Free Republic

President Barack Obama has presided over billions spent battling the Islamic State, despite, by his own admission, lacking a clear and complete strategy to defeat the terror group. War against Islamic State has cost a total of $2.91 billion, averaging $9.2 million per day, according to the Pentagon. More than 50 percent of the cost is directly tied to airstrikes, The Hill reports. Republican Sen. John McCain has criticized the campaign against Islamic State as too weak, noting that 75 percent of airstrike missions return without firing a weapon. Speaking on CBS’s “Face The Nation” in late May, McCain said,...

We were trying to build a central government in a country that never had a central government. Afghanistan is called a country but it is really just a name for a territory housing a bunch of loosely related tribes who occupy the land between Pakistan and the other Central Asian ‘stans. Many of the Afghans, probably the majority, practice a brutal, fundamentalist kind of Islam full of executions, beatings, with special attention being meted out on women and homosexuals. People of different religions aren't exactly favored either, to put it mildly.

A dispute that began after a passenger refused to pull up his sagging pants led to his arrest and removal from a plane at San Francisco International Airport on Wednesday, police said. Deshon Marman, 20, a University of New Mexico football player who was in the city to attend the funeral of a close friend, former Lincoln High School standout David Henderson, was being held at San Mateo County Jail on suspicion of trespassing, battery and resisting arrest. Henderson was shot May 26 on Kirkwood Avenue and died 11 days later. On Wednesday, San Francisco police got a call about...

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is apologizing for saying the lives of the more than 3,000 U.S. troops killed in the Iraq war were "wasted." During his first campaign trip this weekend, the Illinois senator told a crowd in Iowa: "We now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted." He immediately apologized on Sunday, saying the remark was "a slip of the tongue." During an appearance Monday in Nashua, N.H., he apologized again, telling reporters he meant to criticize the civilian leadership of the war, not those serving in the military....

"Our goal is not to cope with the drug problem, but to actively reduce substance abuse in our society," Walters said in an address to the National Treatment Accountability for Safer Communities conference. [...] "We have a responsibility - as family members, employers, physicians, educators, religious leaders, neighbors, colleagues and friends - to reach out to help these people," Walters said. "We must find ways to lead them back to drug-free lives."