Free Republic

"I don't need to see those pictures, and no one needs to see them," Sen. Dianne Feinstein said after viewing the kill photos of Osama bin Laden on Friday. The morning trip to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., capped a five-month nail-biter that began in December when Feinstein, as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was briefed by the CIA that bin Laden had been tracked to a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. On April 30, a day before the Navy SEALs raid on the compound, the California Democrat got a classified call from CIA headquarters alerting her that the...

Lorenzo had a hard time concealing his nervousness. Standing in front of a large room packed with Boeing employees in late March, the tall, lanky African American gang member described the arc of his life. At 22, he had spent nearly a third of his life incarcerated. Peering out of his round, black-rimmed glasses, he talked about his seven months at Homeboy Industries (the largest gang reentry program in the country), and about how he had moved quickly from the janitorial team to become an assistant in the accounting department. "I used to steal money," he said. "Now I'm counting...

Dogs have been fighting alongside U.S. soldiers for more than 100 years, seeing combat in the Civil War and World War I. But their service was informal; only in 1942 were canines officially inducted into the U.S. Army. Today, they're a central part of U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan -- as of early 2010 the U.S. Army had 2,800 active-duty dogs deployed (the largest canine contingent in the world). And these numbers will continue to grow as these dogs become an ever-more-vital military asset. So it should come as no surprise that among the 79 commandos involved in...

For the second time in three weeks on Wednesday, Rep. Russ Carnahan engaged a fellow Missouri Democrat in a heated confrontation over redistricting on the House floor. This time, it was Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, who had encouraged a state lawmaker to cast what became the deciding vote to put in place a state redistricting plan that pairs Carnahan, who is white, with Rep. Lacy Clay, who is black, in a St. Louis-area district that is heavily African-American. “He’s angry,” Cleaver, a longtime Carnahan family friend, said after the verbal altercation. “I understand the frustration...

Lawmakers in Missouri's state House have voted to override a gubernatorial veto of a redistricting plan approved by the legislature late last month. The successful override vote in the House all but guarantees the new congressional map, which Missouri Democrats have slammed as unfairly partisan, will become law. It's now up to the Missouri state Senate to hold an override vote, and Republicans have more than enough votes in that chamber to override Gov. Jay Nixon's (D) veto. The veto is likely to take place by Wednesday afternoon. More on the vote from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Earlier this week,...

For the next 20 years, Matt Foist will be paying off his $46,000 in cooking-school loans, and all he says he has to show for it is a useless chef's diploma, a nice set of knives - but no job. He said he'd be lucky to make $15 an hour in the culinary world, even though the school told him he would land jobs with annual salaries of $45,000. So he's gone back to his software career. The 46-year-old, who believes he was scammed by San Francisco's California Culinary Academy, is one of the representatives of a class-action lawsuit in...

Few people felt the low turnout at this year's May Day march as acutely as Salvador Ramirez. Ramirez, an illegal immigrant from Jalisco, Mexico, pushed a cart among the few thousand immigrant-rights and labor activists Sunday on Broadway, selling American flags. "It's really bad," said Ramirez, 48, who said he lost his job as an electrician due to his lack of documents and became a street vendor a year and a half ago. About halfway through Sunday's march, Ramirez had only sold about 10 to 15 flags, which he buys for $7.50 a dozen. "I'm selling them almost at cost,"...

Yvette Vickers, an early Playboy playmate whose credits as a B-movie actress included such cult films as “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” and “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” was found dead last week at her Benedict Canyon home. Her body appears to have gone undiscovered for months, police said. Vickers, 82, had not been seen for a long time. A neighbor discovered her body in an upstairs room of her Westwanda Drive home on April 27. Its mummified state suggests she could have been dead for close to a year, police said. The official cause of death will by determined...

Kansas City police arrested more than 50 protesters this morning as they peacefully marched onto the construction site of the billion-dollar Honeywell plant that will produce parts for nuclear bombs. Police warned the protesters several times to leave, but they refused. Police said the group waited until news cameras arrived and then walked in an orderly fashion toward the plant’s gates. When company officials closed the gates, the protesters surrounded a truck that was trying to leave the property. Protesters held hands and sang hymns before going peacefully with officers. Police transported the arrestees to police headquarters using a police...

With the biggest news in a decade dominating the Internet, it didn't take long for rogue viruses, Trojans and other malware to mess with computers given the chance.Web searches and links to a variety of stories — real and fake — about the death of Osama bin Laden are sprouting with all kinds of malicious software as cybercriminals look for a big payday tied to the appetite for news about the Al-Qaida leader's demise."The bad guys were quite fast and started to poison searches results in Google Images," said Favio Assolini, a Kaspersky Labs expert on the security software company's...

