Free Republic

During a White House roundtable with three Spanish-language media outlets on Wednesday, President Barack Obama skated around questions about Operation Fast and Furious. “We’re working very hard to have a much more effective interdiction effort … we are checking southbound transit … to capture illegal guns, illegal cash transfers to cartels,” he said at the morning event with representatives from Yahoo!, MSN Latino, and AOL Latino/Huffington Post Latino Voices. “It is something we’ve been building … its not yet finished, and there’s more work to do,” he said. Conservative Action Fund treasurer Shaun McCutcheon told The Daily Caller that Obama’s...

Before the Senate Judiciary Committee a short time ago, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan appeared reluctant to admit that she wrote a 1996 Clinton White House memo aimed at altering a key medical group’s opinion of whether partial birth abortion is medically necessary. The memo, reported yesterday by National Review, has caused a stir in conservative circles because it appeared that Kagan, then a White House policy aide, put words in the medical group’s mouth in order to soften its position on the controversial procedure. But when Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch brought the subject up with Kagan, he had a...

Iran's state shipping company has changed the names and ownership of most of its vessels to evade U.S. sanctions, but the Treasury Department has yet to update the blacklist that U.S. companies use to verify they are in compliance, according to a new report. As a result, some firms are at risk of doing business with the company, Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, despite a ban that has been in place since 2008, says the report by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a Washington-based nonprofit watchdog. The findings raise questions about the effectiveness of some of Washington's...