Free Republic

The White House reacted to the news today that Chairman Trey Gowdy of the House Select Committee On Benghazi requested an interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding the use of her private email address and her home server. During the White House press briefing today, Earnest said that the issue was now in the hands of Clinton and her lawyers as well as the leaders of the congressional committee. “I don’t have an opinion on it,” Earnest said, when asked about the request by reporters, reminding them that the former Secretary of State was acting as a “private...

Search giant (GOOGLE) averages a White House meeting a week during Obama administration. As the federal government was wrapping up its antitrust investigation of Google Inc., company executives had a flurry of meetings with top officials at the White House and Federal Trade Commission, the agency running the probe. Google co-founder Larry Page met with FTC officials to discuss settlement talks, according to visitor logs and emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt met with Pete Rouse, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, in the White House. The documents don’t show exactly what was discussed...

One of the most admirable things about Europe is that most (if not all) of the right-wing rhetoric that you hear in the US is explicitly against the law there. For example, attempting to link Islam with terrorism, saying that gay marriage isn’t really marriage, or saying that trans women aren’t really women would get you charged with discrimination and/or incitement to hatred. Numerous European public figures have been charged with hate crimes for implying that large-scale immigration is connected to higher crime. In fact, a politician in Sweden was prosecuted for hate crimes for posting statistics about immigrant crime...

Obama is going to the UN to get approval instead of getting approval of the senate. Marc Thiessen said that Obama intends that UN will give it force of international law. The problem is that the Constitution trumps international law. Obama is trying to make it difficult for the next president to revoke the deal.

President Obama took direct aim at Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker Monday night after the state became the 25th in the nation to enact right-to-work laws that weaken the power of labor unions. In a statement, Mr. Obama said the Wisconsin bill is the latest in a “sustained, coordinated assault on unions” led by the wealthy and their friends in government, predicting it will hamper economic growth and harm the middle class moving forward.

"Look at our history. We are Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea, pioneers who braved the unfamiliar, followed by a stampede of farmers and miners, and entrepreneurs and hucksters. That’s our spirit. That’s who we are.

The New York Times has been accused of bias by conservative US media after cropping George W Bush and his wife Laura out of its front-page image of the Selma anniversary march. The former Republican president took part in Saturday's march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama to mark 50 years since one of the bloodiest episodes in America's civil rights movement. But the photograph on the front page of Sunday's New York Times, which showed Barack and Michelle Obama leading the anniversary march, appeared to cut the Bushes from the right-hand side of the image.

An Indianapolis bakery that drew national media attention a year ago after refusing to make a cake for a same-sex “wedding” has closed its doors. Randy and Trish McGath, the owners of the former 111 Cakery, said they closed the business down because Trish, the shop’s primary baker, was tired and wanted to spend more time with her grandchildren. The work was “wearing [Trish] out,” said Randy, who has since transitioned to a job selling recreational vehicles. Last March, the McGaths endured a campaign of internet harassment by homosexual activists after a local television station reported that the couple had...

The people at State who are responsible for this probably didn’t see anything amiss. They probably believe much the same thing, even if they wouldn’t state it in the same lurid terms: they likely think that if Israel would just go away, peace would prevail in the Middle East.

FASCIST STATE: Facebook Shuts Down Page Of Black 6th Grader Who Made Viral Video Questioning Obama’s Patriotism Excerpted from The Examiner: On Friday, C.J. Pearson, a 12-year-old conservative from Georgia who posted a viral video supporting Rudy Giuliani, discovered that his personal Facebook page was locked. In an exclusive interview with Examiner.com on Saturday, Pearson said he received a message from someone about 6 a.m. Friday. That’s when he learned his account and page had been locked for “suspicious activity.” He jumped through all of Facebook’s hoops, but wasn’t able to recover his account. So he created a new profile...

While childhood vaccination rates are well over 90%, adults are far more likely to be behind on vaccinations http://www.hhs.gov/nvpo/national_adult_immunization_plan_final.pdf Think you're up to date on your vaccinations? You might be surprised at how many vaccinations are now recommended for American adults -- and the federal government plans to start tracking which of those vaccines you're behind on. The Department of Health and Human Services released its preliminary draft of a new five year plan to increase adult vaccinations this month. The newly revised 52-page National Adult Immunization Plan says: While the NVP provides a vision for improving protection from vaccine-preventable...

Matthews said, “Let me finish tonight with this crapstorm that has Netanyahu has started. All the Prime Minister had to do to avoid all this fighting with Washington was to speak out. That’s what he could have done, speak out the second he heard that the invitation for him to address the US Congress was issued without the knowledge of the American President. All he had to do was say ‘I will only come if this invitation is bipartisan, and certainly only if the President of the United States has approved it.’ All he had to do was that just...

Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook will report: “Former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney joins Amazon on Monday as senior vice president for Worldwide Corporate Affairs.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has made some last-minute revisions to his net neutrality plan after Google and public interest groups pressed for the changes, according to sources at the commission. Google, Free Press and New America’s Open Technology Institute last week asked the commission to revise language they said could unintentionally allow Internet service providers to charge websites for sending content to consumers. Such a scenario could open the door to an avalanche of new fees for Web companies and threaten their business models. Google executives on Feb. 19 called aides to Wheeler and staffers for the FCC’s two other...

Liberal philanthropist George Soros and the Ford Foundation have lavished groups supporting the administration’s “net neutrality” agenda, donating $196 million and landing proponents on the White House staff, according to a new report. And now, as the Federal Communications Commission nears approving a type of government control over the Internet, the groups are poised to declare victory in the years-long fight, according to the report from MRC Business, an arm of the conservative media watchdog, the Media Research Center. “These left-wing groups not only impacted the public debate and funded top liberal think tanks from the Center for American Progress...

So I was watching Glee the other day (yes I watch Glee, okay?!), and man has that show jumped the shark. It’s frustrating, because Glee went down in flames the way a lot of good shows do: it got too busy constructing a leftist fantasyland to tell a decent story. It’s another victim of what I like to call “liberal backslide.”Bear with me here for a second. I realize Glee was never an elegant allegory of fiscal conservatism. And no one could claim that it ever had an ironclad grip on reality. The show takes place in an underfunded Ohio...

What’s most successful when it appears to be something it’s not? Astroturf. As in fake grassroots.The many ways that corporations, special interests and political interests of all stripes exploit media and the Internet to perpetuate astroturf is ever-expanding. Surreptitious astroturf methods are now more important to these interests than traditional lobbying of Congress. There’s an entire PR industry built around it in Washington.Below are the top ten astroturfers as viewed by respondents in an informal, non-scientific survey.* TOP 10 ASTROTURFERS 1. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and Everytown2. Media Matters for America3. University of California Hastings Professor...

The Secret Service said Monday that its second-ranking official was resigning his post, a departure under pressure of one of the last remaining senior managers who had presided over a string of embarrassing security lapses in recent years. The ouster of Deputy Director Alvin “A.T.” Smith, which followed pressure from lawmakers who have called for fresh leadership at the troubled agency, came three days before he was scheduled to testify before a House oversight committee. He was considered one of the few people with a deep understanding of the Secret Service’s highly specialized mission.

"We're as free of foreign oil as we've been in 30 years," Obama said. "We've doubled the amount of clean energy that we're producing. A lot of families are saving a lot of money at the gas pump, which is putting some smiles on folks' faces." "You're welcome," Obama said to tepid applause.

At the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama reminded attendees that violence rooted in religion isn’t exclusive to Islam, but has been carried out by Christians as well. ~snip~ “Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”