Free Republic

<p>Former Florida Rep. Allen West had some harsh words for nationally known civil rights activists like the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, who have remained silent on a video showing black teens beating a white boy on a school bus.</p>

Following in the well-worn footsteps of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Blueprint for Federal Action on Illegal Guns, this week the Council on Foreign Relations released a memo urging the Obama administration to disregard the will of the American people and Congress and unilaterally enact a series of gun controls. Entitled, A Strategy to Reduce Gun Trafficking and Violence in the Americas, and written by CFR Senior Fellow for Latin American Studies, Julia F. Sweig, the memo pins the ills of Central and South America on U.S. gun owners and urges the president to curb our rights to...

The president said that Republicans have one unifying principle - denying 30 million Americans the right to health care. Ummm... The CBO said that there would be 30 million without insurance even with ObamaCare fully implemented. Obama. Mixed up. Fail.

The Mainstream (Establishment) Media is trying to once again do the Republican vs Democrat thingy: that Obama has proposed some serious (cough, laugh) changes to the NSA spying program, and those wascally wepubs (Rep. McCaul and Peter King (R-GOP-e) are trying to thwart him. I never thought that I would see a recent liberal rally where hundreds marched (not reported by the MSM-e) where a person would be carrying a sign that said Snowden, patriot and Pelosi, traitor. And even the New York Times (Editorial Board, June 6th: Obama administration has lost all credibility on the issue of the NSA...

A sudden influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico requesting asylum is overwhelming immigration agents in San Diego, forcing agencies to rent hotel rooms

Liberals love their fantasies about slavery in America. It makes them feel superior to insist America was founded by “Old White Men” (OWM) who loved slavery. They refuse to acknowledge that those same OWMs often freed their own slaves although not until their death. They love their own fairy tale that, “freeing slaves had nothing to do with the Civil War.” Allowing that would force them to credit Lincoln and the (hated) Republicans with freeing the slaves – a gross violation of the false liberal narrative of American history. They are so desperate to keep the truth of who were...

It seems that not only is Justice blind in Washington, D.C., but she's been kicked out of town altogether. On Saturday, it was reported that Cindy Thomas just got a big promotion. If you don't know who Cindy Thomas is, she was the IRS official in charge of the exempt organizations office in Cincinnati. This was one of the IRS groups who targeted conservative tea party groups for harassment and intimidation. They also illegally leaked confidential tax information to other agencies and liberal groups. Cindy Thomas is a 35 year veteran of the IRS (bet her pension plan is rocking!)...

The “phony scandal” at the IRS keeps growing. E-mail correspondence unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee reveals that Lois Lerner, the figure at the center of the scandal, may have committed a felony by divulging information about a conservative group to the Federal Election Commission, in an incident that dates back at least to 2008, before President Obama took office. Though some conservatives have eagerly sought evidence that Obama’s White House instigated the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups, the latest evidence suggests that an anti-conservative bias may instead be an endemic feature of the federal bureaucracy. And now,...

Our government, & by extension our Country, is lost to us. The harvest we’ve reaped for the seeds of pernicious infidelity we’ve allowed to be sown by undermining treasonists. The average American citizen has basically been relegated to the role of “taxed spectator” to this oppressive travesty we’re made to fund.

<p>The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.</p>

The Brain Dead American Media missed this veiled threat in Obama's opening statement: "We shouldn’t forget the difference between the ability of our government to collect information online under strict guidelines and for narrow purposes, and the willingness of some other governments to throw their own citizens in prison for what they say online" Tell that to the arab who made a movie and posted it to the Net and who was blamed for creating the Benghazi Attacks ? Tell that to all those who have been surveilled by federal agencies using the NSA databases ? Obama often uses words...

The email service reportedly used by surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden abruptly shut down on Thursday after its owner cryptically announced his refusal to become "complicit in crimes against the American people."Lavabit, an email service that boasted of its security features and claimed 350,000 customers, is no more, apparently after rejecting a court order for cooperation with the US government to participate in surveillance on its customers. It is the first such company known to have shuttered rather than comply with government surveillance."I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or...

