Free Republic

Dear President Obama, I write this letter in response to your May 12 visit to Georgetown University where, in a so-called religious setting, you urged conservatives and liberals to unify to fight poverty. Helping those in need is a cause that touches the heart of God, so I was a little encouraged until you took a potshot at Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, insinuating they could care less about the plight of the poor. Your insinuation was offensive, revealing that even in helping others you cannot help insulting your political opponents. And obviously,...

Columnist and Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers' new book, "The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech," links her snugly to the cause of unfettered thought and expression -- important for conservatives, certainly but also for non-conservatives. As it should be for any American, come to think of it, as the "progressive" left pounds and pulverizes anyone of differing mind and purpose. The politicization of almost everything has put at some risk, in the most talkative of ages, the broadly assumed right of First Amendment-cherishing Americans to speak their pieces. "The illiberal left," says Powers, "... believes that people...

PARIS -- Pentagon officials are touting the success of a Delta Force special operations commando raid in Syria last weekend that resulted in the dispatch of about a dozen Islamic State riffraff. Not to take anything away from Delta Force, which is comprised of America's most elite warriors, but this kind of straightforward, direct-action job sounds like a waste of their immense talents and skills, and nothing that a few Rangers or Marines couldn't handle. It smacks of little more than a publicity stunt. And if, as speculated, the target was a big fish who wasn't there when the raid...

· George Stephanopoulos appears to have made a mistake. It was a mistake he made three times having given $25,000 per year for three years to one or another of that Gordian Knot of elements that make up the Clinton's foundation. · Stephanopoulos reportedly makes about $7 million a year so $75,000 won't make him miss a meal, but it's real money. · Why should we care about that? I'm not sure. The Clinton collection of foundations make it unclear to me (with my multiple degrees in accounting and law) whether they are even tax deductible but, as President Barack...

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., isn't worried that, absent a Senate vote, key provisions of the Patriot Act are slated to sunset May 31. The GOP presidential hopeful told "Meet the Press" Sunday that a federal appeals court found the data-gathering authorized under the Patriot Act's Section 215 is unconstitutional, "so really, it ought to stop." He continued: "I don't want to replace it with another system. I really think that we could get along with the Constitution just fine." Paul spoke to the same effect during a recent trip to San Francisco. He even has threatened a filibuster, if needed,...

As Middle America rises in rage against "fast track" and the mammoth Obamatrade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, The Wall Street Journal has located the source of the malady. Last Monday's lead editorial began: "Here we go again. In the 1990s Pat Buchanan launched a civil war within the Republican Party on a platform targeting immigration and trade. Some claimed Pitchfork Pat was the future of the GOP, though in the end he mainly contributed to its presidential defeats." But, woe is us, "the GOP's Buchanan wing is making a comeback." Now it is true that, while Nixon and...

Rideshare company Uber Technologies may be headed for a world of hurt. A California judge has ruled that a class action complaint against the rideshare company will be heard by a jury, in order to decide if Uber drivers shall be classified as employees or independent contractors.Should the jury decide that drivers are, in fact, employees, it will cost the rideshare company untold sums due to its workforce. It could be on the hook for overtime; unpaid tips; health, life, and disability insurance; Social Security and Medicare; unemployment and worker’s comp insurance; paid leave, vacation pay, and sick days; and...

Pamela Geller -- the woman whose group, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, organized the Muhammad cartoon drawing contest in Garland, Texas -- may be the most hated person in America right now. She is certainly the left's chief villain. And, sad to say, though few conservatives hate her, more than a few have condemned her. The question is why? Here are three reasons. Reason One: The left Hates Those Who Confront Evil The first and most important reason is a rule of life that I wrote about in a recent column explaining the left's hatred for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin...

My first job in journalism was as a copyboy at the NBC News Bureau in Washington, D.C. In my early 20s, I asked Bill Corrigan, the newsroom manager, "What must I do to get on the air?" He replied, "Get a college degree and a minimum of five years writing experience with a newspaper or wire service." In those days every reporter at NBC News and the other two networks came from print because television was relatively new and as network news president Reuven Frank noted in his book "Out of Thin Air," we were making it up as...

I think Hillary Clinton has learned (or believes she has learned) a great deal from Barack Obama over the years, though none of it has to do with statesmanship. It has to do with how a presidential candidate positions herself with the electorate. From all indications and a recent Washington Post article on the subject, Hillary's strategy is to emulate Obama's appeal to his leftist base and his arrogant disrespect for any constitutional limitations on his authority. Hillary is covering all the bases of the Democratic base -- gays, blacks, Hispanics, women, teachers unions. She has announced her undying fealty...

