Free Republic

This week Elise Jordan, wife of famed journalist Michael Hastings, who recently died under suspicious circumstances, corroborated this reporter's sources that CIA Director, John Brennan was Hastings next exposé project (CNN clip). Last month a source provided San Diego 6 News with an alarming email hacked from super secret CIA contractor Stratfor’s President Fred Burton. The email (link here) was posted on WikiLeaks and alleged that then Obama counter-terrorism Czar Brennan, was in charge of the government's continued crackdown or witch-hunt on investigative journalists. After providing the Stratfor email to the CIA for comment, the spymaster's spokesperson responded in lightning...

IRS screeners continue to flag certain applications for exempt status for secondary scrutiny on the basis of name alone regardless of whether there is any evidence of political activity, an IRS employee has told a House Ways and Means Committee investigation. A transcript of the interview with a Cincinnati-based IRS employee was released today by Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Charles Boustany Jr., M.D. (R-LA) in a letter calling on IRS Acting Commissioner Daniel Werfel to immediately cease the IRS’ apparent continued practice of targeting Tea Party applications based on name alone. …

<p>That new face is a pina colada-sipping, lobster-loving lothario named Jason Greenslate.</p> <p>Greenslate, a 29-year-old La Jolla California surfer and musician who sings that he does not want a “mother**king job” and has “f**k no” guilt about living on $200 of what he calls “free money ” — or what the government called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Benefits — while he avoids a job to hang out on the beach, sing and chase women.</p>

Putin talks NSA, Syria, Iran, and Drones in Exclusive Video

Mexico City And Washington, D.C., Are About Equally Safe Mexico’s travel industry has been hurting, as crime waves have swept the country and scared tourists away. But is traveling in Mexico any less safe than traveling in the United States? It depends on where you go and what you do, of course. But if you compare tourist destinations in both places, you might conclude you’re better off heading to Mexico. Take Orlando, Florida, home of Disney World. There were 7.5 murders per 100,000 residents there in 2010. Cancun, on the other hand, saw 1.83 murders per 100,000 residents, and...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed a new plan to change U.S. neighborhoods it says are racially imbalanced or are too tilted toward rich or poor, arguing the country's housing policies have not been effective at creating the kind of integrated communities the agency had hoped for. The proposed federal rule, called "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing," is currently under a 60-day public comment period. Though details of how the policy would specifically work are unclear, the rule says HUD would provide states, local governments and others who receive agency money with data and a geospatial tool to...

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he hopes Republicans who oppose the president do so “based on substance and not the fact that he's an African-American.” The comment came during a wide-ranging interview Friday with Las Vegas-based National Public Radio affiliate KNPR, in which Reid lamented Republican filibusters and claimed opponents do everything they can to make Obama fail. … Reid’s comments went unchallenged by the program’s moderator, but not by Newsmax contributor and Conservative African-American columnist Clarence V. McKee, who said there was no reason for Reid to bring up the race issue during the interview. … He...

(Reuters) - Cue up the indignant reactions: President Barack Obama and his family are about to go on an eight-day vacation on the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard, an elite playground for the East Coast wealthy set.

When the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) is fully enforced on individuals and families next year, a middle-aged, middle-class couple with three children could be hit with a $9,355 hike in their annual health insurance premiums if their annual household income happens to increase by just $1. Under ACA, all Americans are required to secure health insurance. Those who do not get it through their employer can buy it through government-run health insurance exchanges, which the law requires to be set up in every state. People buying their Obamacare-mandated health coverage through these exchanges will be eligible...

Heritage Foundation President and former U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint tells Newsmax that the House should defund Obamacare no matter what the risk to the Republican Party, even if it leads to a government shutdown. The South Carolina Republican also says the Affordable Care Act will do more damage to the nation “than anything I’ve seen pass in my lifetime.” And he insists, in an exclusive interview Thursday with Newsmax TV, that a path to citizenship for illegals constitutes amnesty and opposing immigration reform won’t necessarily hurt the GOP. …

In a remarkable admission that is likely to rock the Internal Revenue Service again, testimony released Thursday by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp reveals that an agent involved in reviewing tax exempt applications from conservative groups told a committee investigator that the agency is still targeting Tea Party groups, three months after the IRS scandal erupted..

