Free Republic

President Obama has officially proclaimed June to be Lesbian Gay Bisexual & Transgender (LGBT) Pride Month in America, just as opponents of same-sex marriage in this Washington prepared to turn in signatures to force a referendum in November. The 44th President noted the nation’s past movements for civil rights and equal rights and emancipation, and said the LGBT’s fight for rights is a “proud chapter” in the tradition of challenging “unjust laws” and marching on Washington.

Virginia Democratic Rep. Jim Moran joined the growing chorus of opposition to the proposed Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial on Tuesday, just ahead of Friday’s scheduled hearing on the monument’s controversial design. “I have also met with members of the Eisenhower family and share their objections to the current design,” Moran wrote in a letter obtained by The Daily Caller. “While the Eisenhower Memorial is very far along in the process, I have approached several of my colleagues who serve on the commission and encouraged them to rethink their support and allow a new public competition on an alternative design.”

The myth for today is that of Obama Invictus -- the undefeated champion, the master campaigner, the man who could have taught lessons to Honey Fitz, Dick Daley, and Lyndon B. Johnson himself. Obama is the epitome of the politician for our time and perhaps for all time. His election was inevitable, so we're told, as soon as he decided to descend from Olympus and claim the White House. The idea that mere mortals would seek to contest it would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. Somebody like Mitt Romney represents no more than a few hours' sport. There's...

President Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Tuesday to Dolores Huerta, an 82-year-old labor activist and co-founder of the United Farm Workers union. Huerta is also an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. DSA describes itself as “the largest socialist organization in the United States, and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International.”

'President Barack Obama today paid tribute to the nation's fallen warriors during a moving ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery as America remembered its veterans through Memorial Day services throughout the country. The president is participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, and is expected to marking the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Mr Obama said during the Arlington service that 'for the first time in nine years our troops are not fighting and dying in Iraq' and that the war in Afghanistan is 'winding...

While Army Sgt. Matthew Corrigan was sound asleep inside his Northwest D.C. home, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) was preparing to launch a full-scale invasion of his home. SWAT and explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) teams spent four hours readying the assault on the English basement apartment in the middle of the snowstorm of the century. (This is part two of a four part series on Sgt. Corrigan's case. Click here to read the first story.) The police arrested the veteran of the Iraq war and searched his house without a warrant, not to protect the public from a terrorist or...

On May 25, 2011, Kathy Hochul woke up a star. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called her from London with congratulations. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, effusively praised her. News outlets from France, Denmark and Japan all covered the story of how she had pulled off an upset in a Republican district in a closely watched special election. “It was an exhilarating time,” Ms. Hochul recalled. Life is more anxiety-filled these days for Ms. Hochul, who now is the most endangered Democratic House incumbent in New York State and one of the most imperiled in the country, according...

The new round of national and state surveys this week generally showing President Obama clinging to a tenuous advantage over Republican Mitt Romney reinforce the conclusion that socially liberal, upscale white women may stand as the president's indispensable line of defense in his struggle for reelection. Both the national ABC/Washington Post survey released earlier this week, and the NBC/Marist Polls released Thursday in the battleground states of Ohio, Virginia and Florida show Obama retaining preponderant support among minority voters who were critical to his 2008 victory. Conversely, in almost all of the surveys, Obama faces a consistent pattern of erosion...

While some will be celebrating more peaceful Memorial Days and other may have forgotten just what the holiday is in celebration of, citizens of Washington D.C. will have one loud reminder when Rolling Thunder storms in over the weekend. The annual Rolling Thunder Motorcycle Rally takes place on Sunday in Washington D.C. and was developed to honor military veterans and those missing in action. It isn't a great weekend to drive in to D.C., as police will be blocking off Fairfax Boulevard Sunday morning for Ride of the Patriots, reducing both eastbound and westbound traffic to a single lane in...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- D.C. Councilmember Marion Barry says he misspoke when he referred to the Polish community with the disparaging term "Polacks." Barry made the remark when he was meeting with Asian-Americans.

