Free Republic

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will meet with the top four House Republicans next week in Washington. The high tech CEO’s visit comes as Facebook is facing ongoing scrutiny over privacy concerns and Internet safety. Zuckerberg will meet Thursday with Speaker John Boehner and the rest of his leadership team, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Whip Kevin McCarthy and Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers. The meeting is expected to be a broad discussion of issues related to Facebook, according to a GOP aide. While immigration may come up, the meeting is not specifically to discuss comprehensive reform, which Zuckerberg has...

AUSTIN — What do Donald Trump and former President George W. Bush have in common? They both want Greg Abbott to be the next governor of Texas. Both men are among the contributors listed in Abbott’s latest campaign finance report to the state, which covers fundraising over six weeks in June and July that the Legislature was in special session. Trump, the millionaire developer, gave the Republican candidate for governor $25,000 last month. Bush contributed $5,000 in July. Abbott, the state attorney general, raised $1 million, while Republican rival Tom Pauken, the former state GOP chairman, raised $44,395. During the...

A man detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents allegedly spat blood and assaulted an agent, while he was being transferred to another vehicle. According to court documents obtained by Action 4 News, an FBI agent observed Alberto Mayen who was present in the U.S. illegally try to escape by twisting the arm of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The incident happened at the Rio Grande City Border Patrol station. After allegedly twisting the agents arm, Mayen then fled on foot. When the agent caught up to him, a violent encounter begun. Mayen was told to stop resisting multiple times in...

SOMERS, N.Y. -- An 82-year-old man died following a three car accident on Route 118 in the town of Somers Tuesday, police said. Dimitrios Caratzas succumbed to injuries sustained in the fatal accident that occurred at around 2 p.m. Tuesday on Route 118. Patterson resident Tomas Salguera-Ramirez, who was driving a Toyota Tundra pickup truck, was headed southbound on Route 118 when he swerved and clipped a 2012 Hyundai Sonata and struck a Hyundai Santa Fe in the northbound lane head-on, state police in Somers reported. Salguera-Ramirez, Santa Fe driver Elaine Mazzeo, of Somers, and Caratzas were transported to Putnam...

Last week, a jury of 13 military officers found Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan guilty of 13 counts of murder and 32 counts of attempted murder for his shooting rampage at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood in November 2009. The conviction followed a trial in which Hasan, acting as his own legal representative, offered little by way of defense and stated early in the trial that evidence would show that, “I am the shooter.” Hasan’s conviction notwithstanding, the public, U.S. law enforcement agencies, and the broader counterterrorism community must not allow this small legal victory to cloud...

Now wait a minute. We're constantly told that no Muslims in the U.S. -- none -- adhere to Al Qaeda's understanding of Islam, and only greasy Islamophobes think otherwise. So how did Amiir Farouk Ibrahim, no doubt known to all and sundry back home in Pennsylvania as a solid and respectable burgher of serious mien, come to misunderstand his peaceful religion so resoundingly? "American passport found at al Qaeda base in northern Syria," by Bill Roggio for the Long War Journal, July 23 (thanks to Jerk Chicken): A passport said to belong to an American citizen was found among a...

WHAT REALLY DIED IN AUSCHWITZ What really died at Auschwitz ? Here's an interesting viewpoint. The following is a copy of an article written by Spanish writer Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez and published in a Spanish newspaper on Jan. 15, 2011. It doesn't take much imagination to extrapolate the message to the rest of Europe - and possibly to the rest of the world. "I walked down the street in Barcelona and suddenly discovered a terrible truth - Europe died in Auschwitz ... We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture,...

I was inclined to be kindly disposed toward the incoming archbishop of Los Angeles. Archbishop Jose Gomez faces a thankless task, taking over a church that has just suffered a major persecution – one conducted by his predecessor in office. Whatever the legal cloud following him up from Texas, Archbishop Gomez was formed for the priesthood by members of Opus Dei, a worthy and much-maligned group. That much sounds promising. The state of catechesis and even of liturgy should improve in that long-suffering archdiocese – though it's too much to hope that Archbishop Gomez will deconsecrate the $189.7 million monstrosity...

A founding member of the Ready for Hillary PAC’s Finance Council is a member of George Soros’ progressive donor network, The Democracy Alliance, and has links to controversial progressive organizations Media Matters for America and the Tides Foundation. San Francisco environmentalist Susie Tompkins Buell is one of the key founding members of the Finance Council for Ready for Hillary, a super PAC that hopes to build a strong coalition of donors and online supporters in preparation for Hillary Clinton’s expected 2016 presidential campaign. …Buell, a co-founder of the Esprit clothing line, is a member of the Democracy Alliance, a secretive...