Why Slate will no longer refer to Washington’s NFL team as the Redskins. This is the last Slate article that will refer to the Washington NFL team as the Redskins. For decades, American Indian activists and others have been asking, urging, and haranguing the Washington Redskins to ditch their nickname, calling it a racist slur and an insult to Indians. They have collected historical and cultural examples of the use of redskin as a pejorative and twice sued to void the Redskins trademark, arguing that the name cannot be legally protected because it’s a slur. (A ruling on the second...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture made farm subsidy payments to 28,613 dead farmers between 2011 and 2012, of which 1,799 were deemed “improper,” according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report issued in June. The report, entitled “USDA Needs to Do More to Prevent Improper Payments to Deceased Individuals,” said USDA’s Farm Service Agency identified “thousands of deceased individuals who were paid $3.3 million in improper payments after their dates of death, of which FSA has recovered approximately $1 million.” … “Improper payments” are those sent to individuals who had not properly filed documentation and who had subsequently died, or...

Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe said Wednesday that he will seek a fourth term in the U.S. Senate, telling supporters be believes liberals are endangering the country and saying he had a successful track record of fighting the president’s administration. “Washington liberals have our country on a crash course, and it’s doing damage right here at home,” Inhofe said in a statement announcing he was running. “The Obama administration’s destructive policies have resulted in the hollowing of our military, a staggering job market from excessive regulations and a struggling economy from big government spending.” His re-election bid was anticipated for...

The Pentagon is poised to extend health care, housing and other benefits to the same-sex spouses of military members by the end of August, but may reverse earlier plans to provide benefits to gay partners who are not married. According to a draft Defense Department memo obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, the department instead may provide up to 10 days of leave to military personnel in same-sex relationships so they can travel to states where they can marry legally. While no final decisions have been made, the memo from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to top defense leaders would reverse...

The White House publicity machine has tried to turn the national conversation from the topics of the day to attempt to make our President relevant again. Obama, who has gained the new nickname Griffin (as in H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man), has all but disappeared since his failed attempt to change the national gun laws in the beginning of this year. To clear grass so high that Obama needs a weed whacker just to be seen, his team has attempted a typical Obama technique. In this case they are creating a new mantra to discredit legitimate concerns of American voters...

In the past week, The New York Times Co. announced it was selling the Boston Globe to Boston Red Sox owner John W. Henry, and Washington Post Chairman Donald Graham announced Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos was buying the paper that Graham's family has run for decades. Both papers went cheap. The Times bought the Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion and is now selling it for $70 million. The price tag on the Post was just $250 million. The combined $320 million market value of these two big-city dailies is about as much as the federal government now spends in...

I don’t like to plug, honestly, but my anthology Mark Steyn’s Passing Parade includes an essay written twelve years ago, upon the death of Washington Post proprietor Kay Graham. Excerpt: The media’s sense of proportion is never more out of whack than when bidding farewell to one of its own, but even so the passing of Katharine Graham set impressive new standards of risibility: “The Most Powerful Woman In America,” “The Most Powerful Woman In The World,” “America’s Queen,” “Kay’s Amazing Grace,” “Oh, Kay,” “Special Kay”… No “Kay, Why?”, funnily enough, though the question is certainly worth asking...

Secretary of State John Kerry announced Wednesday the formation of the Office of Faith-Based Community Initiatives, which will be headed by Shaun Casey, a former religion advisor to President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and a liberal professor who last year touted the end of “civil religion” in the United States. “I, frankly, am glad American civil religion is dying,” Casey said at a discussion last year at the Center for American Progress focused on “God and Politics” in the last presidential election. Kerry introduced Casey as a person who cares about faith in American society. …

Chalk it up as an unintended consequence of Obamacare: a growing number of U.S. employers are aiming to cut their healthcare costs by shifting retirees into the law’s new public insurance exchanges, which launch this October. Detroit, which filed for bankruptcy, hopes to push retirees who are too young for Medicare onto the new public insurance exchanges as a way of shedding healthcare liabilities. Chicago has proposed a plan to migrate most of its 30,000 under-65 retirees to the state exchanges by 2017. And, in the private sector, more than 60 percent of employers are reassessing their retiree health coverage...

Secretary of State John Kerry announced Friday at the U.S. Embassy in London that the State Department will now recognize in its visa-processing practices same-sex marriages performed in foreign countries—saying that “as long as a marriage has been performed in a jurisdiction that recognizes it so that it is legal, then that marriage is valid under U.S. immigration laws.” The State Department clarified to CNSNews.com on Monday that this principle does not extend to polygamous marriages, which are legal in many Muslim countries. … However, the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual describes polygamy as an “historical or religious practice” and...

