Free Republic

MOSCOW — Russia's foreign minister has rejected U.S. demands to extradite National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, who has apparently stopped in Moscow while trying to evade U.S. justice. Sergey Lavrov said that Snowden hasn't crossed the Russian border and insisted that Russia has nothing to do with him, his relations with U.S. justice or his travel plans. Speaking at a news conference Tuesday, he angrily lashed out at the U.S. demands for the extradition and warnings of negative consequences if Moscow fails to comply. Lavrov said that accusing Russia of "violation of U.S. laws and even some sort of...

<p>The Obama administration has revamped a government website aimed at promoting the federal health care law as part of its all-hands-on-deck campaign to get Americans enrolled in the law’s insurance markets when they debut this fall.</p> <p>The site, healthcare.gov, features sleeker graphics than its prior iteration and features a “Start Now” button that takes consumers on a step-by-step guide to coverage, with questions on age, gender, location and employment, among other things.</p>

Hi, all! This week, we got some big news about the immigration reform bill. It's a little wonky, but it's so great that I couldn't wait to share it with you. The nonpartisan experts who estimate the financial impact of legislation for Congress concluded that because undocumented immigrants will start paying more in taxes for things like education and Social Security, the immigration proposal in the Senate will make the economy fairer for middle class families while cutting the U.S. deficit by almost $1,000,000,000,000 over the next two decades. With every passing day, it’s becoming clear that we can’t afford...

Mark Zuckerberg, one of the young cofounders of Facebook, on Tuesday met with Samsung Electronics executives including the heir Lee Jay-yong and mobile unit chief Shin Jong-kyun to ask Samsung to manufacture a “Facebook-friendly” phone, industry watchers said. “Facebook has every intention of becoming the second Google, and with that intent in mind, Zuckerberg is said to have asked Samsung to step up cooperation by launching a phone with a Facebook interface,” said one watcher, declining to be identified. However, Samsung is unlikely to be considering the request for Facebook-platform phone in a positive light, industry experts said, as there...

With healthcare costs continually on the rise — a situation compounded by ObamaCare’s new taxes and regulations — employers are looking for every means possible to keep those costs down. The healthcare law requires them to offer coverage to all full-time employees and their dependent children aged 25 and younger. The one person whose coverage it does not mandate, however, is the employee’s spouse; spousal coverage, therefore, is increasingly on employers’ chopping blocks. According to MarketWatch, since the passage of ObamaCare, companies have instituted various measures designed to discourage, if not outright exclude, individuals from obtaining health coverage via their...

Hundreds of pro-immigration goons stormed Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s home this past weekend. The mob brought megaphones and rallied on his front porch. And they hurled threats at his family. (VIDEO-AT-LINK) The leftists dared the Secretary of State to come outside. Todd Starnes at Townhall reported: Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is calling for a criminal investigation after a huge mob of illegal alien supporters surrounded his private home Saturday and held a rally on his front porch. At least 200 members of Sunflower Community Action were bussed into Kobach’s Kansas City-area neighborhood on Saturday – to...

Two defendants in military sexual assault cases cannot be punitively discharged, if found guilty, because of “unlawful command influence” derived from comments made by President Barack Obama, a judge ruled in a Hawaii military court this week

In a sharp escalation of the U.S. role in Syria's bloody civil war, the White House announced late Thursday that it will provide military aid to rebels fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad after confirming that his government used chemical weapons on the opposition. Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes told reporters on a conference call that President Barack Obama had heard pleas from Syria's rebel Supreme Military Council (SMC) for more help. "Our aim is to be responsive," Rhodes said, underlining that the new assistance would have "direct military purposes."

Homeland Insecurity: The White House assures that tracking our every phone call and keystroke is to stop terrorists, and yet it won't snoop in mosques, where the terrorists are. That's right, the government's sweeping surveillance of our most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists are radicalized. Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents.

This little item could give the IRS’ whole “targeting” conservatives scandal a brand-new twist. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) tweeted that he observed IRS agents training with AR-15s when he toured the Department of Homeland Security: A few weeks ago when I toured a DHS facility I saw #IRS agents training with AR-15's. I'm looking into the issue now. #PJNET

<p>Technology companies stung by the controversy over the National Security Agency’s sweeping Internet surveillance program are calling on U.S. officials to ease the secrecy surrounding national security investigations and lift long-standing gag orders covering the nature and extent of information collected about Internet users.</p>

The NSA is systematically monitoring the Internet posts and telephone conversations of U.S. military returning from Afghanistan, according to a civil-liberties attorney. “The FBI and the Secret Service are showing up to request an interview to question specific Internet posts the veteran has placed on websites such as Facebook,” explained attorney John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute. Whitehead said the agencies are looking for “anti-Obama views that can be interpreted to reflect psychological problems of sufficient seriousness to disqualify the veteran from ever owning a firearm.”Rutherford told WND credible sources within the National Security Agency have told him the...

The LA Times reports that sales of the book, which concerns a discontented propagandist working for the Ministry of Truth in a time of endless war, are up 5,771 percent as of Tuesday morning. From a sales rank of 12,507 in the days before The Guardian published top-secret government documents provided by Snowden, "1984" has risen to crack Amazon's top 200.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is under fire for statements he made before Congress that suggested he had no knowledge about federal government programs that collected data on millions of Americans’ phone calls and Internet activities. In March, Clapper said at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that he was not aware that the National Security Agency was involved in such large-scale efforts. The questioning of Clapper’s statements follow blockbuster news last week that the federal government has since 9/11 been logging millions, perhaps billions, of calls and Internet activities and as the NSA’s top official goes before the same...

Two prominent civil rights groups have filed a lawsuit against the National Security Agency over its program that reportedly collects the telephone records of millions of American customers of Verizon. The American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union say in a lawsuit filed in federal court Tuesday that the program violates First Amendment rights of free speech and association. It also alleges the program violates Fourth Amendment rights to privacy. The lawsuit additionally alleges the government's program exceeds Congress' authority.

My life has crossed paths with President Obama on multiple occasions. According to Obama, we were Columbia University classmates, both Pre Law and Political Science majors in the Class of ’83. I also ran against Obama in 2008 on the Libertarian Party Presidential ticket. What are the odds? But something about “the Obama at Columbia story” has always bothered me. Earlier in the week right here at The Blaze I wrote about having just returned from New York, where I attended my 30th Columbia University reunion. I celebrated with my esteemed classmates. Everyone except Barack Obama. As usual- he wasn’t...

A Washington IRS attorney named Carter Hull closely oversaw the targeting of conservative nonprofit groups and suggested questions that IRS employees could ask of conservative and Tea Party groups applying for tax-exempt nonprofit status, according to interviews that two IRS employees gave with congressional investigators. “I was essentially a front person, because I had no autonomy or no authority to act on [applications] without Carter Hull’s influence or input,” said Elizabeth Hofacre, an employee of the Cincinnati IRS office, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal. Hofacre’s office, which oversaw tax-exempt applications, reportedly requested help from the...