Free Republic

Army National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos took a break from practicing in Los Angeles for Dancing With the Stars to travel to Sacramento, California, this weekend to visit his hospitalized pal Spencer Stone. Skarlatos, Stone, and Anthony Sadler were all credited with helping to stop a gunman on a Paris-bound train in August. Stone, a United States airman, has been in hospital since Thursday after being stabbed during a fight. It was reported that Stone was stabbed trying to protect a girl who was being punched by her boyfriend after he enjoyed a night out with friends at Badlands dance club...

PASSPORT TO TERROR: MailOnline reporter buys Syrian papers being sold to ISIS fighters sneaking into Europe hidden among refugees. Reporter bought $2,000 Syrian passport, ID card and driving licence in Turkey under the name of a real man who was killed in the conflict. Forger boasted that ISIS fighters are using documents to travel to Europe to start terror sleeper cells or live under false name free of past crimes. Also being used by economic migrants from other countries exploiting generosity of Europe to Syrian refugees. Keith Vaz, chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee told MailOnline the scam was...

Classmates of the younger Boston Marathon bomber were horrified Friday to wake up to the news that their mild-mannered schoolmate had been identified as the culprit behind one of the largest-scale terrorist attacks on American soil in recent history. Dzokhar Tsarnaev, 19, is, as of this writing, still at large; his older brother Tamerlan was killed in a shoot-out with police on Thursday night in Watertown, Massachusetts, after the brothers killed an officer on the MIT campus. (snip)"I saw the pictures last night and thought it looked kind of like him," said Rebecca Mazur, who was in Tsarnaev's class at...

It is no secret that President Obama’s and green-energy supporters’ (from both parties) foray into venture capitalism has not gone well. But the extent of its failure has been largely ignored by the press. Sure, single instances garner attention as they happen, but they ignore past failures in order to make it seem like a rare case. The truth is that the problem is widespread. The government’s picking winners and losers in the energy market has cost taxpayers billions of dollars, and the rate of failure, cronyism, and corruption at the companies receiving the subsidies is substantial. The fact that...

A former county supervisor and the estranged wife of California's Treasurer has been arrested after police found methamphetamine stashed in the Orange County home she was living in with the couple's nine-year-old son. Mr Bill Lockyer, the state's former attorney general and current treasurer, helped his much younger wife with $1.6million in campaign funding when she won her supervisor seat in 2010, but has since filed for divorce and is seeking joint custody of their son. Police received a tip last week that led them to a house where Mrs Lockyer was staying with relatives, district attorney's spokeswoman Farrah Emami...

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) fired off a biting letter to Attorney General Eric Holder today, rebuking him for misleading congressional investigators even as new documents show that senior Justice Department officials had detailed information about Operation Fast and Furious tactics. Six wiretap applications in the gunwalking scandal were submitted to DoJ officials in Washington for justification and approval. The wiretaps have been sealed by a federal judge, but committee members were able to gain access to them — after Holder refused to turn them over under subpoena. “In a May 15, 2012 letter, the...

A House investigative committee said Tuesday it has obtained new information from wiretaps related to the Obama administration’s Operation Fast and Furious that suggests high-ranking officials know more than they are telling Congress about the flawed weapons sting. “The wiretap applications show that immense detail about questionable investigative tactics was available to the senior officials who reviewed and authorized them,” Issa said in a June 5 letter to Holder. “The close involvement of these officials -- much greater than previously known -- is shocking.” The targets of "Fast and Furious" bought nearly 2,000 weapons over several months. For reasons that...

(Reuters) - Representative Phil Roe retired from his medical career to go to Congress, but on Tuesday he put his doctor skills to use to help save a man's life at a Charlotte, North Carolina airport. The Tennessee Republican said he was drinking a cup of coffee and chatting with Representative Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport when he heard someone shouting for a doctor. Roe ran over to a man lying on the floor. "I couldn't feel a pulse," Roe told Reuters by telephone from Washington. "It looked like he was taking his last...

CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson has revealed a recent document submitted by the Department of Justice to congressional investigators. The document shows that guns linked to Operation Fast and Furious are responsible for at least three more murders in addition to the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry: Weapons linked to ATF’s controversial “Fast and Furious” operation have been tied to at least eight violent crimes in Mexico including three murders, four kidnappings and an attempted homicide. According to a letter from U.S. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), the...

Who can forget Stanley Kubrick's dystopian tale of coddled hooligans run amok in pre-Thatcher England? Who is surprised that life is back to imitating art? Last week's cultural eruption in London was not just an assault on property. It was a bold repudiation of the concept of property. The violence was widespread but it wasn't mindless. It was the natural consequence of an economic philosophy that holds great sway in many western democracies. This particular manifestation differed from what we've seen in Greece, yet the same moral decay preceded both. What's worse, the source of this decay is not an...

