Free Republic

An accused terrorist who was at the center of two previous Supreme Court decisions over his years-long detention by the U.S. military has lost his latest legal challenge. A federal judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has ruled that Fawzi al-Odah of Kuwait can be held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, denying his petition for habeas corpus, which had demanded that the government justify his imprisonment. In a ruling released by the court Tuesday, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly offered a more restrictive view of executive authority to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects than the...

"During my visit to Berlin last week I witnessed first hand the price we paid for being helpless, but we returned to our homeland, and we are obligated to strengthen our hold on the land and preserve our independence," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told students at a school in Sdeh Eliyahu belonging to the cooperative settlement movement (Hityashvut Ovedet). Netanyahu visited a number of schools throughout the country on Tuesday, the first day of the new school year. "We advocate education that stresses values, Zionism and a love of the land, which you are practicing here," he told the...

The Supreme Court, in District of Columbia v. Heller, declared that Washington’s 32-year ban on all functional firearms violated the Second Amendment. Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion, however, applied only to possession of guns in the home. The court did not address, and was not asked to address, firearms carried outside the home. That’s the issue posed in a new lawsuit against the District by Tom Palmer (disclosure: my colleague at the Cato Institute) and four other plaintiffs — represented by Alan Gura, the lawyer who successfully argued Heller before the court. After Heller, the District relaxed its ban on...

Sarah Palin's spokeswoman, Meg Stapleton, says the former governor will indeed be speaking in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong-based brokerage firm CLSA said this week that Palin will be the keynote speaker at their annual investor's conference this month. But, given recent history, it seemed prudent to make sure Palin was actually on board. Stapleton also confirmed reports that Palin has signed with the Washington Speakers Bureau to handle her paid speaking engagements.

Interesting town hall in Chicago--being broadcast live. You can listen on internet.

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency is refusing to make public hundreds of pages of internal documents about the agency’s defunct detention and interrogation program, saying such disclosures would jeopardize national security by revealing classified intelligence sources and operations. The C.I.A.’s argument to withhold the material, laid out Monday in a declaration to a federal court in New York, comes a week after the Obama administration declassified documents about abuses in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons and the Justice Department began investigating the actions of C.I.A. operatives.

This is the Pollster.com average of National Presidential Job Approval Polls (Rasmussen, Zogby, Gallup, etc.) And it's the last time the average will be a positive number for Obama. Tonight, Obama is ahead by a tenth of a percent: 47.6 v. 47.5

Van Jones takes a page out of “Rules for Radicals” too 2009 August 31 tags: Barack Obama, News, NewsRealblog, Politics, Saul Alinsky, Van Jones by johnperazzo For the past several days, FOX News’ Glenn Beck has been exhorting his viewers to lay aside their ideologies and ask themselves, with open minds, whether what they are witnessing in the Obama administration is congruent with what they would expect of a President governing from somewhere near the center of the political spectrum rather than from the extreme left. A key figure upon whom Beck has focused his attention is Van Jones, Obama’s “Green Jobs...

Same-sex couples in Vermont began to marry on Tuesday after a law legalizing gay and lesbian marriage took effect... As couples tied the knot at the stroke of midnight, the South Burlington, Vt.-based Ben & Jerry's ice cream company renamed their popular "Chubby Hubby" flavor to "Hubby Hubby." "The legalization of marriage for gay and lesbian couples in Vermont is certainly a step in the right direction, and something worth celebrating with peace, love – and plenty of ice cream," said Ben & Jerry’s CEO Walt Freese, according to the Boston Herald. Free "Hubby Hubby" was handed out Tuesday. The...

Some see this as simply a way to comply with the Presidential Records Act, others remember the who "fishy" incident and see this as a new Big Brother Obama attempt to collect information on individual citizens. The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) has discovered a secret White House project to harvest personal date from social networking websites like facebook and twitter. The White House office of New Media has sent out a request for proposals from technology vendors to develop and run the project. According to the proposal request, the information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails,...

The governing party in South Africa, the ANC, has condemned as "racist" a decision by Canada to grant a white South African man refugee status. Brandon Huntley, 31, had told officials in Canada he could not return to South Africa after seven different attacks.

WND has found new evidence that Stanley Ann Dunham, President Obama's mother, was in Seattle in August 1961, within days of her son's birth, contrary to the accepted narrative. In a video that has been removed from the Internet since the 2008 presidential campaign, Susan Blake, a high school friend of Obama's mother, gave an interview in which she discussed seeing Dunham shortly after Barack Obama Jr.'s Aug. 4, 1961, birth. The video can be seen here:

It's not that Americans mind being BS-ed. It's that we get agitated if sufficient effort is not put into the spinning of the yarn. BS-ing has a long history in America. In our earlier years, the tall tale became an American art form. The colorful characters who tamed the frontier loved to sit around campfires swapping wildly exaggerated stories about America and American heroes. They told tales about lands so fertile they produced watermelons as big as houses. They talked about people, such as John Henry, Daniel Boone and Johnny Appleseed, who achieved super-human feats. We've had our share of...

One thing about former Vice President Dick Cheney: He'll never be mis taken for a wallflower. And good for him. With the eighth anniversary of 9/11 rapidly approaching, Cheney took to the airwaves Sunday to strip some hide off the Obama administration over its decision to target past CIA efforts to protect America from terrorism. "It's an outrageous political act that will do great damage, long term, to our capacity to be able to have people take on difficult jobs [and] make difficult decisions," he charged on Fox News Sunday. He's right, of course -- especially given the startling revelations...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (Aug. 31) - A judge ruled Monday that prosecutors withheld evidence in the trial of an ex-high school football coach charged with reckless homicide in the death of one of his players. The ruling came on the opening day of jury selection in David Jason Stinson's trial. The former Pleasure Ridge Park coach is also charged with wanton endangerment in the death of 15-year-old offensive lineman Max Gilpin, who collapsed during practice while running in 94-degree heat last August. Gilpin died three days later

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) - A nurse's aide hit a homeless man with her car, drove home with him stuck headfirst in her broken windshield, and ignored his cries for help as he bled to death in her garage over the next two or three days, police say. One of the most disturbing features of the story is that the nurse's aide, Chante Mallard, told police she periodically went into the garage to apologize to the man for hitting him and leaving him to die in her windshield. Someone had taught her, no doubt, that if you do something bad...

I spoke with thousands of voters at town-hall meetings this summer. What I gathered from them is that it's not just the proposed overhaul of health care that has them upset. Many also expressed a sense of betrayal. In spite of their hope for change, it still appears that the government in Washington is run for its own benefit and the benefit of special interests—not for the benefit of the American people. The folks I met with also don't trust politicians in Washington to address mounting long-term challenges to our economy. It's not just the attendees of town-halls meetings in...

I heard a news brief referencing "The Third Way." Let's take a look ON THE INTERNET.

The other day President Obama issued a special message to the Muslim world for the annual Ramadan holiday. Tonight, before leaving Wednesday for the rest of his stay-cation at Camp David, the president hosts a White House banquet to celebrate the same holiday. Invited guests include three Cabinet secretaries, numerous diplomats, five members of Congress including the lone Muslim, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, and chief of the Palestine Liberation Organization mission. Here is the list of invited guests, as provided by the White House: