmond (a specialist in gun laws in New York) and the two visited the local police precinct. Mr. Tresmond reportedly went into the precinct and informed the officers that his...

Even Joe Klein is seeing the handwriting on the wall: ObamaCare is in big trouble! Klein is blaming it on incompetence but I have a couple of words for Joe and other startled liberals who can't believe what they are watching. ObamaCare is in trouble because it violated a couple of rules that a nice counselor taught me at a high school Junior Achievement class in Wisconsin. First, don't bite more than you can chew. In other words, who in their right mind thought that bureaucrats could take over 1/6 of the US economy competently? How arrogant are these people?...

The White House is facing pressure from House Republicans to defend President Obama's decision not to address the Knesset on his upcoming trip to Israel. A group of Republicans wrote to Obama to "commend" him for traveling to Israel but also questioning the choice not to address members of the Knesset, which they describe as "a customary and symbolic gesture that celebrates our shared democratic ideals and the special relationship between Israel and United States." The letter notes that both of Obama's most recent predecessors, President Clinton and President George W. Bush, addressed the Israeli legislative body, Bush doing so...

Obama lectures about peace, but the war intensifies. North Korea has cut the hotline with the south, after threatening war, and warns of imminent attack. The Saudis have once again warned Iran to stay away from Abu Musa island. What if they don’t? Meanwhile, a leading cleric warns of domestic unrest in the kingdom (h/t Drudge), where the Iranians have long incited the Shi’a minority to confront the Wahabbi royal family. Small and not-so-small armies are marching over and around Syria. It is said that we are training the Free Syrian Army at a base in Jordan. Cyberattacks against our...

President Obama urged compromise Monday as he pushed congressional Republicans to reach an agreement to avoid big spending cuts due to take effect at the end of the week. "There are always going to be some areas where we have genuine disagreement ... but there are more areas where we can do a lot more cooperating than we have seen in the past couple years," Obama told a meeting of the National Governors Association at the White House. "At some point, we've got to do some governing. And, certainly, we can't keep careening from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis." ....

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified at hearings before House and Senate committees recently. The hearings were largely tense affairs that had Clinton on the defensive for much of the time. In the aftermath of the attack on our consulate in Benghazi that left four Americans dead, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, the Obama Administration and State Department stuck by an unlikely narrative that the obvious terrorist attack was the result of a spontaneous protest over a YouTube video that got out of hand. The pushing of this narrative in conjunction with the State Department’s unwillingness to act on requests...