Free Republic

The family of the alleged ISIS-inspired Port Authority bomber said they were “heartbroken” by the attack on Monday and blasted law enforcement agencies for what they claimed were heavy-handed tactics by investigators. “We are heartbroken by the violence that was targeted at our city today and by the allegations being made against a member of our family,” said the statement read by Albert Fox Cahn, the Legal Director for the NY Chapter Council for Islamic Relations. “But we’re also outraged by the behavior of the law enforcement officials who held children as small as 4 years old out in the...

It’s a wonder that President Trump devotes so much time to discrediting the press, when the press does so much to discredit itself. The media’s errors over the last week haven’t been marginal or coincidental, but involved blockbuster reports on one of the most dominating stories of the last year — Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. And they all slanted one way — namely, toward lurid conclusions about the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with the Russians. Every media outlet makes mistakes. It’s easier than ever to run with fragmentary or dubious information in a frenzied news cycle that never stops. But...

LOS ANGELES — Jimmy Kimmel held his baby son as he returned to his late-night son from a week off for the boy’s heart surgery. Kimmel was crying from the first moment of his monologue Monday night as he pleaded with Congress to restore and improve children’s health coverage, a cause he has championed since his son Billy was born with a heart defect in April..

Jurors took just three hours on Monday to rule against a controversial blogger who claimed he was fired from a tenured professorship at Florida Atlantic University in retaliation for his conspiracy theorist blogging about the Sandy Hook massacre. James Tracy alleged that FAU violated his First Amendment rights to free speech. He wanted to be reinstated to his former position, with back pay and an unspecified amount of damages. FAU officials say they never censored Tracy or prevented him from expressing his opinions. They say he was fired after repeatedly and intentionally refusing to file mandatory disclosure forms that require...

Following President Trump’s historic declaration recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, West Bank and Gazan Arabs took to the streets in rage. They burned U.S. and Israeli flags. They cursed America, Israel and the Yahuds (Jews). Their imams cited verses from the Koran and the Hadiths about the usurpers and interlopers and the “descendants of apes and pigs.” In other words, it was business as usual for the Palestinians. Nothing had changed. At the State Department too, it was business as usual. In a transparent effort to placate the Arab bloc, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the process...

Campaign Follows 2016's Widely-Awarded Film 'Evan' Sandy Hook Promise and BBDO New York have teamed up once again on the fifth anniversary of the Sandy Hook school massacre with a chilling PSA that warns of the importance of picking up on signs that someone may commit a school shooting. The new film, "Tomorrow's News," follows the organization's widely-awarded 2016 film "Evan," in which viewers miss the warning signs of a shooter because they're distracted by a romance, and only are made aware of them in hindsight. This time, the message is the same but the approach is more direct. The...

Breitbart News Executive Chairman and former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon had a stark warning for Republicans who push back against President Trump’s “America First” agenda and who don’t have his back in the capital. “There’s a special place in hell for Republicans who should know better,” Bannon said. Bannon was addressing a packed event in Midland City, Alabama, a day before voters go the polls in the Alabama Senate race between Republican Judge Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones. Bannon’s remarks are similar to those made by first daughter Ivanka Trump in the wake of allegations of sexual...

The final hours before Alabama voters headed to the polls to decide a special Senate election saw dueling robocalls from President Trump and former President Barack Obama, along with wildly disparate poll results showing everything from decisive wins for each candidate to a race that remains too close to call. One Alabama Republican described the battle on the ground between GOP nominee Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones as a “total shitshow.” On Monday, a Fox News poll showed Jones unexpectedly leading by 10 points. An Emerson College survey released the same day had Moore up by 9 points. Jones...

<p>"Mr. Trump continues to exhibit paranoia about American intelligence agencies," wrote the NeverTrump conservative Max Boot in the New York Times a week or so before the president took office.</p> <p>"Consumed by his paranoia about the deep state, Donald Trump has disappeared into the fog of his own conspiracy theories," declared the Times' Maureen Dowd.</p>

Former United States secretary of state George Shultz says it is time to stop talking about a two-state solution. Interviewed by Maariv, Shultz said, "We must stop talking about a two-state solution and embark on a process in which people learn to live together. There is obviously suspicion, but...

PARIS -- The Russian Defense Ministry and Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi made separate announcements last week that the Islamic State had been defeated. Of course, this doesn't mean that these terrorists won't be popping up elsewhere like bomb-toting, head-chopping Whac-A-Moles. Last month, the BBC reported a deal that allowed some ISIS fighters to escape the Syrian city of Raqqa -- the Islamic State's former "caliphate" -- under the nose of Western and Kurdish officials, ostensibly to facilitate a declaration of "mission accomplished." The question is where these fighters will pop up next. Are we supposed to believe that they're...