Wow! Governor Palin just posted the following on Facebook, along with a link to the article over at Breitbart that we posted last night:Please take a look at the article linked below to understand how the amnesty bill the Senate passed yesterday is a sad betrayal of working class Americans of every ethnicity who will see their wages lowered and their upward mobility lowered too. And yet we still do not have a secured border. This Senate-approved amnesty bill rewards lawbreakers and won’t solve any problems – as the CBO report notes that millions of more illegal immigrants will continue...

I had the opportunity very recently to have an extended conversation with a young gentleman who officially became a U.S. citizen just over a month ago. He claimed that he had always felt he “belonged here,” took the first opportunity to come to the U.S. presented to him and “never looked back.” He worked all sorts of jobs, traveled all over the country and met people from every socioeconomic sector and demographic. Coming from a country where the citizens have substantially less opportunity than in America and a more or less homogenous population, there were many things he still found...

For over a year and a half, I have focused on our GOP -- its key players who are indeed our enemies, the endless steering and manipulation of the election process, and the corruption of Tea Party candidates. Rove's shenanigans are being exposed, and Marco Rubio's association with him should attract our attention, because it is marking his departure from "the people". It is important to note that he defended Rove and the American Crossroads group's project to find the most "conservative" electable candidates. In a one-on-one interview with The Brody File recently, Rubio said: "They both have a place...

In a scene reminiscent of the SEIU’s siege of a Bank of America executive’s home in 2010, a mob of around 300 open borders protesters from across the country today descended on the home of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who is also counsel to the Immigration Law Reform Institute and, according to the following tweets from 501(c)3 Sunflower Community Action, the “King of Hate.”

In his June 4 column in The Washington Times, Frank J. Gaffney Jr. asked if Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) is serious about running for president in 2016--or if he'd rather just be an accepted fixture in the Washington establishment. In other words, Rubio's vote on the immigration overhaul is going to tell us whether he plans on being president or if he's happy just being the next Senator John McCain. Here's how Gaffney put it: If Mr. Rubio is content with merely paying lip service to the safety and security of the American people, he will continue to enable the...

Summary: UPDATED: Turns out U.S. government agencies might be tapping into into a lot more than just Verizon customer records. NSA is watching you US gov't defends NSA surveillance, slams 'reprehensible' journalists NSA: All up in your privacy junk since 1952 FBI, NSA said to be secretly mining data from tech giants The great paradox of our national security NSA 'top secret' spying order affects millions of Americans: FAQ Verizon records tapped by NSA Both the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are said to have been secretly mining data directly from the servers of at least...

A secret National Security Agency program to collect vast amounts of phone records has foiled multiple attempted terrorist attacks inside the United States, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee told reporters on Thursday. Sen. Dianne Feinstein did not specify how many attempted attacks had been prevented, or the nature of the threats, but the California Democrat said there had been more than one. The remarks were made to reporters following a meeting with senators who were concerned over a report in a British newspaper that the NSA had requested phone records from a division of telecommunications giant Verizon. According...

A top-secret April PowerPoint slideshow details how the National Security Agency partnered with nine tech companies, including Apple, Microsoft and Google, to monitor users activity. The NSA got direct access to these companies servers´ in order to directly watch user communications, according to the presentation obtained by the Washington Post and the Guardian. The program was nominally aimed at foreign actors, but as the Post reports, purely domestic communications could easily end up in NSA hands, so long as an algorithm estimated at least a 51 percent probability that they were foreign.

Since the Guardian story about the NSA seizure of the Verizon phone records of millions of Americans dropped last night, the administration and its allies have been asserting that privacy wasn’t invaded because intelligence agencies didn’t listen in on those calls. “The order reprinted overnight does not allow the government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls. The information acquired does not include the content of any communications or the name of any subscriber. It relates exclusively to call details, such as a telephone number or the length of a telephone call,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters aboard...

A timely video from Reason TV on the surveillance state’s newest venture: Cameras and microphones on city buses, just in case Al Qaeda decides to plan its next attack on municipal transportation within earshot of other passengers. Not every city does this, but the practice is spreading — early adapters include San Francisco, Baltimore, and Hartford with funding from, you guessed it, DHS. It’s darkly amusing to think of someone on the bus in one of those cities, reading the news today about the NSA/Verizon warrant on their cell phone, and worrying that the state has their phone records. Who...

<p>The Washington Post has published a remarkable report showing that the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been monitoring the central servers of major Internet companies -- Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple -- and "extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time."</p>