Free Republic

Federal agents and the state fire marshal have effectively barred a federal safety panel from the site of a Texas fertilizer plant blast that killed 15 people and injured about 200 others, hampering its investigation, the panel’s chairman said. In a May 17 letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer, U.S. Chemical Safety Board Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso asked the California Democrat to help the board obtain evidence under control of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that he contends is essential to the board’s investigation, the Waco Tribune-Herald and Austin American-Statesman reported.

President Obama on Thursday will deliver a major speech on his counterterrorism policies, addressing everything from drone strikes and the status of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, to continuing efforts to fight al Qaeda and the legal framework for the continuing "war on terror." In the substantive speech to be delivered at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., Mr. Obama will announce plans to restart transfers of Guantanamo Bay prisoners to third countries. Before their transfer, the prisoners would have to be cleared for release, and the U.S. would have to be satisfied that an oversight and monitoring program...

Even though 132 members of Congress sent former Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Douglas Shulman letters about the IRS targeting of conservative groups, Shulman reiterated Wednesday that he did not have the full story until the inspector general’s report came out. “In the two years that this targeting was taking place, did any member of Congress contact you? Write you? About this particular subject? Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan asked during a House Oversight hearing. “Did you get letters from Congress?” “Yes,” Shulman replied. Jordan explained that based on documents from the IRS, 132 different members of Congress contacted Shulman over...

Monitoring AP but not detaining Tamerlan Tsarnaev — there is a common theme. Government is now so huge, powerful, and callous that citizens risk becoming virtual serfs, lacking the freedoms guaranteed by the Founders. Is that perennial fear an exaggeration? Survey the current news. We have just learned that the Internal Revenue Service before the 2012 election predicated its tax-exemption policies on politics. It inordinately denied tax exemption to groups considered conservative or otherwise antagonistic to the president’s agenda. If the supposedly nonpartisan IRS is perceived as skewing our taxes on the basis of our politics, then the entire system...

The online video that launched former U.S. Rep Anthony Weiner's New York City mayoral campaign Wednesday featured someone who until now had played a limited public role in his political life: his wife, Huma Abedin. Ms. Abedin opens the video in a shot that shows her and Mr. Weiner feeding breakfast to their son, and she closes it sitting beside the candidate on the stoop of a brownstone. "We love this city, and no one will work harder to make it better than Anthony," Ms. Abedin says to the camera. As a longtime aide to former U.S. Secretary of State...

Last week, in an article for the Huffington Post, titled Commencement 2.0, I discussed the need for higher education officials to begin substantive planning for digital disruption. The article argued that low-cost high quality online courses combined with sophisticated exam tools and online teaching assistance would inevitably lead to massive dislocation in higher education. To my surprise, on the same day this article appeared The Georgia Institute of Technology, one of the nation's leading engineering and computer science schools announced that it would begin offering a low-cost Online Master of Computer Science degree. The next phase of digital disruption is...

'Flag@Whitehouse.Gov' A Snitch Line Is the White House Compiling an Enemies List? The Obama administration seems to have committed another political misstep when it set up an email address, 'flag@whitehouse.gov', in order to allow supporters to report on "misinformation" on health care reform. According to Fox News, "The White House is under fire for a blog post asking supporters to send "fishy" information received through rumors, chain e-mails and casual conversations to a White House e-mail address, 'flag@whitehouse.gov'." .... [snip] ....

MADISON –Nearly three years after state Superintendent Tony Evers signed off on implementing the Common Core State Standards, the Assembly and Senate committees on education got around to holding a public hearing to get the facts on the changes in Wisconsin classrooms. The room was packed Wednesday, mostly made up of ‘stop Common Core’ advocates with signs and red T-shirts. There was no mixing up these Common Core opponents with the suit-wearing government bureaucrats and experts asked to testify. Some attendees were shipped down the hall to an overflow room to watch the hearing. The showing at the Capitol could...

A few years ago, after an enjoyable match at the nearby Victoria Cricket Club, I arrived at Rustico, a fine restaurant in the small village of Flatts at the western end of Harrington Sound in Bermuda. The fellow just leaving seemed vaguely familiar, albeit more luridly dressed than usual, and my dining companion informed me that, yes, indeed, it was Michael Bloomberg, the famous Mayor of New York City. "He's here all the time." "All the time?" "Well, he's a regular." Our waiter confirmed that he knows them all by name. Sir John Swan, the former premier of the British...

