Free Republic

In October, shortly after her controversial MTV Video Music Awards act, Miley Cyrus hosted an episode of “Saturday Night Live.” She gave audiences another R-rated performance by donning a brown wig to cover her blond Mohawk and grinding to the song, “We Did Stop”—a spoof of her summer hit, “We Can’t Stop.” Who was Cyrus supposed to be? Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), partying with a flamboyant Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), portrayed by cast member Taran Killam. Bachmann (Cyrus) and Boehner (Killiam) were celebrating the successful shutdown of the federal government, thus proving they could “do whatever they want.” Ha. Politically...

What made Wayne Gretzky a hockey legend or Ronaldo a soccer star may have had more to do with brains than brawn. Professional athletes process complex visual scenes faster than other people, a new study finds.

A "force structure" review that is about to be completed is likely to recommend that the Navy needs around 300 ships to meet its future demands. The study is not yet finished, but could be presented to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus as early as next week, said Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert. A 300-ship Navy is slightly larger than the current fleet of 285, but it is smaller than previous recommendations. Navy leaders since 2006 have said the fleet should grow to 313 ships. During a breakfast with reporters March 16, Greenert said the review is not...

August 17, 2010 Pakistan’s Failed National Strategy Walter Russell Mead The unremitting spate of bad news from Pakistan continues; rains are still drenching the highlands and the devastation continues to spread down the river valleys.  This year’s harvest has been ruined; increasingly, it seems unlikely that farmers will be able to plant fall crops.  While visiting Pakistan earlier this month, I posted on the roots of Pakistan’s rage, doing my best to explain why so many Pakistanis are so angry with the United States.  That is one side of the story; but equally mysterious to many people and especially in...

HH: I begin with Columnist To the World, Mark Steyn. You can read all of Mark’s work at www.steynonline.com. I’m going to be seeing you out this way in a couple of weeks, Mark Steyn. I find you in the Big Apple tonight. Do they have any better sense of what the American foreign policy is in Libya in New York than they do in California? MS: No. And indeed, it may be an entirely different foreign policy in New York than it is in California. This war is getting more incoherent by the day, and I think the reason...

SNIP Disrupt, Dismantle, and Defeat Al-Qa’ida and its Violent Extremist Affiliates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Around the World The United States is waging a global campaign against al-Qa’ida and its terrorist affiliates. To disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qa’ida and its affiliates, we are pursuing a strategy that protects our homeland, secures the world’s most dangerous weapons and material, denies al-Qa’ida safe haven, and builds positive partnerships with Muslim communities around the world. Success requires a broad, sustained, and integrated campaign that judiciously applies every tool of American power—both military and civilian—as well as the concerted efforts of like-minded states and...

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Obama administration is considering creating a unified national security budget that would combine elements of the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development with the Pentagon, according to a draft copy of a long-awaited foreign policy strategy review shared with Congress this week. Citing the joint planning required between U.S. military and civilian agencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, the proposal is one of several that would put the U.S. diplomatic corps and its lead global humanitarian agency on a stronger national security footing, according to a draft of the State Department’s first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and...

Nicaragua invaded and assumed control of a small section of Costa Rica in late October. At first Nicaragua blamed the incursion on Google Maps. This farcical explanation belies the fact that Nicaragua has for years wanted the property on the other side of the San Juan River for its own canal from the Pacific to Atlantic. That project was originally dreamed up when Nicaragua was a Soviet Client state and a completed canal project would be a game changer. Currently the canal project is funded by Iran and Venezuela while Nicaragua is led by the same man that led the...

Here's one place with plenty of job openings: the "E" Ring of the Pentagon. In the next several months, the secretary of defense and four of the six uniformed members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are expected to retire. This kind of mass exodus of military brass is "virtually unheard of," said John Ullyot, a Republican strategist and former spokesman for the Senate Armed Services Committee. "It's very rare to have so many service chiefs up" all at once, he said. "Even in peacetime this would be a lot of turnover, a lot of change for the biggest part...

“We have a lot of transition at this point here,” said one senior Obama aide. “They decided the time was right to bring forward his departure and for Jones to step aside. We always knew it was going to be roughly in this window, at the end of this year. But we’re making a lot of changes now with Rahm leaving, and there was a sense of just, ‘Let’s get this done now.’” But there was more to the timing than the ripple effects of Rahm’s departure. Next month President Obama begins to travel again overseas, and in December he...

