Free Republic

U.S. Speaker John Boehner may be signaling he's willing to move on immigration reform by hiring an expert on the issue, a fellow Republican says. Rebecca Tallent, director of immigration policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, was set to start as a new Boehner assistant Wednesday, The Hill newspaper reported. Former Gov. Haley Barbour, R-Miss., is co-chairman of the center's immigration task force. Barbour said Boehner's decision to hire Tallent was "affirmation of his strong desire to move legislation in 2014," the newspaper reported. The Hill said Boehner, R-Ohio, often has expressed his commitment to immigration reform, but...

People, it is time to talk about guns. My entire adult life has been dedicated to the deliberate management of violence. There are no two ways around that fact. My job, at the end of the day, is about killing. I orchestrate violence. I am not proud of that fact. Indeed, I am often torn-up by the realization that not only is this my job, but that I am really good at my job. But my profession is about directed violence on behalf of the nation. What is happening inside our country is random and disgusting, and living here in...

This week in Washington, Senator Marco Rubio accused a fellow American of treason. Edward Snowden drew the Republican's ire by informing hundreds of millions of innocent people that the NSA is spying on them... Anyone familiar with the Snowden story will understand why Rubio's comments are misleading. Americans are concerned about their civil liberties because of the accurate information the former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor leaked. He isn't responsible for any conspiracy theories, except in the sense that a conspiracy is "an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act," and he exposed NSA and GCHQ cooperation on...

There’s good news and bad news in Barack Obama’s sucker deal with Iran. The Iranians get all the good news, and the West gets all the bad news. The only good news for the good guys is that the deal, like Obamacare, is President Obama’s baby. Sometimes, the baby daddy has to pay up. The president and his administration, having done the full grovel in Geneva, is now into full defensive mode. Stung by the cries of disbelief in Washington from a growing number of his partisan allies in Congress, the president insists that his handiwork “halted the progress of...

British and U.S. intelligence officials say they are worried about a "doomsday" cache of highly classified, heavily encrypted material they believe former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has stored on a data cloud. . . . . (A lot of information in the article. Check out comments, too.) .........................................................................................................

Recently, in the wake of another diplomatic disaster for the Obama regime, Secretary of State John Kerry said, “We are not blind and I don’t think we’re stupid.” He and the President may not think they’re stupid, but the leaders of nations around the world most certainly do. In a recent Wall Street Journal commentary by Brett Stephens, titled the “Axis of Fantasy vs. Axis of Reality”, he cited the French rejection of the negotiations with the Iranians, saying “the French also understand that the sole reason Iran has a nuclear program is to build a nuclear weapon…This now puts...

The top editor of Guns & Ammo became the second employee of the venerable firearms magazine to lose his job after a column advocating gun control backfired, prompting rifle-toting readers to unload on the publication. In a statement posted Wednesday on the InterMedia Outdoors-owned magazine’s homepage, Jim Bequette apologized to “each and every reader” of the magazine for Dick Metcalf’s column that appeared in its December issue, which generated “unprecedented” controversy and left readers “hopping mad” in regards to the magazine’s commitment to the Second Amendment. ********** In his column entitled “Let’s Talk Limits: Do certain firearm regulations really constitute...

These allegations relate to the quid-pro-quo that caused Magistrate Judge Robinson to enter the improper and illegal order of dismissal of the Indictment of Elizabeth Duke. In return for her dismissal, she received extraordinary consideration in the prosecution of her son, Philip Robinson Winkfield, who was facing 40 years. April 25, 2008 – Police arrest Philip Robinson Winkfield and seize five loaded guns, including two semiautomatic pistols, two shotguns and a semiautomatic assault rifle; a bullet resistant vest; 157 grams of heroin; 180 grams of crack; more than six pounds of marijuana and $8,000 cash. May 23, 2008 – Winkfield...