Looking for someone? Yandex People (http://people.yandex.ru/) provides information even on internet users who have restricted access to their social media pages. Produced by RussiaÂ’s most popular search engine, Yandex People is powerful and easy to use. It is a great tool for finding Russian users but will provide results for anyone Yandex has indexed. We can see the power of people.yandex.ru by looking for the pages of the web-savvy anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny. In the people.yandex.ru page, put your subjectÂ’s name into the yellow search box across the top or on the first line of the gray search boxes down...

Although Planned Parenthood has not endorsed a candidate in the Alabama U.S. Senate race, they clearly have an ongoing interest in dissuading the Democratic Party from nominating pro-life candidates – even in conservative states. Planned Parenthood recently commissioned a poll of Alabama voters and spun the results to argue that abortion is an unimportant issue in the ongoing U.S. Senate race. This poll has been picked up by a number of media outlets including The Huffington Post, Breitbart, and NBCNews.com. The poll does contain some interesting information. It was conducted in early November – prior to reporting of the sexual...

The Senate-passed tax bill is a policy triumph that will provide a shot of performance-enhancing drugs to the veins of the economy. It's not perfect, but with the combined effect of cutting business tax rates, eliminating the state and local tax deduction and repealing the Obamacare individual mandate tax, we are at the precipice of the biggest conservative policy victory since the Reagan years. If Republicans were wise, the House would vote immediately to approve the Senate bill and get it to President Donald Trump's desk for signing before anything can go wrong. (Think Obamacare repeal fiasco.) But since they...

In September 1862, a group of Chicago ministers sent a "memorial" (or long letter) to President Abraham Lincoln in which they made a theological argument for the elimination of slavery. Lincoln had also heard from Southern clergy who used the same scriptures to justify slavery's preservation. In response, Lincoln wrote the Chicago group with words that today's Christians might consider when it comes to matters involving sexual harassment and the setting aside of moral and biblical principles to achieve temporary political goals. "I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally...

Coup d’etat is defined in Wikipedia as “the illegal and overt seizure of a state by the military or other elites within the state apparatus”. It is difficult for Americans, who have a long tradition of the orderly transition of power, to admit that what we are seeing now is a coup. But it grows ever more obvious that this is exactly what we are experiencing. To review briefly: Trump’s legitimacy has been challenged continuously since election day, beginning with the ridiculous recounts in multiple states, continuing with the loudly publicized calls for the Electoral College to void the election,...

"We will never accept Russia's occupation and attempted annexation of Crimea," declaimed Rex Tillerson last week in Vienna. "Crimea-related sanctions will remain in place until Russia returns full control of the peninsula to Ukraine." Tillerson's principled rejection of the seizure of land by military force -- "never accept" -- came just one day after President Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and pledged to move our embassy there. How did Israel gain title to East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Golan Heights? Invasion, occupation, colonization, annexation. Those lands are the spoils of victory from Israel's 1967 Six-Day War. Is Israel...

Democrats who want Donald Trump removed from office need a backup plan in case the Russian collusion thing doesn't pan out. And Plan B, I suspect, is sex. Ideally, of course, liberals would like a smoking gun showing that Trump and Vladimir Putin were in cahoots and over a few shots of vodka at Putin's country house in Sochi they conspired to throw the 2016 election, which would be grounds for impeachment. Absent that, they'd be perfectly happy removing Trump from office by way of the 25th Amendment, on grounds that he's nuts. But they know that won't fly. That...

blah, blah, blah ... "The executive at Vkontakte, or VK, Russia’s equivalent to Facebook, emailed Donald Trump Jr. and social media director Dan Scavino in January and again in November of last year, offering to help promote Trump’s campaign to its nearly 100 million users, according to people familiar with the messages...." Looks like Nellie Ohr was looking for Russian Social Media Users in 2014:

Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who was reportedly scheduled to testify behind closed doors in front of the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, will instead meet next week due to a "scheduling error," Department of Justice officials told Fox News. McCabe’s testimony was likely to, at least in part, focus on Peter Strzok’s role in the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Strzok is a former deputy to the assistant director at the FBI who was removed from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's staff after Mueller learned Strzok had exchanged anti-Trump texts with a colleague. House investigators previously told Fox News they have...