Free Republic

MINNEAPOLIS -- Sen. Amy Klobuchar said Thursday she would call a Senate hearing to probe Ticketmaster after the Taylor Swift ticket fiasco this week left many fans frustrated and empty handed. This comes as the company canceled the general public sale of tickets originally scheduled for Friday "due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand." Swift fans sought tickets earlier this week with pre-sale codes and credit card exclusives, a rollout that was beset by technical problems. Klobuchar, who chairs a Senate subcommittee focused on consumer protection and anti-trust, said she...

A Preston, Minn., man who was charged with 12 counts of child pornography last year won’t spend any time in prison. Instead, he will do 10 years of probation and pay a $140 fine, KAAL TV first reported. According to a criminal complaint, 49-year-old Rick James Gavin was charged in September 2021 with two counts of using minors in pornography and 10 counts of possessing child pornography. The complaint says he took videos of two victims, one under the age of 10 and another under the age of seven, and then superimposed images of genitalia over screenshots of the videos....

Puberty blockers are widely touted by doctors and transgender activists as a safe and fully reversible way to pause puberty for children with gender identity issues, but a growing body of evidence is challenging those claims, according to The New York Times. The drug prevents the surge in bone density that would normally occur during puberty, and patients can see lifelong bone issues that are never resolved, according to the Monday NYT article. Medical professionals are also challenging claims that the drug is reversible, arguing instead that blocking puberty permanently cements a child’s transgender identity and puts them on a...

Andrea Vuleta-Jensen of Jordan, Minn., jumped at the chance to take a full-time remote position in February 2021 as a project manager with MSP Communications in Minneapolis, a content marketer behind Mpls.St. Paul Magazine and Twin Cities Business. “They sold the role by saying if your kid doesn’t sleep at night, you can work in the afternoon, take a nap with him. Your child is your number-one responsibility. I just thought this would be a great role for this time in my life,” Vuleta-Jensen said. “This is me going back into the workforce and one of the hardest times going...

Video from the mid-1990s has surfaced showing Keith Ellison doubting the legal culpability of a convicted cop killer. Power Line’s Scott Johnson recently posted unearthed footage from a November 1996 panel discussion Ellison participated in regarding the death penalty. Working as an attorney at the time, Ellison claimed the death penalty was one of several “racially biased” institutions that disproportionately affect black Americans and “oppressed nationalities.” He cited the example of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a black man who was sentenced to death in 1982 for the first-degree murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Despite the guilty conviction, Ellison claimed without...

The Minnesota Parents Alliance packed a room in Golden Valley Sunday afternoon for an event geared toward Somali parents, many of whom were shocked and alarmed to discover some of the materials available to their kids. Public school priorities are increasingly at odds with the family values and religious beliefs of the Somali community, speakers at the event explained. “Our Somali community is very concerned for their school children. Public schools are sexualizing our children. Topics being discussed with our children are inappropriate, confusing and in conflict with our family values and religious beliefs,” said Shukri Abdirahman, a former Republican...

Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign recently dropped tens of thousands of dollars on private security services following her calls to defund the police and support for a campaign to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department, federal filings show. According to Federal Election Commission records, the campaign spent $27,081.14 on “security services” between July and September, the highest quarter to date. Before the third quarter, her campaign paid roughly $83,000 to private security firms between May 2019 and July this year, according to a review of federal filings. The payments also follow Omar’s calls to defund police and her support for a campaign...

A group of Indiana apartment residents beat up a would-be robber and kept him in custody using their own firearms until authorities could arrest him, police said. Kokomo police reported that Marrell Tyler, 18, received multiple facial injuries when he broke into the Annex of Kokomo apartments on Thursday at 3:25 a.m. Police responded quickly but arrived to find Tyler beat up and held at gunpoint, thanks to the actions of three men who had been inside the first apartment he had entered. The men told police that Tyler had entered the apartment wearing a ski mask and pointing a...

Gov. Tim Walz is under fire for accepting the endorsement of former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, who has promoted conspiracy theories about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Walz called it an “honor” to be endorsed by the former one-term governor and thanked him for “taking the unprecedented step” of supporting his campaign. “I can’t stand with anyone or any party who cannot condemn the Jan. 6 insurrection,” Ventura said in his endorsement. “And now, women’s rights are under attack across this country.” Minnesota GOP Chairman David Hann, a Vietnam veteran like Ventura, said he was “appalled” that the governor would “seek...

The release of a new documentary has thrust the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the death of George Floyd back into the national spotlight. “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold,” produced by conservative commentator Candace Owens, was officially released on Wednesday. The documentary looks back on the riots in Minneapolis and around the United States and sheds light on BLM’s exploitation of the Floyd tragedy for “financial gain.” “While everyone was posting a black square on Instagram, Candace didn’t buy the George Floyd narrative the media was selling,” according to the Daily Ware’s landing page for the documentary. “This explosive...

