Free Republic

On the Friday broadcast of “The McLaughlin Group,” columnist Pat Buchanan predicted that President Obama would grant amnesty to illegal immigrants via executive order by Labor Day and that such an action would “set the country completely on fire.” After Washington Examiner Chief Congressional Correspondent Susan Ferrechio argued that “Democrats could gain from Hispanic voters turning out, especially if the president decides to take key executive actions in this summer that would help Hispanics who are here in the country, perhaps living here illegally. That could boost popularity for the party,” Buchanan responded “executive amnesty will set the country completely...

WASHINGTON—A handful of lawmakers are saying President Barack Obama must get congressional authorization for military action in Iraq, a vote that could exacerbate tensions between the branches and present members with a difficult vote just before the midterm elections. Mr. Obama's announcement of limited airstrikes last week aimed at slowing the advance of militants from the Islamic State toward the Kurdish city of Erbil initially triggered few complaints that he had usurped the power to declare war that Congress claims as its own. But with the president warning over the weekend that "I don't think we're going to solve this...

On board Iraqi army helicopter delivering aid to the trapped Yazidis, Jonathan Krohn sees a hellish sight Mount Sinjar stinks of death. The few Yazidis who have managed to escape its clutches can tell you why. “Dogs were eating the bodies of the dead,” said Haji Khedev Haydev, 65, who ran through the lines of Islamic State jihadists surrounding it. On Sunday night, I became the first western journalist to reach the mountains where tens of thousands of Yazidis, a previously obscure Middle Eastern sect, have been taking refuge from the Islamic State forces that seized their largest town, Sinjar....

Pertinent parts of Iraqi constitution: "...2- The Council of Representatives may withdraw confidence from the Prime Minister based on the request of one-fifth (1/5) of its members. This request may be submitted only after a question has been put to the Prime Minister and after at least seven days from submitting the request. 3- The Council of Representatives shall decide to withdraw confidence from the Prime Minister by an absolute majority of its members." ---There has not been a successful "no confidence" vote against Maliki. "...Article 73: First: The President of the Republic shall name the nominee of the Council...

There is an idiom, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” or as George W. Bush said, “fool me once…you fooled me, can’t get fooled again.” However one puts it, the proverbial definition is that after being tricked once, one should be very wary so a person cannot trick one again. Republican warmongers certainly understand they fooled Americans in 2003 and lied through their teeth to take the country to war against a sovereign nation with no connection to al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, or the terror attacks on 911. Now, they are back again lying,...

U.S. air strikes since Friday have opened a corridor through which tens of thousands of Yazidis, trapped and starving on a mountain in Iraq, have escaped to safety in Kurdistan. The Kurds, whose peshmerga fighters were sent reeling by the Islamic State last week, bolstered now by the arrival of U.S. air power, recaptured two towns. But the peshmerga have apparently lost the strategically important town of Jalawla, 20 miles from Iran, the furthest east that ISIS forces have penetrated. Last week's gains by the Islamic State caused Republican hawks to flock to the Sunday talk shows. "ISIS is...

On Thursday, the Pentagon revealed that the Yazidi minorities have been encircled by Islamic State forces on Mt. Sinjar for weeks were in much better shape. Military officials determined that select airstrikes on ISIS positions around the mountain had been successful, and some Yazidis had already evacuated the area. Defense officials determined that the success of contingency operations against ISIS in western Iraq indicated that no further action would need to be undertaken. In a press conference on Thursday, President Barack Obama confirmed that the mission to save the Yazidis had been a success. He added that, while the...

President Barack Obama on Thursday promised to expand U.S. humanitarian relief to Iraqis threatened by the advancing army of the Islamic State militants. He took credit for alleviating the genocide threat to thousands trapped on a mountaintop but said the situation “remains dire” throughout the country. Obama also said U.S. airstrikes would continue to protect Americans and U.S. facilities in Iraq, and he said Washington has increased its delivery of military assistance to Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State. But he gave no indication he intends to shift from the limited, defensive military campaign he announced last week...

An Iraqi MP and United Nations relief workers today dismissed claims by the U.S. and the UK that the humanitarian crisis on Mount Sinjar was all but over. Yazidi MP Vian Dakhil claims some 70-80,000 refugees are still stranded on the mountain despite assertions from American and British leaders that they number only in their low thousands. President Barack Obama yesterday said the ten-day siege by the Islamic State had been 'broken' by missile strikes and humanitarian aid drops, allowing tens of thousands of Yazidis to escape. Downing Street also said the situation had improved so much that further aid...

ISTANBUL — Yazidi leaders and emergency relief officials on Thursday strongly disputed American claims that the siege of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq had been broken and that the crisis was effectively over, saying that tens of thousands of Yazidis remained on the mountain in desperate conditions. On Wednesday, the United States military said that a small team of 18 Marines and Special Operations soldiers had completed an assessment of conditions on Mount Sinjar and found that most of the Yazidis, a small Iraqi religious minority, had succeeded in escaping, and the numbers remaining were in the low thousands. American...

