Free Republic

It's as brazen a defiance of the law as Washington has seen, and the perpetrators are going to get away with it unless things change quickly. The Environmental Protection Agency has bobbed and weaved, defied court orders, made a mockery of the FOIA process and spent barrels of ink redacting its clearly public records ... all to keep Gina McCarthy clean until she can be confirmed in the Senate to become the agency's next administrator. The Environment and Public Works Committee will vote this week on McCarthy's nomination. Senators should not act on her nomination until she orders the veil...

One of the central questions surrounding the Boston Marathon bombings is whether they portend a larger wave of terror attacks by homegrown Islamic radicals. The culprits, two brothers of Chechen origin, one of whom was a naturalized U.S. citizen, had both lived in the country for more than a decade.

With more and more conservatives in the House rebelling against John Boehner’s increasingly questionable Speakership, Republican House leadership is now moving to quash in-house concerns by reaching across the aisle for support. Leadership is moving in the wake of a surprising move by 16 House Republicans to vote against a Republican leadership-crafted closed rule on a government funding bill. The rule was designed to limit amendments to the government funding bill, but some House conservatives, concerned over the Boehner team’s refusal to consider a floor vote on an amendment to defund Obamacare implementation, bucked Boehner on the rule. After undergoing...

With more and more conservatives in the House rebelling against John Boehner’s increasingly questionable Speakership, Republican House leadership is now moving to quash in-house concerns by reaching across the aisle for support. [...] This is a declaration of war within the Republican ranks. And it should be deeply troubling to Republicans across the country, watching as the recently and controversially reminted House leadership continues to pursue the same political philosophy that led to a mini-rebellion in the House in January.

I cannot overestimate the fearless excellence of M. Stanton Evans' work as a historian, and, I am fortunate to say, mentor. His 2007 book Blacklisted by History is not only a shattering revision of half a century of lies about Joseph McCarthy and "McCarthyism" -- and, by extension, obfuscation about the successful penetration and subversion of the US government -- it is also an exercise in courage, in confronting a false and crippling consensus with an unshakeable dedication to fact and logic. On a personal note, the book served me as a rosetta stone by which I was able to...

The Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA), thinks Chicago's embattled police superintendent dug himself deeper into a pit of controversy today by claiming that lawful firearm owners are agents of political corruption. Appearing on a Chicago Sunday morning talk show, superintendent Garry McCarthy expressed his conviction that firearm owners who lobby their elected representatives or who donate money to political campaigns are engaged in corruption that endangers public safety. McCarthy went on to express his belief that judges and legislators should rely on public opinion polls when interpreting our Constitution. After totally dismissing the citizen's right to redress grievances, McCarthy trained...

Congress should update its military-force authorization. We remain a nation at peril, but are we still a nation at war? In his State of the Union speech, President Obama signaled, yet again, that the war in Afghanistan is effectively over. Soon, in fact, it will be over by any honest measure: The presence of American troops will be halved to 34,000 in the coming months, and erased entirely by December 31, 2014. On this arbitrarily chosen date, the president claims, we will “achieve our core objective of defeating the core of al-Qaeda.” This was just rhetorical fluff. The core of...

We as a people seem to now be wondering if our Congress will ever do anything right. We saw the article posted by Tim Brown entitled, “Ten New Gun Bills Introduced On First Day of Congress”. We then began reading, only to see names that looked funny doing this, so we looked up to find out just who these people are that have placed such bills on the floor of the House. Strange to say, the first one by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) is purely due to what happened to her life. Her husband was shot back in 1993 and...

In the wake of the deadly Connecticut school shooting, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy said she has warned the White House “the gloves are off” if President Obama fails to act on the issue. McCarthy (D-N.Y.), the foremost gun control advocate in Congress, said she spoke with White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew before Election Day and told him she will exert pressure on the White House to push for gun control legislation. “I said, ‘Jack, I know the president is going through an election and I’m telling you after the election I’m coming out full force,’” McCarthy told POLITICO Friday....