In an effort to better educate students and their parents about race relations and social injustice, a D.C. elementary school has declared Friday “Trayvon Martin Day.” Teachers at Malcolm X Elementary in Southeast are using the unfolding case and the story surrounding Martin as part of their "Let's Keep Our Children Safe" seminar. Malcolm X Elementary Principal J. Harrison Coleman says that she hopes the lesson will help reduce the needless violence and bullying in the community. --snip-- Coleman said that every adult who attended the seminar would receive an Arizona Iced Tea and each student would get a bag...

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) seems to have it out for our military. The department is using the city’s pointless firearm registration mandate to harass, arrest and jail servicemen. Army 1st Sergeant Matt Corrigan was woken in the middle of the night, forced out of his home, arrested, had his home ransacked, had his guns seized and was thrown in jail -- where he was lost in the prison system for two weeks -- all because the District refuses to recognize the meaning of the Second Amendment. This week, the city dropped all charges against Sgt. Corrigan, but the damage...

Europe’s Greek tragedy has now entered its final act, with potentially fateful consequences for the global economy—and for Barack Obama, whose reelection may hinge on the decisions of Germany in the coming weeks. The 2012 election will pivot on the public’s evaluation of the president’s economic stewardship, and a perceptible decline in the U.S. growth rate—which a badly handled Greek exit from the Eurozone would cause—could easily spell the difference between victory and defeat. Obama’s fate, then, may well lie in Angela Merkel’s hands. That doesn’t mean, though, that there’s nothing he can do about it. What are the economic...

Every ten years, after the U.S. Census releases its latest population reports, most of the 50 states begin the complicated process of drawing new election districts. As you might expect, partisan bickering and maneuvering inevitably distort things. So a decade ago, Arizona voters decided to end the partisanship by removing the redistricting process from the state legislature and placing it in the hands of an independent commission. Last year, the new commission, consisting of two Democrats, two Republicans, and a nonpartisan chair, got to work on its first set of maps after the 2010 census. Unfortunately, the results were...

Washington Times Senior Editor for Opinion Emily Miller was awarded the Clark Mollenhoff Award for Investigative Reporting from the Institute on Political Journalism. The Mollenhoff award was given to Ms. Miller for her “Emily Gets Her Gun” series, which ultimately resulted in review of onerous gun regulations by Washington, D.C., officials. Ms. Miller’s work beat out competition from The Wall Street Journal and the Seattle Times, both previous winners of the award. This is the first time The Washington Times has won this award. “Emily Miller’s work exemplifies the guiding principle of our editorial pages, which is that good opinion...

Middletown, N.J. — It takes Joe Kyrillos, a 52-year-old state senator, 15 minutes to reach his table at the New Monmouth Diner. It’s late in the afternoon and the crowd has thinned, but two silver-haired grandfathers want a word, and a young mother with a child at her knee has a question. Waitresses hoisting heavy trays of burgers and Cokes brush past Kyrillos as he moves from booth to booth, talking politics.Kyrillos is running for the U.S. Senate against Senator Bob Menendez, the Garden State’s junior senator and the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. As a Republican...

You should know, dear reader, we are not among those who despised ADM Jeremy "Mike" Boorda. In fact, we did and always will admire this fine man, who went all the way from Seaman to Chief of Naval Operations. No one has done it before, and it's very likely no one else will accomplish such a feat in the future. ADM Boorda deserves our respect and remembrance as a great leader who deeply cared about his sailors and country. On this, the 16th anniversary of his mysterious death, we should mourn his loss, but also demand the Pentagon come clean...

