Free Republic

The Supreme Court’s ruling that employers with religious objections don’t have to comply with Obamacare requirements to provide contraception coverage sparked swift reaction on Capitol Hill.

The Supreme Court has rejected a challenge to California’s law that bars mental counseling aimed at turning gay minors straight. The justices on Monday let stand an appeals court ruling that said the state’s ban on so-called conversion therapy for minors doesn’t violate the free speech rights of licensed counselors and patients seeking treatment. …

The Department of Justice has spent $1.2 million on a website which depicts cartoon cellphones engaging in real-life dating scenarios, in an effort to help teens define their “digital line” as it pertains to relationship abuse. The website, ThatsNotCool.com, which is operated through the DOJ’s Office on Violence Against Women, is perhaps the cheesiest government-funded ad campaign in recent memory. […] The first video featured on the site, titled “Password,” shows two female cellphone characters sitting on a city bench. One character is typing away on her body, which is also a cellphone keypad. “I should know your profile password,”...

Outwardly, they put on a show of unity — but privately, the Obamas and Clintons, the two power couples of the Democrat Party, loathe each other. “I hate that man Obama more than any man I’ve ever met, more than any man who ever lived,” Bill Clinton said to friends on one occasion, adding he would never forgive Obama for suggesting he was a racist during the 2008 campaign. The feeling is mutual. Obama made ­excuses not to talk to Bill, while the first lady privately sniped about Hillary.

WASHINGTON (CBSDC) – The anti-amnesty group, Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), is calling on Americans to mail their “gently used underwear” to President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner in response to a government request for new briefs for the recent surge of illegal immigrants being held by border patrol. ALIPAC is responding to a Department of Homeland Security solicitation seeking thousands of pairs of “White 100% Cotton Men’s Briefs” – ranging from medium sizes to hundreds of 6X-large pairs – to meet the basic clothing needs of thousands of immigrants detained by Immigration & Customs Enforcement. “Obama...

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) was invited Tuesday, along with fellow members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, to test drive — er, test ride — a driverless car on the Capitol grounds. Well, the ride never happened, because Norton did a particularly good job of testing the car’s bright-red “kill” button — which, as captured by WRC-TV’s cameras, killed the car to the point that it could not proceed with the test ride. “Oh, no, don’t push it!” an engineer from Carnegie Mellon University cried after Norton pounded the mushroom button. “It shuts everything down.” [...]

More whistleblowers are coming forward from the VA, but this woman from North Carolina gives a special insight into the way that wait-list fraud propagated within the system. Paulene DeWenter makes clear that the use of secret wait lists was no spontaneously-occurring method for front-line workers to deal with overstressed resources, but a deliberate strategy employed by VA management. DeWenter tells WITN that her boss told her to use the secret wait list method, or else she would buy DeWenter a bus pass — one way out of town ... DeWenter blew the whistle after one of the patients on...

Hillary Clinton has a “secret deal” with her top aide Huma Abedin to keep her troublesome husband Anthony Weiner out of the spotlight, sources tell Page Six, as the former secretary of state mulls a run for president. Clinton aides have insisted Weiner “stay out of public life for two years,” and that he “avoid causing any further embarrassment to Huma or Clinton,” according to our sources.

If a certain fecal matter had been the only instance of disrepute revealed from within the ranks of the Environmental Protection Agency today, that would have been more than enough; alas… it wasn’t. (snip) The environmental agency is having trouble locating emails belonging to a former agency employee and pulling information from his crashed hard drive, House members revealed Wednesday while questioning Administrator Gina McCarthy at a hearing on complaints of mismanagement. “What is it with bureaucrats and public employees … the hard drives crash?” asked Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.). He and others on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee...

Speaking to the U.S.-Russia Forum on June 16, 2014, the Russian Ambassador to Washington, Sergei Kislyak, told the participants that there are “no ideological divides” between the U.S. and Russia. He said both countries were “market economies” with “democratic systems.” He called for increased U.S.-Russian cooperation and claimed that the Edward Snowden “affair”—the case in which the former CIA and NSA contract employee fled to Russia with highly classified documents—was “thrown on us,” as if the Russian intelligence service, the FSB, was caught flat-footed by his defection. With such absurd and outrageous statements, Kislyak betrayed true Russian intentions, as well...

When President Obama announced an unprecedented effort by the EPA to strong-arm states into adopting cap-and-trade, he made the announcement not by focusing on the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but rather on the so-called co-benefits that closing coal plants will have on particulate matter, which is already tightly regulated. These purported co-benefits are based on two secret studies that have never been publicly validated. Amazingly, the architect of this co-benefits strategy is a long-time EPA staffer named John Beale, now known as federal inmate number 33005-016 and locked up for fraud at Cumberland Federal Correctional Institution. For nearly...