“Kevin McCarthy was a staunch defender of these new lines, reassuring everyone that Republicans would fare just fine under them,” said Jon Fleischman of the Flash Report, the much-read online newsletter on California politics. “Clearly, this turned out not to be the case– although he was easily re-elected to the safe seat drawn for him. Had he drawn a competitive district, I wonder if he would have been so enthusiastic about the lines he helped stopped others from trying to stop.”

Last week, Doug Feith and Seth Cropsey co-authored a very interesting and important op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “A Foreign Policy Failure to Acknowledge the Obvious.” It is about President Obama’s denial of the Islamist threat. In it, they zero in on two “strategic misjudgments” the administration has made: First is the refusal to accept that the terrorism threat is part of a larger problem of Islamist extremism. And second is the belief that terrorism is spawned not by religious fanaticism but by grievances about social, economic, and other problems for which America bears fault. This is largely right....

Multi-religious prayer almost inevitably leads to false interpretations, to indifference as to the content of what is believed or not believed, and thus to the dissolution of real faith.” So wrote Joseph Ratzinger in 1986. Even then, the man who would later become Pope Benedict XVI was renowned as a singularly deep thinker on the finer points of religious belief systems — to say nothing of the sweeping themes. As head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, Cardinal Ratzinger was ruminating on the World Prayer Day for Peace, forged by his legendary papal predecessor, John Paul II. Though he was among...

Road to MoscowBill Clinton’s Early Activism from Fulbright to Moscow By Fedora SummaryDuring the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton’s student protests and Moscow trip generated much controversy, but few answers. While Clinton’s government files from that era seemingly remain unavailable even today, there is at least more information available than in 1992. The public record reveals that Clinton’s social network and views on Vietnam were influenced by a pattern of contact between Communist agents and sympathizers and Clinton’s academic and political associates. This pattern is documented here through an analysis of Clinton’s antiwar activity up through the time he left Oxford...

If they lie, you can’t trust them. That’s a fairly straightforward rule. It is certainly the one that trial lawyers bank on. It is not a hard and fast rule. A person may shade the truth for various reasons: vanity, personal allegiances, financial incentives, etc. Usually, once you figure out the relevant motivation, you can sort out on what matters he is probably credible and what he is prone to lie about. Sometimes, though, the story is so unbelievable, so insulting to the intelligence, that a rational juror knows it is best to discount all of the testimony — or,...

They won’t get very far with “We’re not as bad as they say we are.” After a first term that has been historically abysmal, President Obama stands a good chance of being reelected. How can that be? Here is the blunt explanation: We have lost a third of the country and, as if that weren’t bad enough, Republicans act as if it were two-thirds. The lost third cannot be recovered overnight. For now, it is gone. You cannot cede the campus and the culture to the progressive, post-American Left for two generations and expect a different outcome. So even if...

The group opposes a law curtailing Jew hatred.Breaking news: CAIR, perennial agitator for language purges and “hate speech” regulation, is suddenly the champion of First Amendment free expression. It proves, once again, that Islamists and leftists are just like defense lawyers. A defense lawyer who has a good case can be very persuasive. If the defendant really is innocent, or if the prosecution’s case really is flawed, defense counsel can take one main line of defense and pound away at it relentlessly. That is how doubt is sown, which is the defense lawyer’s objective. A credible story that the prosecutor...

A recent case sheds light on the organization, but most Republicans ignore it. I’m a big fan of the 1 percent. No, not the dastardly 1 percent of Occupy Wall Street myth; I’m partial, instead, to the 1 percent of Congress that takes seriously the threat of Islamic-supremacist influence operations against our government. The people have 435 representatives serving in the House and another hundred in the Senate. Of these 535, a total of 288 are Republicans — 241 and 47 in the lower and upper chambers, respectively. Of these, only five House conservatives — five — have had the...

I’m glad Mitt picked Paul Ryan. Of the finalists who’ve been floated in the last few weeks, he is the best choice. I like him, although as I’ve said before, he’s not quite the Captain Courageous some on our side portray him to be. But he is more serious about dealing with our financial catastrophe than most of the Beltway GOP. As Mark’s never-to-be-missed weekend column illustrates today, that’s not exactly not a high bar, but hey, that’s the hand we’re dealt. Bottom line: I feel better about Romney because he made this choice, and I imagine most other conservatives...

