Free Republic

Obama's anti-press measures 'are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon administration' [James Goodale, the former general counsel of the New York Times during its epic fights with the Nixon administration, and former washington Post Executive Director, Leonard Downie, Jr. both rip the Obama administration big time]

In its first report on press freedom in the United States, the Committee to Protect Journalists warns Obama has ushered in a paralyzing climate of fear for both reporters and their government sources. Among the case it details: six government employees - plus two contractors, including Edward Snowden - have faced felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act for leaking classified information to the press, compared with three such prosecutions in ALL previous U.S. administrations. ...

The Obama White House’s war against leaks, and its penchant for secrecy and noted lack of transparency, are the worst “since the Nixon administration,” according to a major new study that relied on interviews from leading Washington reporters and news organization chiefs. The report, released Thursday by the Committee to Project Journalists (CPJ), found that reporters from many renowned media outlets consider the Obama administration the most closed-off in recent memory, and that there is not “any precedent” for its often hostile relationship toward the press.

Dems say NO to an exemption from ObamaCare (for one-year) for average, hard-working Americans... Dems say NO to ending taxpayer-funded health care subsidies for fat-cats in the U.S. Senate and House of Reps... Dems say NO to ending the ObamaCare exemption for Big Business. Dems say NO to opening up national historic sites that are open 365 days a year - with no federal supervision to boot.

Now comes the latest gun-grabbing set of liars. Check-out their ridiculous website, which claims that ARPA is a "common sense set of hunters and target-shooters" who want to be "a third voice" in the gun debate. The web page asks you to sign-up. There is no article or link that actually tells you who they are or why they want your name and email. The site offers absolutely nothing. Noted in this month's "First Freedom."

The Obama administration’s credibility on intelligence suffered another blow Wednesday as the chief of the National Security Agency admitted that officials put out numbers that vastly overstated the counterterrorism successes of the government’s warrantless bulk collection of all Americans’ phone records. Pressed by the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at an oversight hearing, Gen. Keith B. Alexander admitted that the number of terrorist plots foiled by the NSA’s huge database of every phone call made in or to America was only one or perhaps two — far smaller than the 54 originally claimed by the administration. Gen. Alexander...

Mormon is allegedly a prophet-historian who was the native American believed by Mormons to have written the Book of Mormon – the main religious text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormonism). Mormonism is a religion less than two centuries old, but in this short time it has managed to accrue a long list of embarrassments which the church leaders would prefer were kept silent. These embarrassments range from textual inaccuracies to scandals in the life of the founder, Joseph Smith. Of all religions, it’s difficult to believe this one has caught on given the long...

While the nation’s political class has been fixated on the government shutdown in Washington this week, the National Security Agency (NSA) has continued to spy on all Americans and, by its ambiguity and shrewd silence, seems to be acknowledging slowly that the scope of its spying is truly breathtaking. The Obama administration is of the view that the NSA can spy on anyone, anywhere. The president thinks that federal statutes enable the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to authorize the NSA to capture any information it desires about any persons without identifying the persons and without a showing...

WASHINGTON — After a public backlash to government spying, President Barack Obama called for an independent group to review the vast surveillance programs that allow the collections of phone and email records. Now, weeks before the group’s first report is due, some lawmakers, technology organizations and civil liberties groups are concerned that the panel’s members are too close to the Obama administration and its mission too vague to provide a thorough scrubbing of the National Security Agency technologies that have guided intelligence gathering since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------snip---------------------------- The members of the review group are Richard Clarke,...

The former senior EPA adviser who stole $900,000 from taxpayers while posing as a CIA agent pleaded the Fifth on Tuesday morning — shortly before House members expressed outrage upon learning that he’s still due to get his government pension. John C. Beale invoked his right not to incriminate himself when facing questioning from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, just four days after he pleaded guilty to charges that could bring him three years in prison.“Mr. Beale, do you have a statement?” panel Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) asked during the hearing. “Thank you, Mr. Chairman. No I do...

Even before she retired last week, scandalized IRS official Lois Lerner's compensation was already attracting attention. While on administrative leave, federal rules allowed her to keep collecting a salary, one that reportedly totaled $177,000. So it was no surprise when speculation arose over how much Lerner could collect in federal pension benefits. Unfortunately, that speculation, which initially projected a benefit of over $50,000, might be off by about half ... and in the wrong direction. National Taxpayers Union calculations show that Lerner could qualify for a starting pension at the annual equivalent of as much as $102,600, and up to...