POTTSVILLE, Pa. — A freshman Democrat representing northeastern Pennsylvania's biggest cities and some anthracite coal towns will hold a town hall meeting on the federal health care law in the wake of an uproar over its website woes and insurers discontinuing plans that don't meet the law's standards. U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright was to appear Friday in Pottsville. Cartwright supports the law, even though he wasn't in office for its 2010 enactment. But a backlash over the law in the last mid-term election of 2014 helped drive Democrats from office and Republicans into the House majority.

Germany said it believed that U.S. intelligence agencies may be spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone, an intrusion that it said would constitute a “grave breach of trust” between the longtime allies. Ms. Merkel called President Barack Obama on Wednesday and made clear that such surveillance among allies would be “fully unacceptable,” her spokesman, Steffen [...]

Try getting an answer out of Bill Ayers. I dare you. Last week, I emailed the former Weather Underground bomber to quibble with an account in his latest book, “Public Enemy.” The chapter in question detailed the dinner Ayers hosted for me, Tucker Carlson, Matt Labash and Andrew Breitbart, among others, in January 2012. Ayers had donated the dinner for a local Chicago-area charity auction and Tucker pulled a fast one and purchased it. It was a bizarre evening, but my quibble was with how Ayers said I defined conservatism. I don’t recall defining it the way he said I...

Republican Senator John McCain ripped conservative Senator Ted Cruz tonight before the final senate vote to approve a budget plan. McCain was on with Greta Van Susteren. McCain has a long history of bashing his fellow Republican. [video]

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., is no fan of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. The New York congressman made it clear on Monday’s "Morning Joe" that he will work to stop Cruz and his allies in their tracks. “I’ve been speaking out against Ted Cruz and this whole crazy movement since it started,” King told MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski. King also said he thought that “there’s no doubt that the Democrats are winning,” and that President Obama needed to play “a more aggressive role” in the negotiations to reopen the government and lift the debt ceiling. King also warned that Cruz and...

Moscow (AFP) - US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden warned of dangers to democracy in the first video released of the fugitive since Russia granted him temporary asylum in August. "If we can't understand the policies and programmes of our government we can't grant our consent in regulating them," Snowden said in one of the short video clips posted on the WikiLeaks website Friday night. The anti-secrecy group said the videos were filmed Wednesday when Snowden met with a group of four retired US ex-intelligence workers and activists now seeking to promote ethics within the profession. Snowden, a former National Security...

- Rep. Duncan Hunter was on with Megyn Kelly again tonight to discuss the fact that Obama and Harry Reid had a change of heart and tonight Obama signed a bill to ensure military families get the death benefits they so deserve. Megyn Kelly made a great point during this, that if it was really a concern for the DoD that death benefits weren't going to be paid out to military families, that they would have come back to Congress 9 days ago and said fix it. But they never did, according to Hunter, who says that someone made a...

Glenn Beck told his audience on Monday that the following morning on his radio program, he will reveal the name of a Republican lawmaker who said anyone who stands with FreedomWorks or the Senate Conservatives Fund is a “traitor” to the Senate.

Great news: Jane Fonda has been chosen to receive the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award. The two time Oscar winner will be celebrated by Hollywood on June 5, 2014 in Hollywood. Fonda won Best Actress twice, in 1971 for Klute and 1977 for Coming Home. She’s been nominated seven times altogether, for They Shoot Horses Don’t They, Julia, The China Syndrome, On Golden Pond, and The Morning After. Before Meryl Streep, Fonda held the unofficial title of the Greatest American Actress. She also won an Emmy for The Dollmaker, and has been nominated for a Tony Award. She was...

If Peter King’s brand of Republicanism seems to be on the wane these days, the Long Island congressman isn’t letting it go quietly. Kng, 69, has long been one of the Hill’s most quotable and irascible troublemakers, a frequent presence on cable television with an apparently boundless capacity for outrage. He has fumed over topics as serious as Hurricane Sandy relief and aid for 9/11 responders, and as comparatively trivial as the White House party crashers and the death of Michael Jackson (whom he called a “lowlife” and a “pervert.”) King broke with Newt Gingrich over the government shutdowns of...

