Free Republic

A wave of apprehension and anguish swept the Republican Party on Thursday, with many GOP leaders alarmed by Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the election and concluding that it is probably too late to salvage his flailing presidential campaign. As the Republican nominee reeled from a turbulent performance in the final debate here in Las Vegas, his party’s embattled senators and House members scrambled to protect their seats and preserve the GOP’s congressional majorities against what Republicans privately acknowledge could be a landslide victory for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. With 19 days until the election, the Republican...

My name is Michele and I am not an alcoholic. But if I were, why does it matter whether or not I believe in God? Talk about a lack of fellowship - non-believers battling the bottle have been booted from Alcoholics Anonymous in Toronto. Now Larry Knight is taking AA World Services and its GTA Intergroup (GTAI) to Ontario’s human rights tribunal, alleging discrimination on the basis of creed. Because members of his AA group are agnostic, he says they’ve been expelled from the local Toronto AA directory and have been denied the right to vote “on matters that are...

A woman who six times failed the physical test to become an FDNY firefighter is being given another chance - and this time, critics say, the fix is in. She will graduate, no question, said an FDNY member. The department does­ not want another black eye. Wendy Tapia was allowed to conditionally graduate from the Fire Academy on May 17, 2013, even though she had failed the running test. After swearing her in, the FDNY gave Tapia five more chances to run the required 1.5 miles in 12 minutes or less, but she could not do it. She quit -...

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, NATCA, has called for an investigation of the FAA’s hiring practices following the FOX Business investigation “Trouble in the Skies” first telecast on May 20th. A just released statement from the union which represents the nation’s air traffic controllers says, “NATCA believes these allegations must be thoroughly investigated. The FAA should carefully examine its hiring practices to ensure the highest quality candidates are selected for the training process. The flying public deserves nothing less.” FOX Business uncovered cheating on a key exam to become an air traffic controller as well as serious questions about...

Air traffic controllers are well paid, averaging $136,000 per year. However you have to be under 31-year-old to start, training takes years. ... A major part of the problem is the FAA changed the way it hires controllers about two years ago. They have recently been hiring more of them off the street, instead of candidates with military or college aviation training. Now many of them don't make it through training.

As the nation deals with an air traffic controller shortage, some qualified candidates are not getting hired to fill those positions. Officials said Arizona State University’s air traffic management program has seen its enrollment numbers drop 50 percent. That is due to new hiring procedures put in place last year by the Federal Aviation Administration. Until recently, students who attended an FAA-approved college training initiative program like the one at ASU were shown preference in the controller hiring process. Now, those students are in the same applicant pool as anyone from the general public who applies for a controller job....

Anti-regime activists say jihadist fighters linked to al-Qaeda fought with rebels to capture a Syrian military air defense base near Aleppo. Videos posted online Friday apparently shot inside the base say Jabhat al-Nusra participated in the overnight battle for the base. The videos show fighters inspecting lines of large missiles.

Conservative talk show host Glenn Beck has had it up to here with Donald Trump, even going as far as to accuse his supporters of latent racism. Beck, who hasn’t been shy in his opposition to the Republican frontrunner, said Tuesday that any Tea Partiers who jumped on the Trump bandwagon were probably not genuine in their beliefs. “The media’s making this look like Tea Party people,” Beck said, noting the press coverage of Trump’s enormous rally in Dallas. “I don’t think these are Tea Party people who are following him. Some of them may be, but if you were...

Moscow will reportedly provide Russian troops in Syria with an advanced antiaircraft missile system as part of its military support for Syrian president Bashar Assad. "This system is the advanced version used by Russia, and it's meant to be operated by Russians in Syria," a Western diplomat who is regularly briefed on US, Israeli, and other intelligence assessments told Reuters. And as The Daily Beast's Michael Weiss points out, any antiaircraft missiles deployed by Russian troops in Syria won't be directed at ISIS, since ISIS has no air force. In fact, none of the rebels do — only government forces...

Glenn Beck on his Thursday program revealed the individuals he would like to see in a dream presidential cabinet. Recording his show in front of a live-studio audience, Beck said he would want Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to serve as president with former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina in the slot of vice president. Beck suggested Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) serve as secretary of the treasury with former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum being selected for the job of secretary of state...