This spring it seems as if there have been two-point-something Republican presidential candidacy announcements per week. And, since she made her own announcement April 12, Hillary Clinton has answered an average of about two-point-something questions from the press each week. Those (imprecise) statistics illustrate the asymmetrical nature of the presidential race. One party has so many candidates that media sponsors can't figure out how to get them all in a presidential debate. The other has one candidate who attends events with hand-picked audiences and has little to say about anything. One solution for the Republican debate problem is to adapt...

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation wants a two-star general court-martialed because he spoke about his relationship with God.Major General Craig Olson was a speaker last week at a National Day of Prayer gathering. He described himself in that speech as a "redeemed believer in Christ."Mikey Weinstein called the general's remarks a "brutal disgrace." Mr. Weinstein is the president of the MRFF. He fired off a nasty letter to the Secretary of Defense calling for the Air Force general to be severely punished. He alleged that airmen were "utterly disgusted and shocked by the brazenly illicit and wholly unconstitutional, fundamentalist Christian...

Back in 2003, I was strongly in favor of the invasion of Iraq. I thought George Bush made an excellent case for the war; he gave Saddam every chance to avert the fight; he bent over backwards to bring in more allies and he took his case to Congress and got approval to go to war. Knowing what we know now, itÂ’s very unfortunate that the linchpin of his case was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. At the time we went in, that wasnÂ’t very controversial. Saddam was trying to make everyone think he had WMDs, Intelligence agencies...

As illegal immigrants continue to seek legal status under President Obama's executive actions, the waiting list to enter the United States legally grows longer, as does the waiting time for those in the pipeline. American born Jimmy Gugliotta, who currently lives in Santiago, Chile, with his Argentinian wife and their children, has been waiting more than a year and a half for visas to bring his family to the U.S. He doesn't understand why going through the process legally puts him behind people who sneak into the U.S. illegally. "It's really sad to see that we've been put in the...

RUSH: It's Josh in Williamsburg, Virginia. Great to have you, sir. Hello. Appreciate your patience. CALLER: Hey, Rush. Thanks for taking my call. So I want to do two things. The first is to say that Jeb Bush's answer to Megyn Kelly's initial question was not necessarily wrong. He could validly have that answer to her question. The second is to -- RUSH: Wait a minute, Josh. What -- CALLER: Yeah. RUSH: Just refresh people's -- what did he say? What was his answer to that first question? He would do it all over again, right? CALLER: Yeah. So the...

<p>Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. When ISIS began its attack on Ramadi last week, the Iraqi government threw in its elite units, hoping to stem the tide of the radical Sunni advance and the overall targeting of Baghdad proper. Instead of pushing ISIS back, what transpired was a repeat of the flight from Mosul and other former Iraqi strongholds — a disorganized rout.</p>

Seventeen months before President Obama dismissed the Islamic State as a "JV team," a Defense Intelligence Agency report predicted the rise of the terror group and likely establishment of a caliphate if its momentum was not reversed. While the report was circulated to the CIA, State Department and senior military leaders, among others, it's not known whether Obama was ever briefed on the document. The DIA report, which was reviewed by Fox News, was obtained through a federal lawsuit by conservative watchdog Judicial Watch. Documents from the lawsuit also reveal a host of new details about events leading up to...

RUSH: Mrs. Clinton continuing to be in the news, not only problems involving her e-mails and questions that she will not answer. By the way, on these e-mails, you know, Hillary claims that she got rid of all those e-mails, 30,000 e-mails on her server that she got rid of, that she told us we didn't need to see. Just like Tom Brady and the Patriots, there's nothing here on my phone for you to see -- trust me -- there's nothing here, you don't need to see it, and I'm not surrendering. Hillary said nothing is on my server....

RUSH: We got George Stephanopoulos in bigger trouble at ABC than anybody knows. ABC is more worried about this than anybody knows. That's the story on Page Six of the New York Post today, and I tend to think that it's probably true. I really do. Stephanopoulos was to be, for lack of a better term, the anchor of their entire 2016 presidential campaign coverage. And he has just rendered himself -- well, in the game of pretense, where we all pretend the media's objective, and we all pretend the media is all journalists and so forth, under that umbrella...

RUSH: Anybody in the audience watch Mad Men? Do you watch Mad Men in there? (interruption) You watch it but you didn't see the finale? Well, heck, that means I can't talk about it because if I do it would be a spoiler alert for you. Oh, well, it isn't that big a deal anyway. You haven't seen the finale either, Maimone? And you watch it? Oh, gee. I see. Okay, well, anyway, it reminds me that I had a story last week that I didn't really spend enough time on, so I saved it, and it turns out there's...