He was correct about the Soviet atomic spies. The whole focus of the Soviet atomic bomb program was to build a copy of the American "Fat Man" implosion device. Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, David Greenglass, Rosenbergs and the other spies provided all of the info on the bomb to the Soviets. The first Soviet atomic bomb called "RDS-1", detonated on 29 August 1949 was an almost exact copy of the American "Fat Man".

I strongly disagree with David French’s analysis. I’m inclined, instead, to agree with commentators ranging from former Reagan Justice Department official Mark Levin to Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz that the affidavit is stunningly weak — “unethical,” as Prof. Dershowitz puts it. In fact, I go further (which, after nearly 20 years of writing and supervising the writing of complaint affidavits, I think I’m qualified to do). This affidavit is not law, it is agitprop: invoking, for example, the explosive term “profiled” but carefully avoiding any discussion of what it means and failing to note that (a) there is no evidence of...

Great article about Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America, by Mark Levin. http://www.newcriterion.com/m/articles.cfm/Dystopia-in-America-7299

The reaction to an accidental Koran-burning was inexcusable. We have officially lost our minds. The New York Times reports that President Obama has sent a formal letter of apology to Afghanistan’s ingrate president, Hamid Karzai, for the burning of Korans at a U.S. military base. The only upside of the apology is that it appears (based on the Times account) to be couched as coming personally from our blindly Islamophilic president — “I wish to express my deep regret for the reported incident. . . . I extend to you and the Afghani people my sincere apologies.” It is not...

Remember when WFAN’s Mike Francesca said that Tim Tebow wouldn’t do Rosie O’Donnell’s Sirius XM radio show at the Super Bowl because he objected to her gay lifestyle? That turned out to be bogus, of course: in fact, Rosie even set up Tebow on a date, according to In Touch magazine. When former Playmate Jenny McCarthy told O’Donnell that she was newly single and “had a crush” on Tebow, O’Donnell introduced her to Tebow and demanded that the two exchange phone numbers. “Rosie jumped up and took Jenny by the arm and walked her over to Tim. She said to...

ALBANY — Democratic Rep. Carolyn McCarthy’s Long Island district is on the chopping block as state leaders begin redrawing congressional boundaries, the Daily News has learned. State Senate and Assembly negotiators are looking at merging McCarthy’s Nassau County district into a Nassau-Queens district now held by fellow Dem Gary Ackerman, sources close to the planning said. McCarthy’s current district “collides” with Ackerman’s, making it a perfect candidate for merger, insiders said. The lines are expected to be drawn in a way that favors Ackerman in a potential primary. McCarthy, 68, was first elected in 1996, three years after her husband...

The Editors shortchanged them. I respectfully dissent from National Review’s Wednesday-evening editorial, which derided Newt Gingrich as not merely flawed but unfit for consideration as the GOP presidential nominee. The Editors further gave the back of the hand to the bids of two other prominent conservatives, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann — a judgment that is simply inexplicable in light of the frivolousness of its reasoning and of the Editors’ embrace of Jon Huntsman, a moderate former Obama-administration official, as a serious contender. The editorial surprised me, as it did many readers. I am now advised that the timing was...

Likud MK Ofir Akunis, who sponsored the bill to limit foreign funding to Israeli human rights organization, stood behind Senator Joseph's McCarthy's actions in the 1950s. Speaking on Sunday on the "London and Kirshenbaum" television show on Channel 10, Akunis said McCarthy – who in the 1950s presided over a committee that investigated Americans suspected of harboring Communist views – said "was right in every word, the fact is - there were Soviet agents."

