Free Republic

Decades ago I spent three years writing The Samson Option (1991), an exposé of the unstated policy of American presidents going back to Dwight Eisenhower to look the other way as Israel began the process of building an atomic bomb. The right or wrong for Israel, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, was not the point of the book. My point was that what America was doing was known throughout the Third World, as it was then called, and our duplicity made our worries about the spread of nuclear weapons another example of American hypocrisy. Since then others have undertaken...

Betrayal. Torture. Escape. An American Woman Inside the Islamic State Samantha Elhassani is the first American woman to face terrorism charges after spending time in ISIS territory. SHANE BAUEJUNE 26, 2019 This is an adapted excerpt from Shane Bauer’s two-part series on American involvement in Syria. Read the full article or listen to this special Mother Jones Podcast episode about this story. In the plains near the Iraq border, I pull up to a refugee camp surrounded by a chain-link fence. For the first time since I’ve been in Syria, I see women with covered faces and flowing black abayas....

Fox Business channel host Neil Cavuto challenged college student Keely Mullen, an organizer for the “Million Student March,” leaving her at a loss for words on how to explain paying for a plethora of “free” programs. Calling it an “equitable and fair system,” Mullen listed the group’s grievances with the education system in America, stating: “So the three core demands of the national day of action are free public college, a cancellation of student debt, and a 15 dollar an hour minimum wage — um — for people who work on the campus.” Cavuto then pressed the panhandling millennial, asking...

A selfie-obsessed tourist apologized Sunday for posting an online pic of herself grinning at the site of the deadly East Village inferno. After The Post exposed her with a front-page story headlined “Village Idiots,” Christina Freundlich said she was “deeply sorry for my careless and distasteful post.” “It was inconsiderate to those hurt in the crash and to the city of New York,” she said in an e-mail to The Des Moines Register. “What happened last week in the East Village is not to be taken lightly and I regret my course of action.” Freundlich, who worked on both of...

PRESIDENT OBAMA: "My grandparents came from the Midwest and so when I travel to rural areas of the country, what always strikes me is how hard people work and resilient they are, and how much they are worried about being able to pass on that way of life to the next generation. Those core middle class values that helped to build America, I think they’re still out there in every corner of this country. People still believe in hard work. They still believe in personal responsibility. And that’s why we’ve spent a lot of time on how we build on...

The White House took an optimistic view of the June jobs report on Friday, saying that overall unemployment is down nearly one percentage point over the past year. "The economy has now added private sector jobs for 28 straight months, for a total of 4.4 million payroll jobs during that period," Alan Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a statement. "Employment is growing but it is not growing fast enough given the jobs deficit caused by the deep recession." The jobs report showed the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 8.2 percent in June, while the economy added 80,000...

During the Democratic primaries in 2008, Rush Limbaugh famously launched "Operation Chaos" to keep the divisive contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton going. The Jon Stewart "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" might as well have been the product of an "Operation Diversion." How to keep as many liberals as possible safely in thrall to their own smug superiority and distaste for the rough-and-tumble of political persuasion? Give them a rally a few days before the election where they can amuse themselves with their ironic signs and their highhanded dismissal of anyone not as exquisitely reasonable as they are....

“We are reviewing a list of presidential executive orders and directives to get the job done across a front of issues,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. Any president has vast authority to influence policy even without legislation, through executive orders, agency rule-making and administrative fiat. And Mr. Obama’s success this week in pressuring the Senate to confirm 27 nominations by threatening to use his recess appointment power demonstrated that executive authority can also be leveraged to force action by Congress. “If the stalling tactics continue,” said Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, “he’s not ruling...

As President Hugo Chavez seems to be having an epiphany that most of his economic policies of the last few years were wrong, I do wish someone would explain to him that taking US $7 billion from the international reserves simply works against him and insures that next year, he will be forced to devalue again...There will be 50% (it is actually more, but who cares?) more Bolivars in December than yesterday. This will drive inflation and devaluation, as simple as that. Nobody seems to have told Hugo about this, in contrast with Argentina, where a Court has voided a...

I try not to overdose on the fear factor, but the shocking intelligence failure in the Christmas airline plot isn't the only national security night mare facing America. While we were all absorbed with the underwear bomber, the Iranian nuke mess took another big turn for the worse. President Obama's end-of-the-year deadline for the mad mullahs to make a deal on uranium enrichment came and went, but not without incident. There were three, none good. Most troubling, the White House proved it still doesn't have a Plan B, even though its unBush diplomacy has proven to be a total dud....