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has had a rough time of it ever since she asserted that both she and her husband were “dead broke” and “struggled” after leaving the White House in 2001. “A few weeks before they left the White House, the Clintons were able to muster a cash down payment of $855,000 and secure a $1.995 million mortgage,” Politifact observed. “This hardly fits the common meaning of ‘dead broke.’” Clinton might have taken the public backlash over this minor gaffe in stride, but she didn’t. Speaking with The Guardian over the weekend, Clinton again reasserted her credentials...

The top U.S. official in charge of archiving federal records testified Tuesday that the IRS ran afoul of the law by neglecting to tell his office that a trove of emails from the woman at the center of the targeting scandal disappeared after an apparent hard drive crash. Archivist of the U.S. David Ferriero, speaking before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, made clear that federal agencies are supposed to report whenever their records are destroyed or even accidentally deleted. But he said that after emails from embattled IRS official Lois Lerner vanished after a computer failure in 2011,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans in Congress aren't buying the contention by the head of the Internal Revenue Service that he has seen no evidence anyone committed a crime when the agency lost emails that might shed light on the targeting of tea party and other political groups before the 2010 and 2012 elections. On Tuesday, a House panel will hear from a White House official who once worked at the IRS. Jennifer O'Connor worked at the IRS from May to November 2013, helping the agency gather documents related to the congressional investigations, said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the...

“I said I would provide all the emails. We are providing all the emails. The fact that three years ago, some of them—not all of them, but some of them—were not available, I never said I would provide you emails we didn’t have,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told a Monday evening hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Frustrated Republicans and apologetic Democrats questioned Koskinen about Lois Lerner’s vanished emails for several hours, beginning with Committee Chair Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who asked Koskinen if he knew those critical emails were missing when he testified before Issa’s committee on...

Since President Barack Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued 2,827 new final regulations, equaling 24,915 pages in the Federal Register, totaling approximately 24,915,000 words. The Gutenberg Bible is only 1,282 pages and 646,128 words. Thus, the new EPA regulations issued by the Obama Administration contain 19 times as many pages as the Bible and 38 times as many words. The Obama EPA regulations have 22 times as many words as the entire Harry Potter series, which includes seven books with 1,084,170 words. They have 5,484 times as many words as the U.S....

Last week the controversy over the NFL Washington Redskins’ name, deemed offensive by the professionally aggrieved, reached a new peak when the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board canceled six federal trademark registrations owned by the team.Nevada Senator Harry Reid, who had previously blustered impotently that he wouldn’t accept an invitation to attend a Redskins home game until the team changed its name (a threat which no doubt sent waves of panic through the Redskins organization), gloated that the ruling proved “the handwriting is on the wall.” “It’s only a matter of time,” he tweeted, “until [Redskins owner] Daniel Snyder is...

U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman’s searing criticism of Former Montana Governor Schweitzer’s ridiculously sexist comments inspired some pretty damning headlines yesterday. But, Coffman’s opponent, Andrew Romanoff, was silent on the matter. And, now we know why – Schweitzer was in Colorado seven months ago stumping for Romanoff. ... Calling Diane Feinstein a prostitute-turned-nun is probably not the way to win friends and influence people, so we have to ask – will Romanoff denounce his fundraiser buddy’s comments? We’ve reached out to his campaign for comment. They responded with [drum roll] silence. ... They say you are who your friends are. Perhaps...

The U.S. Trademark Trial and Appeal Board’s cancelation of federal trademark registration for the name Washington “Redskins,” after ruling it disparages Native Americans, puts pressure on team owner Daniel Snyder and the National Football League (NFL) to change the name but falls far short of settling the issue. The split, 2-1, decision by unelected trademark board members shows the increasingly heavy hand that politics is playing in the activities of the private sector, since the ruling followed recent public calls for a name change from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. The team counters that the long-standing “Redskins” name...

Brian Schweitzer, the former Democratic governor of Montana and aspiring 2016 presidential candidate, made some rather off-color remarks .. Schweitzer going after Senator Dianne Feinstein on surveillance issues by likening her to a prostitute on a street corner. Schweitzer found it amusing how Feinstein has been a champion of the intelligence community, and has now turned on the CIA for spying on congressional staffers. He said, “She was the woman who was standing under the streetlight with her dress pulled all the way up over her knees, and now she says, ‘I’m a nun,’ when it comes to this spying!…...