The highly encrypted email service reportedly used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden has gone offline - and its administrator claims the company is legally barred from explaining why. On Thursday, the homepage of Lavabit.com was changed to a letter from the company’s owner announcing that the site’s operations have ceased following a six-week long ordeal that has prompted the company to take legal action in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Now in the midst of an escalating fight from the federal government aimed at cracking down on encrypted communications, one of the last free and secure services has thrown...

The seeds of the IRS targeting of conservative groups were planted by Eric Holder in 2001 when as deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton he convinced incoming Attorney General John Ashcroft to seize the building of a conservative megachurch, says the church’s retired pastor. “Our church was taken over by the IRS in 2001 based on the recommendations of Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder to incoming Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft,” said Greg Dixon, former pastor of the Indianapolis Baptist Temple. “The church was the sacrificial lamb to pave the way for the future targeting of conservative groups. We...

Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years.

Rep. Darrell Issa's demand follows CNN report of contact between the IRS and FEC House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa demanded Wednesday that the Federal Election Commission turn over records of more than five years of communications with the Internal Revenue Service -- a move that significantly expands the California Republican's ongoing probe of alleged federal targeting of conservative groups. In a letter to FEC Chairman Ellen Weintraub -- a Democrat -- Issa cited CNN reporting on Monday that raises "the prospect of inappropriate coordination between the IRS and the FEC about tax-exempt entities." Among other things, Issa asked for...

President Barack Obama’s job approval dropped to the lowest level of his second term during the week of July 29 to Aug. 4, when 45 percent of respondents told the Gallup poll they approved of the job the president was doing and 48 percent said they disapproved. In the previous week, which ended on July 28, Obama’s approval had been 46 percent in the Gallup poll and his disapproval had been 47 percent. …

Did Valerie Jarrett Issue the Order to Stand Down in Benghazi? August 06, 2013 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: There is a somewhat shocking report that I came across today at a website run by Doug Ross. It's called the Conservative Report. Doug Ross maintains here that Valerie Jarrett gave the orders to stand down in Benghazi. Valerie Jarrett, who constitutionally is not in the chain of command and cannot do that. And that's why this, if true, is a bombshell. Valerie Jarrett nixed the raid on bin Laden three separate times, remember, and the adults had to come in and basically...

Politico’s Dylan Byers, in a piece for his buddies in the MSM, declares that conservative criticism of the mainstream media is overblown. Byers writes: So often conservative media, like conservative media criticism, can't be taken seriously because it overplays its hand. Like someone who shouts "thief!" the second his keys go missing, much of the conservative echo-chamber has a hyper-aggressive penchant to see conspiracy where they'd do better to see questions in need of answers. As a general rule -- albeit with plenty of exceptions -- there is a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach among those who fashion themselves as "anti-MSM," which can...

WASHINGTON — As hundreds of commuters emerged from Amtrak and commuter trains at Union Station on a recent morning, an armed squad of men and women dressed in bulletproof vests made their way through the crowds. The squad was not with the Washington police department or Amtrak’s police force, but was one of the Transportation Security Administration’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response squads — VIPR teams for short — assigned to perform random security sweeps to prevent terrorist attacks at transportation hubs across the United States. “The T.S.A., huh,” said Donald Neubauer of Greenville, Ohio, as he walked past the...

When former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked the existence of a massive spying program siphoning up Americans' personal phone records earlier this year, President Obama declared: "I welcome this debate and I think it's healthy for our democracy."Shortly thereafter, his administration revoked Snowden's passport and hit him with Espionage Act charges (filed under seal, naturally).That's the thing about the self-styled "most transparent administration in history": Often you can't find out what they're up to until somebody breaks the law to let you know.One suspects Obama "welcomes this debate" about as enthusiastically as Anthony Weiner greets the debate over...

Surveillance Society: The government says spying on U.S. citizens is acceptable since it's merely a means of fighting foreign terrorists. But what if the government used espionage in investigations of common criminals? The program is so sneaky that officials are trying to cover it up. "Law enforcement agents," says Reuters, "have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin — not only from defense lawyers, but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges." Criminal investigations should be launched, and suspects deprived of liberty, only "when there's a reasonable amount of suspicion, supported by circumstances sufficiently strong to justify a prudent...