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry tells the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in Bali that Republican members of Congress are jeopardizing American foreign relations. After the ongoing government shutdown led President Barack Obama to back out of a long-planned summit in Indonesia, Secretary of State John Kerry, who went in Obama’s stead, took a hardline stance toward the partisan bickering in Washington. Kerry’s tone turned aggressive during a media appearance at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Bali on Saturday, launching a spirited attack on Republican members of Congress for spurring the federal shutdown that forced Obama to cancel...

Records show the U.S. government spent nearly $5 million to court-martial and convict an Army psychiatrist in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting rampage. … Records also show that in the months before his trial, Army helicopters ferried Hasan from the Bell County Jail to Fort Hood so he could work on his defense in his private office at a cost of more than $194,000. …

Sen. John McCain has hired a controversial Syria analyst who recently was fired by one D.C. organization and resigned from another after it emerged that she inflated her academic credentials. The Republican senator's office confirmed to Fox News that Elizabeth O'Bagy was hired as a legislative assistant, and will start work next week. "Elizabeth is a talented researcher, and I have been very impressed by her knowledge and analysis in multiple briefings over the last year. I look forward to her joining my office," McCain said in a statement.

Senator John McCain lashed out at fellow Republican Ted Cruz on Wednesday over a Nazi appeasement comparison he made during his all-night, anti-Obamacare marathon on the U.S. Senate floor. McCain, a Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war, said the comparison was inappropriate. He said he had taken Cruz aside privately to tell him, and got a response he did not like: Cruz told him his appeaser reference applied not to distinguished members of the Senate but only media "pundits." "I resoundingly reject" Cruz's comments, said McCain, a senior Republican and former presidential candidate. "I think it's wrong and I...

Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to sign the UN Arms Trade Treaty sometime Wednesday after opposition from Americans and the National Rifle Association. More from Reuters: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, in a move that puts the Obama administration at odds with the powerful American gun lobby, will sign the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty regulating the $70 billion international conventional arms business, diplomats said on Tuesday. A senior State Department official said President Barack Obama's administration would notify the U.S. Senate on Tuesday and Kerry would sign the treaty on Wednesday on the sidelines of the annual...

â–¶ GOP Strategist Nicolle Wallace: Ted Cruz Is 'Lying to the Voters' - 8/21/13 - YouTube

Video at link.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s dramatic new power plant emissions standards already have touched off a firestorm within the coal industry and on Capitol Hill, with top Republicans promising to fight tooth-and-nail against President Obama’s climate-change agenda. The EPA, the leading actor in the White House’s ambitious global-warming initiative, released the limits on Friday. Hopes that they’d be much less stringent than previous proposals proved to be misplaced. Coal-state lawmakers from both parties are promising to push back. “The president is leading a war on coal and what that really means for Kentucky families is a war on jobs. And the...

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., has recently compared conservative efforts to defund Obamacare to kamikaze pilots and Gen. George Custer. Thursday, he called the effort "fraud." "There's a wing within our party led by people like (Sen.) Ted Cruz, who have been really, as far as I'm concerned, carrying out a fraud with the people" by saying the strategy will work, King said Thursday on CNN's "The Situation Room." Cruz, R-Texas, has been leading the defund effort along with Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah. More moderate members of the GOP say the effort will only hurt the...

This week will bring a major gut check for President Barack Obama’s climate agenda — specifically, his appetite to take on coal. The Environmental Protection Agency is due to release a White House-vetted proposal by Friday that would impose the first-ever limits on greenhouse gases produced by future power plants. It would especially squeeze plants that burn coal, the nation’s cheapest, most abundant and dirtiest fuel source. The rule coming this week wouldn’t apply to existing power plants — EPA will tackle those in a second rule due to be proposed next June and finished a year later. But EPA’s...