Nothing further yet. Just a one line headline from AP.

OXON HILL, Md. — The U.S. Air Force’s former top intelligence officer warned a roomful of generals this week that the U.S. has lost its air power advantages and is dangerously ill-prepared to stop the gap-closing efforts of China and Russia. Lt. Gen. David Deptula, a former F-15 pilot , challenged Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ fundamental belief that U.S. air power vastly overmatches any foreign military. “For the first time, our claim to air supremacy is in jeopardy,” Deptula told the Air Force Association’s national convention on Monday. At the same forum last year, Gates defended ordering a halt to...

Sound too conspiratorial to be true? Like the cover-up ops of spy novels? Well, it's reality. And it is possibly the most bizarre, inhumane and abusive way that the White House is expanding its power over the American people. It's not an extremist belief or theory of the far right. It's a fact that has been confirmed by The New York Times, The Washington Post and MSNBC and even documented by the far-left online magazine Salon.com. And it's the gravest nightmare of U.S. citizens and abandonment of our Constitution to date: a presidential assassination program in which U.S. citizens are...

The White House is revising its Afghanistan strategy to embrace the idea of negotiating with senior members of the Taliban through third parties – a policy to which it had previously been lukewarm. Negotiating with the Taliban has long been advocated by Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, and the British and Pakistani governments, but resisted by Washington. The Guardian has learned that while the American government is still officially resistant to the idea of talks with Taliban leaders, behind the scenes a shift is under way and Washington is encouraging Karzai to take a lead in such negotiations. "There is...

Troops want more protection from the new US commander in Afghanistan. NATO forces fighting in southern Afghanistan face a Catch-22 dilemma: how to protect troops against an enemy that lives — and fights — among the population without killing civilians and turning the people against the US-led mission. There are complaints from the ranks about restrictive policies which place their lives at risks and this is one of the issues facing General David Petraeus — along with relations with a weak Afghan government and jittery allies; slow and uncertain progress

For many Afghans, U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's dismissal over intemperate remarks in a magazine profile has served mainly to underscore their own weariness with a conflict that has dragged on for nearly nine years with no end in sight.For some, the general's woes have sharpened fears that the Western campaign against the Taliban movement — which ruled the country for five long, harsh years — is floundering. And many Afghans think that the Americans, like the Soviet Union two decades ago and so many would-be conquerors, ultimately will fail.McChrystal won the respect, even affection, of many Afghans with...

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama faces two grim choices on Wednesday: Fire Gen. Stanley McChrystal and risk looking like he’s lost control of the war in Afghanistan. Or keep him and risk looking like he’s lost control of his generals. Even before McChrystal’s very public slap at his boss surfaced on Monday night, the White House was already bristling at the perception that the war in Afghanistan was becoming unwinnable. The decisive military offensive to clear the strategic town of Marjah has foundered. Another, bigger offensive to drive the Taliban from its home turf in Kandahar has been delayed. U.S....

Choices are stark: Stick to the timetable and drawdown, or stick it out until the job is done. And so far, he has signaled intent to do both. The news from Afghanistan has been bad lately. The military campaign to win control of Kandahar, the country's second-largest city, has slowed to a crawl. Taliban insurgents have filtered back into parts of southern Afghanistan that U.S. Marines had cleared in the spring. President Hamid Karzai, the erratic leader of Afghanistan's civilian government, has given only halfhearted support to the U.S.-led military effort — and has done little to clean up the...

The so-called “Great Debate” at the National Space Society’s (NSS) International Space and Development Conference (ISDC) in Chicago on Saturday afternoon featuring Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin and former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart was something of a dud, in part because it wasn’t that much of a debate: after ten-minute opening statements by Zubrin (who opposes the agency’s proposed plans) and Schweickart (who supports them), the floor was turned over to the audience, some of whom asked questions of the two, and others who simply expressed their opinions. Conference organizers explained that the event wasn’t intended to be a debate...

The administration of Barack Obama sees its new National Security Strategy – a statement the White House sends Congress from time to time – as a work of great importance, a radical departure from its predecessor’s thinking. It is neither; nor, for that matter, is it a strategy.