Free Republic

I've always thought of Barack Obama as the "Chauncey Gardiner" of American politics. Like Peter Sellers' character in the classic film, "Being There," Obama is an embodiment of outsiders' hopes and dreams for who they think he is. Reality, like the film, shows there isn't really a lot of there, there.This weekend, we learned that President Obama "didn't know about" NSA spying on world leaders, especially German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He also "didn't know about" the posthumously obvious problems with the rollout of the ObamaCare website exchanges. According to the New York Times, these problems were evident 8 months ago....

Rachel Jeantel, identified by the State and defense in opening statements as the young woman who was on the phone with Trayvon Martin minutes before the shooting, is ready to take the stand. (She tweeted the photo above this weekend, with the caption "court nails.") Apparently, the state intends to call her as a witness after all. So who is Rachel Jeantel? Smoking Gun reviews her twitter account, but only tells half the story. [More...] Why this matters? Because Team Crump portrayed her to the media and America as a broken-hearted, traumatized minor, holding a press conference to play her...

What’s going on at the IRS? Don’t expect answers from some of the people who work there. A manager suspected of steering hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to a friend became the second major figure to take the Fifth at a House Oversight Committee hearing into a widening range of malfeasance at the IRS:

MOSCOW — Russia's foreign minister has rejected U.S. demands to extradite National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, who has apparently stopped in Moscow while trying to evade U.S. justice. Sergey Lavrov said that Snowden hasn't crossed the Russian border and insisted that Russia has nothing to do with him, his relations with U.S. justice or his travel plans. Speaking at a news conference Tuesday, he angrily lashed out at the U.S. demands for the extradition and warnings of negative consequences if Moscow fails to comply. Lavrov said that accusing Russia of "violation of U.S. laws and even some sort of...

<p>The Obama administration has revamped a government website aimed at promoting the federal health care law as part of its all-hands-on-deck campaign to get Americans enrolled in the law’s insurance markets when they debut this fall.</p> <p>The site, healthcare.gov, features sleeker graphics than its prior iteration and features a “Start Now” button that takes consumers on a step-by-step guide to coverage, with questions on age, gender, location and employment, among other things.</p>

Hi, all! This week, we got some big news about the immigration reform bill. It's a little wonky, but it's so great that I couldn't wait to share it with you. The nonpartisan experts who estimate the financial impact of legislation for Congress concluded that because undocumented immigrants will start paying more in taxes for things like education and Social Security, the immigration proposal in the Senate will make the economy fairer for middle class families while cutting the U.S. deficit by almost $1,000,000,000,000 over the next two decades. With every passing day, it’s becoming clear that we can’t afford...

Mark Zuckerberg, one of the young cofounders of Facebook, on Tuesday met with Samsung Electronics executives including the heir Lee Jay-yong and mobile unit chief Shin Jong-kyun to ask Samsung to manufacture a “Facebook-friendly” phone, industry watchers said. “Facebook has every intention of becoming the second Google, and with that intent in mind, Zuckerberg is said to have asked Samsung to step up cooperation by launching a phone with a Facebook interface,” said one watcher, declining to be identified. However, Samsung is unlikely to be considering the request for Facebook-platform phone in a positive light, industry experts said, as there...

With healthcare costs continually on the rise — a situation compounded by ObamaCare’s new taxes and regulations — employers are looking for every means possible to keep those costs down. The healthcare law requires them to offer coverage to all full-time employees and their dependent children aged 25 and younger. The one person whose coverage it does not mandate, however, is the employee’s spouse; spousal coverage, therefore, is increasingly on employers’ chopping blocks. According to MarketWatch, since the passage of ObamaCare, companies have instituted various measures designed to discourage, if not outright exclude, individuals from obtaining health coverage via their...

Hundreds of pro-immigration goons stormed Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s home this past weekend. The mob brought megaphones and rallied on his front porch. And they hurled threats at his family. (VIDEO-AT-LINK) The leftists dared the Secretary of State to come outside. Todd Starnes at Townhall reported: Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is calling for a criminal investigation after a huge mob of illegal alien supporters surrounded his private home Saturday and held a rally on his front porch. At least 200 members of Sunflower Community Action were bussed into Kobach’s Kansas City-area neighborhood on Saturday – to...