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) will honor former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with this year’s Liberty Medal from the National Constitution Center. The award will be presented to Clinton on September 10th, the eve of the first anniversary of the terrorist attack on the United States mission in Benghazi that killed four Americans. ... Upon the announcement of Clinton’s award in June, Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft wrote, “Really Jeb, no one else came to mind?"

State Department officials said Thursday they made it quite clear they did not want Pelosi to visit Syria, a nation that is listed as a state sponsor of terror and is home to terror group Hezbollah, which started a low-grade war with Israel last summer. Defying the White House's Middle East policy by meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad, Pelosi said, "The road to Damascus is a road to peace."

Officials said Fort Hood gunman Nidal Hasan was shaved after his move to death row and Texas legislators proposed a new compensation bill for shooting victims. Hasan, who was convicted in the 2009 shooting deaths of 13 people and injury of 31 others at the Texas military base, grew a beard for what he said were religious regions prior to the start of his court-martial. The move drew the ire of the judge, who found Hasan in contempt of court, causing a one-year delay of his trial. After Hasan, 42, was flown to Fort Leavenworth, Kan., Friday to be put...

Appearing on Meet The Press on Sunday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) slammed Secretary of State John Kerry on his willingness to intervene militarily in Syria by twisting his most famous words against him. "I would ask John Kerry, How can you ask a man to be the first one to die for a mistake?" Paul said, in reference to Kerry's famous words against the Vietnam War to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971.

On a good day, transgender people can expect entirely well-meaning journalists and commentators to screw up what pronoun to use when describing one of their own in the news. (The Times and Associated Press are at least trying.) But Fox & Friends leaped into the lead this morning for the most bigoted and insensitive handling of Chelsea Manning by a major news organization when it played the Aerosmith song "Dude (Looks Like a Lady)" to tease a segment. In case you didn't catch the subtle reference, the song's title was displayed in the upper left corner of the screen. "That's...

Steven Salaita, an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, argues in a column posted this morning at Salon.com that Americans should stop saying "support the troops," calling it "trite and tiresome." He argues that patriotism and voicing support for the troops is merely a cover for American "imperialism" and likens American soldiers to murderers and ignorant individuals who "act like an Adam Sandler character."

The movie "Lee Daniels' The Butler" saw its weekend box office receipts plummet by nearly a third, from $24.6 million in its opening week to $17 million last week, after a storm of protests from Republican and veterans groups. The film depicts a White House butler who served eight presidents, and has come under fire for its portrayal of former President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy as being racially insensitive and for casting Jane Fonda as the first lady. Supporters of President Reagan and veterans groups especially have criticized the film, with some calling for boycotts. Though the film...

George Washington would not be welcome in the modern U.S. military. Neither would Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin, according to Department of Defense training documents that depict the Founding Fathers as extremists and conservative organizations as “hate groups.” The Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute training guide was obtained by Judicial Watch under a Freedom of Information Act Request. It was acquired from the Air Force but originated from the Pentagon. “This document deserves a careful examination by military leadership,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told Fox News. “Congress needs to conduct better oversight and figure out what the heck is...

Maj. Nidal Hasan and many of his victims in the Fort Hood shooting seem to want the same thing—his death. But while survivors and relatives of the dead view lethal injection as justice, the Army psychiatrist appears to see it as something else—martyrdom. …

OKLAHOMA CITY, August 13, 2013 ― The election of Senator Marco Rubio to the U.S. Senate in 2010 was a moment of celebration for the newly formed Tea Party movement as Rubio became known as the “Tea Party darling.” Rubio’s stump speech about his family’s escape from Fidel Castro’s Cuba never failed to bring people to their feet. The speech reminded his listeners that America is the greatest country on earth and a beacon to the world’s oppressed. Upon being sworn in, Rubio fought hard against Obamacare and worked to get the U.S. back on the path of economic success....

Bradley Manning, the Army private sentenced to military prison for leaking classified documents, revealed he intends to live out the remainder of his life as a woman. “I am Chelsea Manning. I am female,” the Army private wrote in a statement read on TODAY Thursday. “Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible. I hope that you will support me in this transition.” Manning, 25, was sentenced to 35 years in prison on Wednesday after having been found guilty of 20 charges ranging from espionage to theft...