I'd love to read a few articles entitled: "Obama Threatens to Shut Down Government", "Democrats Threaten to Shut Down Government", "Harry Reid Threatens to Shut Down Government". Those would be the truth in bold print. "Truth in Advertising" so to speak. The reality is that democrat politicians are throwing temper tantrums over adding one more exemption to the huge pile of exemptions they've already issued. They've given exemptions to their fat cats, big businesses, and corporate welfare pals. They've given exemptions to countless cronies. They've even given an exemption to themselves after this really odd whining about ObamaCare draining their...

The National Security Agency has admitted that analysts have abused their authority to spy on love interests on several occasions. In response to a letter from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the NSA identified 12 incidents since 2003 in which analysts intentionally misused their intelligence gathering powers. In one case, an analyst spied on a foreign phone number she discovered in her husband's cellphone, suspecting that he had cheated on her. She intercepted phone calls involving her husband, investigators discovered. The analyst resigned before any disciplinary action could be taken. On one analyst's first day of access to the NSA system,...

I’ve always paid my taxes and have never been arrested or charged with any crime in my life. I am a successful small-business man. But in January of this year, I woke up to find that my business’ entire bank account — more than $35,000 — had been wrongly seized. Later that same day, I was writing checks to my vendors. A federal agent strolls in. She tells me my hard-earned cash was taken by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). I was shocked. I’ve broken no law, committed no crime and was never warned my store could be in trouble....

The Obama administration on Tuesday defended its effort to regulate the tax return preparation business for the first time in U.S. history, basing its case largely on a 19th century law dealing with horses lost or killed in the Civil War.

<p>The Internal Revenue Service said Monday that Lois G. Lerner, the woman at the center of the tea party targeting scandal, has resigned from the agency — though because of privacy rules it could say nothing more.</p> <p>Ms. Lerner, who had been on paid administrative leave, was the director of the division that reviewed the applications for tax-exempt status from political groups over the past few years and that, according to an internal audit, gave extra scrutiny to tea party and other conservative groups.</p>

The National Security Agency pays AT&T T -0.38%, Verizon and Sprint several hundred million dollars a year for access to 81% of all international phone calls into the US, according to a leaked inspector general’s report, which has been reported by the Washington Post, AP, and the New York Review of Books. In fact., this secret report says that “NSA maintains relationships with over 100 U.S. companies, underscoring that the U/S. has the “home-field advantage as the primary hub for worldwide communications,” the New York Review of Books reported in its August 15 issue.... AT&T charges $325 for each activation...

Whether you realize it or not, that is what is taking place. One set of rules for the elite, but a different set for average Joe Americans - they get no one-year exemption, or a Congressional exemption. With all of this in mind, is it no wonder that Obama, Reid, Pelosi and cowardly Republicans are causing Americans to say to h e double l with it all, and leading some like Cruz, Paul, Lee, Palin and others to take a stand and fight for us?

A young Christian girl beheaded in Syria. The sign of extremism and fanatics, the long beards, is present in each and everyone of these subhuman Muslims who killed this small child, in their jihad to Allah – inspired by the Quran. This is Obama, Britain, France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey funded and supported handiwork. Don’t put your support behind any of these people, whether for military action in Syria, asylum, immigration, another hate preaching mosque. This is what is moving into your town, your country, your society, your neighborhood: video... This video is written with false propaganda claiming...

<p>In the liberal remake of Casablanca, the police captain comes upon the scene of the shooting and orders his men to “round up the usual weapons.”</p> <p>It’s always the weapon and never the shooter. Twelve people are murdered in a rampage at the Washington Navy Yard, and before sundown Senator Dianne Feinstein has called for yet another debate on gun violence. Major opprobrium is heaped on the AR-15, the semiautomatic used in the Newtown massacre. Turns out no AR-15 was used at the Navy Yard. And the shotgun that was used was obtained legally in Virginia after the buyer, Aaron Alexis, had passed both a state and federal background check.</p>

IRS employees were “acutely” aware in 2010 that President Obama wanted to crack down on conservative organizations and were egged into targeting tea party groups by press reports mocking the emerging movement, according to an interim report being circulated Tuesday by House investigators.

