Free Republic

A National Guard member stationed in Washington, DC, to protect the Capitol died after suffering a medical emergency while off duty, a spokesperson for the force said Thursday. The Guard member’s name and details about their death were not immediately released. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Guard’s joint task force in DC said the death was under investigation.

Facing accusations that it cannot adequately protect the White House, the U.S. Secret Service plans to hire 1,100 more officers and agents for an agency besieged by embarrassing scandals and security lapses, two law enforcement sources with direct knowledge of the plans said. The addition of 700 uniformed division officers and 400 agents over five years would expand its staff of 6,647 by nearly 17 percent, the biggest hiring increase in more than a decade at the 150-year-old agency whose job it is to protect the president, his family, and senior officials, along with fighting financial crime. The Secret Service...

The pirouetting Palace guardsman: Soldier captured on video showing off his dance moves to delighted tourists (but top brass aren't so impressed) Guarding the Queen’s home is a serious and solemn duty. So it’s a good thing Her Majesty was not around to see this soldier apparently pirouetting on the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. In his red tunic and bearskin, the Grenadier Guard was filmed seemingly trying to ease the boredom of his two-hour shift with a series of remarkably elegant dance moves. His antics delighted tourists but the Army and Ministry of Defence were not amused. He could now...

Since its birth in the 1920s with the first national radio networks, the modern MSM has always had a cozy relationship with power, and until the creation of Fox News, one channel on your TV dial or satellite guide, that power has almost exclusively meant their fellow Democrats. The media have long voted overwhelmingly Democrat in presidential elections; as Walter Cronkite once said at a Radio & TV Correspondents Dinner in the mid-1990s, in-between feting the Clintons on his yacht in Martha’s Vineyard, “Everybody knows that there’s a liberal, that there’s a heavy liberal persuasion among correspondents.” But in the...

"The standard rap against Bush is that he was ducking combat by joining the Guard. Actually, the Texas Air Guard had a program called Palace Alert that allowed pilots to volunteer for flight time in Vietnam. Three of Bush's fellow pilots—Udell, Woodfin and Fred Bradley—recalled to NEWSWEEK that Bush inquired with the base commander about signing up for Palace Alert. He was told no; he had too few flying hours at the time and his plane, the F-102, was by then deemed obsolete for air combat."