WASHINGTON (Routers) In an effort to drive a wedge between moderate Germans and those more extreme, the State Department issued new rules today, stipulating that the word "Nazi" was not to be used by department employees to describe the enemy. Germany recently declared war on our country, as part of its alliance with Imperial Japan, which itself attacked us at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii a little over a week ago, and with which we are now at war. "Nazism has a great many admirable features," said a department spokesman at Foggy Bottom, "and we want to make clear that despite...

Barack Obama showed his deft political touch today, and demonstrated his keen insight into the lives of the little people in this country, with a speech that is sure to be worth at least thirty points in Pennsylvania in the upcoming primary: You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them... And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade...

Barack Obama won’t wear an American flag on his lapel, but on the wall of his Houston campaign office: a Cuban flag with a picture of Communist mass murderer Che Guevara. Video link: http://www.myfoxhouston.com/myfox/pages/Home/Detail?contentId=5700252&version=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=VSTY&pageId=1.1.1 ....And that flag is no fluke. Here’s another one. (Video, as again the Houston news anchors don’t even notice the big image of Che Guevara staring them in the face.) Link: http://www.myfoxhouston.com/myfox/pages/News/Politics/Detail?contentId=5668120&version=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=VSTY&pageId=3.14.1

It had to happen. President Bush’s bungling of the war in Iraq has been the talk of the summer. On Capitol Hill, some of the more reliable Republicans are writing proposals to force Mr. Bush to change course. A showdown vote is looming in the Senate. Enter, stage right, the fear of terrorism. Yesterday, the director of national intelligence released a report with the politically helpful title of “The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” and Fran Townsend, the president’s homeland security adviser, held a news conference to trumpet its findings. The message, as always: Be very afraid. And don’t...

Hollywood goes carbon neutral Entertainment biz is second largest polluter in Los Angeles By STEVEN KOTLER The equation is pretty simple. The more carbon dioxide that's dumped into the atmosphere, the warmer the atmosphere gets. Human beings are major CO2 contributors, of course, but the entertainment industry also does its part. In fact, a recent Los Angeles study found that the entertainment business was the second largest polluter in the city behind the petroleum industry. From the generators that provide power on sets, to the energy used in studio office buildings, to the airplane flights to move a production around...

It is inevitable. Some prominent American will want to be the first on his block to pronounce the shahada and become an official worshipper of mohammed. The publicity will be too delicious, and the ego-augmentation unmatched. The desire to associate such a successful assassin, murderer, rapist, misogynist, slave-holder and all-around in-your-facer with The One True God, is nothing compared to the lure of a celebro-american associating himself with the mosque of what's happening now. Cynthia McKinney and John Conyers do not count. Neither does Noam Chomsky. The CNN-worthy frisson of "reversion" has to be present for this prediction to be...

If only working-class and poor people would register and vote, liberal Democrats would win every election-that's what we thought, until November 2, 2004. Democrats work on voter registration, Republicans work on vote suppression. So tens of millions were spent on Democratic voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts over the summer and fall. But on November 2 we discovered how wrong we were. Turnout in poor and working-class precincts was unprecedented, but many of those voters cast their ballots for George W. Bush-especially white people from non-union households, especially outside of cities. How did the Republicans do it? How did they get...

Home Depot ignored Alan R. Sporn for almost two years, but a $1-million court judgment got the company's attention. The Laguna Hills businessman had his Social Security number stolen, which ended up in a dozen requests for Home Depot credit. The fiasco hurt Sporn's credit rating, but the home improvement giant that prides itself in customer service brushed off his concerns — until he filed a lawsuit, won and then tried to collect the money from a company bank account.

WOODRUFF: As we've seen in our coverage all this week, online blogs are receiving a lot of attention. And some say their influence is overstated. With me now again, Howard Kurtz of CNN's "RELIABLE SOURCES," and political analyst Stu Rothenberg, of "Roll Call" and the "Rothenberg Political Report." Stu, let me start with you. We just heard Howard's report giving us a look at who some of the bloggers are. But you're a long-time political observers, analyst. What do you make of the blogs? STU ROTHENBERG, "ROTHENBERG POLITICAL REPORT": Well, I think blogging is simply another vehicle for people getting...

Their heads swimming in despair over the events since November 2nd, many Far Lefties have reached a fork in the road. Do they flee to Canada (or hopefully even further away) or do they stay and fight President Bush (Chimp, Shrub, or simply *, as they call him)? And if they stay, what does "fight" really mean? There are three things to remember while reading the montage of DU threads set forth below:1. They believe they're living in 1930's Germany.2. They have a breathtakingly arrogant view of their importance.3. Everyone else is stupid.After 35 years of activisim, here are my...