Free Republic

China , Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Pakistan... US president Barack Obama ran through the gamut of nations as he articulated another elegant Asia policy speech in Tokyo this week. Conspicuous by its absence was India. Was India not on his radar? Or was it such a close ally that he skipped naming it at a public function? It left New Delhi wondering. Just two days later, bam! He did something even more astonishing by acquiescing in a Chinese demand to let Beijing assume the role of a monitor in South Asia, an area where China is seen by India as...

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder continued the federal government's campaign to reach out to local Arab Americans, saying last night in Detroit that civil rights must be respected even as the country deals with security threats. "For the last nine months, I've heard from Muslim and Arab Americans who feel uneasy about their relationship with their government, who feel isolated and discriminated against by law enforcement," Holder said, according to the Detroit Free Press. "It is inconsistent with what America is all about." Holder spoke at the Detroit Marriott as part of the Advocates and Leaders for Police and Community...

Reality Check: The "Rationing" Smear... Again?Posted by Dan Pfeiffer November 20, 2009 at 03:03 PM EST When people use arguments they know are bogus, it's probably because they know they don't have any valid arguments at their disposal. So it would seem with opponents of reform in the Senate spending today obsessed with arguments about "rationing" that were debunked months ago. Their attacks are focused on the fact that the legislation supports research into what treatments work best for patients. Before we go any further, let's just say this as plainly as possible: Under health insurance reform, this research cannot...

GAY ACTIVISTS BULLY D.C. PRIESTS November 20, 2009Catholic League president Bill Donohue addresses a serious issue involving gay activists in the District of Columbia:A new homosexual website, ChurchOuting.org, is intent on publicly disclosing who the gay priests are in the Archdiocese of Washington. The goal of this outing is to intimidate gay priests, as well as heterosexual priests who may be “romantically involved,” into voicing objections to the Catholic Church’s opposition to gay marriage. This initiative is the work of Phil Attey, self-described as “Liberal-Gay-Ardent Obama Supporter”; he was active in the Obama Pride Metro-DC campaign. According to one...

I am a fan of horror movies. I have basically seen it all. But this video from Barack Hussein's site makes me physically ill, and I'm not exaggerating. This is nothing short of calling Republicans baby killers.

Read: “Some strange ideological impulse—rather than common sense and respect for the rule of law—is driving the Obama administration to give special treatment to the perpetrator of one of the greatest war crimes ever committed against the United States” per CNSNEWS.com’s Terence P. Jeffrey. “. . .ideological impulse. . .” Richard Morris stated the Obama motive being an “ideological” one. What these two men are saying when using the term “ideological” is Muslim. It is the theology of the Koran. It is what Allah would have Obama do.

Author Larry Sinclair, who insists he had sex and did cocaine with Barack Obama, is taking his campaign for revenge to Congress - and insiders say the furious First Lady vows to crush him! GLOBE bares all the details of the bitter battle in an exclusive you can't afford to miss

"Stop portraying the Prophet Mohammed as a suicide bomber or more Muslims will become suicide bombers and murder you blasphemers." That's pretty much what Algeria's Ambassador to the U.N., Idriss Jazairy, who serves as chairman of the U.N.'s Ad Hoc Committee on Complementary Standards told the Associated Press in an interview about efforts by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to pass a U.N. treaty banning blasphemy against Islam.The exact quote from the AP:"If we keep hitting this glass wall and say there's nothing you can do about Islamophobia — you can do something about anti-Semitism but Islamophobia is...

Invited dinner guests included: Cabinet: Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Deputy Cabinet secretaries: Commerce Deputy Secretary Dennis Hightower and Education Deputy Secretary Adam Miller. Congress: Reps. Andre Carson (D-Ind.), John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) and Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.). Diplomats: Ambassador Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al Hussein of Jordan; Ambassador Adel A.M. Al Jubeir of Saudi Arabia; Ambassador Husain Haqqani of Pakistan; Ambassador Erlan A. Idrissov of Kazakhstan; Ambassador His Excellency Said, Tayeb Jawad of Afghanistan; Ambassador Aziz Mekouar...

A group called Love Honor Cherish launched an Internet-based effort today to collect enough signatures to place a measure repealing Prop. 8, the anti-gay marriage law, on the state ballot by next year. The signature-gathering drive will use social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, organizers said in a statement. “We’re taking names,” said John Henning, who is heading the SignForEquality.com effort launched to collect the signatures. "People throughout California can now help us win marriage back by the simple act of signing and collecting signatures.” Prop. 8 was approved by California voters a year ago, reversing a California...