Last May, in the small village of Qualaday in western Kandahar Province, a young Army lieutenant and his sergeants met with several elders to discuss the recent killing of a local mullah. The desert heat was fierce, and the elders led the soldiers across their village to sit under the shade of nearby trees. Three days had passed since they were last there; during that interval the place appeared to have been abandoned. When they sat down, some of the soldiers removed their helmets, and a few elders their sandals and turbans. A freelance photographer was permitted to make an...

After his major address on the deficit two weeks ago, President Obama sat down for an interview with ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos expecting a conversation about fiscal issues. Instead, Obama faced repeated questions about the controversy surrounding his place of birth, which had escalated in recent weeks as potential Republican candidate Donald Trump made it the centerpiece of his platform. Although the questions were couched as coming from the political fringe, the interview added to the growing sense within the White House that the mainstream media was perpetrating a dangerous myth. Obama, furious, demanded that his staff finally get...

President Obama asked for support Thursday from a small Los Angeles audience dotted with Hollywood stars. Speaking in a tiny room of the Italian restaurant Tavern to a an audience of 60 that included Steven Spielberg, Will Ferrell, Tom Hanks and George Clooney, Obama said he understood frustration with his compromises with centrist Democrats and Republicans on healthcare, ending the Bush tax rates for the wealthy and other issues. Over the past two and a half years, Obama said, he was sure there were times "where you're reading the papers or you're watching TV and you're saying, 'Ah, Obama, you...

Police were called Thursday night after Koran-burning pastor Terry Jones accidentally discharged his firearm in the parking lot of a television station, where he had just conducted an interview, MyFoxDetroit.com reported. "Pastor Terry Jones just discharged his firearm in our parking lot," myFOXdetroit.com announced on its Facebook page. "He claims it was fired by accident. The shot went into the floorboard of his car. No one was hurt. Police on scene." Southfield Police confirmed the gun accidentally discharged. No charges were filed, and police gave the gun back to Jones before sending him on his way.

The photograph showed the son, but my eye gravitated toward the mother. That first glimpse was surprising — the stout, pale-skinned woman in sturdy sandals, standing squarely a half-step ahead of the lithe, darker-skinned figure to her left. His elas­tic-band body bespoke discipline, even asceticism. Her form was well padded, territory ceded long ago to the pleasures of appetite and the forces of anatomical destiny. He had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder. She met the camera head-on, dressed in hand-loomed textile dyed indigo, a silver earring half-hidden in the cascading curtain...

Rep. Russ Carnahan has all but agreed to avoid a primary fight against Rep. Lacy Clay if, as expected, the two Democrats are drawn into the same district by the Missouri legislature. But for detente to occur, there had to be hostilities. Two weeks ago, a frustrated Carnahan approached Clay on the House floor. Carnahan had been hoping to get Clay and fellow Missouri Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleave to pressure Gov. Jay Nixon to veto a Republican remapping of the state’s congressional districts. Not only had Clay and Cleaver declined to help, they had stopped taking Carnahan’s calls on the...

In a document filled with stunning allegations, Tommy R. Bennett has filed a complaint with the City of Chicago Commission on Human Relations against the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., and the minister's Chicago-based organization, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, claiming, among other things, harassment and termination on the basis of Bennett's sexual orientation. Rev. Jackson has a long record of support for LGBT rights, including during his runs for U.S. president and his speech at the LGBT March on Washington in 1987. This is believed to be the first time an allegation has come forward claiming he was involved in sexual...

"Experience is a dear teacher," said Benjamin Franklin, "but fools will learn at no other." Give some credit to fools: At least they eventually learn from experience. What would Franklin say about people who don't? By that, I refer to gun control advocates alarmed that the Illinois legislature may vote to let licensed individuals carry concealed handguns. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence calls the measure "dangerous." Kristen Rand of the Violence Policy Center says that it would lead to Tucson-style mass shootings as well as the killing of police. But concealed-carry, as it is known, is not a...

Even before this week, Republican strategists in Missouri privately described a “vacuum” in the GOP field to face Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill in 2012. The state’s swing nature coupled with McCaskill’s narrow win in 2006 made the race a ripe opportunity, Republican strategists argued, but few big names seemed ready to step up to the plate. McCaskill’s problems over her private plane — and, more specifically, the unpaid back taxes on it — have made her even more vulnerable. But will the Republican field expand? Or is it set? Missouri Republican Party executive director Lloyd Smith said Tuesday that recent...

Tod Pulvermacher drew cheers from the crowd and plenty of attention from the news media Saturday as he chugged around the Capitol Square in Madison on a tractor pulling a manure spreader. The attention could take a different turn. A check of online court records shows that a Tod Pulvermacher has been convicted of drunken driving four times and has no valid driver's license. The license was revoked for 33 months on July 2, the date of his fourth conviction for operating while intoxicated. The unusual spelling of the name, the age and the hometown listed in the online court...