Congress's investigation into the IRS targeting of conservatives has been continuing out of the Syria headlines, and it's turning up news. Emails unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee between former Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner and her staff raise doubts about IRS claims that the targeting wasn't politically motivated and that low-level employees in Cincinnati masterminded the operation. In a February 2011 email, Ms. Lerner advised her staff—including then Exempt Organizations Technical Manager Michael Seto and then Rulings and Agreements director Holly Paz—that a Tea Party matter is "very dangerous," and is something "Counsel and [Lerner adviser]...

The CIA has begun delivering weapons to rebels in Syria, ending months of delay in lethal aid that had been promised by the Obama administration, according to U.S. officials and Syrian figures. The shipments began streaming into the country over the past two weeks, along with separate deliveries by the State Department of vehicles and other gear — a flow of material that marks a major escalation of the U.S. role in Syria’s civil war. The arms shipments, which are limited to light weapons and other munitions that can be tracked, began arriving in Syria at a moment of heightened...

The girlfriend at the center of the split between Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife will no longer be working side by side with her billionaire beau in the wake of the bombshell office romance that has rocked Silicon Valley, The Post has learned.

There ought to be an award ceremony to honor “The Phonies” of American society. The contenders, so far this year, would be none other than our President and maybe his entire administration, harpO Winfrey and the Trayvon Martin case. The President. in repeated references to phony scandals everywhere, was merely referring to his own “phoniness” when he professed outrage over the IRS scandal and of course, the “phoniness” of his entire administration over the youtube video that supposedly precipitated the Benghazi attack. And we can’t forget the phony outrage portrayed by “The Pants Suit” over the very same Benghazi scandal,...

Newsmax American Legion: IRS Demands Military Records for All Members Sunday, August 25, 2013 09:40 AM By: Audrey Hudson A new IRS policy is targeting American veterans' organization with threats of stiff fines if the groups do not report on the service records of all their members, the Daily Caller reports. The new audit guidelines requires the veteran groups to "maintain dates of service and character of service records for all members … The penalty for not having the required proof of eligibility is, apparently, $1,000 per day," according to the American Legion. The new guidelines are enforced by the...

President Obama and his political allies have dismissed as "phony scandals" mounting evidence that the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies hindered and punished conservative advocacy groups. Meanwhile, efforts are under way to impose even more regulation on core political speech. The government's abuses are very real, but the scandal's lessons are not appreciated: The federal regulation of political speech has already gone further than can be justified by existing law, let alone the Constitution.

Obama: No Allegations NSA Is Trying to 'Listen in On People's Email' Daniel Halper August 23, 2013 7:21 AM President Barack Obama defended the NSA surveillance program in an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo this morning. On the NSA surveillance program, Cuomo asked, "Are you confident that you know everything that's going on within that agency and that you can say to the American people, 'It's all done the right way'?" "Yes, but what I've also said is that it can only work if the American people trust what's going on. And what's been clear since the disclosures that were...

Was it a thrill kill or part of a gang initiation? That would be the bushwhacking of Chris Lane, an Aussie college kid and baseball star. Lane was gunned down running along a country road near Duncan, Oklahoma, the other day. You know the story by now. Does it matter what motivated Allen Luna and James Francis Edwards, Jr., Chris Lane's accused killers, and Michael Dewayne Jones, an accessory, to off a young man with a promising future who was just going about the routine of his life on a summer's day? In one sense it doesn't matter. Whether those...

The White House issued a statement yesterday on the President’s meeting with the federal agencies that regulate Wall Street. Curiously, the phrase used to describe the agencies was “independent regulators.” The President’s Deputy Press Secretary, Josh Earnest, held a press briefing with reporters yesterday, taking questions on the meeting. In that briefing, Earnest referred to the regulators as “independent” seven times. If the President now finds it necessary to attempt to brainwash the American public through endless repetition of the word “independent” to shore up sagging public doubt that there are any real cops on the beat when it comes...

Obama administration and Mexican government officials recently discussed creating a three-tier security system designed to protect Mexico’s southern border from drug and human traffickers, according to U.S. officials. The border control plan calls for U.S. funding and technical support of three security lines extending more than 100 miles north of Mexico’s border with Guatemala and Belize. The border security system would use sensors and intelligence-gathering to counter human trafficking and drug running from the region, a major source of illegal immigration into the United States.

SecureKey, based in Toronto, today announced it has been awarded a contract by the USPS to provide a cloud-based authentication infrastructure.Get ready for a new set of abbreviations. This is part of some federal programs that have been underway for several years, mostly below the radar — at least this is the first I have heard of it despite being an avid reader of tech publications. But apparently a lot of people have been working on this — some of the relevant Web sites and information sources are listed below.The Federal Cloud Credential Exchange (FCXX) is designed to enable individuals...