One of the original whistleblowers on Operation Fast and Furious — which allowed thousands of guns to cross the border into Mexico — said Acting Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) Ken Melson’s testimony before congressional investigators on July 4 was nothing but “smoke and mirrors.” ATF Special Agent Vince Cefalu continued: At this point he’s doing what anyone would do, he’s saving his own ass. Cefalu is one of the founders of CleanUpATF.org, a message board dedicated to addressing abuses within the ATF. He is one of the most vocal critics of the heads...

While Holder didn’t pull any triggers, the Department of Justice was involved in Gunwalker from the beginning. A detective assembles a crime’s “history” by collecting and examining evidence, which eventually leads him to the perpetrator. When sufficient evidence points to a reasoned conclusion, perpetrators are arrested and prosecuted in court. Crimes consist of means, motive, and opportunity. So it is with ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious, also known as “Gunwalker.” Violent crimes committed with Gunwalker firearms Besides Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder, “Mexican officials estimate 150 of their people have been shot by Fast and Furious guns.” This indicates...

As whistleblowers continue to blow up the idea that this was a well organized operation with good oversight, even the White House is perpetuating the myth that the Justice Department is cooperating with the investigation. On June 15, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, held another hearing into the failed “Operation Fast and Furious” program, which has also been dubbed the “Gunwalker” scandal. “Gunwalker” allowed literally thousands of weapons to walk across the border into Mexico. The guns, which included semi-automatic AK-47 variants and Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles, were purchased by...

Five years ago, Massachusetts adopted its “universal health care” plan, which served as the template for President Obama’s subsequent national health care legislation. However, Massachusetts’ problems of rising health costs and worsening access foreshadow similar problems for the rest of America — as well as how to avoid them. The Massachusetts Medical Society recently reported that the state law has resulted in “longer patient wait times [and] continued difficult access to primary care physicians.” The average wait time in Massachusetts to see an internal medicine physician is now 48 days — double the national average. Over half of primary care...

Photos showing three dead bodies at Osama bin Laden's compound were sold to Reuters by a Pakistani security official. Reuters has copyrighted the pictures so won't allow us to publish them, however they are claiming that the photos do not show weapons. A high quality version of the full photos can be seen here. The photos are very close up to the bodies, so one wouldn't expect to see any weapons. You mostly see a close up of the upper half of the men's bodies, not much around them or even their lower half. However, one of the dead men...

It’s been less than 72 hours since President Barack Obama announced that U.S. Special Forces “a small team of Americans” had killed Osama Bin Laden. Since then, his administration has been hard at work screwing the whole thing up. Let’s start with that speech Sunday night. It was originally announced for 10:30 but didn’t happen until 11:30. By that time, the news Obama was supposed to be breaking had broken already. Not the best start. Presumably he was delayed arguing with his speechwriters about keeping in all the “I,” “Me,” and “Mine.” Everything having to do with this raid was...

The indigenous Sami peoples in the Arctic have found a way to help reindeer survive the ravages of climate change—but we’re guessing the deer don’t like it too much. Fluctuating temperatures have been a challenge for the reindeer, because melting snow often refreezes and forms ice over the pastures they feed on. Sami researchers have found that castrating male reindeer allows them to more easily break the ice, in part because they keep their antlers later into winter. It also makes the males more likely to share their food with calves that would otherwise starve to death. “To make herds...

Government's sole legitimate purpose is to protect our God-given, unalienable rights to life, liberty, and property. Yet under the influence of progressive and socialist ideas, Progressives now claim a 'right' to have certain benefits provided by others. Progressives conflate rights with responsibilities. They label benefits they think people should have – from food stamps to mortgage relief – as a right. Both are dangerous tendencies, because they reverse the relationship between citizens and government. A misunderstanding of "rights" undermines the basis of our freedom. That rights are unalienable means, simply and unequivocally: No person or persons, including government, is justified...

Raúl Castro is intent on building an efficient and productive socialism, capable of generating profits. That is why he has just laid off half a million unneeded wage earners. The objective is to detach 25 percent of the labor force from the state within 18 months. That's 1.3 million workers who will be put on the street so they may be absorbed by the still-unborn private microentrepreneurial sector. Castro and his claque keep repeating that the revolution cannot feed an army of idle workers. Subsidies must be trimmed, social benefits must be reduced. The general is very confused. He understands...

Videos posted under the profile of Jared Lee Loughner, who is being held in the Giffords attack, offer a scroll of rambling texts on mind control, currency, the Constitution and English grammar. Jared Lee Loughner, the 22-year-old suspect in the Tucson shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and 17 others, left behind a series of rambling YouTube videos in which he speaks of mind control, dreaming and a "new currency." He doesn't appear in any of the videos. Instead, the five clips he apparently posted since October under the (YouTube.com) screen name Classitup10, feature scrolling text on a black screen...