Free Republic

Appearing on MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports on Wednesday, NBC's chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd came up with a long list of excuses for President Obama's poor speech performance in Berlin: After whining about there not being enough people there, Todd grasped at other reasons for the lackluster event: "...then you had that very distracting glass and you could just see that the President himself wasn't feeding off of the crowd. And I think look, part of it, it was hot....it can sap your energy a little bit.

A set of seven stunning photographs emerged Thursday, showing the first official glimpse of the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2012 terror attack on the U.S. Consulate Special Mission Compound in Benghazi, Libya that left US. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead. The grainy, scanned pictures, released by the advocacy group Judicial Watch, were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request lodged with the U.S. Department of State. They are the first images of the Benghazi attack released by the State Department. Three of them show Arabic-language spray paint graffiti. According to translations provided to MailOnline by...

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly launched a stinging rebuke to the federal government’s secret phone and Internet monitoring campaign — and suggested leaker Edward Snowden was right about privacy “abuse.” “I don’t think it ever should have been made secret,” Kelly said today, breaking ranks with US law-enforcement officials.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) warned Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) would face a conference revolt that could threaten his Speakership if he allows a House vote on the immigration bill presently being debated in the Senate. Conservatives have been pressuring Boehner to adhere to the unwritten “Hastert Rule” — named after former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) — that says no bill should come to the House floor unless it has the backing of a majority of a chamber's majority party. Rohrabacher said if Boehner moves forward with a vote on immigration reform without a Republican majority, it would be a “betrayal”...

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who helped draft the immigration reform bill currently being discussed in the Senate, says he will walk away from the negotiations if it includes a controversial amendment to provide immigration benefits for gay couples. "If this bill has in it something that gives gay couples immigration rights and so forth, it kills the bill. I'm done," said Rubio during an interview on the Andrea Tantaros Show on Thursday. "I'm off it, and I've said that repeatedly. I don't think that's going to happen and it shouldn't happen. This is already a difficult enough issue as it...

The Obama administration is considering resettling thousands of refugees who left Syria during the country's ongoing civil war to multiple towns and cities across the United States, the L.A. Times reports.

The Russian Duma, or the lower house of parliament, passed a law banning homosexual propaganda by an overwhelming 436-0 vote on Tuesday, leading to clashes between gay activists and their opponents. "Traditional sexual relations are relations between a man and a woman, which ... are a condition for the preservation and development of the multi-ethnic Russian people," lawmaker Yelena Mizulina said on Tuesday before the Duma. "It is precisely these relations that need special protection by the state." The bill, which must still pass the upper parliament and be signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, reflects the country's strong stance...

Court Marshal Sexually Assaults Woman And Arrests Her Afterwards

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) on Tuesday defended the Obama administration's domestic spying programs, arguing that, unlike the secret surveillance under President George W. Bush, the current programs appear legal.

Sales of George Orwell’s "1984" are up 69 percent on Amazon, according to a list on the website.

ST. PAUL (WCCO) — US Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., says he’s not surprised by revelations that federal security agencies collect phone and computer data on American citizens.

President Obama has said the outrage over the federal government’s decision to monitor citizens’ phone activity is all “hype.”

A small town in Spain has given new meaning to the phrase "doggy bag." For a campaign to crack down on irresponsible dog owners in the town of Brunete, volunteers spent a week in February on the lookout for dog owners who failed to scoop their canine's excrement, the Telegraph reported Tuesday. They approached the owner and struck up a conversation to determine the dog's name. "With the name of the dog and the breed it was possible to identify the owner from a registered pet database held in the town hall," a council spokesman said. The volunteers scooped up...

BARF ALERT! Video at link.

FBI confirms it has agents executing a search warrant at the California Capitol, “taking evidence respective to an ongoing investigation”

The fisherman wanted his photo shot with a beaver. The beaver had other ideas: It attacked the 60-year-old man with razor-sharp teeth, slicing an artery and causing him to bleed to death. It was the most serious in a string of beaver attacks on humans in Belarus, as the rodents have turned increasingly aggressive when confronted by humans after wandering near homes, shops and schools. "The character of the wound was totally shocking for us medical professionals," recalled village doctor Leonty Sulim. "We had never run into anything like this before." Once hunted nearly to extinction in Europe, beavers have...

<p>I was watching “The Voice” last night, NBC’s singing competition and I could not believe the words coming out of my flat screen television.</p> <p>It happened near the end of the two-hour episode just after country music crooner Amber Carrington had been saved from elimination by television viewers.</p>

WASHINGTON — U.S. officials confirmed that two American employees of the U.S. embassy in Caracas, Venezuela, were shot outside of a nightclub early this morning. The men were part of the embassy’s defense attaché and were hospitalized after the incident.

When Cardinal Bergoglio was first chosen as Pope, my immediate reaction was that, although he would probably not tamper with the Church’s views on sexual issues, he would likely move it to the left in terms of economic rhetoric. I based that to some small degree on his choice of name: Saint Francis is something of a favorite of progressives in the Church due to his vow of poverty and his love of animals. But even more important to me was the intellectual milieu out of which he came: Argentine populism, and his own public statements as a cardinal in...

On the surface, conservatives and progressives seem to be in agreement about what should be done about the IRS scandal: Larry Kudlow: “…must find out exactly what happened and who was involved, and then come up with a fix so it never happens again.” Steven Rattner: “…the matter needs to be fully investigated, those responsible need to be held accountable and procedures need to be put in place to ensure that nothing like this can happen again.” However, abuse of IRS power has been going on for almost 80 years. It began under FDR, not long after the IRS was...