Barack Obama has been running around the country taking credit for an "economic recovery", but the truth is that things have not gotten better under Obama. Compared to when he first took office, a smaller percentage of the working age population is employed, the quality of our jobs has declined substantially and the middle class has been absolutely shredded. If we are really in the middle of an "economic recovery", why is the homeownership rate the lowest that it has been in 18 years? Why has the number of Americans on food stamps increased by nearly 50 percent while Obama...

Earlier this month, Reuters revealed that a special division within the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been using intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a mass database of telephone records to secretly identify targets for drug enforcement actions.In the wake of these revelations, a former prosecutor tells IPS he believes he and his colleagues may have been unwitting pawns in the federal government's effort to deceive defendants and the court system, thereby violating citizens' constitutional rights. "None of us had any idea whatsoever there was a secret DEA programme that instructed DEA agents to conceal the source," Patrick Nightingale, a...

According to a declassified order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as of 2011, the US National Security Agency was "acquiring" more than 250 million "internet communications" each year under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) — the statute that allows the NSA to collect the content of internet communications. The order states that the "vast majority" of these communications were obtained from internet service providers under PRISM, and that only nine percent of of the total internet communications acquired by the NSA were part of its "upstream" collection practices, which pull data directly from telecommunications cables. The...

Yesterday, CNN was all over the story of three teenagers in Oklahoma who shot and killed a baseball player who was walking down the street just to watch him die. It’s a horrific story, and these teens definitely deserve to fry, but as with every other gun-related story the mainstream media picks up on, it’s being used to demonize the NRA and further the gun control agenda. But consider the following: these teens were too young to legally purchase firearms in the first place. So, in fact, the proposed gun control bill that Democrats still have their panties in a...

After the news that the four State Department employees who had been superficially and symbolically ‘held accountable’ following last September’s terrorist attack in Benghazi are now back at work at the State Department, House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa issued the appropriately scathing statement: “Obama administration officials repeatedly promised the families of victims and the American people that officials responsible for security failures would be held accountable. Instead of accountability, the State Department offered a charade that included false reports of firings and resignations and now ends in a game of musical chairs where no one misses a single day on...

In addition to illegally trafficking in food stamps for years, Mohammad’s store operated illegally after the secretary of state canceled its business license in 2009 because of Mohammad’s failure to pay the business’s taxes. Store manager Ahmad Damra and clerk Mahmoud Jamil Damrah allegedly helped Mohammad defraud the SNAP and WIC programs for a total of approximately $780,710. Court records allege that the store traded customers’ WIC checks for a cash, allowing customers circumvent program restrictions on using taxpayer funding to purchase products such as beer and cigarettes.

The American media have been disgracefully ignoring the murder of U.S. ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens in Benghazi almost one year ago with some of them having the nerve to echo President Obama's claim that it's a "phony scandal." Not Camille Paglia who in an interview with Salon Wednesday said, "I for one think it was a very big deal that our ambassador was murdered in Benghazi...As far as I’m concerned, Hillary [Clinton] disqualified herself for the presidency in that fist-pounding moment at a congressional hearing when she said, 'What difference does it make what we knew and when we...

The following is a contribution from (Dan from Squirrel Hill). The original title of the article is “Obama supporters will go hysterical over this well sourced list of 252 examples of his lying, lawbreaking, corruption, cronyism, etc.” it’s lengthy, but is a ‘one-stop shop’ for all the dirty details on the Obama presidency. Every President, every politician, and every human being tells lies and engages in acts of hypocrisy. But Barack Obama does these things to a far greater degree than anyone else that I have ever known of. His campaign promises were so much better sounding than anyone else’s...

Precisely the right takeaway from this morning’s news about the Benghazi Four’s reinstatement, and for precisely the right reason. There were so many strands of possible wrongdoing related to the Benghazi attack — manipulation of the CIA talking points, scapegoating of the Mohammed moviemaker, lost opportunities for military action, alleged CIA intimidation of agents, and DOJ paralysis in pursuing the culprits — that the most fundamental wrongdoing, the catastrophic lapse in security for the consulate, was often overlooked. Maybe that’s a function of its comparative lack of sex appeal; the other elements all suggest intentional ass-covering government malfeasance while the...