Almost every day, two Army helicopters land at the Bell County Jail to pick up the man known as the “inmate of high value." Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who's accused of gunning down dozens of fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, is that inmate. The Army helicopters carry Hasan about 20 miles into Fort Hood so he can work on his legal defense. Since there is no jail at the Army post, Bell County Sheriff Eddy Lange houses Hasan at the Bell County Jail under a special Army contract in a special room the Army equipped to accommodate Hasan’s...

There was no briefing on Friday so this was the first chance to press him on CNN’s scoop. Ace says he watched most of it and didn’t hear a peep about it. When he tweeted at Ed Henry of Fox to ask what’s up, Henry tweeted back — well, go look. Consider this a bleg: Did anyone watch, start to finish, and can confirm or deny that it’s true? Even with the big terror alert preoccupying the media, it’s unfathomable that they wouldn’t pick up a story pushed by a major cable news net that kinda sorta hinted the CIA...

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges. "It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up...

<p>To adapt H.L. Mencken, nobody ever went broke underestimating the cynicism and self-dealing of the American political class. Witness their ad-libbed decision, at the 11th hour and on the basis of no legal authority, to create a special exemption for themselves from the ObamaCare health coverage that everybody else is mandated to buy.</p>

US Govt In Turmoil Over ‘Big New Al-Qaeda Plot’ While Obama Funds Them Anthony Gucciardi by Anthony Gucciardi August 4th, 2013 Updated 08/04/2013 at 5:17 pm The mainstream media is reporting on the latest ‘big terror’ threat from al-Qaeda that is apparently the ‘most significant’ threat in years, yet they simultaneously fail to mention that the Obama administration is all the while funding al-Qaeda through arming and financing Syrian rebels that have major ties to the group. obama-funding-al-qaedaSurely this essential point is at least worth mentioning when you consider the fact that Obama even initiated the large-scale arming of the...

Your guns are in danger. Obama has stopped defending the Second Amendment. He did not get his gun control agenda passed in the Senate. So, he’s unconstitutionally trying to use the United Nations to control your guns. Don’t let him. Obama is getting dangerously close to signing the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty. If he signs this treaty and the Senate ratifies it, the Second Amendment is toast. And your guns will be in the control of dictators around the world. This sounds like a bad movie or a conspiracy theory, and I wish it were. But it’s real. 130...

<p>NBC-DFW Channel 5 in Dallas just aired an exclusive bombshell report on Maj. Nidal Hasan that he receives a VIP military helicopter trip every day to and from the jail so he can use facilities to research and study resources on the military base. They also said that a special Sheriff has been hired to stand 12 hours a day watching Hasan at the jail when he is returned to his cell at the county jail.</p>

CENTREVILLE, Va. — A race to define Obamacare to the masses began today between the stacks at the Centreville Library. Over pizza in Decatur, Texas. And with a glass of wine in Naples, Fla. Dozens of communities around the country hosted pro-Obamacare events, convened by the president’s foot soldiers at Organizing for Action. The series is the first salvo in what is fixing to be a month of high-stakes health care spin. When Congress returns from its summer recess in early September, there will be less than a month until Obamacare’s most sweeping coverage programs start signing up customers in...

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform subpoenaed Obama Treasury Secretary Jack Lew for withholding documentation from Congress in the ongoing IRS Tea Party Scandal investigation. The Oversight Committee accuses the Obama Administration of impeding and obstructing the investigation. “During the past two weeks, President Obama and you have repeatedly labeled the IRS’s strategy of targeting Americans for their political beliefs as a ‘phony’ scandal. While the Obama Administration has so publicly deflected responsibility for the targeting, it simultaneously has attempted to thwart congressional oversight into the matter… the IRS has engaged in a systematic effort to delay, frustrate,...

But what has Obama himself been doing throughout 2013? Pushing gun control, and then pushing an immigration bill, and failing at both, in between vacations and rounds of golf. Whose eye is off the ball here? As the failures have piled up and the economic data isn’t getting any better, a frustrated Obama now critiques the system he leads as if he’s just a bystander and threatens to just bypass Congress to exert his will. Neither of those amounts to anything close to leadership, making deals, and compromising. His rhetoric in fact makes compromises all but impossible, because he resorts...