How appropriate that the District of Columbia’s scandal-plagued mayor, Vincent Gray, was in Sin City when his close friend and top aide got criminally charged for destroying records to cover up a corruption scheme that took place during his 2010 campaign. Gray has been embroiled in a variety of controversies throughout his political career, which includes a lengthy tenure on the D.C. council before taking over as mayor last year. As council chairman he got busted for using official stationery to solicit donations for the Democratic Party and for having a politically-connected contractor renovate his house. Gray used official council...

A US soldier accused of plotting an attack on a military base after fleeing his post as a Muslim conscientious objector went on trial Tuesday wearing a surgical mask and manacled to the floor. Courtroom security agents behind him wore protective goggles, an apparent reaction to an incident in which the soldier, Naser Jason Abdo, who claims to be HIV positive, bit his lip and spat blood at law enforcement officers. Prosecutors called the first of 43 witnesses to the stand in a bid to show that Abdo, who fled his post in Kentucky, was gathering bomb-making materials and weapons...

Americans Elect, after qualifying for ballot in 29 states, won't nominate a third-party presidential candidateAmericans Elect qualified for the presidential ballot in Oregon and 28 other states, but the group on Thursday said it is abandoning its effort to field a third-party presidential candidate this year. The well-funded group developed an elaborate online process aimed at attracting millions of voters who would nominate a candidate for president.  But the group said that no candidate managed to get enough voter support to participate in an online convention in June. "We will not hold a June convention," Ileana Wachtel, the group's press...

The stunning expansion of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Washington, D.C., area is profiled in a long, interesting and meticulously accurate CNN story that suggests "the nation's capital has become a Mormon stronghold, with Latter-day Saints playing a big and growing role in the Washington establishment."-SNIP-"It's hard to point to federal legislation or a White House initiative that bears distinctly Mormon fingerprints," Gilgoff writes, "while it's easy to do the same for other faiths." He cites as an example a recent White House "compromise" on contraception funding, which he says was "mostly a reaction to...

'More than a million fake electronic parts from China have been found in US military aircraft, posing a risk to national security, an investigation has revealed. A report by the US Senate uncovered 1,800 cases of bogus parts - including some in special operations helicopters and the US Air Force's largest cargo plane. The total number of individual components involved in these cases exceeded one million, the Committee on Armed Services publication said. "This flood of counterfeit parts, overwhelmingly from China, threatens national security, the safety of our troops and American jobs," committee chairman Senator Carl Levin said. "It underscores...

Mitt Romney begins the general election campaign at a disadvantage among female voters more...

In the run-up to this weekend’s G-8 summit at Camp David, journalists have unfavorably compared European “austerity� with Barack Obama’s economic policies.European spending cuts, the argument goes, have hurt people and are arousing political opposition, while Obama’s proposals to keep federal spending at 24 percent of gross domestic product indefinitely are likely to succeed.Evil Republican spending cuts, in contrast, would deny the economy needed stimulus and wreak havoc on ordinary people.But the facts undermine the storyline. Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University took a look at what “austerity� in Europe actually means.What she found...

The active duty soldier who had his guns confiscated by the District of Columbia two years ago will have his property returned by Memorial Day. It took the help of a high-powered lawyer, two U.S. Senators, a member of Congress and national publicity to force the obstinate District to show some respect for the Constitution. It should never happen again. On Friday, D.C. property clerk Derek Gray determined the city would finally return 1st Lt. Augustine Kim’s “dangerous articles” because the Army national guardsman fulfilled the plea agreement arranged with the U.S. attorney’s office a year earlier. The Metropolitan Police...

Last week, I wrote a piece suggesting that Mitt Romney's path to the presidency wasn't necessarily narrow. Rather, the breadth of that path will depend on "environmental" factors that could ultimately push him well past the 286 electoral vote ceiling that has seemingly been imposed upon the Republican party since 1992. On the other hand, Ron Brownstein suggests that this ceiling is an outgrowth of demography and changing coalitions, and is largely etched into our electoral map. This has created a “blue wall” consisting of “the 11 states from Maryland to Maine (except New Hampshire); the three West Coast states;...

