Free Republic

Apparently, my previous article on the famous "Situation Room" photo tapped a nationwide nerve. The response ranged from some eye-opening tips on other photos to a few perplexed criticisms as to the motivation for Photoshopping a Situation Room photo. The answer to that latter question can be summed up in one simple thought: To hide the truth. Obama was out golfing while the OBL mission was unfolding, and the administration needed the Situation Room photo op for public perception -- to give the illusion that he's presidential. Obama's entire "Composite Presidency" and administration are orchestrated in this fashion. Not...

By Las Vegas standards, the night was young when two men entered the Bellagio at 10:45 Saturday and made a beeline for the table games. The two weren’t there for traditional gambling, though. Armed with pepper spray and disguised by wigs and sunglasses, the men made a bold bid to grab and make off with more than $100,000 worth of casino chips, according to a Metro Police arrest report released Monday. Bellagio employees foiled the robbery and captured 24-year-old Michael Quinn Belton, of Nuevo, Calif., police said. His alleged accomplice ran from the casino and remained at large Monday. The...

Taxpayers in Arizona spend $125 million each school year funding more than 13,000 students who don’t exist at public schools. That’s because the state school system uses an antique budget approach that causes taxpayers to overpay, says a new report, “Ghost Busters: How to Save $125 Million a Year in Arizona’s Education Budget,” by Goldwater Institute education director Jonathan Butcher. The system pays for some students twice, Butcher says. Here’s how it happens. Arizona schools are funded based on the number of students who attend each school in the prior school year, Butcher’s report says. However, when a student transfers...

In a major development in his probe of Barack Obama’s eligibility for Arizona’s 2012 presidential ballot, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has dispatched his lead Cold Case Posse investigator and a deputy detective to Hawaii. The mission to Obama’s purported birthplace comes as the Hawaii Department of Health continues to resist efforts by Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett to verify that the Honolulu agency has a valid birth certificate on file for Obama.

Sovereignty: Even if he's not re-elected, the president hopes to leave behind a treaty giving a U.N. body veto power over the use of our territorial waters and to which we'd be required to give half of our offshore oil revenue. The Law Of The Sea Treaty (LOST) has been lurking in the shadows for decades. Like the Kyoto Protocol that pretended to be an effort to save the earth from the poisoned fruit of the Industrial Revolution, LOST pretends to be an effort to protect the world's oceans from environmental damage and remove it as a cause of potential...

Russ Caswell, 68, is bewildered: “What country are we in?” He and his wife, Pat, are ensnared in a Kafkaesque nightmare unfolding in Orwellian language. This town’s police department is conniving with the federal government to circumvent Massachusetts law — which is less permissive than federal law — to seize his livelihood and retirement asset. In the lawsuit titled United States of America v. 434 Main Street, Tewksbury, Massachusetts, the government is suing an inanimate object, the motel Caswell’s father built in 1955. The U.S. Department of Justice intends to seize it, sell it for perhaps $1.5 million and give...

House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy joined Rep. Darrell Issa last week to once again demand Attorney General Eric Holder come clean about his involvement in Operation Fast and Furious. The Republican leadership signed a May 18 letter asking more questions of the US Attorney General who has refused to provide subpoenaed documents to congressional investigators. The back-and-forth correspondence over the past 16 months may in the end provide a useful record of an Obama administration program which led to hundreds of murders. But for now the letters are little more than posturing...

Federal courts could soon decide a fight between Congress and Attorney General Eric Holder on the Operation Fast and Furious gun-running scandal. If Republicans persevere, this is a battle that Holder should lose in what would be a humiliating defeat for President Barack Obama.  Most Americans have now heard that our government allowed drug cartels to illegally smuggle thousands of guns from the U.S. into Mexico. The National Rifle Association has relentlessly pursued the White House and Department of Justice (DOJ) about Fast and Furious for over a year, and the massive gun-rights organization has only increased its focus in...

Obama administration officials may have pressured government contractors to change job loss estimates associated with coal regulations, audio recordings reveal. The tapes show that unnamed officials with the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM) asked government contractors to change their calculations of job losses associated with the Stream Protection Rule.A preliminary draft of an environmental impact statement estimated that up to 7,000 coalminers could lose their jobs under the administration’s “preferred” regulation. After a leaked copy of the report went public, officials asked the contractors to compare job estimates to a model in which another regulation was enforced,...

Obama Voters Losing Jobless Benefits Due to the Manipulation of Workforce Numbers May 11, 2012 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Michael in Momence, Illinois. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello. CALLER: Thanks a lot, Rush, first-time caller. I'm calling because I was at the unemployment office just yesterday, and they have tables there where people fill out the paperwork that they have -- RUSH: Wait, wait, wait whoa, whoa, whoa, just a second. I need you to go slow here. CALLER: Okay. RUSH: Why were you at the unemployment office? It may seem like an obvious question, but...

