Free Republic

Iran announces that Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian and three Iranian Americans have been freed from prison

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Four years ago, few seemed to care when Rodney Brown uttered, "I can't breathe" after being tased 11 times by Cleveland police officers during a New Year's Eve traffic stop – at least that's how his family felt. Now the phrase has become a powerful symbol of civil unrest, a rallying cry represented on T-shirts and chanted during marches protesting police use of force cases across the country, like the one involving Eric Garner, who repeated it 11 times while lying face down on a Staten Island sidewalk.

Under pressure from a large faction of rank-and-file members, Senate Republican leaders are warming to the idea of keeping the rule change known as the “nuclear option” that Democrats imposed to end filibusters of nominations. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican who will become majority leader in January, is leaving the decision to the will of his members, and at least half of them currently oppose reversing course, said GOP aides close to the discussions. The leadership team this week began signaling that the new rule, which reduced the number of votes needed to cut off confirmation filibusters...

The polls may suggest Republicans will see gains in this November’s elections, but former Democratic strategist Bob Beckel thinks they shouldn’t get too comfortable. The Five co-host mysteriously signaled Democrats have something up their sleeve. “I’ll tell you: I would expect an October surprise,” Beckel said on Thursday. “I think I know what is — I’m not going to say it, but I think I know what it is — and it is going to shake things up, and it has to do with national security.” Beckel’s secrecy comes as President Obama faces perhaps the most significant foreign-policy challenge of...

The population of Mogadishu is moving to Minneapolis, through the miracle of chain immigration. I don’t know whether there is any limiting principle to this or whether all of Mogadishu will one day reside along the Mississippi, but in any event, the Somali influx is already impacting Minnesota politics. Despite being “natural conservatives”–imagine what they must think of abortion and gay marriage!–the Somalis have so far been reliable Democratic voters. This has created one of this year’s most interesting local races, in which Phyllis Kahn, a left-wing Democrat who has represented her district in the Minnesota House of Representatives for...

The White House said on Wednesday that Kathryn Ruemmler, the president's chief legal counsel, would step down at the end of the year.

A new report claims that the Syrian rebels are more jihadist and hardline than the Obama administration has asserted. Jamie Dettmer reports from Lebanon. Nearly half of the rebel forces battling to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are jihadist or hardline Islamists, a British defense consultancy has warned its private clients, thus contradicting claims by Obama administration officials that opposition ranks are predominately moderate. According to a study by IHS Jane’s for commercial clients, the rebels number around 100,000 fighters and are spread across more than 1,000 fragmented bands that are often at odds with each other and increasingly engaged...

George Zimmerman has been taken into custody in Central Florida after an incident involving a gun with another person. Lake Mary police say they were called to a house on Sprucewood Road Monday afternoon after a report that Zimmerman was involved in an altercation with another person with a threat involved. No other details were immediately available.

Christopher Greene at AMTV hammers McCain.

Gulf-based supporters have sent a 400-ton shipment of arms to Syria's outgunned rebels, one of the biggest to reach them in their two-year-old uprising, opposition sources said on Sunday. The consignment - mostly ammunition for shoulder-fired weapons and anti-aircraft machine guns - came into northern Syria via the Turkish province of Hatay in the past 24 hours, and was already being handed out, the sources added. One rebel officer told Reuters the flow of arms bound for rebels had increased since opposition groups accused the government of launching deadly chemical weapons attacks in Damascus on Wednesday. "Twenty trailers crossed from...

In a statement released this morning, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham call for the U.S. to "take limited military actions in Syria." “Recent reports and information from Syria lend additional credibility to what has been clear since last week: Assad and his forces have once again used chemical weapons against civilians in Syria and are, in fact, escalating their use. Their recent massacre of hundreds of men, women, and children around Damascus clearly constitutes the commission of a war crime, and it is the responsibility of civilized nations everywhere to ensure that those responsible are held accountable," the statement...

CLEVELAND– A mentally challenged man was violently assaulted while walking home from work in Cleveland. According to family members, John Rager, 47, was savagely beaten last Wednesday while walking on E. 152nd Street after his shift ended at 1 a.m. “They were out to do as much bodily harm as they could,” said Rager’s sister, Jimi-Lee Hoover. Despite his challenges, Rager worked every night for the past 15 plus years at a Cleveland Heights bakery. He needed both the bus and his bicycle to get to and from work, but last week his bike had a flat tire so he...

Russia has invited the U.S. to participate in a tank biathlon so that both nations may learn to play nice — with heavy artillery. The invitation was apparently extended while Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Shoigu in Washington on Friday. The "two-on-two" talks were intended to relieve some of the tension between the two countries, so the suggestion of a little friendly competition — under fire — wasn't out of place. Defense Minister Shoigu repeated the invitation during a Friday press conference, and according to Russia's , Shoigu says the U.S....

A hazardous materials unit and federal agents are investigating a suspicious substance found at the Baltimore office of Rep. Elijah Cummings, officials said.

The Pentagon has placed its elite cadre of special operations teams on full alert to launch preemptive attacks against suspected al Qaeda targets across the globe, according to reports. The American special forces teams have spent the past week waiting for U.S. military and intelligence officials to confirm the whereabouts of the terror cell plotting to attack U.S. diplomatic outposts in the Mideast and North Africa. Unnamed sources told CNN on Monday that the teams were poised to carry out the preemptive strikes, but declined to comment on where the U.S. forces were located or which potential targets the Pentagon...

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges. The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that...

Russian President Vladimir Putin is nothing more than a “school-yard bully” and President Barack Obama should cancel their meeting in Moscow next month, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D.N.Y.) said Sunday. Last week, Putin granted National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden temporary political asylum in Russia, prompting outrage from many U.S. officials, including Schumer. “The relationship between the United States and Russia is more poisonous than any time since the Cold War because of all of this,” Schumer said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.” “Putin’s behaving like a school-yard bully,” he added. “Unless you stand up to that bully, they ask...

The Conservative Party has hired Barack Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina for its general election campaign team, BBC Newsnight has learned. Sources confirmed that he would act as a campaign strategy adviser to the Conservative party. A lifelong Democrat, Mr Messina masterminded the US president's successful 2012 re-election campaign. The political parties in Westminster are readying themselves for the general election, now under two years away.

The United States said Thursday it would close an unspecified number of embassies around the world on Sunday over security concerns. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said that after Sunday, the government would reassess its options, without specifying the particular threat to the embassies concerned.

President Barack Obama is nominating a retired corporate restructuring expert to take over the Internal Revenue Service, which is under fire for its screening of political groups. In a statement obtained by The Associated Press, Obama says John Koskinen (KOS'-kihn-ihn) "knows how to lead in difficult times." The president said he is confident Koskinen will restore public trust as the tax agency's commissioner. Koskinen was brought in to overhaul mortgage buyer Freddie Mac after its near collapse in the financial crisis, among handling many other public and private reorganizations.