Nebraska state Sen. Deb Fischer wrested the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate from Attorney General Jon Bruning Tuesday night, riding a burst of late momentum to pull off an unexpected victory.Her stunning come-from-behind performance amounts to a warning flare about the volatility of the primary season and the unintended impact of outside groups.Fischer, a rancher and little-known state lawmaker, maintained a positive, above-the-fray tone while Bruning and state Treasurer Don Stenberg consistently traded blistering barbs. But she also benefited from a flurry of outside spending against Bruning, the front-running establishment favorite for more than a year who watched his polling...

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee wants Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to find out if taxpayer dollars received by Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office through a federal grant program were used by his deputies to illegally detain Hispanics whom the government alleges were the victims of racial profiling. If so, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, wants the Justice Department to consider ways of getting the money back - a total that could exceed $25 million. “I urge the department to take all appropriate steps to determine whether taxpayer dollars - have been used in connection with the...

In January, Hillary and Nicholas Fredrick’s plan to relocate from Tennessee to the District seemed to be materializing. On a whirlwind trip here, they looked at 35 houses, made an offer on the one they liked and signed a contract with the sellers. That deal fell through when the sellers’ financing hit a snag. But when they moved here in March to begin their search anew for a house in the $500,000 to $550,000 price range, they discovered that the market had changed considerably.

Washington gun owners’ rights are, once again, getting blown off by city leaders. While the city council voted unanimously on April 17 in favor of a bill to ease restrictions on Second Amendment rights, Mayor Vincent Gray has not signed the bill into law. The mayor’s spokesman Pedro Ribeiro has not responded to my repeated requests for an explanation. The council’s website shows the legislation had not been updated since it passed. But on Friday, the bill suddenly appeared as having been transmitted for mayoral review on Wednesday. Members of the council had expected the mayor to sign the bill...

The District grabbed the guns belonging to 1st Lt. Augustine Kim and won’t give them back. Two years ago, the South Carolina Army national guardsman had been injured on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan. Now he’s fighting to restore his constitutional rights. Before deploying overseas, the soldier drove his collection - which included an AR-15, a Beretta 9mm and several .45 caliber pistols - to his parents’ house in New Jersey for safe storage. Upon his return to the states and recovery, Lt. Kim wanted to bring his weapons back to his home in Charleston. On the way,...

WASHINGTON—Danita C. Doleman, 46, the president of a non-profit organization, pled guilty today to a charge of filing a false tax return stemming from her participation in a scheme involving former District of Columbia Council member Harry L. Thomas, Jr. The guilty plea was announced by U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen, Jr.; James W. McJunkin, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI Washington Field Office; and Eric Hylton, Acting Special Agent in Charge of the Washington Field Office of the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI). Doleman, of Washington, D.C., pled guilty in the U.S. District Court for the District of...

Just as the political air is filled with talk of the inevitability of Barack Obama’s reelection — we are told that the kids at his Chicago headquarters are brimming with confidence — in come some poll numbers showing him behind.Not by anything statistically significant, mind you. But when you get the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls and the Politico/George Washington University Battleground poll all showing Mitt Romney leading Obama by one point, an Obama victory seems far from inevitable.These results came in at a time when the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls shows 50 percent expressing favorable...

Occupy DC has gotten an upgrade from the run-down tent village where they once lived, now that one of the country’s most powerful labor unions is paying for office digs in downtown Washington. The Service Employees International Union, one of President Obama’s biggest supporters, is paying the protest group’s $4,000-a-month rent at the Institute for Policy Studies, institute spokeswoman Lacy MacAuley told Fox News on Wednesday. She said SEIU recently extended the offer, so Occupy organizers went shopping for office space and decided on a “separate, side suite” at the institute’s headquarters. An Occupy spokeswoman confirmed the group is working...

Incumbents are more entrenched than ever. More Americans approve of polygamy than of Congress. A February CBS News/New York Times poll found just 10 percent of respondents approved of Congress’s job performance. A recent poll from the same source found 11 percent of respondents thought polygamy “morally acceptable.” Other polls have found that the “U.S. going communist” has 11 percent support—meaning that concept has more fans than Congress has... --snip-- A week after its Ohio victory, CFPA fell short in its efforts to knock off House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus, the subject of a federal probe into alleged...

A top official at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, in response to a Washington Times investigation that found a lack of accountability and racism at the transit agency, has issued a memo to all rail employees quoting Whitney Houston and encouraging employees to band together against the outside world. “Family pulls together when they perceive that they are being attacked from the outside,” wrote HerculesBallard, managing director of rail transportation. “We will use our pride as a shield against any attack they wage against us. (Click here to read the full memo) Mr. Ballard goes on to say that...

The major Demo tactical effort against Mitt Romney is based on portraying him as a robotic, out-of-touch figure not much like other Americans -- at least not Americans of the 21st century. Romney is a creature of the 1950s, raised and indoctrinated within a Mormon cocoon, a man effectively living in a time warp. He uses words like "zany." His hair looks funny. He's been married to the same woman for nearly half a century. What kind of post-'60s American is this? The key element here, repeated in piece after piece, is that Romney was "untouched by the '60s." Liberals...

When Jonathan Frederick Will was born 40 years ago -- on May 4, 1972, his father's 31st birthday -- the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome was about 20 years. That is understandable. The day after Jon was born, a doctor told Jon's parents that the first question for them was whether they intended to take Jon home from the hospital. Nonplussed, they said they thought that is what parents do with newborns. Not doing so was, however, still considered an acceptable choice for parents who might prefer to institutionalize or put up for adoption children thought to have...

Former D.C. Council member Harry Thomas Jr. was sentenced Thursday to 38 months in prison for stealing more than $350,000 in public funds. “This is my weakest moment. the lowest moment of my life,” Thomas said, after testimony from his mother and a little league baseball official. The U.S. attorney for the District said the court should impose 46 months in prison. Thomas directed funds intended for youth sports programs through the Children & Youth Investment Trust Corp. to nonprofits and then skimmed off money for himself to pay for trips and lavish expenses. U.S. District Court John D. Bates...

WASHINGTON - There is new information in the murder of Jasmine Moss, a pregnant woman found stabbed to death Friday inside her car in District Heights. Prosecutors now say the man accused in the crime, Nathan Rogers, was supposed to be confined to his home after pleading guilty last year to first-degree assault. According to the court affidavit filed in the case, Rogers confessed to the crime, telling police he killed Moss inside his house after she came over for a visit. The 22-year-old was serving 18 months of home detention after pleading guilty last March. Court records show he...

The Murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer by Jacob G. Hornberger, April 11, 2012 In early 1976 the National Enquirer published a story that shocked the elite political class in Washington, D.C. The story disclosed that a woman named Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was a divorced spouse of a high CIA official named Cord Meyer, had been engaged in a two-year sexual affair with President John F. Kennedy. By the time the article was published, JFK had been assassinated, and Mary Pinchot Meyer herself was dead, a victim of a murder that took place in Washington on October 12, 1964. The...

Adding to the growing list of books about President Barack Obama and his family is a new memoir by his sister who was raised in Africa. Auma Obama, who now works at CARE International in Nairobi, didn't meet Barack until the 1980s and it's unclear how much new ground the book breaks. But she did have an interesting vantage point: that of the Obama family in Africa and how her brother's political career impacted it. In published excerpts of "And Then Life Happens," she wrote about meeting Hillary Clinton after the nasty primary race in 2008 and the media frenzy...