About two dozen members of the Dalton Tea Party gathered outside the Internal Revenue Service office on Professional Boulevard in Dalton on Tuesday during the lunch hour protesting the agency on the national level for singling out conservative groups for extra scrutiny. “They went way overboard in demanding information and throwing up obstacles to some groups and allowed groups that weren’t conservative to sail through. That isn’t fair,” said Warren Tatum.

Re: Veto Recommendations regarding "gun" legislation. Dear Governor Brown: As I have said previously, a government that does not protect us and will not let us protect ourselves does not deserve our respect or loyalty. The U-T San Diego newspaper reports a series of "gun" bills is headed to you for consideration. Sadly the State of California is presently violating its primary constitutional duty which is to protect the public from domestic threats such as criminal activity. In the 1980s, the legislature responded to the enormously high crime rate by "right sizing" the state prison system and making some overdue...

An energy company has received approval to start construction of a new natural gas processing plant in northwestern North Dakota. The Oneok company says the plant will cost $160 million and be able to process 100 million cubic feet of natural gas each day. Oneok is based in Tulsa, Okla.

Even with national Democratic leaders in the audience, Calypso Louie still doesn’t miss a beat. At 81, Louis Farrakhan is as still full of the old fire-breathing hatred of “Satanic Jews” and the “Synagogue of Satan” as ever. And he still loves President Obama, and would probably love him even more if he didn’t surround “himself with Satan … members of the Jewish community.” That was a report from the Detroit Free Press – no right-wing bastion there – about a speech the Nation of Islam leader delivered Friday night at a Detroit church. Listeners to the man Rush Limbaugh...

BRUTAL: Markets Are Getting Destroyed Around The World Sam Ro May 23, 2013, 4:59 AM European markets have been open for a few hours, and things are ugly. England's FTSE is down. 1.8%. France's CAC 40 is down 2.4%. Germany's DAX is down 2.5%. Spain's IBEX is down 2.1%. Italy's FTSE MIB is down 2.7%. This follows sell-offs in the U.S. and Asia. Japan's Nikkei fell by a stunning 7.3%. On Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that the Fed could start tapering its quantitative easing (QE) program during one of its next...

Anti-Muslim reprisals after Woolwich attack English Defence League in street battles with police in Woolwich and mosques attacked in apparent acts of revenge by Ben Quinn and Conal Urquhart The Guardian, Wednesday 22 May 2013Scores of supporters of the English Defence League threw bottles at police and chanted anti-Muslim slogans in Woolwich hours after the murder of one man and the shooting of his two suspected assailants. About 100 men, including some wearing balaclavas printed with "EDL", engaged in running battles with police for less than an hour. A police commander said officers cited section 60 of the Public Order...

Post-9/11, we in the omniscient pundit class were all Afghan experts. Post-Boston, we are all Chechen experts. Strictly between us, I can count what I know about Chechens on one leg. A couple of years ago, while I was in Copenhagen picking up an award from the Danish Free Press Society, a one-legged Chechen prematurely self-detonated in the Hotel Jørgensen while assembling a bomb. His device, using the same highly volatile TATP as in the London Tube bombings, was intended for my friends at Jyllands-Posten, publishers of the famous Mohammed cartoons, to whom I chanced to be giving an interview....

Two members of the FBI’s elite counterterrorism unit died Friday while practicing how to quickly drop from a helicopter to a ship using a rope, the FBI announced Monday in a statement. The statement gave few details regarding the deaths of Special Agents Christopher Lorek and Stephen Shaw, other than to say the helicopter encountered unspecified difficulties and the agents fell a “significant distance.” Last month, the team was involved in the arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings. And in February, it rescued a 5-year-old boy held hostage for six days in an underground bunker...

Gov. Andrew Cuomo — calling job creation the state's "number-one mission" — on Wednesday unveiled a plan for dozens of tax-free zones on public college campuses across the state. The zones would be available to new businesses as well as to businesses that relocate from outside the state, and to those that create net new jobs. In the zones, they would face no business or corporate tax, no sales tax, no property tax, no franchise fee and no state income tax for the owner of the company or its employees. The breaks would last for 10 years. (...) One of...

Several major U.S. utilities are under "constant" cyberattack and haven't taken precautions to protect critical systems from Iran, North Korea and other adversaries, according to a congressional survey of more than 100 companies accounting for much of the nation's power system. The survey shows the nation's electrical grid remains "highly vulnerable" to attack after four years of failed efforts to pass major cyber-security legislation, according to an accompanying report. Industry trade groups, including the Edison Electric Institute, joined by Republicans in the Senate, opposed the bill, arguing minimum cyber-security standards would be out-of-date by the time they were implemented. "Our...