Last week, we were told there were 40,000 Yazidis on Sinjar Mountain facing starvation if they remained there, and slaughter by ISIS if they came down. But a team of Marines and Special Forces that helicoptered in has reported back that, with a corridor off the mountain opened up by U.S. air strikes, the humanitarian crisis is over. The few thousand who remain can be airdropped food and water. The rest can be brought out. The emergency over, President Obama should think long and hard about launching a new air war in Iraq or Syria. For Iraq War III holds...

As Vladimir Putin’s tanks begin to roll forth from Russia like Sauron’s legions from Mordor, a pair of American villains is working hard to undermine our resolve against the greatest threat from Europe to American values and power, and indeed to world peace, since Adolf Hitler.Evgeny Feldman, a photographer for the maverick Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, recently visited a book store in Moscow and tweeted [1] a photograph from amongst its shelves. Among volumes on one topical shelf such as The Crimes of the U.S.A. and The Third World War and Forward to Victory, in which authors offered bloodthirsty...

With the party united, the odds are now at least even that the GOP will not only hold the House but also capture the Senate in November. But before traditional conservatives cheer that prospect, they might take a closer look at the foreign policy that a Republican Senate would seek to impose upon the nation.

Last week, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the troubled bastion of mainstream liberal journalistic thought in the great American heartland published a short, but typically piquant editorial piece slamming Patrick J. Buchanan for his soon-to-be released memoir of the 1968 Presidential campaign entitled, “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create a New Majority.” The Post-Dispatch, anticipating the release of Buchanan’s work launched what may be charitably labeled a pre-emptive strike on Buchanan, even though his new book does not concern the PD. Tony Messenger, the newspaper editor, picked an unnecessary fight with Pat Buchanan, and, like...

WASHINGTON — Increasingly, across this city, the “I” word is being heard. Impeachment is being brought up by Republicans outraged over Barack Obama’s usurpations of power and unilateral rewriting of laws. And Obama is taunting John Boehner and the GOP: “So sue me.” Democrats are talking impeachment to rally a lethargic base to come out and vote this fall to prevent Republicans from taking control of the Senate, and with it the power to convict an impeached president. Still, Republicans should drop the talk of impeachment.

“For the first time since President Richard M. Nixon’s divisive ‘Southern strategy’ that sent whites to the Republican Party and blacks to the Democrats …” began a New York Times story last week. Thus has one of the big lies of U.S. political history morphed into a cliche — that Richard Nixon used racist politics to steal the South from a Democratic Party battling heroically for civil rights. A brief stroll through Bruce Bartlett’s “Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past” might better enlighten us. Where Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner, Woodrow Wilson re-segregated the U.S....

There is absolutely no evidence, aside from rhetoric, to suggest that Russia in general and Putin in particular have been converted to Christianity. Instead, what we are witnessing is a massive Russian “active measures” campaign that has ensnared many American conservatives, convincing them that Putin is somehow a legitimate alternative to President Obama’s decadent worldview. It is troubling to see some of these conservatives endorse Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine. The term “active measures” refers to influence operations that use agents of influence, disinformation and propaganda. .... Rather than embrace Christianity, the evidence shows Russia has embraced the Russian...

For 10 days, Americans have argued over the wisdom of trading five Taliban senior commanders for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. President Obama handed the Taliban a victory, critics contend, and imperiled U.S. troops in Afghanistan when the five return to the battlefield. Moreover, he has inspired the Haqqani network and other Islamists to capture more Americans to trade. But which represents the greater long-term threat to the safety and security of our people and nation: sending those five Taliban leaders to Doha, and perhaps back to Afghanistan, or releasing into the U.S. population last year 36,000 criminal illegal aliens with 88,000...

SIMFEROPOL, Crimea — After Russia annexed Crimea practically overnight, the Russian bureaucrats handling passports and residence permits inhabited the building of their Ukrainian predecessors, where Roman Nikolayev now waits daily with a seemingly mundane question. His daughter and granddaughter were newly arrived from Ukraine when they suddenly found themselves in a different country, so he wonders if they can become legal residents. But he cannot get inside to ask because he is No. 4,475 on the waiting list for passports. At most, 200 people are admitted each day from the crowd churning around the tall, rusty iron gate. “They set...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan summed up the armed federal standoff between agents with the Bureau of Land Management and cattle rancher Cliven Bundy, his family and his supporters: It was all over an unpaid bill. “You don’t send the Seventh Cavalry to collect a bill, and that’s exactly what happened,” he told Sean Hannity on his radio show Monday. He went on, Breitbart reported: “And when they put all those forces out there — that’s what attracted all the others, the history of what happened at Waco, Ruby Ridge. And so these folks came to that rancher’s defense. But the...