A Democrat member of Arizona’s House of Representatives who fights for illegal aliens’ rights, Paul Ben Arredondo, was charged on Wednesday by a federal grand jury with bribery, fraud, attempted extortion and false statements he made to the FBI in connection with receiving more than $6,000 in tickets to sporting and special events while he was a Tempe, Arizona, council member and a member-elect of the Arizona House, according to a federal law enforcement official. The indictment charges the 63-year-old liberal with one count of federal programs bribery, two counts of honest services mail fraud, one count of attempted Hobbs...

When analyzing Barack Obama’s electoral success a few years back, I pointed out that there was more than white guilt at work. He was, quite frankly, what every good little liberal had always been looking for. Sure, he was “black,” using that old bigoted “one-drop” standard, which, curiously, has been embraced by modern black activists. But more specifically he was half black, with Kenyan pedigree, half white and bore an exotic name. He was mentored by a Marxist, mothered by an atheist (when Momma Dunham was actually around), lived in Indonesia and Hawaii, had Muslim influence and black-church conscience. An...

A tree-trimming company based in Houston reached a $2 million settlement agreement with the Department of Homeland Security that will allow it to avoid criminal prosecution for hiring illegal immigrants, officials announced Friday. The agreement capped an investigation into ABC Professional Tree Services Inc. that dates to early 2008, when Homeland Security Investigations agents in Alabama were tipped off that the company was hiring illegal immigrants. The company, which trims trees and vegetation for electric utilities in more than a dozen states, made about $2 million between 2005 and 2011 from the work of illegal immigrants, according to the U.S....

There's no truth whatever to Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren's claim to Indian ancestry. She's been proved a fraud. Time for her to fess up and end this charade. All the evidence she's offered to justify listing herself as a minority on law school directories the last 25 years has been shot down. The Harvard law professor's claims just don't stand up to scrutiny. The New England Historical Genealogical Society this week reversed its claim it had proof of Warren's alleged Cherokee heritage. That proof was hearsay Warren fed the society, and in turn, the Boston Globe. She cited the...

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts." -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan Conservatives and liberals may disagree on reasons, motivations, and excuses for Barack Obama's performance, but the facts are still facts. There may be many reasons that a pro football coach goes 1-15, but everyone can agree that his record is still 1-15, right? Well, here are some basic facts about how the country is faring with Barack Obama in the White House. Take a look at the numbers, sans commentary, and make your own judgment about whether Barack Obama deserves...

President Obama’s reelection campaign launched a national drive Friday to counter new restrictive voter-access laws, which advisers said threaten his electoral chances in November. Organizers will fan out in key swing states this weekend to teach volunteers and voters how to navigate a series of laws passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures imposing stricter identification requirements, limiting early voting and making it harder to organize voter-registration drives. It is the beginning of a months-long effort, campaign officials said, to combat what they described as a Republican effort to stifle voting among young people and minorities, two groups that traditionally tend to...

According to the Times, the Romney team has decided not to assail Obama's "likability," for fear personal attacks will backfire with independents. Message to the Republican establishment:  do not muzzle those of us who want to focus on Obama's troubling history with angry Marxists, black and white, including Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers.   This is not about race.  It is about knowing who Obama is, understanding what he has already done to our country, and what he is capable of doing.  The issue of Rev erend Wright is not peripheral, it is central.  It gets to the heart of the...

Sean Hannity hosted a panel on his show last night, to discuss Barack Obama’s history, in his “own words.” Stephen K. Bannon was a member of that panel, and reminded viewers (around the 3:30 mark) that the McCain campaign failed to vet Obama during the 2008 presidential election: The decision to not vet the current president in 2008 by Steve Schmidt and other incompetent individuals within the McCain camp, played a role in outcome in that race. Governor Palin knew the American people deserved to know the facts about Obama’s history and associations. Schmidt & Co. simply wouldn’t allow it,...

Three men who ran an immigration consulting firm in Halifax have been charged with running a fraud scheme to get people into Canada, it was announced today. The Canada Border Services Agency said it doesn't believe the three are currently in Canada. It's alleged the men used their business, Canada 2000 Immigration and Business Services Inc., to help families maintain fake homes in Canada so they would keep their permanent resident status. People under the permanent resident category must live in the country for 730 days over a five-year period. In May 2011, the border agency raided the business at...

The text editor of the 1991 literary agency booklet that described Barack Obama as “born in Kenya” said Thursday the line in question was “nothing more than a fact checking error.” Miriam Goderich issued a statement to the Political Wire saying the future president never suggested “in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii”: “You’re undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This was nothing more...