Texas outperformed every other state in the nation on jobs and growth over the past decade, according to the latest annual report on state economic performance released Thursday by the American Legislative Exchange Council. Michigan came in dead last. The rankings are based on state GDP growth, population shifts, and changes in non-farm payroll jobs between 2001 and 2011. The ALEC report also finds that Utah has the best economic outlook this year, and Vermont the worst.

A mother-of-two described tonight how she put her own life on the line by trying to persuade the soldier’s murderers to hand over their weapons.

a historic vote on the agenda that could change the iconic organization’s century-old policy and allow avowed homosexuals, some 1,400 Boy Scout leaders from across the nation who form the National Council have gathered in Grapevine, Texas. A final vote is scheduled for Thursday on a proposal that would allow openly homosexual scouts but retain the ban on adult homosexual scout leaders. Treatment for TinnitusRinging, buzzing, music in ears? There is hope in Kentucky www.kytinnitustreatment.com The Antichrist: Free BookDiscover What the Early Church Knew About Rapture & the Meaning of 666. VoiceOfElijah.org/Antichrist In the BSA’s official “Voice of the Scout”...

Alice Walker, the author of “The Color Purple” who was also a “jurist” in the kangaroo court “Russell Tribunal on Palestine,” believes that Israel is an apartheid state. She also believes that the world is run by shape-shifting reptilian aliens who practice mind control from the Moon. I’m not sure which opinion is more bizarre. On her blog, she waxes poetic over the book that taught her so much about the aliens: that control our world: Earlier I wrote that David Icke reminded me of Malcolm X. I was thinking especially of Malcolm’s fearlessness. A fearlessness that made him seem...

General Motors Co. is recalling more than 27,000 Cadillac SUVs worldwide because the wheels can fall off. The company says the recall affects the 2013 Cadillac SRX with 18-inch wheels. Canadian safety regulators say the wheel nuts may not have been tightened enough at the factory. GM says the problem hasn't caused any crashes or injuries, and no wheels have fallen from vehicles. Dealers will rotate tires and tighten the nuts at no cost to the owners. The recall affects almost 19,000 SUVs in the U.S. and another 913 in Canada. The rest were exported to other countries.

Just thought you'd like to see what a left-wing cartoonist is thinking about His O'ness this week. Yes, he gets in a shot at the GOP in the last couple of panels, but all in all I'm having fun reading this and the comments on the liberal site where it was published.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Stock futures were pointing to a down day on Wall Street Thursday on worries that the Federal Reserve may be heading for a wind-down of quantitative easing. Furthermore, data in China indicated a slowdown in the Asia economic engine on signs of an unexpected contraction in manufacturing activity. All overseas markets were down on the developments, with the Nikkei 225 in Japan suffering its steepest drop since the aftermath of the tsunami and nuclear disaster in March 2011, closing down 7.3%.

Not that I go there much, but: Anyone else see that the IRS and Benghazi and AP scandal stories are always absent from Google News headlines? More "backward watchdog" press behavior--the Google News dog protecting its elite masters from potentially meddlesome little people.

SPRINGFIELD— — An Illinois House version of legislation to allow people to carry concealed weapons that emerged Wednesday would not let Chicago have its own set of rules and could make it easier to get a permit. The latest proposal is an attempt to address concerns of gun rights advocates who balked last week at a more restrictive Senate concealed carry bill favored by gun control supporters. Backers, including Democratic Speaker Michael Madigan, hope the House version finds enough common ground between the two sides to clear the General Assembly and meet the standards of a federal appeals court ruling...

In the world of White House politics and the politics of handling the White House press corps, the president's press secretary is the most visible target and often the first to fall when the media turns on an administration. And it appears that press secretary Jay Carney may well be approaching the point at which his deft handling of the media in past years suddenly becomes a liability in the middle of not just one but multiple presidential controversies. I have known a few other past presidential press secretaries, but not Carney. As a rule of thumb, I would say...

A specter has been haunting the Western Hemisphere since mid-summer 2012, the specter of China's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) routinely patrolling the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. At first sight, it might seem that Beijing is truly laying the groundwork for its foothold in the Atlantic Rim. Not least, Chinese government signed a free-trade agreement with Iceland in April and PLAN vessels recently made a month-long trip in the Mediterranean Sea and Eastern Atlantic. Even so, China's strategic projection in the Atlantic is still far from becoming reality. The whole psychodrama unfolded at the end of June 2012, when...