Atlanta's gay community has lost its Southern Voice. The city's gay and lesbian weekly has shut its doors after 21 years. Southern Voice, along with David Atlanta, a publication about gay men's nightlife in Atlanta, closed after a long-time financial battle to stay afloat. Southern's owner, Washington, D.C.-based Window Media LLC, shuttered the weekly newspaper and a handful of other gay publications nationwide over the weekend, the newspaper's editor, Laura Douglas Brown, confirmed to the AJC on Monday. Employees arrived at the newspaper's offices off of Briarcliff Road early Monday to find the door locked and a sign posted on...

The poisonous ENDA is back. Barney Frank, the champion of gay America, will force a “debate” on the Employment Non Discrimination Act (ENDA) on Wednesday. Indications are it has a good chance of being signed into law. Frank has 189 cosponsors for the latest ENDA bill H.R.3017 and six of them are Republicans. According to Congressman George Miller: “The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (H.R. 3017), … would prohibit employment discrimination, preferential treatment, and retaliation on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity by employers with 15 or more employees.” This sounds okay right? Think again. If gays were discriminated against...

Connecticut’s year-old marriage equality law has meant hard-earned respect for same-sex couples — society’s official acceptance and the state’s unqualified recognition of their domestic happiness. “For same-sex couples, it’s a life-long dream” said Ridgefielder Barbara Simkins. “Who’d have thought there’d be such a day, that we’d have the same rights as every other human being in this country? But, unfortunately, it’s only in six states so far. I’m very very proud of Connecticut.” The state’s open-minded law has also made Ridgefield — with its pretty Main Street, nice restaurants, and a gay-owned bed and breakfast — a bit of a...

It’s one thing to avoid the “terrorist” label when reporting on Ft. Hood suspect Major Nidal Hasan. It’s quite another to say that those who do use it are making a political calculation to “paint the Democrats as soft terror.” Yet that’s what MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow insisted on her Nov. 11 broadcast. Maddow launched into a minute-and-a-half soliloquy on why it is bad for the Democratic Party when commentators label Hasan a “terrorist.” She even attempted to make the case on Hasan’s behalf against a terrorism label. Who needs a legal team when you have friends like Maddow and Chris...

Like many New Yorkers and members of the families of the nearly 3,000 innocent Americans murdered on that horrific Tuesday morning eight years ago, I'm outraged and insulted by President Obama's decision to transfer Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, to New York City for trial in civilian federal court. The decision will go down in history as one of the worst made by any US president. While it may be hailed by Europeans, the ACLU and the far-left-wing of the Democratic Party, the president's action actually threatens American lives and weakens US national security.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Friday that the Obama administration will push for “immigration reform” by giving the estimated 14 million people who are in the United States illegally “fair pathway to earned legal status.” “A tough and fair pathway to earned legal status will mandate that illegal immigrants meet a number of requirements—including registering, paying a fine, passing a criminal background check, fully paying all taxes and learning English,” Napolitano said Friday at a panel discussion at the liberal Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. “These are substantial requirements that will make sure this population gets right...

In surveying the cultural carnage in the wake of the worst terrorist attack on a military installation in U.S. history, it bears noting that there have been seismic shifts in America. When America was free of the shackles of Islam, say, fifty years ago, the current response to such an attack by an enemy faction would have been unthinkable. I have watched in abject horror the elites' stunning reaction to this act of war. The denial, the submission, the excuses, the dodging, the self-flagellation, the shame -- the deceiving of the American people by the media, the military, society, law...

Ben Smith, following on Eli Lake’s blockbuster story, has a must-read post on the emerging scandal concerning the mullahs’ favorite front group, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). The issues go far beyond whether NIAC has been illegally operating without registering as a foreign agent, and have ensnared NIAC’s close ally, none other than J Street. First, NIAC is a Soros-backed group. Soros is of course the money behind MoveOn.org and got J Street up and running. He is also paying “the $90,000 annual salary of the NIAC staffer, Patrick Disney.” The Left’s moneyman is plainly in the mullah’s corner....

Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim and always has been a Muslim. His disgraceful conduct in response to the Ft. Hood murders strengthens the case. While campaigning Obama and his lackeys did everything they could to smother the truth about his background, but the truth is now shining through. Leftist websites like Urban Legends and Media Matters led the counterattacks against anyone who raised questions about Obama. CNN boasted of sending a crew to Indonesia to check out the school Obama attended in 1971 and guess what? They were told it was NOT a religious institution when he went there,...

Though it’s been moving in this direction for quite some time, political correctness has finally gone from a cute liberal idea meant not to offend anyone to become a dangerous idea that threatens the lives of American soldiers and citizens... Hasan is a Muslim. Witnesses say that, just before he began shooting, he yelled “Allahu Akbar!” meaning, in English, “Allah is great!” This is a war cry used by radical Islamic jihadists. He was known to be an admirer of Anwar al-Awlaki, an imam with various ties to al-Qaeda and someone found on a number of United States and United...

Last week, there was a spate of editorials and punditry on how President Obama and his team have misfired in their efforts to have Israelis and Palestinians back at the table negotiating a final peace deal. Even NYTimes’ Tom Friedman let forth his frustration by calling for the President to “get out of the picture” and leave Israelis and Palestinians alone until they are ready to come back to the table of their own needs and will. (Hey, wasn’t that an approach Friedman and others regularly attacked President G.W. Bush for engaging in?) This week saw Rahm Emanuel standing in...

Few words have been more popular in recent years than "diversity." And few concepts have been more destructive. Destructive of our social fabric, destructive of our moral well-being, destructive of our ability to make judgments. In schools, non-profits and government programs across the nation, diversity has been held up as a great and noble prize. Some objective to be fought for and given prominence. It has become the top priority in institutions from colleges to corporations. And it has become a philosphy handed down like the word of god from the pulpits of education, business and government. And yet it...

Recently on ABC television news, one of their videos showed a U.S. Marine hunkered down in Afghanistan complaining on camera that he was not allowed to shoot back when under fire. This situation resulted from Obama’s new rules of engagement from his new Afghanistan commander. General McChrystal explained it to BBC news that they are now advising troops to break off from firefights with the Taliban, "If you are in a situation where you are under fire from the enemy... if there is any chance of creating civilian casualties or if you don't know whether you will create civilian casualties,...

Kerry Eleveld reports that there's a plan and a timetable for repealing "don't ask, don't tell": Repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” will likely be included as part of next year’s Department of Defense authorization bill in both chambers of Congress, Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said Wednesday. “Military issues are always done as part of the overall authorization bill,” Frank said, insisting that this has been the strategy for overturning the policy all along. “'Don’t ask, don’t tell' was always going to be part of the military authorization.” Frank said he has been in direct communication with the White House, House...

John Limbert will be the senior Iran official at the State Department, replacing Dennis Ross, who has moved to the National Security Council (and who has not been heard from publicly since). Should America be concerned? Yes. Limbert is not a neutral arbiter; he serves on the advisory board of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). What is the National Iranian American Council? The Council is widely considered the de facto lobby for the Iranian regime in America. It opposes sanctions on Iran, soft-pedals any controversial events in Iran, and counsels "patience" regarding Iran's stance towards its nuclear program. The...

Gay rights activists are looking to a possible vote to legalize same-sex marriage in New York State on Tuesday as a way to drive a national campaign that opponents say has lost momentum. Five U.S. states have already legalized gay marriage -- Iowa, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont -- but earlier this month voters in a sixth, Maine, chose to repeal such a law, which was due to take effect in September. Forty U.S. states have laws banning gay marriage. New York's Democratic-controlled State Assembly passed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage in May, but the proposed legislation faces a...

The Army psychiatrist suspected of killing 13 people at Fort Hood reportedly warned senior Army physicians in 2007 that the military should allow Muslim soldiers to be released as conscientious objectors instead of fighting in wars to avoid "adverse events." According to The Washington Post, Major Nidal Malik Hasan was supposed to make a presentation on a medical topic during his senior year as a psychiatric resident at Walter Reed Medical Center. Instead, Hasan lectured his supervisors and two dozen mental health staff members on Islam, homicide bombings and threats the military could encounter from Muslims conflicted about fighting against...

A homosexual blogger passed off as a "joke" a suggestion by a contributor to his website that there might be church bombings because of Christians' refusal to support the homosexual lifestyle. But several individuals named in the column are taking the threat seriously. "That is what Fort Hood teaches us," said Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, referring to the attack on the Texas Army base by a Muslim officer that killed 13 people and wounded 28. LaBarbera was cited by name in the postings on the "joemygod" website run by homosexual advocate Joe Jervis. "When people...