ALL ABOUT PRESIDENT OBAMA'S "PHONY" SCANDALS Last week (the week of July 14, 2013) President Barack Hussein Obama, in a long rambling speech, spoke of how upset he was that the country had gotten off-track as he termed it, and was too focused on what he called, "phony scandals," to address what he deemed were the real issues facing the nation. So, I thought I would examine and talk a little bit about Obama's belief that America has been "distracted," by these "phony," scandals. THE BENGHAZI SCANDAL Is one of those scandals the attack on the US consulate in...

IRS-Gate: From stonewalling Congress to Federal Election Commission collusion to harassment of already-tax-exempt conservative groups, the IRS scandal metastasizes. Someone high-up was clearly giving orders. 'Phony scandals," to use President Obama's term, should not generate near-daily news coverage from a media that would like nothing better than to see its dream president let off the hook. Yet everywhere you look comes another bolt of lightning keeping this Frankenstein monster "alive!": • In addition to conservative organizations being ultra-scrutinized in applying for tax-exempt status, existing conservative groups like Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute, around since 1979, and the Claire Booth Luce Policy...

National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander was met with both heckling and applause at the Black Hat information security conference in Las Vegas, Nevada on Wednesday. Ever since the leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden thrust the agency’s domestic surveillance policies into the limelight and sparked widespread public debate, Alexander and other intelligence officials have been on the hot seat, in a persistent state of defense against seemingly unending press reports.

IRS chief Daniel Werfel says he wants to keep his health care plan, not switch to Obamacare: "Mr. Werfel, last week your employees who are a member of the National Treasury Employee's Union sent a form letter for union members to send in to ask they be exempt from the exchanges," a congressman asked. "Why are your employees trying to exempt themselves from the very law that you're tasked to enforce?" "I don't want to speak for the NTEU, but I'll offer a perspective as a federal employee myself and a federal employee at the IRS," said the IRS chief....

Until Wednesday morning, you'd probably never heard of something called "XKeyscore," a program that the National Security Agency itself describes as its "widest reaching" means of gathering data from across the Internet. According to reports shared by NSA leaker Edward Snowden with the Guardian, is that in addition to all of the other recent revelations about the NSA's surveillance programs, by using XKeyscore, "analysts can also search by name, telephone number, IP address, keywords, the language in which the Internet activity was conducted or the type of browser used." David Brown, who co-authored the recent book "Deep State: Inside the...

The White House said bluntly Wednesday that it considers the controversy over the Benghazi attack to be among the so-called "phony scandals" that President Obama has been complaining about in recent speeches -- even as new questions were being raised about the lack of progress in the investigation. Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked at the daily briefing about Obama's repeated claim -- which he asserted most recently during a speech in Tennessee on Tuesday -- that Washington is getting distracted by phony scandals. Asked what the president was referring to, Carney listed the scandals over the IRS targeting of...

Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner and an attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office appear to have twice colluded to influence the record before the FEC’s vote in the case of a conservative non-profit organization, according to e-mails unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee and obtained exclusively by National Review Online. The correspondence suggests the discrimination of conservative groups extended beyond the IRS and into the FEC, where an attorney from the agency’s enforcement division in at least one case sought and received tax information about the status of a conservative group, the American...

Perhaps folks are just becoming burnt out & suffering from scandal fatigue. God knows if these scandals were oil, Obama would be a pipeline of inexhaustible energy. Like the multi-headed Lernaean Hydra confronted by Hercules during his 12 labors, it seems for every scandal Obama manufactures that we try to deal with, 2 more scandals pop up to add to the pile. It’s unbelievable.

That all depends on the meaning of  "sex" "phony."But I''m a GOOD little boy.There is a procedure through which the Obama Scandals can be deemed to be phony regardless of the facts. Consider the procedural device attempted to be used to "deem" ObamaCare to have been passed by the House without voting on it. Hence, anyone prepared to deem something false to be true or vice versa can easily deem any or all of the Obama Scandals phony. There are also other useful ploys. Some common definitions and synonyms for "phony" are provided at the link. In a bipartisan effort to be fair -- in...

