Free Republic

Israel’s defense minister announced his resignation on Friday, saying the governing party had been taken over by “extremist and dangerous elements” and that he no longer trusted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following reports that he was to be replaced. Moshe Ya’alon’s departure removes a strong voice of moderation in the Cabinet and deepens the rift between the security establishment and the hardline politicians. Ya’alon told reporters that “Israel is a healthy society” with a “sane majority” that is tolerant of minorities and strives for a liberal and democratic society. “But to my great dismay extremist and dangerous elements have taken...

The immense popularity enjoyed by Pope Francis ever since his election in 2013 has precipitated sharply during the past year, and he no longer ranks among the top ten most admired men in the world, according to a massive new study involving 31,000 interviews.

Christian churches in Germany have reported widespread interest from recently-arrived migrants and refugees who want to convert to Christianity, German newspaper Focus reported.

remarks Published May 16, 2016 FoxNews.com Facebook117 Twitter335 livefyre1070 Email Print Now Playing White House defends Iran deal in wake of Rhodes profile Never autoplay videos The White House confirmed Monday that Obama adviser Ben Rhodes will not be allowed to testify before House lawmakers on the Iran nuclear deal, after a last-ditch attempt by Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz to pry the controversial aide loose for the hearing. Chaffetz and the White House have been engaged in an escalating feud, all on the heels of a New York Times Magazine piece where Rhodes was quoted boasting about the administration’s success...

Sen. Tom Cotton ?79% alleged Tuesday that President Barack Obama’s administration officials say one thing in classified briefings with members of Congress and another thing in public to the American people. “It’s time that the administration came clean and told the American people exactly what they tell Congress in a classified setting,” Cotton insisted. Appearing on the Hugh Hewitt Show on Tuesday, Cotton said that he “became public enemy number one at the White House… because I’m telling the truth about the Iran deal.” On Monday, during the White House press briefing, press secretary Josh Earnest claimed that Cotton “time

WASHINGTON -- The White House said Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes will not be testifying at a Tuesday House hearing because it's not "a fair deal for people who lied about the Iran deal to question the person that told the truth," in the words of press secretary Josh Earnest. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee called the hearing on the White House's messaging surrounding the Iran nuclear deal after a New York Times article detailed how Rhodes helmed the effort to spin the deal to sell it to Congress and the American public. (snip) "The truth is,...

White House Spokesman Josh Earnest repeatedly ducked questions about whether presidential national security adviser Ben Rhodes should testify before a Congressional committee hearing exploring the controversial Iran nuclear deal on Tuesday, instead asserting that Rhodes is the one who told the truth about the agreement, whereas multiple Republicans repeatedly issued false statements on the subject. Rhodes has come under fire after the New York Times published a profile piece in which President Obama's 39-year-old "mind meld" confidante on foreign affairs -- an "aspiring novelist" who holds academic degrees in political science, English and creative writing -- boasts of actively manipulating America's...

The White House told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Monday that Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes won't be testifying on Tuesday about his controversial comments on the Iran deal. In a letter to Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, Neil Eggleston, counsel to President Obama, said it would raise "constitutional concerns" if Rhodes were to testify. He also said Congress has been consulted enough. "While the administration will continue to consult closely with Congress on this important matter, testimony by one of the most senior advisers to the president raises significant constitutional concerns rooted in the separation of...

Leading members of Congress are calling on President Barack Obama to fire one of his top advisers amid a deepening scandal over accusations the White House intentionally misled lawmakers and the American public about the contents of last summer’s comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran, according to a letter sent Monday to Obama and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The lawmakers are pressing Obama to fire deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes following revelations he and other officials “spearheaded the charge to mislead elected lawmakers and the American people about the Iran nuclear deal and the negotiations that led to...

The mediasphere is boiling after the New York Times ran a piece on Ben Rhodes, Obama's foreign policy guru, a failed writer who openly boasted about manipulating the media. It was full of quotes like this... Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we...