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Prosecutors are pursuing rape charges against a 40-year-old Malaysian who allegedly had sex with a 13-year-old girl and then married her. Restaurant manager Riduan Masmud was charged with committing statutory rape in a parked car in Borneo in February, but his lawyer said he has since married the girl. Rights activists have long criticised Malaysian laws that allow very young Muslims to be wedded with the permission of Islamic courts. Attorney General Abdul Gani Patail said late Wednesday that authorities remain firmly against statutory rape and were compiling a DNA report and other evidence in Riduan's...

“How many isolated incidents does it take to make it not isolated?” Stephen Coughlin on the events in Europe over the last couple of days. Yesterday’s barbaric attack on a British Soldier on a London street & muslim riots in Sweden... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX6PW6hESPQ

Listen to the Quinn & Rose Morning Show from 6:00 to 9:00 Eastern on: www.wpgb.com (104.7 Pittsburgh, Pa) http://wysl1040.com/ (Rochester, NY) http://www.talkradio560.com/ (Frostburg, MD) http://wicofm.com/ (Salisbury/Ocean City, MD) http://www.wobx.net/ WOBX - Outer banks NC WVTT 96.7 - Olean, NY http://www.wncoam.com/main.html (Ashland, OH) And now on 166 XM http://tunein.com/radio/The-War-Room-p34761/

Conservatives have alleged that progressives have been engaged in a callous attempt under this plutocratic administration in creating artificial crises so that the plutocracy can abridge citizens' rights. I mean further than they’ve already abridged them. And until now the press has ignored this vast right wing conspiracy theory time after time: Fast and Furious, Solyndra, TARP, HARP, Benghazi, the IRS, Gun Grabbing, Libya, Iran, Syria, Russia, stimulus spending, the Boston Bombing and the phony math on Obamacare. Wisconsin’s Jim Sensenbrenner summed it up during a House hearing on Fast and Furious when he said: "There is really no responsibility...

The Army psychiatrist charged in the deadly 2009 Fort Hood attack wants to represent himself at his upcoming murder trial, which means he could question the nearly three dozen soldiers he’s accused of wounding in the shooting rampage. Maj. Nidal Hasan’s request, announced Wednesday by Fort Hood officials, is to be considered at a pretrial hearing next week. The request prompted the military judge, Col. Tara Osborn, to delay jury selection to June 5, about a week after it was scheduled to start. Hasan, an American-born Muslim, faces the death penalty or life in prison without parole if convicted of...

  The European Parliament met Tuesday to discuss the issue of tax evasion throughout the UK and the Eurozone, and how the European Parliament might clamp down on those attempting to protect their well earned wealth from government confiscation.    All was going according to plan, until UKIP member Nigel Farage was given the floor.    Farage immediately launched into a classic rant against Barroso and the rest of the EU bureaucrats, stating that it is not the average man on the street that is engaging in tax fraud, but the European Parliament members themselves:    If we look at the...

A secretly drafted bill to block release of photos, tapes of 911 calls and death certificates related to the Dec. 14 Newtown elementary school massacre could be acted on in the General Assembly as early as the end of the week, officials said Wednesday. Family members of victims would have discretion over release of some of the records. A draft of the bill was released Wednesday afternoon by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's office, which has been working behind the scenes in recent weeks on drafting the language with legislative leaders and the office of the state's top prosecutor, Chief State's...

At first I thought the IRS scandal was leaked to distract from the Benghazi scandal. But that didn't make sense because the IRS scandal is a more obvious abuse of power than the White House lying about the murder of four Americans in Libya. Before I had resolved which scandal was distracting from which, we found out the Department of Justice was spying on The Associated Press -- not to protect national security, but to prevent the AP from scooping the White House. Then, this week, it broke that the Department of Justice was also spying on Fox News for...

Kris Koenig is the mastermind behind the upcoming documentary titled Assaulted: Civil Rights Under Fire. The project started as a look into the gun control debate raging in California, but as the debate heated up nationwide this past winter they broadened their scope to include the national debate as well. The project has been funded entirely through the website Kickstarter (initial funding – second push), where individuals pledge their own money to support a cause they believe in, and the finished product is nearing release. Kris has set a date of May 23rd (tomorrow) as the date for the initial...

Washington - India and the US have called upon all nations - without naming any country - to take effective steps to work toward eliminating sanctuaries and infrastructure that supports terrorism and to increase efforts to counter violent extremism. The call was made in a joint communiqué issued after the Second US-India Homeland Security Dialogue here Tuesday co-chaired by Indian Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde and US Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. The communiqué reaffirmed the two nations' own "commitment to, and importance of, bilateral homeland security cooperation on common challenges faced such as terrorism, and countering violent extremism." India...