Centennial School Board candidate Jessica Schwinn suggested white people who quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are racist and accused them of advocating for white supremacy. Schwinn called a “family meeting” in an undated TikTok video to reprimand white people, calling them racist and uninformed. They are “upholding” white supremacy, she said. Schwinn is running for school board with a slate of candidates calling themselves “4Centennial,” which includes Andrew Meyer, Laura Gannon, and Kara Schmitz. The Centennial School District encompasses Blaine, Centerville, Circle Pines, Lexington, and Lino Lakes. The text introducing the video reads: “ATTN: white people: Family meeting time....

Another county in the state of Minnesota has sent voters erroneous ballots, bringing the total number of affected counties to four. In a filing with the Minnesota Supreme Court last Friday, Murray County Auditor-Treasurer Heidi Winter cited a “clerical error” as the reason why midterm general election ballots were distributed with outdated district numbers for the Minnesota Senate and House of Representatives races. Due to redistricting, Murray County’s state Senate and House district numbers were changed from 22 and 22A to 21 and 21A. But the ballots sent to voters were still printed with 22 and 22A. The filing states...

WCCO claims to be lacking evidence that Attorney General Keith Ellison is “anti-cop,” as a Republican Attorneys General Association ad has it. The station ran a fact-check on the ad Monday, asking for “more specifics” on the “serious accusations” that Ellison has been “anti-cop forever” and “supports convicts.” In the article, University of Minnesota professor Larry Jacobs, without specifying, said “some” of the “claims” in the ad are “outright wrong.” Much of this information on Ellison has been discussed in the past. Power Line’s Scott Johnson has been writing about Ellison’s early life on and off for the past 15...

Since 2018 two prominent members of the Soros family have donated thousands of dollars to help Keith Ellison become or remain Minnesota’s attorney general. According to a campaign finance disclosure, George Soros and his son Alexander each gave Ellison’s 2022 reelection campaign $2,500 in October of last year. Ellison appears to be one of the only individual candidates in Minnesota to whom the Soros’ have personally donated money. Aside from Ellison’s campaign itself, Alexander Soros gave a whopping $100,000 to the People’s Lawyer PAC in June 2018. Per the Washington Free Beacon, the People’s Lawyer PAC was an independent expenditure...

A Democrat state representative with children deleted a tweet saying abortion should be legal because being a mother is difficult. Rep. Liz Boldon, a mother of three children who serves the Rochester area in the Minnesota House of Representatives, tweeted Sunday morning that motherhood is the “hardest job” she’ll “ever have” and added that “no one should be forced to be a parent.” “Being a mom is the hardest job I’ll ever have. No one should be forced to be a parent. #AbortionIsHealthcare,” she said. Boldon deleted the tweet after receiving significant backlash, but not before others took screenshots of...

Kristie Estes suddenly developed carpal tunnel in both hands despite having no prior symptoms. She is one of thousands of Minnesotans who have developed unexplainable medical conditions after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. Different types of vaccines, different companies, same result: Life-altering health issues. Estes now belongs to a support group called Minnesota Team Humanity. Team Humanity is looking for answers. The group was started by Suzanna Newell last year when her health dramatically changed after receiving the jab. Team Humanity connects vax-injured Minnesotans so they can share their stories about the impact the COVID-19 vaccine has had on their health....

Minnesota’s teachers union, one of Gov. Tim Walz’s top political allies, has donated nearly $2 million to state Democrats so far this election cycle. According to new campaign finance reports, Education Minnesota’s political action committee gifted $513,000 each to the House and Senate DFL caucuses, and another $900,000 to the DFL State Central Committee, for a total of $1.9 million. All of the donations were made in August and September. Emails previously obtained by Alpha News show the union was given inside access to the Walz administration throughout the pandemic and its president, Denise Specht, had a close working relationship...

A Mankato, Minn., man is facing several charges after he allegedly beat a woman so severely that police officers “couldn’t see her eyes.” The suspect, 23-year-old Paul Peter Jal, was “upset” because the victim was “wearing an American flag shirt,” a criminal complaint says. Jal is facing charges of second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon, third-degree assault, threats of violence, disrupting a 911 call, and damage to property. The complaint says Mankato police responded to an apartment residence around 4:15 a.m. Oct. 2 after 911 received a call from a woman who was “screaming” as a male voice and “thumping...

It’s unclear whether the FBI has arrested a single person following at least 150 attacks, threats and other incidents against pro-life advocacy groups, crisis pregnancy centers and churches following the May 2 leak of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation. There have been at least 73 attacks on pregnancy centers and pro-life offices, along with at least 83 attacks on Catholic churches, since the court’s decision was leaked to the public, according to CatholicVote, a Catholic political advocacy group. The FBI says it is investigating these incidents, some of...

A DFL candidate who has the support of some of the party’s top officials wants to abolish the police and defended rioting during a June speech. Leigh Finke won the DFL nomination for House District 66A in August and will likely win November’s election in the solidly-blue district. Finke, who is transgender, previously worked for the ACLU, authored a guide for “LGBTQ+ Christian teens,” served on the Stonewall DFL board, and produced a documentary called “White Savior,” which explores “racism in the American church.” Finke repeatedly called for abolishing the police throughout 2021, according to Facebook screenshots provided to Alpha...