Free Republic

Who even knows what’s true anymore? The same administration that is watching 57,000 kids just stroll across the border, while claiming that the same border is more secure than ever before, now says that funds to deport are getting low. Even though actual deportations — not the phony ones that the administration claimed for years — are down overall. The Homeland Security agency responsible for removing immigrants who are in the country illegally will run out of money by mid-August unless Congress approves President Barack Obama’s emergency request for $3.7 billion to help deal with a flood of child immigrants...

"The spread of polio around the world has become so serious it is now an international public health emergency, the World Health Organization warned today. The agency said the problem could grow in the next few months and unravel the nearly three-decade effort to eradicate the crippling disease. It described current polio outbreaks in Asia, Africa and the Middle East as an 'extraordinary event' that required a coordinated international response. It was the first-ever international alert on polio. 'Until it is eradicated, polio will continue to spread internationally, find and paralyze susceptible kids,' Dr Bruce Aylward, who leads WHO's polio...

The top two officials at the Defense Intelligence Agency said Wednesday that they will retire from those positions in the coming months, part of a leadership shake-up at an agency that is under pressure to trim budgets and shift focus after more than a decade of war, current and former U.S. officials said. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn is expected to end his tenure as DIA director this summer, about a year before he was scheduled to depart, according to officials who said Flynn faced pressure from Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and others in recent months....

**SNIP** That could pose problems for Democrats, who we’re hearing are confident they can muster all 54 votes from their caucus, plus Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Watt’s home-state colleague. But that’s still short of the 60 they need to move Watt’s nomination to a final vote. The stern warning from the powerful conservative group could sap their prospects for finding a few more GOP votes. Meanwhile, the White House is calling for his swift approval. Senior White House officials met with the heads of housing organization Monday, and according to a White House spokeswoman, the message during the meeting was...

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Americans may insist on the right to pursue happiness, but Venezuela now has a formal government agency in charge of enforcing it. President Nicolas Maduro says the new Vice Ministry of Supreme Social Happiness will coordinate all the "mission" programs created by the late President Hugo Chavez to alleviate poverty. Wags had a field day Friday, waxing sarcastic on Twitter about how happy they felt less than 24 hours after the announcement.

Washington - Eight Democratic senators and congressmen have asked Attorney General Eric Holder to answer questions about a Reuters report that the National Security Agency supplies the Drug Enforcement Administration with intelligence information used to make non-terrorism cases against American citizens. The August report revealed that a secretive DEA unit passes the NSA information to agents in the field, including those from the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI and Homeland Security, with instructions to never disclose the original source, even in court.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Under increasing pressure to justify electronic surveillance programs that at times capture communications of American citizens, the U.S. National Security Agency went to unusual lengths on Friday to insist its activities are lawful and any mistakes largely unintentional. **SNIP** The NSA's presentation was an attempt to calm the latest firestorm over documents disclosed by Snowden. The Washington Post late Thursday reported that the NSA had broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since 2008, citing an internal agency audit and other top secret documents. "These are not willful violations, they are...

Additional clips of a United States Department of Agriculture sensitivity training class feature USDA employees being told to recite, “If we work for a federal agency, we’ve discriminated in the past.” The clips, released by the conservative government accountability group Judicial Watch Thursday evening, are the second installation of revealing footage obtained by a Freedom of Information Act (FIOA) request the organization made last May. According to Judicial Watch, the documents reveal the sensitivity training was delivered to USDA employees at least 16 times last year in an attempt to boost employees’ “emotional intelligence.”

Less than a month after reopening, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is full of algae, a sea of green overshadowing the nearly two-year, $34 million renovation of the famous site. [snip] “This is a direct consequence of the fact that this is a green project,” Johnson said. “The conditions are pretty good for algae, once it gets in there.”

The head of the National Security Agency on Monday denied reports that NSA’s new data center in Utah would collect and store data about Americans, including their e-mails and web-browsing habits. The $2 billion data center in Bluffdale, Utah, will house massive supercomputers capable of storing and analyzing vast quantities of data when it comes online next year, but U.S. ArmyGen. Keith B. Alexander reiterated NSA’s insistence it does not unlawfully conduct surveillance of Americans. (Snip) However, “I’m not going to come out and say what we are doing” at NSA, he added. “That would be ludicrous, too.”