Throughout the primary campaign last year, Obama consistently said one of the genuine, important policy differences between him and Hillary Clinton was that he did not support an individual mandate to buy health insurance. I know people who voted for him in the primary on this one issue. One example of many: Senator Clinton. . . believes that we have to force people who don't have health insurance to buy it. Otherwise, there will be a lot of people who don't get it. I don't see those folks. And I think that it is important for us to recognize that...

Dr. Phil and the Fort Hood Killer His terrorist motive is obvious to everyone but the press and the Army brass. DOROTHY RABINOWITZ It can by now come as no surprise that the Fort Hood massacre yielded an instant flow of exculpatory media meditations on the stresses that must have weighed on the killer who mowed down 13 Americans and wounded 29 others. Still, the intense drive to wrap this clear case in a fog of mystery is eminently worthy of notice. The tide of pronouncements and ruminations pointing to every cause for this event other than the one obvious...

Building on the theme in President Obama’s Cairo speech of demonstrating respect for Islam by respecting U.S. Muslim communities, this morning Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano swore in Kareem Shora, the national executive director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, to a position on the Homeland Security Advisory Council, an outside-the-department group of national security experts that advises the secretary. (Members include 9/11 Commissioner Lee Hamilton and New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.) As far as I can tell, Shora is the first Arab rights or Muslim rights advocate on the panel. At the swearing-in ceremony in Albequerque, Shora, who was...

Aren't you proud of President Obama for being named Jihad Today's Man of the Year? It is an honor that is richly deserved.

Late this evening, the House passed the Affordable Health Care for America Act, H.R. 3962, by a vote of 220 to 215. While this is a historic step toward improving health care for all Americans, it is also a tremendous advance for the health needs of LGBT people. HRC lobbied the three committees involved in drafting the bill to include provisions that would help LGBT people in particular obtain the improved access to health care that the Act is designed to provide. Some of these measures have been part of HRC’s legislative agenda as free-standing bills for many years. The...

ABU DHABI // The killing of 13 people by a Muslim psychiatrist at an American army base must not lead to the victimisation of Muslim Americans, the US secretary of homeland security has said. On a visit to the capital, Janet Napolitano said grassroots efforts were vital to preserving relations between Muslim Americans and the wider community after Friday’s shootings at Fort Hood in Texas. “We object to, and do not believe, that anti-Muslim sentiment should emanate from this,” she said. “This was an individual who does not represent the Muslim faith.” Describing the killings as “a terrible tragedy”, Ms...

Labels and Gay Benefits in Health Bill By ROBERT PEAR Published: November 7, 2009 WASHINGTON — Lower taxes for gay couples who receive health benefits from employers. Nutrition labeling requirements for snack food sold in vending machines and many restaurants. A new program to teach parents how to interact with their children. Those are some of the little-noticed provisions in a mammoth health care bill taken up Saturday by the House of Representatives. The main purpose of the bill is to make health insurance readily available to all Americans. To that end, it would expand Medicaid and provide hundreds of...

General George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, said on Sunday that he was concerned that speculation about the religious beliefs of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of killing 12 fellow soldiers and one civilian and wounding 30 0thers in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, could “cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.” “I’ve asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that,” General Casey said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union. “It would be a shame — as great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame...

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — The U.S. Homeland Security secretary says she is working to prevent a possible wave of anti-Muslim sentiment after the shootings at Fort Hood in Texas. Janet Napolitano says her agency is working with groups across the United States to try to deflect any backlash against American Muslims following Thursday's rampage by Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim who reportedly expressed growing dismay over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The shootings left 13 people dead and 29 wounded. Napolitano was in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday for talks with security officials and...

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the gunman who killed 13 at America's Fort Hood military base, once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats. He also told colleagues at America's top military hospital that non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire. The outburst came during an hour-long talk Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, gave on the Koran in front of dozens of other doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington DC, where he worked for six years before arriving at...

"NEW YORK — A New York City bicycle cabbie who mocked the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl and posted a prayer on the Web calling for the murder of Jews is now sending a "Get Well Soon" message to the suspected Fort Hood gunman, the New York Post reported. Yousef al-Khattab, 41, a radical Muslim in the borough of Queens who runs RevolutionMuslim.com, claims on the site that the soldiers massacred at the Texas base deserved to be massacred, and he insists the victims are in "eternal hellfire." As for the suspected gunman — Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik...