Via the Daily Caller, note that he’s talking specifically about refugees here, not migrants. Migrants seek a better job market in a wealthier economy; refugees seek safe haven from being persecuted or killed if they stay where they are. One of the headaches Germany and its EU partners are suffering right now is figuring out how many of the many thousands from the Middle East who are pounding on Europe’s door are true refugees and how many are merely migrants. How will Beck distinguish between the two, and then distinguish the refugees from aspiring terrorists? He says he has a...

Data Proves that Slavery has Little to do with the Current Plight of African-Americans By Onan Coca / 24 June 2015 / The brilliant economist and political thinker (and Professor at George Mason University) Walter E. Williams has a new column up at CNS News discussing modern black America. Professor Williams is a conservative African-American who is often at odds with the liberal orthodoxy on the problems within the black community, and his latest commentary is no different. In his latest effort, Williams discusses the mythology that has arisen around the current problems in the black community – particularly fatherlessness,...

Whether to capitalize on a tragedy for political purposes, or because their urge to “do something” isn’t tempered by a sense of reality, Senators Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) reacted to the deplorable murders at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, last week by saying that they may reintroduce so-called “universal” background check legislation to require background checks on private sales and trades of firearms, including those between many family members and friends. NRA members and supporters will recall that a previous version of the Manchin-Toomey “universal” background check legislation was soundly defeated in...

How far will our ideologically demented ruling class push Affirmative Action before people start pushing back? Already it has played a role in destroying our schools, with a liberal judge actually abolishing aptitude tests on the grounds that blacks don’t score as well. But apparently people don’t think it matters whether teachers have any qualifications other than skin color. If being black can get you into the White House, why not a classroom? Maybe airliners crashing into each other will wake people up:

EVANS, Ga. (WRDW) -- A Evans woman is facing charges after the Columbia County Sheriff's Office says her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor reported her for having a party that involved alcohol, drugs, sex, and minors. Rachel Lehnardt, 35, was arrested Monday and charged with two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The incident report says the A.A. sponsor reported that Lehnardt allowed her 16-year old daughter and friends to come to her house "to party". The report says the minors were allowed to drink and smoke marijuana in her home. The sponsor says the Lehnardt told her that...

On Monday I got a phone call from a man named Easton Elliott. We talked briefly on Monday, and have had additional telephone conversations since then. Elliott* is a businessman who lives in the Las Vegas area, and he thinks he knows what really happened to Harry Reid. This is the story as he related it to me: Elliott spent a portion of last New Year’s Eve at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Henderson, Nevada. His AA group has meetings every hour on New Year’s Eve, along with a pot luck supper. There were approximately 20 people present at the...

[SNIP] The 12 steps are so deeply ingrained in the United States that many people, including doctors and therapists, believe attending meetings, earning one’s sobriety chips, and never taking another sip of alcohol is the only way to get better. Hospitals, outpatient clinics, and rehab centers use the 12 steps as the basis for treatment. But although few people seem to realize it, there are alternatives, including prescription drugs and therapies that aim to help patients learn to drink in moderation. Unlike Alcoholics Anonymous, these methods are based on modern science and have been proved, in randomized, controlled studies, to...

A helicopter pilot and Britney Spears ex-boyfriend — who helped the pop princess quit booze — has been killed by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. John Sundahl, 44, was shot down during a flight from Kabul, where he’d been working as a private contractor transporting officials across the war-torn nation, according to the Daily Mirror. “She is devastated,” a source close to Spears told the UK paper. “Britney thought he was a lovely man.” A former real estate whiz, Sundahl dated Spears, 33, in 2007 after they met at Alcoholics Anonymous in Los Angeles. He spoke openly about her alcohol abuse.

North Carolina's flagship public university is trying to fire a senior professor, accepted the resignation of another faculty member and dismissed an academic counselor for athletes for their roles in the fraud scandal that rocked the school, campus officials said Wednesday ---SNIP--- The report by former U.S. Justice Department official Kenneth Wainstein found a pattern of fake classes, which allowed 3,100 athletes and other students to earn artificially high grades from 1993 to 2011. While the sham courses were solely in the African studies department, multiple people around campus knew of them or suspected something but said nothing, the report...

Alice Cooper, the shock-rock megastar who makes Marilyn Manson look like a choir boy, stopped his hard-partying ways and returned to his Bible Christian roots in the late 1980s and today, still hugely popular and touring, says he isn’t shy about discussing his faith, says his early songs always warned against choosing evil, and contends that the world we live in “doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to Satan.” “The world doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to Satan,” said Alice Cooper. “We’re living with that. We’re bombarded with that every day.” “[A]lmost everything I wrote was good and evil,”...