Free Republic

"The owners of DC Solar, a Benicia-based company, pleaded guilty today to charges related to a billion dollar Ponzi scheme— the biggest criminal fraud scheme in the history of the Eastern District of California. The government’s investigation has resulted in the largest criminal forfeiture in the history of the District with over $120 million in assets forfeited that will go to victims, and has returned $500 million to the United States Treasury, with more to come, U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced. Jeff Carpoff, 49, of Martinez, pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. His...

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al Abadi says Baghdad is willing to share anti-ISIS intelligence with Russia, Iran and Syria Oct 4, 2015 08:06 GMT Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al Abadi announced on Saturday that Iraq will share anti-ISIS intelligence with Russia, Iran and Syria if cooperation is requested. “We have been fighting ISIS more than a year and we have some important security information that no other country has regarding ISIS,” Abadi stated during a press conference which took place at the presidential office in the capital. Abadi also stated that he would welcome military equipment assistance from Iran, Syria...

I can't believe I'm writing this sentence, but Obamacare's exchanges appear to somehow be more deeply corrupted and broken than previously known. If there were words more impactful than "meltdown" and "trainwreck," I'd use them. Instead, I'll simply present the facts as they continue to come to light. USA Today: The federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system, technology experts told USA TODAY....Recent changes have made the exchanges easier to use, but they still require clearing the...

Just hours after debuting online, the new marketplace for Obamacare has apparently crashed.Consumers are supposed to use Healthcare.gov as an outlet to sign up for coverage, but just after selecting the state where we wanted to enroll, an error message popped up citing heavy traffic from too many visitors. We tried to engage a customer service representative via the site's Live Chat feature, but after 15 minutes of waiting and no response, we gave up. We're not too fussed. Kinks are bound to happen this early in the site's roll out, and at least heavy traffic signals that consumers are eager to...

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, the Tea Party favorite and emerging 2016 GOP presidential star, on Wednesday showed he is looking to broaden his and the Republican Party's base far beyond white males to include African-American youths. In a speech to Howard University Wednesday morning, Paul reached out to blacks, arguing that the Democrats and President Obama has failed African Americans, but admitting that the GOP has a long way to go before blacks see Republicans as their guide to success. "Some have said that I'm either brave or crazy to be here today. I've never been one to watch the...

Halfway through her rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" at President Barack Obama's inauguration on Monday, Beyonce dramatically did away with the earpiece that singers use to hear themselves and their bands in a live setting. One viewer likened it to the gutsy move Luke Skywalker made in the dramatic chase scene in the original "Star Wars," tweeting: "Taking out the earpiece is Luke turning off the targeting system in the Death Star trench." But now a rep for the United States Marine Band says Beyonce was not even singing the song live. She was lip-syncing. The rep said that...

<p>Beyoncé sang the national anthem at yesterday’s inauguration ceremony for President Obama and received overwhelming praise for her performance, ranging from Business Insider (“It was just amazing”) to TMZ (“f*cking awesome”). Beyoncé’s Instagram photo of herself in a recording studio with members of the Marine Corps Band.</p>

The Obama administration's strategy of prepositioning supplies for quick distribution in disasters apparently has fallen short on meeting the demand for drinking water in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.   "The agency [FEMA} appears to have been unprepared to distribute bottled water to Hurricane Sandy victims when the storm hit [last Monday]," Breitbart News reported over the weekend.

The excremental liberal press is boycotting coverage of this to protect Obama but Fox is covering it. Staten Island has received zero help after four days. Bloomberg has stolen three huge generators to power marathon tents and given no help to the people of Staten Island. The entire borough is a ruined disaster. No food, no water, no gasoline, the homeless wandering across the island with no shoes, no socks, injured, starving, crying for help from camera crews. People fighting one another over dumpster garbage. Death toll rising. Another Liberal success story.

Already facing intense scrutiny for its shifting narrative about the assault on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, the Pentagon now says it will not reclassify the Fort Hood shootings as a terrorist attack over concern about biasing the case against the gunman — an argument that is getting a mixed review from legal experts. Late Friday, after 160 victims of the Fort Hood shooting called on the Pentagon to label the attack terrorism instead of workplace violence as it has for the past three years, the Department of Defense said it would not reclassify the attack. In rejecting the victims...

In Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 3 a.m. television ad in the 2008 primary campaign, we heard the sound of a ringing phone and saw sleeping children. In ominous tones, a narrator warned that “something is happening in the world” and asked, “Who do you want answering the phone?” Well, it’s 2012, and — the phone is still ringing. Please, somebody answer the damn thing! The story of the terror attack in Benghazi is that neither Clinton nor the president who made her secretary of state responded to the real emergency when it came. The biggest foreign-policy crisis of the last four...

In the week following 9/11/12 something big happened: the collapse of the Cairo Doctrine, the centerpiece of President Obama’s foreign policy. It was to reset the very course of post-9/11 America, creating, after the (allegedly) brutal depredations of the Bush years, a profound rapprochement with the Islamic world. Never lacking ambition or self-regard, Obama promised in Cairo, June 4, 2009, “a new beginning” offering Muslims “mutual respect,” unsubtly implying previous disrespect. Curious, as over the previous 20 years, America had six times committed its military forces on behalf of oppressed Muslims, three times for reasons of pure humanitarianism (Somalia, Bosnia,...

On Wednesday September 12, 2012 blogger Speak With Authority discovered that five days before 9-11, the US State Department sent out a memo announcing no credible security threats against the United States on the anniversary of 9-11. The Overseas Security Advisory Council, who posted the memo, is part of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security under the U.S. Department of State. The OSAC memo said: Terrorism and Important Dates Global 9/6/2012 OSAC currently has no credible information to suggest that al-Qa’ida or any other terrorist group is plotting any kind of attack overseas to coincide with the upcoming anniversary of September...

Today I went out into the field here in Chicago looking to talk to some of the striking teachers but no one in a red-shirt was anywhere to be found (or, if they were wearing one, they had nothing to do with the teachers’ union strike). A journalist friend of mine asked me to nose around and see if I could uncover anything about slain Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was rumored to be gay. A former “roommate” of Stevens by the name of Austin Tichenor lives and works in Chicago and while making calls to friends of mine in the...

WASHINGTON (AP)—As Americans debate whether they are better off now than they were four years ago, there is a similar question with a somewhat easier answer: Are you safer now than you were when President Barack Obama took office? By most measures, the answer is yes. More than a decade after terrorists slammed planes into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside, Americans have stopped fretting daily about a possible attack or stockpiling duct tape and water. Getting through airport security has become a routine irritation, not a grim foreboding. While the threat of...

According to the White House calendar, there is no public record of President Barack Obama attending his daily intelligence briefing–known as the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB)–in the week leading up to the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the murder of U.S. Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens and three American members of his staff...

Imagine for a moment, if you will, Sarah Palin attending an event at Ohio State University. She casually greets college aged supporters, and a group of excited, young students decide to spell out the word “Ohio” using the old YMCA routine. The group is in place, arms readied, fans surrounding them armed with their cameras and cellphones. Then this happens… OIHI. It is inarguable that the media, in all their smugness and ‘we are intellectually superior’ attitude would have ripped her from the California coast to the glaciated plains of … well … Oihi. Oi. Hi. More like oy vey....

There’s something profoundly tragic about the failed presidency of Barack Obama. He was supposed to be a new kind of president, a man who embodied hope and would transcend petty politics and even race. Instead, we’re left with a downgraded America that is stagnating under the weight of its bloated government. As tragic as that alone is, even this is but a mere symptom of Mr. Obama’s larger fundamental failure: He simply does not trust the Americans who entrusted him with the presidency. Most presidents, we believe, ascend to the Oval Office, but for the 44th president, the reverse seems...

No video yet, but it sure sounds like that’s the end of that. For now.Who knew the big finale would end Sopranos-style? Bennett said his client sees “no value” in revisiting the issue now, but “stands by the complaint that she made.”Bennett said his client would disagree with Cain’s characterization of the alleged harassment incidents.He confirmed that the alleged harassment occurred in 1999 over a period of “at least a month or two.” There was “more than one incident,” he said. And here’s the key part of the statement from the NRA: “Based upon the information currently available, we can...

Last week’s column asserting that the president is unelectable has triggered strong responses. Democrats, in particular, seem to think my judgment is premature. It strikes them as ridiculous that anyone could make such a “bold prediction” so far in advance of the 2012 election. Hey, that’s what we do, as seasoned political professionals, as pollsters. But I must stress that I am not so much making a personal prediction as drawing an informed conclusion based on all the numbers available. I do this in each election cycle for other candidates, and it’s time to make the call on President Obama.