Binyam Mohamed is back in the news. You may remember him as the al-Qaeda operative who was slated to help would-be “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla conduct a second wave of post-9/11 attacks, targeting American cities. You also may not remember him. After all, the Obama administration quietly released him without charges. Well, there’s a new chapter in this sordid tale. Mohamed is living large — taxpayer-funded large — in Great Britain. For that, we can thank the Lawyer Left’s stubborn insistence that enemy war criminals are really run-of-the-mill defendants. Actually, make that run-of-the-mill plaintiffs. Unlike Padilla, who actually got into...

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) touted “common ground” measures to spur job creation in the GOP weekly address on Saturday. The California lawmaker – a former small business owner – took to the airwaves promoting several areas in which he says there is bipartisan agreement. “By finding ways to support small business and promote entrepreneurship, we can rev up our economy and grow the jobs we need," he said. "And this shouldn’t be an exercise of partisan gamesmanship or credit-claiming." Noting that the Congress approved three trade deals for the president’s signature last week, McCarthy says that there are...

ANDREW C. McCARTHY Christie’s ‘Crazies’ Sharia is not a figment of our imagination. This “sharia-law business is crap . . . and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies!” So blustered Chris Christie. Bluster is the New Jersey governor’s default mode. It has certainly served him well. When directed at surly advocates of New Jersey’s teachers’ unions — who, after all, deserve it — bluster can apparently make a conservative heartthrob out of a pol whose bite is bipartisan moderate, however titillating his bark may be. The style is so effective that Christie seems to be trying it out on...

He is an enemy combatant, so treat him as one. An Iran-backed Hezbollah commander who killed American soldiers in cold blood has been in U.S. custody for four years. Most Americans would see this as a good thing. For the Obama administration, it is a vexing dilemma. This highlights, yet again, why the country can’t afford a second Obama administration. Ali Mussa Daqduq has been a Hezbollah operative for almost 30 years. He is the hardcore. When he joined back in 1983, the “Party of God” (hizb Allah) was just getting its start as Iran’s forward militia in Lebanon, announcing...

Congressional leadership reacted on Friday after House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio., ended debt limit talks with the White House.House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.:"Tonight, months after we had begun negotiations with President Obama, Vice President Biden, and the Administration, Speaker Boehner and I are ending discussions with the White House and beginning conversations with Senate leaders in the hopes of finding a solution to the debt limit debate in order to avoid default. Throughout the months of discussions, we have worked to identify real spending cuts, binding budget reforms, structural changes to save our entitlement programs, and significant debt reduction....

They choose a pivotal moment in the Gunwalker investigation to announce a gun-control bill.A handful of Democratic lawmakers in Congress and a fish cop held a press conference Friday to announce a new gun control proposal, the “Stop Gun Trafficking and Strengthen Law Enforcement Act.� The proposed law has no chance of passing, and seems orchestrated as a Democratic response meant to draw attention away from the still-developing “Gunwalker” scandal: U.S. Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD), ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) will join other members and a...

Top House leaders offered markedly different views on the future of the debt talks after Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner said he would no longer pursue a $4 trillion deficit-reduction deal proposed by the White House. Republicans now want a smaller deal, which would reduce the deficit by between $2 trillion to $2.5 trillion over 10 years, and consists largely of spending cuts. House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the larger deal broke down because Democrats had insisted on including tax increases as part of any package, which is...

Tim Pawlenty winced audibly when The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg made the obvious explicit. In the race for the GOP presidential nomination, the columnist posited, "I guess you represent the John McCain-Lindsey Graham foreign-policy wing." Mr. Goldberg's question, after all, was asked only after listening to Pawlenty's speech at the Council on Foreign Relations - a McCain redoubt where dreams of a progressive world order frequently substitute for the world that is. Pakistan, is urging the Afghans to dump the United States and look not just to Pakistan and Iran but also to China for help striking a deal with the...

Chicago Police Chief Garry McCarthy told parishoners at Saint Sabina Church earlier this month that the easy availability of guns in the United States is the extension of a tradition of "government-sponsored racism" that began with slavery and Jim Crow. McCarthy -— like many urban police officials an advocate of strict gun control -- was speaking at a liberal, activist church whose priest, Father Michael Pfleger, drew national attention for mocking Hillary Clinton in 2008. "This is sensitive. You know, because everybody’s afraid of race. Have you noticed that? Everybody’s afraid of race," McCarthy, a former New York and Newark...