The federal government has determined that obesity is a national health epidemic, and while obesity-prevention goals were established at the national level in 2012, the question now is how to determine if those goals are being met—not just nationally, but in your very own neighborhood. The federally funded Institute of Medicine (IOM) has just released a report listing 83 ways to “assess the progress made in every community”—and at the national level—in the fight against obesity. Some of the benchmarks would require new legislation or executive action to change the way we live and work. …

President Barack Obama’s job approval dropped to the lowest level of his second term during the week of July 29 to Aug. 4, when 45 percent of respondents told the Gallup poll they approved of the job the president was doing and 48 percent said they disapproved. In the previous week, which ended on July 28, Obama’s approval had been 46 percent in the Gallup poll and his disapproval had been 47 percent. …

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said there is “no question” that al-Qaeda is on the run, even though U.S. outposts remain closed due to terror threats throughout the world. “We do stand by that,” Carney said on Tuesday when asked if he stands by his previous comments that al-Qaeda has been weakened despite the recent threat, according to the pool report. “There's no question that core al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been severely diminished,” he said. …

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said that without getting to the bottom of what happened at the Benghazi consulate, the administration feels like it has to close embassies in the face of a threat “like a bunch of cowards.” “This administration’s idea that you can go give a pretty speech and apologize really well and then everybody will love you, which it has not happened. We’ve lost credibility in Muslim nations under this president,” Gohmert said this morning on Fox. “If you don’t get to the bottom of why our security was breached in Benghazi, just like we never got to...

President Barack Obama is proposing to overhaul the nation’s mortgage finance system, including shutting down government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—a plan with bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. Obama will also insist that popular 30-year mortgages be widely available to borrowers, even in a system that would rely more on the private sector than the government to guarantee loans. The president was to outline his proposals Tuesday at a construction company in Phoenix, once the epicenter of the housing crisis following the 2008 economic collapse. The housing market in the region, as in much of the country, has rebounded in...

Despite pledges by US President Barack Obama and key congressional leaders to shield the Israeli Iron Dome from sequestration cuts, Israel has offered to waive funding protection, reports Defense News, which says Israel has been “insisting it should bear its share of the burden.” “Our position is we must bear the burden that our American friends are bearing,” Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador in Washington, told the website in an interview to be published in an upcoming edition. Sources from both countries told the website that this is “a painful, yet pragmatic price for the goodwill to be generated among longtime...

Journalists responded with shock, awe and a predictable amount of snark to the news that Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos had bought The Washington Post. The news was announced Monday afternoon. Bezos himself, rather than his company, bought the Washington newspaper for roughly $250 million. The sale includes just the Post and not other publications owned by The Washington Post Company. Esquire's Chris Jones joked about Bezos's decision not to buy the contrarian Slate.com, which The Washington Post Company owned for the last few years.....

The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham family’s stewardship of one of America’s leading news organizations after four generations. Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the world’s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to the Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses. Seattle-based Amazon will have no role in the purchase; Bezos himself will buy the news organization and become its sole owner when the sale is completed, probably within 60...

The best mob story ever told does not involve Al Capone or Bugsy Segal or John Gotti. It involves a mobster few American have ever heard of, Greg Scarpa by name, and his not quite as lethal son, Greg Scarpa Jr., "Junior" going forward. One reason few people ever heard of Scarpa is that until his arrest in September 1992, he worked as a "Top Echelon Confidential Informant" under the protection of the FBI for the most of the thirty years prior. During that time, Scarpa murdered at least fifty people. Understandably, this is not a story not that the...

House Republicans will take a carefully orchestrated, staunchly anti-Washington campaign to voters this month, blaming President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats for Americans’ unhappiness with government. “Every day I serve in Congress, I work to fight Washington,” says a suggested op-ed in a richly detailed “planning kit” distributed to all 234 House Republicans ahead of the August recess. Running against Washington is an old strategy. Ronald Reagan summarized it only minutes after being sworn in as president in January 1981. “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem,” he told the country. “Government is the...

