Free Republic

Hard to miss the recently kerfuffle over the fact that the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, invited the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, to speak to a joint session of Congress. This happened immediately after President Obama’s State of the Union speech where many thought he skirted over the crisis with Iran. The problem is almost all of the analysis has missed the point. It begins with trying to understand why Speaker Boehner gave the White House only a half-day notice of the invitation. In what was disclosed by the Washington Post, the Speaker previously had been left...

correction appearing in the New York Times quietly unravels what has become a major story as phony agitprop, intended to discredit the leaders of Israel and the House of Representatives. Of course, the story is still believed by many, and has well served those in the White House and media who created and disseminated it. Omri Ceren spotted the correction and explained on Twitter: NYT tries to promote anti-Netanyahu talking point that #Israel blindsided Obama. They got just 1 tiny detail wrong.

Exclusive: Secret tapes undermine Hillary Clinton on Libyan warJoint Chiefs, key lawmaker held own talks with Moammar Gadhafi regime First of three parts Top Pentagon officials and a senior Democrat in Congress so distrusted Secretary of State ...

It really breaks your heart when you see trust that is so cynically manipulated “We came, we saw, he died.”—Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laughingly gloating over the death of Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011) Clinton was in Tripoli earlier this week for talks with leaders of Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC). [A] reporter asked if [Clinton thought] Qaddafi’s death had anything to do with her surprise visit to show support for the Libyan people. “No,” she replied, before rolling her eyes and saying “I’m sure it did” with a chuckle. —Corbett Daly, “CBS News” 10/20/11 “... there was a distortion...

HARRISON TWP., Ohio (WDTN) – A Dayton man is accused of making racially charged threats at police. A Montgomery County grand jury indicted Aaron Johnson, 28, on Friday. He is charged with ethnic intimidation for an incident that happened January 1. Prosecutors say he made a 911 call on New Year’s Day stating that he would shoot any officers that came near him. They say he went on to say he would kill any “caucasian” police officers that responded to his home on Castlewood Avenue in Harrison Township. Johnson is accused of using terminology like “killing cops”, especially “white cops”...

CINCINNATI, OH (FOX19) - The city is investigating controversial comments in a monthly newsletter put out by the Cincinnati Police Department's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender liaison officer. Chief Jeffrey Blackwell issued an agency-wide apology Thursday for the publication that went to about 1,000 officers earlier this month. Among comments offending some officers include this excerpt cited from a recent online article in the Huffington Post. "Homes that deny transgender identities result in a suicide-attempt rate that's 14 times higher than in homes where such identities are accepted," the newsletter quotes from the article. "If you belong to a religion...

Ohio will delay the executions of seven death row inmates while searching for an adequate supply of drugs that complies with its new execution protocol, the state's Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said Friday. That means the state will not carry out any executions in 2015, the agency said in a press release.

WASHINGTON — When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint session of Congress in March, it is unclear whether everybody invited will actually show up. Democrats have criticized House Speaker John Boehner for circumventing the administration when he invited Netanyahu to speak, and the White House has already said Obama will not meet with him when he’s here. BuzzFeed News asked several Senate Democrats whether they planned on skipping the speech or not. Most said they either hadn’t thought about it or they hadn’t decided. But there were no hard answers in the negative. Only one senator definitively said...

The State of the Union address this year falls one day after the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. So it's quite fitting that Speaker John Boehner have as his honored guest a black human-rights activist. But alas, said human-rights activist is also a Cuban dissident, a former political prisoner of the Castro regime and a critic of resident Obama's push to normalize relations with Cuba without any concomitant political and economic reforms on the island to empower the impoverished, oppressed people there. We will watch to see what mention, if any, is given by network journalists tonight to Jorge...

Matthew 25 includes a call for more entitlement spending and provides biblical justification for Obamacare, or so says Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Promoting Obamacare in South Dakota, Montana and several national interviews last week, Kasich touted the Bible chapter’s depiction of judgment based on individual charity as a sweeping endorsement of government programs for the poor. Kasich, a Republican, campaigned against Obamacare in 2010, saying the law’s Medicaid expansion would “stick states with large and unsustainable costs.” He unilaterally implemented the Obamacare Medicaid expansion in 2013. The Obamacare expansion puts able-bodied, working-age adults with no dependent children on Medicaid at...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Niles-area Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan said in an interview Wednesday that his announcement that he now supports abortion rights was motivated by dealing with his wife's pregnancy last year, not politics. The thinking behind a column he authored in Tuesday's Akron Beacon Journal to announce his abortion switch "crystallized over the course of our own kid being born and going through that process," said Ryan, whose son, Brady, was born in June. The column explained that Ryan considered himself to be "pro-life" after being raised Catholic, but 14 years in political office gave him "a deeper understanding...

Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan has pretended to be a pro-life Catholic for years but now he says that talking to women helped change his mind into becoming pro-choice. This, of course, is malarkey. I don't understand how talking to anyone could convince anyone that a baby is not a human being. I'm thinking he wanted to cash those fat checks from EMILY's List and Planned Parenthood. Hey, baby killers' checks don't bounce. He wrote in an op-ed, "These women gave me a better understanding of how complex and difficult certain situations can become. And while there are people of good...

At first blush, it might seem that the White House has become unhinged over an appearance by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before a joint session of Congress. After days of whining that Netanyahu’s appearance was not cleared with the White House, U.S. officials have taken to the press to anonymously screech and moan... ....... Ironically, the scuffle comes just after Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists killed two Israeli soldiers, reminding us that Iran is on the march throughout the region and that the Iranian government with which Obama hopes to achieve a grand reconciliation is committed to Israel’s destruction. UPDATE: In...

House Speaker John Boehner sat down with Bret Baier today for an exclusive interview, covering everything from immigration to ObamaCare to Boehner’s invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Boehner charged the administration with antipathy toward Netanyahu, and he sounded off on plans to sue President Barack Obama over his executive action on immigration. […] Baier asked whether this Congress is Boehner’s “last time around” and if he thinks he can bring all Republicans together. He responded with a laugh and said “I’ll be here for a while,” before adding that he sympathizes with the concerns of the more conservative...

How is it possible that a president can win re-election by a relatively comfortable margin while receiving fewer raw votes than his first election? Enter Mitt Romney. A simple data comparison is very telling. That comparison is the Romney raw vote vs. all votes for congressional Republicans in a given state. Crunching the numbers, Romney significantly underperformed the Republican congressional vote totals in multiple states. In North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin -- all presidential swing states -- Mitt Romney underperformed the total raw votes cast for all Republican congressional candidates by an average of 3 percent. That means that...

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The state's largest anti-abortion organization plans to lobby state lawmakers to shorten the amount of time allowed before a pregnant woman can abort a fetus in Ohio. Ohio Right to Life officials announced Tuesday that legislation banning abortions after 20 weeks, when they believes the fetus can feel pain, will be introduced soon in the GOP-led General Assembly. "Our pain-capable legislation will alter the abortion debate in Ohio," Stephanie Ranade Krider, executive director of Ohio Right to Life, said in a news release. "An overwhelming majority of Americans, especially women, support protecting pre-born babies from scalpels and...

It would not surprise me if, at the next Republican National Convention, Benjamin Netanyahu took a seat in the delegates-from-abroad section. The Israeli leader has both allied and associated himself with congressional Republicans who differ with President Obama over whether to impose additional sanctions on Iran and who also — let’s not beat around the bush — hate his guts. Their foreign policy is actually a domestic one: to destroy the president. Whether this is political or personal — or a combination of the two — is beside the point. Whatever the case, when Netanyahu accepted John Boehner’s invitation to...

The self-important Boston Globe ran an editorial that is a microcosm of how the Left manages to be so consistently wrong on so many substantive issues. The piece had to do with the supposed wrongheadedness of Republican House Speaker John Boehner. It seems that according to the Globe, Boehner has committed some kind of treasonous act by inviting Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, to address a joint session of Congress without asking permission from their boss President Barack Obama. The writer moans that such an undercutting of Obama’s authority will damage the delicate negotiations Obama is in with the Iranians;...

In this time of challenge, I am asking the Prime Minister to address Congress on the grave threats radical Islam and Iran pose to our security and way of life…” – House Majority Leader John Boehner on his inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before Congress Well it seems hell has just frozen over a bit as the impossible seems to have happened…John Boehner appears to be growing a spine and it took a State of the Union Address with pages right out of the Iranian playbook to do it. Inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu…the world’s last great statesman…to speak...

Rivlin is in New York to address the official Holocaust commemorations of the United Nations. His schedule includes meetings with African-American leaders and others. According to unsourced Israeli media reports, the White House invited Rivlin to a summit meeting with Obama in Washington. Israeli media outlets, including Channel 10 and the Ynet news site, have suggested the White House invitation was meant to embarrass Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was not invited to meet with Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry during his stay in Washington to address both houses of Congress in early March. Netanyahu was invited to...