Thanks to the delayed employer mandate in ObamaCare, we are now sixteen months away from enforcement of those statutes, even though they go into effect in four months. Are employers taking a break from ObamaCare prep? Not hardly. Today we have three new stories about how the perverse incentives of the ACA will impact workers, starting with UPS, which has just announced that it will stop offering health-care coverage to spouses — and explicitly cites ObamaCare as the reason (via Jim Geraghty and Jeryl Bier): United Parcel Service Inc. plans to remove thousands of spouses from its medical plan because...

It's obvious to any sentient being that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee. Already she has begun the round of speeches at influential venues, the visits to primary states, the media spin, the heightening of speculation on "Will she run?" All of this, along with a five-part miniseries and full-length documentary planned for release ahead of the 2016 election. As for fund-raising, that is hardly a problem for the Clinton machine. Actually, Hillary Clinton is already not only the frontrunner for her party's nomination, but also the favorite to win against any GOP candidate. The polls...

Amanda Lindhout traveled to Somalia hoping to find a story that would launch her career as a television reporter. Four days after arriving in the country with a photographer friend, both were taken hostage by Islamist insurgents. While in captivity, she was “starved, beaten and sexually brutalized” according to her memoir of the 2008 saga set to be released next month... Lindhout spent fifteen months “of harrowing captivity” after being pulled from the car in which she was traveling by a group of masked men. During her 460-day ordeal, the aspiring reporter converted to Islam in order not to be...

WASHINGTON — The electric grid, as government and private experts describe it, is the glass jaw of American industry. If an adversary lands a knockout blow, they fear, it could black out vast areas of the continent for weeks; interrupt supplies of water, gasoline, diesel fuel and fresh food; shut down communications; and create disruptions of a scale that was only hinted at by Hurricane Sandy and the attacks of Sept. 11. ~ SNIP ~ One goal of the drill, called "GridEx II", is to explore how governments would react as the loss of the grid crippled the supply chain...

Like the car salesman in National Lampoon’s Vacation (played by Eugene Levy) said: “You think you hate it now, but wait ’til you drive it!” The same applies to the Affordable Healthcare Act (aka, Obamacare). levycar Now UPS has announced that it is cutting 15,000 spouses from healthcare coverage. This is effectively another way that Obamacare raises the cost of healthcare. This, of course, is outrageous, the government telling companies what they can and cannot do for healthcare coverage. Why will you hate Obamacare once you drive it? 1. Forced forced home inspections by gov’t agents: Under Obamacare, government agents...

AUGUST 20, 2013 AT 9:56 AM A draft of the next IPCC climate report has arrived, and it is more of the same: We are all gonna die! An international panel of scientists has found with near certainty that human activity is the cause of most of the temperature increases of recent decades, and warns that sea levels could conceivably rise by more than three feet by the end of the century if emissions continue at a runaway pace. The scientists, whose findings are reported in a draft summary of the next big United Nations climate report, largely dismiss a...

We need police to catch murderers, thieves and con men, and so we give them special power -- the power to use force on others. Sadly, today's police use that power to invade people's homes over accusations of trivial, nonviolent offenses -- and often do it with tanks, battering rams and armor you'd expect on battlefields. In his book "Rise of the Warrior Cop," Radley Balko recounts the rise of police SWAT teams (SWAT stands for Special Weapons And Tactics) armed with heavy military equipment. SWAT raids began as rarely used methods of dealing with violent situations, like hostage-takings. But...

Americans for Responsible Solutions (ARS), the PAC of Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly focused on gun control, is being forced to refund money to contributors after being caught accepting illegal donations.One of the illegal donations was tied to Bette Midler's private family foundation and another to the Rupa and Bharat B. Bhatt Foundation. Midler's foundation gave $10,000 and the Bhatt foundation contributed $5,000.According to The Center For Public Integrity, both donations were "strictly prohibited" by the IRS:

Another anti-gun group gets caught with the proverbial hand in the cookie jar. This time Gabby Giffords has her prints all over it. The total amount of illegal contributions received was $15,250. That is not a small chunk of change. Giffords’ PAC, Americans for Responsible Solutions PAC, received three illegal donations it has been discovered. This is not coincidence or a mistake. One could be a mistake and two could be coincidence. Three times is conspiracy to defraud. Publicintegrity.org reports: Singer, actress and comedian Bette Midler took to Twitter on April 18 to promote Gabby Giffords’ new gun control effort....