Free Republic

A 73-Year-Old Man Tried to Assassinate JFK with a Buick Full of Dynamite Weeks after John Fitzgerald Kennedy beat Richard Nixon in the 1960 United States presidential election, an elderly man nearly killed the President-Elect. Richard Pavlick, a disturbed man with anti-Catholic sentiments, packed his car and traveled from New Hampshire to Florida with one goal in mind - the death of President-Elect Kennedy. Pavlick's brute force plan would likely have succeeded, but a moment of compassion stopped Pavlick in his tracks and allowed for the era of Camelot to begin. Retired postal worker Richard Pavlick often voiced anti-Catholic sentiments...

F-16 Jets Intercept Small Plane as Obama Leaves LA The plane was forced to land at El Monte Airport on Friday morning as Air Force One was leaving LAX The North American Aerospace Defense Command scrambled the two jets that intercepted the Piper 28 aircraft over northeast Los Angeles at approximately 9:45 a.m. PDT, and followed it until it landed about five minutes later and was met by local law enforcement, NORAD said in a statement. The Piper landed at the small airport in El Monte about 15 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, local police Lt. Dan Burlingham said....

One of the Colombian escorts at the center of the Secret Service scandal emerged from hiding today, recounting in detail her night in Cartagena with a member of President Obama's protective detail and saying she fears for her safety. Dania Suarez, a 24-year old dark-haired beauty, appeared on a call-in show carried by Colombia's W Radio and Carocol Television Friday morning, telling callers the agent was "heavily intoxicated" and everything in his luggage and his papers was left open in his room and could have been easily stolen.

Regardless of whether or not you are a soldier in the military or a federal agent, your actions are a reflection of your leadership.  Soldiers in a military unit will be squared away if they have good leadership. The leadership sets the tone for the entire unit. If soldiers in a unit know that their commander will nail them to the wall for not following the standards then the soldiers of that unit will generally be well trained, display professionalism and follow the standards. Why? Because regardless of their personal beliefs or morals, they know that this is what the...

What the Secret Service could learn from drunken sailors Roberto Loiederman, a merchant seaman from 1966 to 1974, is a writer in California. He co-authored “The Eagle Mutiny,” an account of the 1970 mutiny on a U.S. vessel. What happened in Cartagena, Colombia, with the Secret Service seems unsavory to me, but not for the reasons you might think. I make no judgments about men spending a night with escorts. As far as I’m concerned, those who take a holier-than-thou attitude about this are like Inspector Renault in “Casablanca” when he says he’s “shocked, shocked” to discover there is gambling...

Leave it to this administration to add a whole new meaning to the word spin! "The White House's top counter-terrorism adviser [John Brennan] says the Secret Service prostitution scandal did not expose weak spots in the president's security" - USA Today Despite the administration’s statement to the contrary, this incident did, in fact, expose weak spots in the President’s security. Simply stated, members of the security detail were enticed away from their assigned duties by several ample bosomed females willing to provide sexual favors. That in itself constitutes a breach in security, whether the women were agents of a foreign government or not.It’s a known...

Embarrassed by a prostitution scandal, the Secret Service will assign chaperones on some trips to enforce new rules of conduct that make clear that excessive drinking, entertaining foreigners in their hotel rooms and cavorting in disreputable establishments are no longer tolerated. The stricter measures, issued by the Secret Service on Friday for agents and employees, apply even when traveling personnel are off duty. The policies, outlined in a memorandum obtained by The Associated Press, are the agency's latest attempt to respond to the scandal that surfaced as President Barack Obama was headed to a Latin American summit in Cartagena, Colombia,...

Scandal highlights lack of women in Secret Service By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press – 1 hour ago </span></span> <script type="text/javascript"> if (gbar.lPWF) { gbar.lPWF(function() { gapi.plusone.render('plusone-div', { "size" : "small", "count" : "true", "href" : "http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jvg2Ipgq5i2cc8pvqOXXvvlsnItQ?docId\x3d687dfe077ee840918f70c824c98f7df1" }); }); } sandbarSharebox.registerMicrodataParser( window.top, document.getElementById('hostednews-article')); </script></p> <p>WASHINGTON (AP) — Secret Service agents are often portrayed in popular culture as disciplined, unflappable, loyal — and male. A spiraling prostitution scandal that has highlighted the dearth of women in the agency that protects the president and dignitaries has many wondering: Would more females in the ranks prevent future dishonor?</p><p>Only about a tenth of field agents...

New Secret Service rules on alcohol, unsavory barsBy ALICIA A. CALDWELL and LAURIE KELLMAN | Associated Press – 20 mins ago WASHINGTON (AP) — Seeking to shake the disgrace of a prostitution scandal, the Secret Service late Friday tightened conduct rules for its agents to prohibit them from drinking excessively, visiting disreputable establishments while traveling or bringing foreigners to their hotel rooms. The new behavior policies apply to Secret Service agents even when they are off duty while traveling, barring them from drinking alcohol within 10 hours of working, according to a memorandum describing the changes obtained by The Associated...

