Free Republic

Two of the most prominent and influential megadonors in the Republican Party reportedly have picked their man in the 2016 presidential race: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R). According to The New York Times, David Koch told a Monday gathering of GOP donors that he and his fellow billionaire brother, Charles Koch, want Walker in the White House. "We will support whoever the candidate is," Koch said at the Manhattan event, according to Times reporter Nick Confessore's sources. "But it should be Scott Walker." The Koch brothers are two of the most free-spending donors in American politics, and they have a...

A Whitefish Bay man was sentenced to nine years in federal prison Friday for running a large-scale marijuana distribution ring through his three North Shore McDonald's restaurants. Prosecutors say Edward G. Patterson, 40, recruited his employees and a fellow Little League dad into the conspiracy, carried a gun and, once in jail, tried to hire someone to murder informants who helped agents make the case against him. According to court records, he had started at the bottom of the McDonald's career ladder, worked his way up in the family business from laborer to manager and eventually took an ownership stake...

The cardiac surgeon had unknowingly spread a staph infection from the rash on his hand to the hearts of at least five patients by the time Los Angeles County health investigators learned of the outbreak. The doctor had operated on more than 60 others in recent months, and county officials feared those patients could be struck with the same dangerous infection. Investigators didn't ultimately tie any deaths to the 2012 outbreak, but four patients needed additional surgery because of the infection. The only public mention of the case came a year later in a little-noticed appendix to the health department's...

In oral arguments Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear the government defend its kleptocratic behavior while administering an indefensible law. The Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937 is among the measures by which New Dealers tried and failed to regulate and mandate America back to prosperity. Seventy-eight years later, it is the government’s reason for stealing Marvin and Laura Horne’s raisins. New Dealers had bushels of theories, including this: In an economic depression, prices fall, so a recovery will occur when government compels prices to stabilize above where a free market would put them. So Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “brains trust”...

I've received several inquiries asking me to spell out some implications of this week's editorial. Here goes: 1) No deal is better than a bad Iran deal. And a bad Iran deal is not just a foreign policy setback. It's a foreign policy disaster. 2) The administration is heading toward a bad deal (see Kissinger-Schultz, and now even James Baker). 3) The Corker bill only helps, if it does, after a deal has been signed—and then 67 votes in the Senate and 290 in the House are needed to overturn a deal. That's unlikely. And a lot of damage in...

Middleburg, Va. Republicans have few built-in advantages in politics. But they do have one that’s already a factor in the 2016 presidential campaign. That advantage is ideas, especially ones affecting middle-income Americans. GOP presidential candidates were among the first to notice. Florida senator Marco Rubio, who announced for president last week, met several times with a group of conservative intellectuals last year. Now his agenda, notably on taxes, echoes their ideas. So does his new book, American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone. When Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, came to Washington in February, he made a point of...

A bunch of moms in a garage band in Massachusetts have recorded a new version of the Beatles song “Revolution” to give voice to their opposition to Common Core. Dressed in jeans, anti-Common Core t-shirts, and tri-cornered hats, The Revolution Band sings that “politicians fear no retribution” and that “control and money’s is what it’s about.” They belt out, “Well, we have to tell the Feds, it’s not alright…” The third verse gets to the heart of the problem: You’d have to change the Constitution Well you know, you just spit on it instead Teachers have no say in education...

Miami Five days before he would take the biggest step of his young political career, Marco Rubio called Bernie Navarro, a Miami real estate investor, to ask for a favor. Rubio wanted to have a small, low-key gathering to thank friends and family before his official announcement the next day, and he needed someone to host it. Navarro, like Rubio the son of Cuban exiles, asked permission from his wife. Although she had denied his repeated requests to host a Super Bowl party, there was no hesitation in approving this one. At dusk on a steamy Sunday evening, Rubio, wearing...

The following contrasting videos should be enough to chill the bones of every Democrat sensibly worried about how good a candidate Hillary Clinton will be. Dan Calabrese, of Herman Cain’s CainTV.com website brings us the two videos of the same TMZ reporter walking up to both candidates at an airport as they arrive. First, here is Marco Rubio: All smiles and affability, Sure, the reporter is not hostile, but anyone could get annoyed at questions about a spouse's past. Instead, Rubio laughs, makes a joke at his own expense, and comes across as a totally likable guy. Hillary, not so...

rresponsibility: A new report finds that 27.3% of student loans are delinquent. Why does this matter? Because thanks to President Obama, about $1 trillion dollars of student loan debt is owed to the federal government. Obama keeps trying to portray the student loan crisis as a problem suffered by students burdened by a mountain of debt when they graduate, and who are unable to make enough money to pay it back. But that's not the real crisis. First, average student loan debt is only a little over $20,000. A student who gave up his $5-a-day Starbucks habit could pay off...

The granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, of the multi-national media empire Hearst Corporation, and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) are launching a campaign that demands Cosmopolitan Magazine be displayed behind blinders or in an opaque wrapper and not sold to minors. Victoria Hearst, who is also the founder and president of Praise Him Ministries in Montrose, Colorado, and Dawn Hawkins, executive director of NCOSE, will be joined by child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist and author Dr. Miriam Grossman on Wednesday, April 22 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. to launch their new campaign titled “Cosmo Harms...

MADISON, Wis. — The Washington, D.C., attorney representing Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson in her civil rights case against her peers serves on the board of directors of a George Soros-backed judicial group. Robert S. Peck is founder and president of the Center for Constitutional Litigation, which bills itself as “among the most sought-after appellate litigators within the plaintiffs’ bar.” Abrahamson tapped the constitutional law expert to represent her in a civil rights case that aims to save her powerful chief justice position from a voter-backed, state constitutional amendment approved at the polls last week. The amendment allows...

At the end of March, two weeks before he declared his candidacy for President, Marco Rubio visited New York City’s Upper West Side to meet the moneyed class and hand out his new book American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone. In a gorgeous apartment overlooking the Park and the Museum of Natural History, Mr. Rubio delivered a spellbinding speech, skewering the president and articulating a cohesive worldview, especially in the arena of foreign policy. The smart and funny senator from Florida also took questions on all topics, impressing the room of well-heeled elites, plus journalists like Bret Stephens and...

Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) says he will force a vote on Loretta Lynch‘s attorney general nomination if it is delayed any longer by Senate Republicans, Mediaite has learned. Reid, the outgoing Senate minority leader, will call for the vote in an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow set to air on Thursday night. “We’ve put up with this far too long and we’re going to need to have a vote on her very soon that’s created by Mitch McConnell or I’ll create one,” Reid will say. “I can still do that. I know parliamentary procedure around here and we’re going to...

HOUSTON – Oil field services firm Schlumberger announced Thursday it plans to ax another 11,000 workers, kicking off what could be a second major wave of layoffs across the oil industry. The move will bring Schlumberger’s layoffs up to 20,000 employees, roughly 15 percent of its workforce, since it began paring back its payroll earlier this year to cope with low oil prices. The nine-month oil slump has cost the energy industry more than 120,000 jobs so far, according to oil field staffing firm Swift Worldwide Resources. Oil equipment companies have been forced to fine-tune their workforce as they promise...

That would be Hillary!, of course — a woman so dishonest and phony that she’s cannot seem to the tell the truth about anything: Speaking in Iowa Wednesday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that all her grandparents had immigrated to the United States, a story that conflicts with public census and other records related to her maternal and paternal grandparents. The story of her grandmother specifically immigrating is one Clinton has told before. Clinton’s sole foreign-born grandparent, Hugh Rodham Sr., immigrated as a child. “Her grandparents always spoke about the immigrant experience and, as a result she has...

A confession: Many years ago, I was an ultra-left liberal, a Marxist, in fact. As a newly minted attorney at law in New York, I joined the ACLU and volunteered serve as one of their lawyers. About six weeks later, they asked me to represent an American Nazi accused of inciting to riot. I refused. They were mightily put off, horrified in fact. They remonstrated. “But he has a right to counsel.” I said, “Maybe so, but he doesn’t have a right to me. I’m protected by the Thirteenth Amendment.” (The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary...

The blistering drought that has Californians timing their showers, driving dirty cars and staring at brown lawns and empty swimming pools is a “man-made disaster,” according to critics, who say the Golden State’s misguided environmental policies allow much-needed freshwater to flow straight into the Pacific. In an average year, California gets enough snow and rain to put 200 million acres under a foot of water, but environmental opposition to dams over the last several decades has allowed the majority of the freshwater to flow into the ocean, even as the state’s population exploded to nearly 40 million people. ~snip~ “This...

Was TWA Flight 800 shot out of the sky? As a former pilot, that is a question I get asked about all the time. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but let’s be clear: Yes. I say it was. And I believe the FBI covered it up. LOOK BACK: REPORTING THE CRASH OF TWA FLIGHT 800 ON JULY 17, 1996 There are many reasons to disbelieve the official explanation of what happened to TWA 800 almost 19 years ago, on July 17, 1996, off the South Shore of Long Island. There’s hardly an airline pilot among the hundreds I know who buys...

The FBI had advance warning of an al-Qaeda plot to bring down a commercial airliner on American soil just weeks before the 1996 TWA 800 crash that claimed 230 civilian lives. Now, a series of previously-confidential FBI documents obtained by investigative journalist Peter Lance and seen by MailOnline, provide compelling evidence that the crash was an act of terror orchestrated by the man now believed by many to be the true architect of 9/11. Speaking to MailOnline Lance said: ‘Who wants to have an act of terror on their watch especially an act of terror where an argument could be...