The body of Aharon Zindani, who was murdered three weeks ago in Yemen, was brought to Israel Wednesday and will be buried Thursday evening in the Rehovot Cemetery. In a protracted and complicated operation, carried out by Jewish Agency personnel with the assistance of the Foreign Ministry, Zindani's body was brought out of Yemen together with his widow, Afya al-Ashar, and their five children. Zindani, 46, was a leading member of the Jewish community in San'a. He made aliyah to Israel several years ago but then returned to Yemen. On Tuesday, May 22, when he was shopping in the market...

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa snapped at National Labor Relations Board general counsel Lafe Solomon for openly defying his congressional subpoena. Not complying with congressional subpoena is technically an illegal act, and Solomon could be charged with contempt of Congress if Issa, a leading Republican, chooses to proceed down that path. “Your continued personal obstruction, lack of compliance with a validly issued congressional subpoena and false statements to the committee are unacceptable,” Issa said in a Monday letter to Solomon. “The NLRB is acting as a rogue agency that believes it does not have to fully answer to...

The National Geospatial Agency mapped bin Laden's compound, analyzed drone data, and helped the SEALs simulate their missionPresident Obama's first brush with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency was ignominious. Out for lunch in May 2009, at a Five Guys burger franchise in Washington, the new President started to shake the hands of other customers, TV cameras in tow. Then he turned to men with government ID badges. "So what do you?" the president asked. "I work for at NGA, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency," one said. "Outstanding. How long have you been doing that?" Obama wondered. "Six years." Obama then asked: "So, explain...

Lost in the kabuki-dance drama of last week's budget showdown were immensely important votes in the Senate and House on the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to govern through regulation. In the House, 19 Democrats joined the Republican majority in a decisive 255-172 vote to defund the EPA's attempt to circumvent Congress and begin its own cap-and-trade program. The measure was introduced by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton of Michigan. A companion measure introduced in the Senate by Sen. Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who is the ranking minority member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee,

Green Township is being singled out because federal investigators believe the housing authority blocked new public housing there for at least the past two years. More public housing for the poor is likely headed to Green Township and some other communities as part of a deal to resolve a discrimination complaint against Cincinnati's housing authority.

Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps made a case for a government hand in media policy in a speech to the FCBA on Tuesday. "The commission can act now. It should have acted on the media before now. I am disappointed that it has not," he said. The decline of "real journalism" justifies federal involvement, according to Copps. "The news is suffering from a bad case of substance abuse," he said. The Democratic commissioner pointed to Fox News' Bernie Goldberg and Bill O'Reilly as examples of the problem with today's media landscape,

Tax Deal: The media are touting a rating agency's schizophrenic claim that keeping the Bush tax rates helps the economy, but hurts the country's credit standing. Are ratings firms even relevant anymore? Manhattan Institute senior fellow Nicole Gelinas, in her richly detailed analysis of the roots of the financial crisis, "After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street — and Washington," pulls back the curtain and exposes the ugly reality of the once all-powerful credit ratings agencies Moody's, Fitch and Standard & Poor's. "Reliance on ratings agencies contravenes market principles," Gelinas warns. "The ratings-agency world is small and homogeneous, populated...

After almost 100 years, the State Compensation Insurance Fund is pulling 755 of its 830 jobs out of town, having determined that San Francisco is just too expensive - and its workforce too dumb - for the agency to continue doing most of its business here. Workers called to a recent meeting at the Herbst Theatre were told that 293 jobs will move to Pleasanton, 422 to Vacaville and 40 to Sacramento, with 75 employees remaining in the city. "It's part of a whole geographic strategy to reduce our footprint in high-cost areas like San Francisco," said agency spokeswoman Jennifer...

Today is the Environmental Protection Agency’s 40th birthday. Thank you Richard Nixon: you left us a heck of a legacy on this one. The media is sure to tout the remarkable environmental progress in the United States over the past 40 years, and indeed we have never had cleaner air, cleaner water, or more plentiful wildlife. By any objective measure, environmental progress has been remarkable over the past 40 years, but it was also remarkable for decades before the creation of the EPA, and indeed every advanced economy has seen dramatic environmental improvement, regardless of its regulatory model.

After six years, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine has faced questions about leaders' pay and the lack of medical breakthroughs. But its chairman plans to ask voters for another $3 billion in bonds. When millionaire Silicon Valley real estate developer Bob Klein launched his ballot drive to create a $3-billion state fund for stem-cell research in 2004, he pitched it as a way of taking politics out of science and focusing on cures. One particularly heartbreaking campaign ad showed former big screen Superman Christopher Reeve paralyzed in a wheelchair, struggling for breath and imploring California voters to "stand up...