Last week, Barack Obama delivered speeches at universities in Chapel Hill, N.C., Iowa City, Iowa, and Boulder, Colo. The trip was, press secretary Jay Carney assured us, official government business, not political campaigning.It’s part of a pattern. Neil Munro of the Daily Caller has counted 130 appearances by the president, vice president, their spouses, White House officials, and cabinet secretaries at colleges and universities since spring 2011.Obviously, the Obama campaign strategists are worried that he cannot duplicate his margin among young voters back in 2008, which was 66 to 32 percent.Recent surveys of young people show inconsistent results. Gallup’s...

The stakes in this year's election are higher than normal because the next president may have the unusual opportunity to impact the ideological direction of the Supreme Court, untypical of any one presidential term. During the next presidential term, starting in January 2013, of the nine Supreme Court justices, "three of the justices will be in their 80s," notes Clint Bolick, author of the new book, "Two-Fer: Electing a President and a Supreme Court." "[W]hoever is elected in November may have the rare chance to reinforce or alter the courts balance," he said. And with Supreme Court rulings like Citizens...

Photo By Rachel Larue The U.S. Army Drill Team, 3d U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) performs during the Twilight Tattoo on Summerall Field on Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall. The opening night endorsements for this year’s Twilight Tattoo season are in. If an out-of-state visitor or a National Capital Region resident is searching for patriotic entertainment on a Wednesday night this spring or summer, venture to Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall for an evening of entertainment. Two Central Georgia school groups jammed the center bleachers to enjoy the 2012 Twilight Tattoo premiere. Students, teachers and chaperones from Dames Ferry and...

It’s a new chapter in the 2012 presidential campaign, and for Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, it means he no longer has to remain neutral watching the GOP contenders slug it out. The party chairman talked to NRO about how the RNC would help the Romney campaign and down-ticket GOP candidates across the country. He also discussed the RNC’s recent complaint to the General Accountability Office about the president’s doing campaign-style events at taxpayers’ expense. NRO: Your video department has been busy lately.REINCE PRIEBUS: They’re doing a great job. We’ve actually hired a person in-house whose entire job...

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa has drafted a 48-page contempt of Congress citation for Attorney General Eric Holder over Operation Fast and Furious. It now appears Issa is currently moving forward without the support of House Speaker John Boehner. Holder’s Department of Justice has provided only about 7,000 pages worth of the more than 70,000 pages of documents Issa has subpoenaed related to Operation Fast and Furious. Issa and many others on Capitol Hill have threatened for months that they’ll hold Holder in contempt without actually doing it. This 48-page contempt citation is the first official step in...

For Immediate Release Contact: Garren Shipley (540) 686-1138 Obama 'Kicks Off' Campaign in Virginia ... after 120 Fund Raisers and Taxpayer Funded Events -- After months of wasting taxpayer dollars trying to hide his failed record, Obama stops governing, goes into full campaign mode -- For those covering President Obama's upcoming visit to Richmond on May 5, please consider the following response from RPV Chairman Pat Mullins: "President Obama is coming back to Virginia, ostensibly to 'kick off' his 2012 campaign. You know, it sort of makes me wonder what all those 120 fund raisers and other events that were...

Georgetown University has rejected attempts by liberal pro-abortion activists and Sandra Fluke to reject attempts by her to get the Catholic college to change its birth control coverage policy. Today, Georgetown University President John J. DeGioia released a public letter saying Georgetown will not change its policy unless legally forced to do so. The letter doesn’t take Fluke to task or even mention her directly, but it rebuts many of the claims she made as she gained national notoriety and attempted to use it to force the college to do her bidding. One of Fluke’s biggest points of contention is...

WASHINGTON — The defeat of two conservative House Democrats by more liberal opponents in Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary illustrates the strong hold the new health care law still has over committed Democratic voters and foreshadows an even more polarized Congress next year in the aftermath of the latest round of redistricting. Representatives Jason Altmire and Tim Holden both lost in primaries to opponents who joined together with activist groups to pummel the veteran lawmakers over the opposition to the new health care law and climate change legislation — positions they had used to their advantage in the past to show their...