Free Republic

Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate, called her former running mate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) a “maverick and a fighter” in a statement after his death Saturday afternoon. “Today we lost an American original. Sen. John McCain was a maverick and a fighter, never afraid to stand for his beliefs. John never took the easy path in life — and through sacrifice and suffering he inspired others to serve something greater than self,” she said. “John McCain was my friend. I will remember the good times. My family and I send prayers for Cindy and the...

SEOUL, South Korea — He was one of North Korea’s deadliest secret agents. On Oct. 9, 1983, Kang Min-chul and two other North Korean agents bombed the Martyrs’ Museum in Rangoon, Burma, in a plot to kill the South Korean president, who was to have laid a wreath there. The bomb missed its mark — the president’s car had been delayed — but 17 South Koreans, including four cabinet ministers, were killed. For his deed, Mr. Kang was consigned to oblivion. North Korea denied any connection with the attack. In South Korea, where the bombing was declared a North Korean...

It was a typical December night in Moscow. The cold was biting, the snow thick and dry. In the Federal Security Service's headquarters on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad, hundreds of intelligence officers met as they did every year to celebrate the founding of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. Champagne glasses tinkled as the officers spoke in jubilant tones. Classical music played softly in the background. The hall grew quiet as Vladimir Putin -- the former FSB director who had been appointed prime minister a few months earlier -- stood to speak. "Dear comrades," Putin said. "I would like to announce to...

In his new book, The Restless Wave, and in an upcoming HBO documentary, U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) expresses regret about choosing former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in the 2008 election. According to TheNew York Times, in the documentary, McCain refers to the Palin selection as “another mistake” he made in a long political career. In his new book, McCain reportedly claims that former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, a Democrat, would have been a better choice for the ticket. McCain noted that his advisers convinced him not to choose the Democrat, so he picked...

John McCain may have admitted that he regrets picking Sarah Palin as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election, but according to the former Alaska governor, “that’s not what Sen. McCain has told me all these years.” The one-time Republican vice-presidential candidate told The Daily Mail on Thursday that she feels a “perpetual gut punch” every time she hears reports about McCain’s regrets and that having to read the news every day is “not a real fun thing.” “I attribute a lot of what we’re hearing and reading regarding McCain’s statements to his ghostwriter or ghostwriters,” Palin said. “I...

United States presidential candidate John McCain now retains a lead over Barack Obama in several polls conducted in the past few days. Both Zogby International and Rasmussen Reports have McCain with a slight, but not statistically significant lead. The most recent Gallup tracking poll has McCain with a statistical lead of 5.0 percent. The Day to Day Politics Poll Average also has a slight, but not statistically significantly lead of 0.4% for McCain. Obama had a 6.0 percent lead in the Day to Day Politics Poll Average after the Democratic National Convention, but now is trailing after the Republican National...

The forthcoming final memoir from Senator John McCain, titled The Restless Wave, and a nearly two-hour-long HBO documentary on its way seem to be being used as an opportunity to settle some scores. Jonathan Martin of the New York Times has obtained copies of both books, and has spoken with the ailing senator at his ranch, where he seems to be spending his final days. This leaped out at me: While he continues to defend Ms. Palin’s performance, Mr. McCain uses the documentary and the book to unburden himself about not selecting Mr. Lieberman, a Democrat-turned-independent, as his running...

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he regrets choosing former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) to be his running mate during the 2008 presidential campaign. The New York Times reported on Saturday that McCain, while still defending Palin’s performance, said in his upcoming book “The Restless Wave” that he wishes he had instead selected former Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) His advisers reportedly had warned against choosing Lieberman, who was once a Democrat, stating that Lieberman’s support of abortion rights could divide Republicans. “It was sound advice that I could reason for myself,” he writes. “But my gut told me to ignore...

Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2004 1:09 p.m. EDT Billionaires Secretly Met in Aspen to Defeat Bush In the days following the Democratic National Convention in Boston this past August, several billionaire Democratic activists secretly met at the famed Aspen Institute in Colorado. The purpose of their clandestine meeting was "to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush," The New Yorker magazine reports in its most recent edition. Details of the meeting remain sketchy, but the magazine described the Aspen conference this way: "Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the...