Mitt Romney is said to be the early frontrunner in the GOP presidential sweepstakes. One rival, Newt Gingrich, is perceived as floundering in a swirl of unforced errors and staff insurrection. Yet when it comes to Islam, which will continue to matter mightily in the next administration, the frontrunner could learn a thing or two from the flounderer. The issue is not religion. It is the seditious Islamist political program. Most Americans, myself included, would prefer not to have to think about Islam at all. Muslims forced their beliefs onto our consciousness by wanton violence and gross violations of human...

Congressman /Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy Talks About the Debt, Fields Questions from Bakersfield Tea Party Patriots at Bakersfield Townhall Meeting (Video). On Saturday, June 11, Kevin McCarthy joined the Bakersfield Tea Party for a Townhall meeting. About 75 patriots were on hand for breakfast and an opportunity to ask direct questions about the budget, debt ceiling, energy dependence, our nation's continued involvement in Libya, and other current issues and concerns. As the Majority Whip, McCarthy is the person who is tasked with gauging and building consensus within the Republican House. His unique role in Congress afforded the Tea Party an...

Sharia compliance correlates with violent attitudes among American Muslims. What is it that radicalizes Muslims, including American Muslims? Is it American foreign policy? Israeli “occupation” of the ancient Jewish territories of Judea and Samaria? Cartoons depicting the warrior-prophet as a warrior? Korans torched by obscure Florida pastors? The life of Osama bin Laden, or, perhaps, his death? Any of a thousand claimed slights, real or imagined, that purportedly provoke young Muslims to “conflagrate” — if we may borrow from the forgiving rationalizations of Faisal Rauf, would-be imam of the would-be Ground Zero mosque? Here is the unsettling but sedulously avoided...

Last week, I had the pleasure of introducing many of my readers to author Dorothy Thompson for the first time. Thompson, who died in 1961, started her career before World War I as a suffragette working to win American women the right to vote, then briefly worked as a social worker. After the war, she sailed to Europe and began a stint as a foreign correspondent in Europe, where she had the reputation for always being in the right place at the right time during a chaotic period of history. Later, she became an on-air commentator on world events and...

Roger Cohen in the NYT: Obama, in a first for an American president, has now said the border between Israel and Palestine should be “based on the 1967 lines.” Yes, it should. Netanyahu still talks of “Judea and Samaria,” a lexicon that, true to his Likud party’s platform, does not acknowledge those lines but sees one land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean..... What is “indefensible” over time for Israel is colonizing another people. That process has continued with settlements expanding in defiance of Obama’s urging. Andrew C. McCarthy in the National review: As the president utters his paeans...

Would that the president of the United States were as worried about Arizona’s border as he is about “Palestine’s.” There was less fanfare about this latest Obama oration on the future of the Middle East, staged at Foggy Bottom, than there was about his 2009 Cairo speech. It was, however, every bit as delusional, and twice as treacherous. As for the delusional, “Arab Spring” devotees are thrilled that the president has morphed into his predecessor on the Democracy Project — the enterprise in which future generations of American taxpayers go deeper into hock as our tapped-out government borrows more Chinese...

A House bill that could drastically overhaul the nation’s gun control laws and strengthen federal power over states' handling of individuals' background checks is expected to be introduced today by New York Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, The Daily Caller has learned. McCarthy is expected to drop the Fix Gun Checks Act of 2011 — a  near-identical companion to that of fellow New Yorker Chuck Schumer's Senate bill — according to sources familiar with the legislation.A draft of the bill obtained by TheDC makes clear that McCarthy's legislation significantly mirrors Schumer's much-publicized bill and would make three significant changes to current national...

“Why should we give a damn about the Afghan people?” Andy McCarthy asks. Our presence in Afghanistan, he says, is “pointless.” Now, this is different than saying we would like to help them but the ability to do so is beyond our reach. It’s also a separate matter from saying that there are countless claims on our conscience, but because of inherent limitations on our resources, the suffering the Afghan people are experiencing doesn’t warrant our assistance. And it’s a different argument from saying we shouldn’t continue to expend American blood in a 10-year-old war.No, what McCarthy is arguing, in...

John McCain, Joseph Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham are the Senate’s most energetic proponents of sinking the nation ever deeper into the Libyan morass. In a joint interview on Fox last weekend, Senators McCain (R., Ariz.) and Lieberman (I., Conn.) were breathless in their rendering of the “freedom fighters� and the “Arab Spring� of spontaneous “democracy.� Friday they upped the ante with a Wall Street Journal op-ed, rehearsing yet again what an incorrigible thug Qaddafi is and how “we cannot allow [him] to consolidate his grip� on parts of Libya that he still controls. For his part, Senator Graham (R., S.C.)...

For nearly 20 years, we’ve willfully blinded ourselves to the Rosetta Stone that decodes our enemy’s war doctrine. But the jihad (or shall we call it “kinetic Islam”?) is catalyzed not by al-Qaeda but by sharia — by Muslim law. So is the “Arab Spring,” now playing in Tripoli (and elsewhere) after rave reviews in Cairo. I have been opposed to our country’s starting a war against Libya. And starting a war is exactly what we have done, exactly what we would call it if the shoe were on the other foot — the “kinetic” and “limited” obfuscations of intervention...

Freedom's Enemies: A collaborator of the Rosenbergs admits his previously unknown Soviet espionage more than 60 years after the fact. It's just the latest revelation that the anti-communists of that era were right. The "innocent victims" of the Red Scare were once legion — like suave U.S. envoy Alger Hiss, who doubled as a Soviet spy chief, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who gave Moscow A-bomb plans. The latest debunking of this myth is Rosenberg fellow spy Morton Sobell, who finally admitted it in 2008. But in a December interview with Ronald Radosh and Steven Usdin, Sobell, 93, added that...

Author: Andrew C. McCarthy Why do intervention proponents insist on calling them rebels when they call themselves mujahideen -- Muslim warriors fighting a jihad? At Pajamas, John Rosenthal has details of a report by French jounralist Marc de Chalvron, who was embedded with the Libyan "rebels" before they were turned back by Qaddafi's forces. They refer to their battle as "the jihad" -- Islamic holy war. (At least that's what they interpret jihad to mean. They apparently haven't gotten the memo from Georgetown that jihad is really a peaceful internal struggle for personal betterment, a solemn commitment to brush after...

Virginia Tea Party activists this weekend turned up the pressure on House Majority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) over the speed at which the GOP-led Congress is looking to cut spending.  Leaders of the Virginia Tea Party Patriot Federation issued a tough statement on Sunday, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, calling on Cantor to make deeper cuts to the budget at a faster pace. "We are extremely disappointed in Eric Cantor, but not surprised," Mark K. Lloyd, the group's chairman, said in a release. "The will of the American people was pretty clear in November — cut, cut, cut spending. Apparently,...

Representative Peter King will chair a hearing Thursday on radicalization within the American Muslim community. Doing so has stirred a nest of leftist hornets. The ACLU, along with several other "civil rights organizations," have "warned" King to refrain from examining religious beliefs. A number of threats against King have necessitated additional security. And critics are tripping over themselves to craft the most hyperbolic comparisons to Joseph McCarthy. However, such comparisons have the potential to backfire, at least among those with an accurate perception of history. The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus took a reasoned stance Wednesday. Certainly, the best evidence against...

WASHINGTON – The Republican congressman who has organized controversial hearings into radical Islam called Muslims "part of the mosaic" of America Wednesday and said they shouldn't feel threatened or intimidated by his inquiry. "If there is going to be animosity, I would blame it on my opponents," Rep. Peter King said in a nationally broadcast interview. King, who heads the House Homeland Security Committee, has come under withering criticism for the hearings scheduled to begin Thursday. Protests have already started, and comparisons to McCarthyism and the era of communist witch hunts are being heard. In one appearance on morning television,...