So what if he disclosed information that potentially threatened American lives and security interests? Manning's a "frail guy who doesn't look threatening to anyone." So you have to question the length of his sentence. Such was the bizarre logic that Chris Matthews employed as he bemoaned Bradley Mannings' sentence--which could in practice see him freed in less than 10 years. Matthews was also moved by the fact that in military prison, Manning will be surrounded by people "who won't like him." View the video here.

FORT MEADE, Maryland-A U.S. military judge on Tuesday started considering the sentence of soldier Bradley Manning for the largest leak of classified information in the country's history - and she said it will be announced Wednesday morning.

Boyd Marcus, a veteran Republican political consultant whose client list has included U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and former Gov. Jim Gilmore, is endorsing Democrat Terry R. McAuliffe and advising his campaign over GOP nominee Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia's neck-and-neck race for governor. The announcement by McAuliffe's campaign, confirmed to The Associated Press on Tuesday in a phone interview with Marcus, rocked Virginia politics and exposed the clearest sign to date of bad blood within the GOP between its establishment and the tea party conservatives who comprise Cuccinelli's ardent army and control the state Republican Party machinery. (snip) The...

Michael Grunwald, Senior National Correspondent for TIME Magazine, spent much of last night trying to find the mythical delete from internet button that many before him have sought out so desperately. At 7:25 P.M. on Saturday, Grunwald offered his opinion on how the United States should solve the problem of Julian Assange and his antagonizing position toward the U.S. Here's the tweet:Looking beyond the fact that Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks and Australian citizen, has never been convicted (or charged) with a crime under United States law, Grunwald's use of the phrase "take out" more appropriately describes a Mafia-style hit...

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin is a statist and a bully. The Senator, known for comparing U.S. soldiers to Nazis, recently used his senatorial letterhead to demand answers from us here at the Freedom Foundation. Sen. Durbin wants to know whether the Freedom Foundation is, or ever has been, a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

On the same day that Bradley Manning finally took to the stand and apologized for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks - the army he betrayed released a picture of the troubled soldier wearing a blond wig, makeup and lipstick. He addressed the court after a day of testimony about his troubled childhood in Oklahoma and the extreme psychological pressure that experts said he felt in the 'hyper-masculine' military because of his gender-identity disorder — his feeling that he was a woman trapped in a man's body.

Jane Fonda says conservative icons like Sarah Palin and Bill O'Reilly would benefit from watching Aaron Sorkin's show "The Newsroom," on which she plays a CEO of the company that owns the cable network. "Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, the tea partiers, Sarah Palin are the people that I wish would listen to it and really hear the logic of what is being said, you know, because it's the tension between a news division, a news bureau, that's trying to get good ratings as opposed to telling the truth, or telling what's an important story, and it's an important...

John Kerry: 'This Little Thing Called the Internet ... Makes It Much Harder to Govern' August 13, 2013 - 5:29 PM By Terence P. Jeffrey (CNSNews.com) - Speaking to State Department personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, Brazil, on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry said that "this little thing called the Internet ... makes it much harder to govern." He also said that "ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators." "I’m a student of history, and I love to go back and read a particularly...

Speaking to State Department personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, Brazil, on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry said that "this little thing called the Internet ... makes it much harder to govern." He also said that "ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators." "I’m a student of history, and I love to go back and read a particularly great book like [Henry] Kissinger’s book about diplomacy where you think about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the balance of power and how difficult it was...

Thursday marks the one-year anniversary of the start of President Obama’s deferred deportation program for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children, which he authorized through executive authority last summer. As The Washington Post reported Tuesday, the Obama administration has granted more than 400,000 of those immigrants temporary legal status to work or go to school without fear of deportation. Now, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is warning that the administration is likely to dramatically expand the program to cover the majority of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants if Congress fails to pass comprehensive immigration reform. Rubio has been...