Free Republic

Bill Maher has said a lot of REALLY dumb things throughout his career, but this howler uttered with a straight face on HBO’s Real Time Friday might possibly be his stupidest. … America needs to start defining peace as strength. Do you know who the role model for every president should be? Jimmy Carter. Because he is the one out of all of them who figured out how to sit in office for four years and never fire a shot. And every President’s negative example should be Dick Cheney who even shot his friends in the face. …Ignoring his poor...

Secretary of State John Kerry in Turkey Sunday condemned the “cowardly terrorists” who killed a young foreign service officer in Afghanistan and referred to Kurdish terrorism against Turkey, but when asked minutes later about Hamas – the Palestinian terrorist group embraced by his Turkish hosts – he chose to comment only indirectly. The incident provided a fresh example of the Obama administration’s reluctance to tackle Turkey’s Islamist government in public over its support for Hamas, even as it partners with Ankara in its centerpiece counter-terror initiative (which excludes Israel). During a joint press appearance in Istanbul with his Turkish counterpart...

A young diplomat is among the dead after a Taliban suicide car bombing branded "despicable" by US Secretary of State John Kerry. Taliban militants have killed six Americans, including a young female diplomat, in the deadliest day in Afghanistan for the US in eight months. Three members of the military, two US civilians and an Afghan doctor died after being hit by an explosion while travelling to donate books to a school in the south. In a statement, Secretary of State John Kerry paid tribute to Anne Smedinghoff, a 25-year-old foreign service officer with the US State Department, who was...