There are lots of despicable people in Washington engaged in a lot of unsavory behavior, so it would be very difficult to get agreement if you asked regular people to select the most odious feature of the political class. Many people would probably choose corruption as the defining characteristic of Washington, and it would be hard to argue with that choice, but I think hypocrisy is an even better choice. There's something fundamentally wrong when people push for policies while making sure they don't have to abide by the results. Yet it happens all the time in government. 1. It...

The establishment press's general refusal to cover clearly newsworthy developments in the Obama administration scandal involving the targeting of conservative, tea party, prolife and other groups by the Internal Revenue Service has been so negligent and blatant that several leading conservatives, including the MRC's Brent Bozell and talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, called it out in an open letter earlier this week. Consistent with the rest of their colleagues, the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, appears to have had no substantive story on the scandal since July 18 -- and that one was about primarily Democrats beating the false meme...

During his one-hour, six-minute snoozer of a speech supposedly about the economy in Galesburg, Illinois, on Wednesday, President Barack Obama denounced Washington’s “endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals.” “Phony”? The rest of the president’s speech was so utterly devoid of new ideas that even ordinarily reliable apparatchik Chuck Todd at MSNBC couldn’t handle it, aptly observing of Obama and his administration: “They have nothing new to say.” Obama, whose flunkies presented his speech as yet another “pivot” back to jobs and the economy, didn’t even identify employment growth as his top priority. Instead, he said that...

In a bid to change the national narrative, President Obama slammed ongoing investigations into Administration actions as “phony” and “a distraction from the real issues Americans care about.” Incidents being investigated include the attack in Benghazi that killed the US Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans, the IRS abuse of political opponents, and the extensive spying on US citizens by the NSA. “The tragedy in Benghazi was heart rending,” Obama acknowledged. “But no matter what we do now we can’t bring those people back to life. Stirring things up, trying to figure out who to blame diverts us from...

Obama and the phony scandals neo-neocon July 26, 2013 Pat Smith has something to say to President Obama: The mother of a Benghazi victim is furious about the new White House strategy of calling the terrorist attack and many other scandals plaguing the Obama administration “fake” or “phony.” Patricia Smith, mother of Sean Smith, who was slain in the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack, lashed out on “Your World” on the Fox News… “I don’t believe [Obama] anymore,” Smith said. “He’s wrong. My son is dead. How could that be phony?” According to Smith, she has been given no answers...

“With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball.” – Barack Hussein Obama, July 25, 2013 These are the words of Barack Hussein Obama during a speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., on July 25, 2013. Branding all of his burgeoning scandals ranging from Benghazi-gate, to Navy SEAL-gate, to IRS-gate, to NSA-gate, as simply “phony” is an attempt to deflect attention away from the seriousness of them all and their mounting disastrous effect on his presidency. If calling four dead Americans at Benghazi, the murder of 22 SEAL Team...

BREAKING: US Benghazi Hero Waited 20 Hours For Help With a Shredded Leg – While Obama Campaigned in Las Vegas Diplomatic security agent David Ubben, like former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, ran into the Special Mission Compound (SMC) to help save US officials under siege in Benghazi. Ubben was struck by a mortar round that killed Woods and Doherty. His leg was shredded. Ubben was forced to wait twenty hours before a plane was sent to pick him up. While Ubben was waiting for help with a shredded leg Barack Obama was campaigning in Las Vegas.

Every other story about Obama’s union pals and government employees demanding waivers from the health-care disaster they supported pale in comparison to this one. ObamaCare is all about expanding the power of the Internal Revenue Service – that’s the only promise it has actually kept, the only part of the 11,000-page program that’s actually working the way it was supposed to. The IRS became as important to health care as any doctor or hospital when ObamaCare was passed, because they are its enforcement arm, and like all central planning schemes, there’s a huge amount of enforcing to be done. And...

It’s been a rough couple of days for any freedom loving American. Two big stories broke in relation to the NSA scandal and neither bodes well for the future of privacy in this country. Yesterday’s big story came from CNET. That is significant in and of itself because CNET is not exactly what you would call a site for political news junkies. CNET is more for the computer savvy techies. They are reporting that the feds are applying intense pressure to gather passwords. CNET reports: The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users’ stored passwords, according to...