President Barack Obama's trip to Africa later this month could be one of the most expensive of his tenure, costing the government as much as $100 million. According to a confidential internal planning document obtained by The Washington Post, hundreds of Secret Service agents will be dispatched to secure facilities in Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania, which the first family will visit from June 26 to July 3. A Navy aircraft carrier or amphibious ship, with fully staffed medical trauma center, will be stationed offshore in case of an emergency. In addition, military cargo planes will airlift in 56 support...

Two defendants in military sexual assault cases cannot be punitively discharged, if found guilty, because of “unlawful command influence” derived from comments made by President Barack Obama, a judge ruled in a Hawaii military court this week

President and Mrs. Obama are planning a trip to sub-Saharan Africa later in the month, but the White House has scotched a plan to include a Tanzanian safari on the agenda after a reporter revealed that a team of snipers with high-powered military assault rifles would accompany him in the wild. The Washington Post reported Thursday afternoon that the itinerary's dangers 'would have required the president’s special counterassault team to carry sniper rifles with high-caliber rounds that could neutralize cheetahs, lions or other animals if they became a threat.' The newspaper based its report on a confidential planning document leaked...

EL PASO COUNTY, Colo. - Colorado's most destructive fire continues to roar through the heavily wooded neighborhoods in Black Forest, and is heading toward the city of Colorado Springs, prompting officials yet again to expand the mandatory evacuation zone Thursday afternoon, now to include parts of the city of Colorado Springs. The newest evacuations impact 1,020 homes and 3,000 people. Officials say University of Colorado at Colorado Springs will open as a shelter for evacuees within the hour. The Colorado State Patrol also said at 2:30 p.m. that through traffic on northbound and southbound Interstate 25 from Interquest Parkway to...

In a sharp escalation of the U.S. role in Syria's bloody civil war, the White House announced late Thursday that it will provide military aid to rebels fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad after confirming that his government used chemical weapons on the opposition. Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes told reporters on a conference call that President Barack Obama had heard pleas from Syria's rebel Supreme Military Council (SMC) for more help. "Our aim is to be responsive," Rhodes said, underlining that the new assistance would have "direct military purposes."

Homeland Insecurity: The White House assures that tracking our every phone call and keystroke is to stop terrorists, and yet it won't snoop in mosques, where the terrorists are. That's right, the government's sweeping surveillance of our most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists are radicalized. Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents.

This little item could give the IRS’ whole “targeting” conservatives scandal a brand-new twist. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) tweeted that he observed IRS agents training with AR-15s when he toured the Department of Homeland Security: A few weeks ago when I toured a DHS facility I saw #IRS agents training with AR-15's. I'm looking into the issue now. #PJNET

<p>Technology companies stung by the controversy over the National Security Agency’s sweeping Internet surveillance program are calling on U.S. officials to ease the secrecy surrounding national security investigations and lift long-standing gag orders covering the nature and extent of information collected about Internet users.</p>

The NSA is systematically monitoring the Internet posts and telephone conversations of U.S. military returning from Afghanistan, according to a civil-liberties attorney. “The FBI and the Secret Service are showing up to request an interview to question specific Internet posts the veteran has placed on websites such as Facebook,” explained attorney John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute. Whitehead said the agencies are looking for “anti-Obama views that can be interpreted to reflect psychological problems of sufficient seriousness to disqualify the veteran from ever owning a firearm.”Rutherford told WND credible sources within the National Security Agency have told him the...

The LA Times reports that sales of the book, which concerns a discontented propagandist working for the Ministry of Truth in a time of endless war, are up 5,771 percent as of Tuesday morning. From a sales rank of 12,507 in the days before The Guardian published top-secret government documents provided by Snowden, "1984" has risen to crack Amazon's top 200.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is under fire for statements he made before Congress that suggested he had no knowledge about federal government programs that collected data on millions of Americans’ phone calls and Internet activities. In March, Clapper said at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that he was not aware that the National Security Agency was involved in such large-scale efforts. The questioning of Clapper’s statements follow blockbuster news last week that the federal government has since 9/11 been logging millions, perhaps billions, of calls and Internet activities and as the NSA’s top official goes before the same...