Free Republic

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it received 31 pages of records in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit from the Department of Homeland Security that show the identity of the companion of Obama’s chef Tafari Campbell as a woman named “Ms. Taylor,” who reported that “[Campbell] fell in the water and struggled for a couple of seconds before giving up and sinking underwater.” The records also show that the Secret Service could not get the first two boats they tried to use to search for Campbell to function and had to use the groundskeeper’s boat. Also,...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The California Department of Justice on Wednesday acknowledged the agency wrongly made public the personal information of perhaps hundreds of thousands of gun owners in up to six state-operated databases, a broader exposure than the agency initially disclosed a day earlier. Rob Bonta, the Democrat who heads the agency and is running for reelection in November, said he was “deeply disturbed and angered” by the failure to protect the information his department is entrusted to keep. He ordered an investigation and promised to fix any problems. “This unauthorized release of personal information is unacceptable and falls...

Gerald Walpin, the inspector general who was at the center of controversy in 2009 when he was fired by the White House amid an investigation of an Obama friend, died today. He was 84. Walpin's son-in-law, Allan Tananbaum, said Walpin was struck by a car while crossing a street in Manhattan. Walpin was fired in June 2009 for his investigation of the misuse of money in AmeriCorps, the service organization that was part of the Corporation for National and Community Service, where Walpin served as inspector general. The investigation focused on Kevin Johnson, the former NBA star who became mayor...

WASHINGTON — National Public Radio’s (NPR) ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen released an explanation and apology Monday for a map published on the news organization’s website that erased Israel from the Middle East. On January 24, NPR’s blog Goats and Soda, which covers health and culture issues around the world, ran a piece titled, “What Are You Afraid Of In 2016? Globetrotters Share Their Fears.” The post focused on travelers’ anxieties for the coming year, and included an illustration of the Middle East and North Africa, the region of the world that travelers most perceive as being at risk. “The map portion...

( worth a re-read) September 28, 2008 Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis By James Simpson America waits with bated breath while Washington struggles to bring the U.S. economy back from the brink of disaster. But many of those same politicians caused the crisis, and if left to their own devices will do so again. Despite the mass media news blackout, a series of books, talk radio and the blogosphere have managed to expose Barack Obama's connections to his radical mentors -- Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and others....

A captured Al-Qaeda operative has told Canadian Intelligence investigators that a Montreal man who trained in Afghanistan alongside the 9-11 hijackers was responsible for the crash of an American Airlines flight in New York three years ago.