Free Republic

Ann B. Davis, aka Alice from “The Brady Bunch,” passed away this past weekend. This morning, MSNBC took a moment to remember her — by showing a picture of someone else:

One great big GOP/Fox News rebuke. That’s the early word on Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi explanation in her new book, “Hard Choices,” out on June 10. She’s “defiant,” not “defensive.” She blames her Ben-ghazi critics for exploiting the “tragedy over and over as a political tool” against her that has nothing to do with justice for the four Americans who died there. Since that’s an accurate summation of Republicans’ cynical agenda on Benghazi — and since an awful lot of Americans can see that clearly — I’d say those who think Ben-ghazi will sink Clinton in 2016, well, they better think...

When Barack Obama was a newbie president, there was no shortage of ambition or lack of confidence in the government he was about to lead. Government should be seen as a force for good, not evil. Sure, he told us, it needed to be "smarter and better," but that could—and would—happen under his watch. Instead, the President is living his own version of "Alice Through the Looking Glass": staring down a rabbit hole of government bureaucracy and inefficiency. The government he has studiously tried to grow, manage and change has become his own personal nemesis. All of which makes you...

... What is needed from Washington is not a heroic exertion of American military power but rather a sustained effort to engage with allies, isolate enemies, support free markets and democratic values and push these positive trends forward. The Obama administration is, in fact, deeply internationalist — building on alliances in Europe and Asia, working with institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations, isolating adversaries and strengthening the global order that has proved so beneficial to the United States and the world since 1945. ... A Democratic Advisory Council committee headed by Acheson called Eisenhower’s foreign...

Studies warning of an Antarctic ice sheet collapse. A wildfire season that could shatter records. Shellfish eaten away by oceans turned more acidic due to greenhouse gases. U.N. and U.S. reports stating that climate change is advancing more quickly. Everyone gets down about their work from time to time, but for environmentalists, they can sometimes quite literally be dealing with the end of the world as we know it. “It’s hard to stay perky when scientists conclude that tragedy, such as the loss of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is inevitable,” says Denis Hayes, a veteran activist who co-founded Earth...

The scandal over a made-up study that badly disrupted traffic at the George Washington Bridge may not be New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's biggest problem after all. Less than a year after the charismatic governor was the toast of the Republican Party and a leading contender to run for the White House in 2016, the story was supposed to be about a New Jersey economy that he had managed to turn around and budget problems he had been able to solve. That narrative appears to be unraveling.

.... It’s unlikely Shinseki would exit today -- it just isn’t Obama’s style. But what we do know is that the president, potentially, has a feeding frenzy on his hands; even if all of its bureaucratic problems date back for decades. And it’s now turned into a local news story, in which news organizations are looking closely at their own VA hospitals. Perhaps more importantly, the story has resurrected all of the complaints about President Obama’s management style, especially during a crisis. He’s too methodical. He doesn’t get that mad. He seems to have found about this at the same...

Over the past few months, the new U.S. education standard known as the “Common Core” has attracted its fair share of negative attention by opponents.But Florida Republican State Rep. Charles Van Zant took the Common Core critique to a new level by claiming that the educational initiative promoted by the Obama administration will turn your children “homosexual.”Van Zant made the comments at an Orlando education conference back in March, but the video of his remarks went viral on Tuesday. Van Zant told his audience that the American Institutes for Research (AIR), that implements the Common Core in Florida, “will promote...

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A federal judge threw out Oregon's same-sex marriage ban Monday, marking the 13th legal victory for gay marriage advocates since the U.S. Supreme Court last year overturned part of a federal ban.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The New York Times, released a statement Saturday afternoon detailing his decision to fire the newspaper’s executive editor, Jill Abramson. He was responding to a growing controversy over accusations by Ms. Abramson’s supporters that gender played a role in her dismissal. The decision to remove her, which was announced on Wednesday, “has been cast by many as an example of the unequal treatment of women in the workplace,” Mr. Sulzberger wrote. Instead, the statement said, it “was a situation involving a specific individual who, as we all do, has strengths and weaknesses.”