In case you missed it over the weekend, National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes admitted in a lengthy New York Times Magazine profile that the Obama administration used the media to manipulate and lie to the American people about the nuclear deal with Iran. Here is one of the lies pushed by the administration, which David Reaboi highlighted yesterday at The Federalist. First, the lies and the denials about the negotiations. It took months before a few dogged journalists started to ask questions about the talks Obama officials were engaged in with Ahmadinejad’s regime. In February 2013, then-State Department Spokesperson Victoria Nuland...

The State Department cut a section of a daily briefing video from December 2013 in which Department spokesperson Jen Psaki admitted her predecessor had misled a reporter about the administration having direct negotiations with Iran. The missing minutes of video were removed from both the You Tube upload of the 2013 briefing and the version of the video which is kept on the State Department website, though the transcript of the briefing was not altered. When asked about the deletion the State Department could not explain it nor could they point to any other daily briefing which had been edited...

Over the weekend, top White House aide Ben Rhodes issued something of a mea culpa to the mainstream press for calling them know-nothings and depicting them as little more than propaganda amplifiers. It’s not clear why Rhodes felt the need to apologize, since reporters weren’t complaining all that much.

Sen. Tom Cotton accepted the challenge, but President Obama’s speechwriter and high-ranking foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes ducked out of a hearing Tuesday where he was to explain whether he misled the country in pushing the Iran nuclear deal. Members of Congress had been eager to prod Mr. Rhodes over misrepresentations, but the White House had seemed skeptical, saying lawmakers should poke one of their own, Mr. Cotton, an Arkansas Republican that Mr. Obama’s aides say has been misleading.

Richard Hoagland, the acting U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, discussed with Code Pink and anti-Israel activists what he said was classified information, during an October 3 meeting with the groups in Islamabad. Code Pink, a liberal anti-war organization known for disrupting Republican and conservative public events, uploaded a video of the meeting to an Internet video sharing website on Oct. 5. Realizing what he had said, Hoagland told the activist gathering: “I probably just, you know, got into big trouble with what I just said.”

Perhaps the Carter administration was comparably hostile to Israel, but the passive-aggressive, honor-deficient Obama administration has both caused and acceded to greater danger to the Jewish State than any other U.S. administration since 1948.Yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that he would not be attending the Mideast conference to be held in Paris on May 30, which was organized by France's socialist President Francois Hollande.According to State, Kerry is simply too busy.As a result, Hollande has postponed the conference and no alternative date has been set.Eager to force Israel towards negotiations with the bifurcated, terror-supporting Palestinian leadership, Hollande had...

The latest issue of Al Qaeda’s online magazine Inspire released Saturday calls on would-be jihadis to undermine the American economy by targeting business leaders and entrepreneurs, according to analysts who monitor web chatter from the jihadist organization. AND the magazine also features a section on bomb-making and encouraging radical Islamic terrorists to emulate the Palestinian stabbings of Israelis by walking up to Americans and stabbing them to death.

Iran has launched a new crackdown on social media, arresting fashion models active on photo-sharing websites and a blog website manager after Tehran's top leader declared war on un-Islamic thoughts on the Internet. Eight members of a modeling network were arrested and accused of publishing photos of women without the obligatory hijab headscarf on the picture-sharing application Instagram, Tasnim news agency said on Sunday.

Employing his college degree in fiction writing, White House communications strategist Ben Rhodes wrote deceitful talking points on the Benghazi attack and one-sided Iran nuclear deal – and later bragged about manipulating “clueless reporters.” Perhaps he’s also orchestrating administration climate spin. Rising ocean tides will bring “waves of climate refugees” to America and Europe, President Obama has declared. “Environmental migrants” are already fleeing shrinking islands in the Pacific, and it is a “dereliction of duty” for military officers to “deny the reality” of dangerous manmade climate change. Even if we act in accord with the Paris climate “accords” (none dare...

GSM31 will be out of town on Thursday, so we recorded this early.