This wasn’t the revolution the tea party had in mind. Four years ago, the movement and its potent mix of anger and populism persuaded thousands of costumed and sign-waving conservatives to protest the ballooning deficit and President Obama’s health care law. It swept a crop of no-compromise lawmakers into Congress and governor’s offices and transformed political up-and-comers, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, into household names. But as many tea party stars seek re-election next year and Rubio considers a 2016 presidential run, conservative activists are finding themselves at a crossroads. Many of their standard-bearers have embraced more moderate positions on...

An unknown number of U.S. military veterans are dead within 30 days of contracting Legionnaires' disease in a Veterans Affairs hospital in Pittsburgh. Aside from their family members, few people seem to be outraged. If that doesn't grab your attention, perhaps this will: VA officials in charge when those men were dying from a preventable illness received more than $100,000 in performance bonuses. The same bureaucrats who were paid handsomely for negligence and incompetence also refuse to answer reporters' questions about whether they've removed the deadly Legionella bacteria from hospitals that were built to heal, protect and serve those who...

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform subpoenaed Obama Treasury Secretary Jack Lew for withholding documentation from Congress in the ongoing IRS Tea Party Scandal investigation. The Oversight Committee accuses the Obama Administration of impeding and obstructing the investigation. “During the past two weeks, President Obama and you have repeatedly labeled the IRS’s strategy of targeting Americans for their political beliefs as a ‘phony’ scandal. While the Obama Administration has so publicly deflected responsibility for the targeting, it simultaneously has attempted to thwart congressional oversight into the matter… the IRS has engaged in a systematic effort to delay, frustrate,...

The barbs are personal, the differences are multiplying among Republicans, a party divided over spending, foreign policy, a willingness to risk a government shutdown in order to defund the health care law and more. “I didn't start this one and I don’t plan on starting things by criticizing other Republicans,” Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said recently as he and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie likened one another to various cuts of a butchered pig. “But if they want to make me the target, they will get it back in spades.” …

What do northwest Washington, D.C., South Beach Miami and upper Manhattan have in common? Less than 50 years ago, the now vibrant communities didn't look much different from most of Detroit, says emergency manager Kevyn Orr—whom Gov. Rick Snyder tapped in March to revive the broken Motor City. This is what gives him hope that Detroit can stage a comeback. "D.C. in '91 was still burned out from the 1968 riots," recalls the youthful 55-year-old attorney who worked for 22 years in D.C., at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Resolution Trust Corporation, Justice Department and Jones Day law firm. "You...

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a top general in the battle to defund Obamacare, says the only way the movement can succeed is if “historic levels” of Americans join the fight. “The smoke-filled rooms of elected representatives and lobbyists … will never prevail,” Cruz told Dom Giordano, guest host of The Steve Malzberg Show on Newsmax TV. “The only thing we can [do to] win this fight is if the American people get motivated, engaged, and mobilized at historic levels.” Cruz said DontFundIt.com—the national petition drive launched by the Senate Conservatives Fund last week—has already gained 125,000 signatures. He hopes...

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday that he sides with Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz because they are not afraid to ask important questions, and it is disheartening to watch establishment Republicans like Gov. Chris Christie "grow hysterical." "I consistently have been on the side of having the courage that Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have and I think it's sad to watch the establishment grow hysterical, but frankly they're hysterical because they have no answers," Gingrich said while appearing on "The Laura Ingraham Show," Politico reports. Gingrich was on Ingraham's show to offer his opinion on the...

The Senate easily confirmed President Barack Obama’s selection for ambassador to the United Nations on Thursday, capping a month in which senators used a bipartisan truce on once-mired nominations to fill a cluster of vacancies in the president’s second-term administration. Senators approved Samantha Power for the post by 87-10. The vote put the former Obama foreign policy adviser and outspoken human rights advocate into the job formerly held by Susan Rice, whom the president has made his national security adviser. … Power joined a stack of nominees that senators have approved since striking a bipartisan deal in mid-July. Republicans agreed...

If the Senate immigration bill came up for a vote in the House, it would probably pass — some of the Republicans and almost all of the Democrats would combine for 218 votes. But conservatives have extracted promises from John Boehner not to let that happen, and the Speaker has dutifully pledged to keep the House from voting on any bill that lacks the support of most Republicans. That would seem to make comprehensive reform pretty dead, right? Except Paul Ryan, who clearly wants to pass a bill, floated a way around this promise: -snip- So the plan he's discussing...