This is a video of an American group PRAISING the Islamic Murders at Ft Hood This is happening in America! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhHYiWCm8Gs

On Thursday afternoon, a radicalized Muslim US Army officer shouting, "Allahu akbar!" ("God is great!") committed the worst act of terror on American soil since 9/11. And no one wants to call it an act of terror or associate it with Islam. What cowards we are. Political correctness killed those patriotic Americans at Fort Hood as surely as the Islamist gunman did. And the media treat it like a case of nondenominational shoplifting. This was a terrorist act. When an extremist plans and executes a murderous plot against our unarmed soldiers to protest our efforts to counter Islamist fanatics, it's...

Newsweek's Evan Thomas regretted the Fort Hood mass murderer, Major Nidal Hasan, is a Muslim because of how that reality will be abused by conservatives. On this weekend's Inside Washington, Thomas, now Editor at Large with Newsweek after stints as Assistant Managing Editor and Washington bureau chief, rued: I cringe that he's a Muslim. I mean, because it inflames all the fears. I think he's probably just a nut case. But with that label attached to him, it will get the right wing going and it just -- I mean these things are tragic, but that makes it much worse.

Frustrated at California's woes, voters are sharply pessimistic about whether the next governor will be able to move the state in the right direction, and most believe California is in the midst of a long-term decline, a new Los Angeles Times/USC poll shows. Against that grim backdrop, next year's political contests loom as potentially volatile, but Democrats start out holding the upper hand, the poll found. .. In the election to replace Schwarzenegger, Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown, the only major figure currently angling for the Democratic nomination, was seen favorably by more than 4 in 10 voters, and unfavorably by...

Barack Hussein Obama II, used a crude gay-baiting sexual slur to denigrate Tea Party patriots in a talk with House Democrats yesterday on Capitol Hill, reported the New York Times:According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked, “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”The word 'teabag' is used to describe a sexual practice popular in the homosexual community. Earlier this year as the anti-big...

Incredibly, it appears that Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan, the alleged shooter in the massacre that resulted in at least 12 dead and 31 wounded at Fort Hood today, served on the Homeland Security Policy Institute’s presidential transition task force between April 2008 and January 2009 when Barack Obama was inaugurated as the nation’s 44th president.

MAJ. GEN. ROBERT SCALES (RET.) "This was a deliberate act of execution."

The suspect, a Virginia Tech graduate and one-time Vinton resident, was shot but survived at Fort Hood, Texas. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of shooting 12 people to death and wounding 31 others at Fort Hood, Texas, on Thursday, was the son of Roanoke merchants and restaurateurs, lived in Vinton and graduated from Virginia Tech. Hasan was born in Arlington to Palestinian immigrants from near Jerusalem who later settled in Vinton. Neighbors on Vinton's Ramada Road remembered him as a "studious" boy who went by "Michael." While his brother Eyad -- "Eddie" -- would play football with...

(SNIP) But instead of a somber chief executive offering reassuring words and expressions of sympathy and compassion, viewers saw a wildly disconnected and, inappropriately light president making introductory remarks. At the event, a Tribal Nations Conference hosted by the Department of Interior's Bureau of Indian affairs, the president thanked various staffers and offered a "shout-out" to "Dr. Joe Medicine Crow -- that Congressional Medal of Honor winner." Three minutes in, the president spoke about the shooting, in measured and appropriate terms. Who is advising him?

Witnesses to Thursday's massacre at Fort Hood said alleged shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was calm as he opened fire at a crowd of young soldiers, pausing only to reload before he was taken down by a female officer that many hailed today as a hero. "It was very deliberate in his approach, they said that he was calm," Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone, the base commander at Fort Hood, told "Good Morning America" today. "Several soldiers shot multiple times and were recounting how they were shot." The attacker killed 13 people, mostly military, and wounded 30. The Fort Hood...

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan never served a tour of duty in Iraq. But the psychiatrist worked inside two places that have seen the terrible fallout from the war – first Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in the nation's capital, and lately at Fort Hood, the giant Central Texas base. He dealt with some of the invisible wounds from the conflict. He counseled soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, perhaps getting a preview of the horrors of war that he had yet to see. But Hasan was, in many ways, very different from the soldiers and family members who had direct experience...