... Think of it this way: Once upon a time it was possible to take climate change seriously while remaining a Republican in good standing. Today, listening to climate scientists gets you excommunicated - hence Rubio's statement, which was effectively a partisan pledge of allegiance. And truly crazy positions are becoming the norm. A decade ago, only the GOP's extremist fringe asserted that global warming was a hoax concocted by a vast global conspiracy of scientists (although even then that fringe included some powerful politicians). Today, such conspiracy theorizing is mainstream within the party, and rapidly becoming mandatory; witch hunts...

Democrats are in a curious political position in this year’s congressional election campaign. Their chance of avoiding political disaster depends more on the Republicans offering up another batch of right-wing dimwits as candidates and less on convincing voters that that the good times are back. So far, establishment GOP candidates has done fairly well fighting off challenges from the tea party, which does not bode well for Democrats.

OAKLAND, Calif. -- It's been two months since Rodrigo Salido left the maximum security wing at Santa Rita jail, and two months without pills for his bipolar disorder. Now Salido, who served two years for burglary, assault and gang involvement, has no health insurance and few options for refilling his medication. California and 25 other states, under a provision of President Obama’s health law, opened up Medicaid to single and so-called “childless” adults. The change in eligibility criteria will extend Medicaid coverage to vast numbers of ex-offenders whose incomes are below the federal poverty line. Men and women involved in...

What will it take for ABC, CBS, and NBC to cover the IRS targeting scandal, which is no doubt bigger than Watergate? Time after time after time, we’ve seen major developments in this story go completely unreported, or, at best, given a few token seconds. The liberal media are downright allergic to the truth about the IRS scandal. This administration has lied countless times to the media’s face, and they just continue to sit there and take it. They’re so lovesick with everything Obama that they can’t bring themselves to do their jobs and report the news. It’d be pitiful...

... Abramson recently learned her pay package was not commensurate with that of her predecessor, Bill Keller, and sought parity... “‘She confronted the top brass,’ one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was ‘pushy,’ a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect.” [Publisher Arthur] Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits ...

What keeps you up at night? That’s the question economist Gary Yohe, one of the architects behind the White House’s 2014 Climate Assessment report, posed to several of his co-authors during a May 6 panel in Washington D.C. Unsurprisingly, the assembled team of climate experts and other academics had no lack of answers, ranging from the possibility of more extreme weather events to the risk of climate-induced mental health degradation. But what keeps Iowa State University climate scientist Gene Wanker up at night is what climate change could do to one of humanity’s most basic needs. “I worry about food...

A Baltimore television station has been evacuated after someone rammed a truck into the building. That person is now believed to be barricaded in the building. WMAR-TV posted this to its Facebook page, “ALERT | Stay away from ABC2 News studio at 6400 York Road. A man in a truck crashed through the lobby and is potentially armed. Will update as needed.”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's longtime press secretary says he's confident his boss of 14 years had no knowledge of or involvement in the scheme that shut traffic near the George Washington Bridge in a political payback plot. The spokesman, Michael Drewniak, called the plot reckless and perplexing in an opening statement Tuesday before a New Jersey legislative committee that's investigating last September's lane closings. Drewniak has also testified before a federal grand jury that's separately investigating the lane closings.

The left laughs and the right groans as Ann Coulter, once again, has managed to confound and amaze with her special brand of self-promotional crazy. She couldn’t have seen it coming, but at least some entertainment value came out of it. It started Sunday night, when Coulter took her circus to Twitter to mock the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag, which was created earlier this month to draw support for the missing schoolgirls in Nigeria. Nothing like distorting good-faith efforts into Twitter snark to fit some monotonous political narrative. To be fair, Coulter wasn’t the only one who took a few jabs at...

Here's a riddle: Many Republicans deny it's happening. Some Democrats don't want to talk about it. What is it? The answer is the growing U.S. economy, on pace to expand as much as 3.5 percent this year, about the best performance in the industrialized world. Unemployment has fallen from 10 percent to about 6.3 percent and consumer confidence is at a six-year high. Better economic data could help persuade voters in November to look past President Barack Obama's weak approval ratings and his unpopular healthcare law and give Democrats enough lift to hold onto the Senate and limit their losses...