The New York senator helps land a sweetheart deal for a politically-connect yogurt company.Starting this month, the United States Department of Agriculture has announced that it will test out a new product in school lunches—high-protein, a.k.a. Greek-style yogurt—in four different states. Yet, what seems like an innocuous, even reasonable addition to the menu of foods offered to American public school students upon inspection turns out to be the latest example of corrupt nanny-statism masquerading as “for the kids” do-goodism.The USDA argues that Greek-style yogurt is better for kids because it has more protein. And given Michelle Obama’s new National School...

Lonnie Bunch, the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, told the Post he'd "love" to acquire the sweatshirt for a collection, an idea endorsed by the Rev. Al Sharpton: . . "“It became the symbolic way to talk the Trayvon Martin case. It’s rare that you get one artifact that really becomes the symbol,” Bunch said. “Because it’s such a symbol, it would allow you to talk about race in the age of Obama.” Curators, he mused, could “ask the bigger questions” prompted by the case. “Are we in a post-racial age?” Bunch asked, dreaming...

President Barack Obama—citing the job losses since he took office—said “the economy would be much better off,” unemployment would be 6.5 percent and the national deficit would be in decline if there were more federal, state and local government workers. “If those layoffs had not happened, if public sector employees grew like they did in the past two recessions, the unemployment rate would be 6.5 instead of 7.5,” Obama said. “Our economy would be much better off, and the deficit would still be going down because we would be getting more tax revenue.” …

Federal employees were paid more than $155 million of taxpayer dollars in 2011 for spending more than 3.4 million hours of “official time” on labor union activities that fell outside their assigned government duties, according to a survey by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). “Voluntary membership in Federal sector unions results in considerable reliance by unions on the volunteer work of bargaining unit employees, rather than paid union business agents, to represent the union in representational matters such as collective bargaining and grievances,” the OPM stated. But these “volunteers” were doing their union work on government time. …

The Republican Party wishes the tea party would go away, and would prefer a new base altogether, says conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh. In an hour-long interview with Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Susteren Tuesday, Limbaugh said the Republican leadership isn’t conservative.“They’re not particularly crazy about conservatives,” he said, adding that members of the tea party can’t be controlled by the GOP leadership. In 2010, the grassroots movement rose up in opposition to President Barack Obama, but the Republican establishment didn't embrace them. …

WASHINGTON — The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reportedly gave its approval last week to an Obama administration plan to provide weapons to moderate rebels in Syria, but how individual members of the committee stood on the subject remains unknown.

A wave of vandalism continued to mar some of Washington’s more popular landmarks Monday with at least three more attractions spattered with green paint, and authorities announced the arrest of a woman near one of the incidents at Washington National Cathedral. The latest crimes occurred three days after the Lincoln Memorial was hit in similar fashion. On Monday, the light-green paint was discovered on an organ in the cathedral’s Bethlehem Chapel, in the cathedral’s Children’s Chapel and on the granite base of a statue next to the Smithsonian Castle on the Mall. D.C. police said Monday evening that they had...

Conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status were more closely scrutinized by the Internal Revenue Service than their progressive counterparts, according to a report Tuesday by House Republican investigators. Tea party and other conservative groups were, on average, asked three times as many questions as progressive groups, said the report by Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee. Conservative groups were less likely to be approved for tax-exempt status and more likely to have their applications delayed, the report said. The IRS has been under siege since May when agency officials acknowledged that agents working in a Cincinnati office had improperly...

President Barack Obama on Tuesday offered congressional Republicans a new corporate tax cut and jobs spending package he said might “help break through some of the political logjam in Washington,” only to have GOP lawmakers immediately throw cold water on the idea. The announcement and quick rejection underscored how elusive common ground is between the Democratic White House and Republicans in Congress on fiscal issues. The divide was particularly stark on the corporate tax proposal given that both parties generally have supported overhauling the code for businesses, though the White House and Republicans have differed on specifics. … The U.S....

This is just horrible, horrible racism.Jessica Chasmar at the Washington Times reports: “This is for George Zimmerman.”That’s what one of three white men told a black man as they approached him early Saturday in Washington before committing what police are saying may be a hate crime, according to Metropolitan Police Officer Anthony Clay.The men kicked the man, who was not identified, as they took his iPhone and wallet, the officer said Sunday, according to CNN. Wow, three on one. Really brave, you racists. I guess Touré Neblett is right. We really are living in Emmett Till’s America. Haven’t you done...