FAISALABAD, Pakistan — The father of Imran Awan — an IT aide to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz who investigators concluded made “unauthorized access” to House servers — transferred a USB drive to a Pakistani senator and former head of a Pakistani intelligence agency, the father’s ex-business partner, Rashid Minhas, alleged. Minhas told The Daily Caller News Foundation that Imran Awan’s father, Haji Ashraf Awan, was giving data to Pakistani official Rehman Malik, and that Imran bragged he had the power to “change the U.S. president.” Asked for how he knew this, he said that on one occasion in 2008 when...

WASHINGTON -- The Securities and Exchange Commission tapped Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive Adam Storch on Friday to serve as the agency's first-ever chief operating officer of the enforcement division. The new hire represents the latest personnel change at the SEC in its effort to improve its operations following its failure to detect Bernard Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme. Enforcement Division Director Robert Khuzami created Mr. Storch's position of managing executive as part of the major re-structuring effort he announced earlier this year. Mr. Storch will oversee division operations that include budget, information technology and administrative services. He will also supervise...

SNIPPET: “..."For the Love of Islam: A Second American Woman Is Arrested in Cartoonist Case,” by Vanessa O’Connell, Stephanie Simon and Evan Perez in the Wall Street Journal, March 13..." Last Easter, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a 31-year-old mom with a $30,000-a-year job as a medical assistant, announced to her family that she had converted to Islam. A few months later, she began posting to Facebook forums whose headings included “STOP caLLing MUSLIMS TERRORISTS!”” SNIPPET: “On Sept. 11, she suddenly left Leadville, Colo., a small town in the Rocky Mountains, for Denver, then for New York, to meet and marry a Muslim...

A top White House national security adviser and key proponent of the Obama administration's diplomacy with Iran is the focus of a congressional inquiry following disclosures the FBI may have denied him top-level security clearances, according to communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser who led the administration's efforts to mislead Congress about the terms of the Iran nuclear agreement, is under scrutiny in the wake of disclosures he was declined interim clearance status by the FBI in 2008, when the administration was moving into the White House. Since that...

As this discussion of gun control and mental health continues to evolve, let's keep this quote in mind from one of the Left's domestic terrorist: "I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people and they were dead serious." Bill Ayers I have no doubt if Ayers and his ilk though they could have gotten away with it they would.They had models from the former Soviet Union, China, North Korea,...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals on Friday for attempting to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, so naturally, CNN is doubling down on its coverage of possible collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. In fact, the network sent chief international correspondent Matthew Chance to St. Petersburg, Russia to literally dig through the garbage of an office building housing the alleged “troll farm” in order to try and find some clues. “This is the office in which that atmosphere of chaos was stoked from the Russian side,” Chance told guest host Jim Sciutto. “That’s...

Since the allegations about Donald Trump’s business connections to Russia started to fly last year in the middle of his presidential campaign, the fog of political war has made it difficult to tell the real from the shadow. Except for one very visible landmark: a sprawling, rococo seaside mansion in Palm Beach that Trump himself liked to boast about as an example of his real-estate acumen. “What do I have to do with Russia?” he replied to reporters’ questions at a press conference in Doral last summer. “You know the closest I came to Russia, I bought a house a...

BEIJING/SHANGHAI, Feb 7 (Reuters) - An HNA Group company has failed to make an early payment it had agreed to on a 1.7 billion yuan ($271.9 million) trust product that falls due next week, two sources with direct knowledge of the situation said, the latest indication of financial stress at the highly leveraged conglomerate.

Cables Portray Expanded Reach of Drug Agency By GINGER THOMPSON and SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables. In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be...

A week after Josh Meyer’s Politico expose,“The Secret Backstory Of How Obama Let Hezbollah Off the Hook,” former Obama officials are still berating Meyer for his 13,000-word article detailing how the Obama administration killed a nearly decade-long DEA effort to stem a global Hezbollah cocaine-smuggling-and-organized-crime ring to help secure its nuclear deal with Iran. “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” former Defense Department analyst David Asher explained in the article. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.” Asher helped establish and...

NOTE TO ADMIN MOD: this is not a commercial solicitation. I have no expectations of selling the item for $37,500. The point is to expose the story. After three false FEC returns, the FEC gave Hillary an immunity agreement and ordered her to file a fourth report. She filed a fourth false report and the crime thus continues. FREEPERS --- please ask questions on the item and allow me to tell the story and further skewer her. I hope this story can make the news. Thanks. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Bill Clinton signed directors chair seatback from concert that evidenced a crime Hillary...