Lewd behavior is no surprise in a culture of unrestraint US Secret Service and its dirty secrets By Julio Severo Colombia, the South American Thailand according to the US media, threw the presidential trip of Barack Obama in a scandal when some his secret agents engaged in prostitution. The Colombia scandal erupted the morning of April 12, when a fight over payment between a prostitute and a Secret Service officer spilled into the hotel, local police and media. The secret of the secret agents was exposed for lack of payment to a prostitute! Several Secret Service officers have been forced...

President Obama is presiding over a corrupt administration. In fact, the moral rot renders America an international laughingstock. Mr. Obama has created a political culture of arrogance and abuse of power that is infecting every segment of the federal government. The U.S. Secret Service is a case in point. Hookergate has shaken the agency to its very foundations. Secret Service agents went wild in Cartagena, Colombia, prior to a recent summit attended by Mr. Obama and other world leaders. A dozen agents and more than 10 military personnel have been implicated so far. Bar hopping, boozing and soliciting prostitutes —...

A Black Secret Service agent is being hailed as the heroine in what is reportedly the worst scandal in the agency’s history. Paula Reid is the 46-year-old special agent responsible for blowing the whistle on the sex scandal that turned the esteemed agency into so much fodder for the 24-hour news cycle and cable talk shows. Reid, the head of the service detail down in Latin America, discovered that at least 11 agents, including two supervisors, had brought prostitutes back to their hotel rooms in Cartanega, Colombia, just days before the president arrived for an international summit. Such action posed...

MSNBC SECRET SERVICE SCANDAL: New Allegations (Video)

It was easy to see this coming. When the news about Secret Service agents hooking up with prostitutes in Columbia first broke we were told there were 11 men (some reports had it at 12) being investigated. Immediately we heard six were kicked out leaving; five “still under investigation.” In this case “under investigation” meant being squeezed to see if they would break and roll on their partners. Three decided to clam up and take whatever was coming instead of turning on their teammates. That left two. Any good cop knows why those two weren’t immediately fired. They handed up...

A day after U.S. lawmakers were briefed on an alleged prostitution scandal in Colombia involving Secret Service members, a report emerged Thursday of similar allegations, this time in El Salvador. Seattle TV station KIRO, a CNN affiliate, cited an unnamed U.S. government contractor who worked extensively with the Secret Service advance team in San Salvador prior to President Barack Obama's trip there in March, 2011. The source said he was with about a dozen Secret Service agents and a few U.S. military specialists at a strip club in the city a few days before Obama arrived, KIRO reported. The men...

Washington -- When you have a young woman screaming in a hallway about some sort of grievance she has with you, you have a problem. Even a Secret Service agent, surrounded by his buddies, has a problem. I know about this sort of thing from my work in the archives pursuant to my researches as a presidential historian. One thinks back to the late 1940s of Elizabeth Bentley, an American spying for the Soviet Union. She raised an intolerable ruckus outside a hotel room with one, possibly two, Soviet intelligence operatives -- both male. Her involvement with one had been...

The clamor over Ted Nugent saying he would “be dead or in jail” if President Barack Obama is re-elected has settled down, but the conservative rocker isn’t shying away from taking shots at his detractors. On Wednesday’s broadcast of “The Dennis Miller Radio Show,” Nugent blamed a certain core group for making an issue of his remarks and forcing the Secret Service to interview him. “It was a wonderful meeting,” Nugent said. “I could not say more positive glowing respect for the men and women of federal law enforcement. The vast majority of them are absolutely dedicated. They put themselves...

...................Bolden said he was shocked by how lax Kennedy's security was in D.C. and the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., where he met Robert Kennedy. Bolden said many agents got drunk on duty, womanized and spoke openly of their disdain for the president.........

The Perfect Storm of Liberalism has arrived. A professional collapse inside the several departments and agencies of the United States government created by a decades-long erosion of standards. An erosion fed by all manner of deadly liberal obsessions from racial quotas to political correctness to an addiction to lawsuits, the tolerance for a culture of out of control spending, wildly improper personal behavior, and more. This deadly combination is now surfacing repeatedly in scandals as seemingly different as those engulfing the Secret Service, the GSA, the U.S. military, the Department of Justice, and every other tentacle of the federal government...

President Obama's chief counsel has concluded that no White House staffers in Colombia were involved in wrongdoing, press secretary Jay Carney said on Monday. Carney said the counsel looked into the actions of members of the White House advance team as a matter of "due diligence" and that "there have been no specific credible allegations of misconduct."