PALO ALTO, Calif.-- Tesla Motors announced that it has paid off the entire loan awarded to the company by the Department of Energy in 2010. In addition to payments made in 2012 and Q1 2013, today’s wire of almost half a billion dollars ($451.8M) repays the full loan facility with interest. Following this payment, Tesla will be the only American car company to have fully repaid the government. For the first seven years since its founding in 2003, Tesla was funded entirely with private funds, led by Elon Musk. Tesla brought its Roadster sports car to market with a 30%...

WASHINGTON — Internal Revenue Service officials are not fully cooperating with efforts to learn who is responsible for targeting conservative groups, lawmakers learned Wednesday during the third and most tense, dramatic hearing on the scandal. First, the director of the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations at the heart of the scandal invoked her constitutional Fifth Amendment right and refused to answer questions during an appearance before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.Then, a Treasury Department inspector general told the committee that IRS employees in the Cincinnati office that handled applications for tax-exempt designations were not being fully...

The president has a base of loyalists that won't quit and, at least for now, there's no evidence he was involved in any scandals. Another day, another poll showing that President Obama's job-approval rating is not collapsing under the weight of scandals and controversies. Why is he holding steady? Will it last? And will Republicans take any cues from his staying power? Given the noise level on Capitol Hill, cable TV, and social media, Obama's 50 percent-plus showings in recent polls from CNN, Pew, and ABC/Washington Post seem somewhat surprising. But two veteran political pollsters, one from each party, say...

APThe contention that the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups was limited to several low-level workers may not be holding up.Former IRS acting head Steven Miller testified last week that two “rogue” agents responsible have already been disciplined. But Fox Cincinnati affiliate WXIX-TV has identified six local employees that sent probing letters to Tea Party groups: Mitchel Steele, Carly Young, Joseph Herr, Stephen Seok, Liz Hofacre and a woman known only as Ms. Richards.According to WXIX, all of those workers have separate managers, and separate territory managers above them; the only supervisor they do have in common is Cindy...

Although White House Chief Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler claims to have learned about the IRS audit scandal only last month, she had three unprecedented one-on-one meetings last year with the Treasury Department’s chief lawyer, who has known about the inspector general’s investigation of the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative nonprofits since at least June 2012. The Treasury lawyer in turn has a long history of extreme left-wing agitation. Christopher J. Meade, Treasury Chief Counsel, met with Ruemmler on September 27th, December 11th, and December 13th, 2012, according to White House Visitor Records requests. The two had never met one-on-one prior...

A new type of asthma drug meant to attack the underlying causes of the respiratory disease slashed episodes by 87 percent in a mid-stage trial, making it a potential game changer for patients with moderate to severe disease, researchers said on Tuesday. "Overall, these are the most exciting data we've seen in asthma in 20 years," said Dr. Sally Wenzel, lead investigator for the 104-patient study of dupilumab, an injectable treatment being developed by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc and French drugmaker Sanofi. The drug also met all its secondary goals, such as improving symptoms and lung function and reducing the need...

An obscure November 2012 Wikileaks email dump points to former White House counterterrorism adviser and now-CIA chief John Brennan as the person behind the “witch hunt” of journalists who reported unflattering Obama administration leaks. A little over a week after President Barack Obama’s reelection, Wikileaks released an email dump of global intelligence files from the private intelligence company Stratfor. One particular email, dated September 21, 2010 discussed President Obama’s “Leak Investigations.”

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) You know that part in the video where the announcer is speaking over the Muslim killer. That’s the part where the killer is saying, “Many, many Ayah throughout the Koran that we must fight them as they fight us.” Instead the official media video cuts the Koran part out and picks up only when the Muslim killer says, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” That doctrine is used today by Muslim countries to demand a literal eye for an eye justice. In August 2000, the Saudi Arabian media reported that Abdel Moti Abdel Rahman...

Sydney - The case for describing fanatics as insane is pretty convincing. These people’s minds are totally subordinated. “Extremism” is a euphemism. This is brainwashing, perversion of minds, and historically it leads only to violence and suffering. The current forms of “extremism” are media and money-fueled, false, pseudo-ideologies. “Fundamentalist” religion has absolutely nothing in common with Islam or Christianity as cited by their founders. It’s based on interpretations of interpretations, like the “pass the message” communications exercise in which the message ultimately becomes totally different.

When bystanders in John Wilson Street heard a car smashing into a street sign, they turned and saw what they thought were two black men trying to help a white man they had run over.....