Free Republic

The conservative tea party challenger who was narrowly beaten in the Republican primary by U.S. Rep. Bill Shuster says he will run against the eight-term incumbent -- as a Democrat. Art Halvorson, a retired Coast Guard captain from Bedford County, received more than the 1,000 write-in votes in the Democratic primary. ... Halvorson has called Shuster too moderate, and the challenger touts himself as a tea party-backed conservative Christian. Shuster is the House Transportation Committee chairman and is Pennsylvania's highest-ranked member of Congress. He beat Halvorson in the 2014 Republican primary, but his second victory over Halvorson in April was...

Funding Iran directly funds terrorism because the Iranian regime is effectively a terror state. Back in the Senate, Obama fought against the classification of the Revolutionary Guard, a key Iranian political-military institution, as terrorists. He's remained consistent since then. 3. This is simply treason. Obama is aiding and abetting the murder of Americans. He's funding terrorism. He's funding Iran's wars in the region, which aside from Israel, include campaigns in Iraq and Syria that have dragged the United States in. The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January...

A 5-year-old boy trying to save his mother during a robbery offered the only thing he had: $1. Three armed, masked men burst into the living room of their Colorado Springs home demanding money from his mother, Courtney Beaudette, according to court records. When she said she didn't have any, the men told her to strip. She took off her shirt but refused to go further, the documents said. Amid the chaos, Beaudette's son ran to his room to retrieve the only money he had, a single dollar bill, the report said. Then the gun went off. ... Michael Ryan...

Building that bridge or expanding that highway just became more difficult under a rigorous standard issued Tuesday by the Obama administration that will make it easier to block a wide range of projects in the name of climate change. The final guidance broadens the National Environmental Policy Act by requiring agencies to quantify the impact of activities that require federal permits not just on the environment but also on “projected direct and indirect GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions.” ... Republicans blasted the guidance as the latest in a flurry of resident Obama’s end-of-term executive actions, led by the Clean Power Plan,...

Two weeks ago at the Republican National Convention (RNC) a grieving mother blasted Hillary Clinton for the debacle of the 2012 Benghazi attack. Last Thursday, at the Democratic National Convention (DNC), grieving parents gave a speech criticizing Donald Trump for his statements against Muslims. While all the grieving parents deserve sympathy, the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) network evening and morning shows seemed to only care about the parents that showed up at the Democratic Convention. Khizr Khan and his wife Ghazla’s DNC appearance earned 55 minutes, 13 seconds of Big Three network coverage, nearly 50 times more than Pat...

The property tax bill on Jeff and Roberta Price's Lincoln Park home was about $400 in 1977, the first year they lived there. It's been going up ever since but rarely with the jolt of this year's 63 percent increase. The increase, from $8,652 to $14,104, has the couple re-considering their plan to retire in the Kenmore Avenue home, where they raised their kids. They're looking at homes in Indiana "as a backup plan" for the time when Roberta retires in a few years, said Jeff, who is already retired. "We have lived in our home for almost 39 years...

Something very courageous happened at a recent Douglas County commissioners’ hearing. Colorado Community Media reported that at a June 28 hearing, Commissioners Roger Partridge and David Weaver voted “no” to accepting federal Housing and Urban Development Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) monies. In the past, CDBG funds have been distributed to a variety of nonprofit and non-governmental entities throughout Douglas County. Both commissioners voiced their concerns of the far-reaching rules, regulations and compliance requirements hidden deep within HUD’s updated CDBG application. Included in HUD’s application are two things that should cause each of us to pause. The first is the...

Alaska’s credit rating was downgraded by Moody’s Investors Services, in the midst of its multi-billion-dollar deficit. Moody’s dropped the Last Frontier’s general obligation rating from Aa1 to Aa2. The outlook remains negative, according to the bond credit rating business. This marks the 49th State’s third credit decline from leading global credit rating agencies, that includes downgrades by Standard and Poor’s Rating Services and Fitch Ratings. ... In addition, Moody’s downgraded Alaska’s lease-appropriation bonds to Aa3 from Aa2, along with its moral obligation bonds to A1 from Aa3. These two bonds are consistently ranked one to two grades lower than the...

Some U.S. officers in Baghdad believe the Obama administration is rushing plans for a Mosul offensive so it takes place before the November presidential election, a retired general says. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Barbero said his contacts in Baghdad have relayed the concerns to him, fearing there is now an “artificial timeline” for what promises to be by far the toughest battle in the war against the Islamic State in Iraq.

The leaders of Colorado’s Public Employee Retirement Association (PERA) assure us that if we have patience, long-term investment returns of 7.5 percent will fully fund the program’s promises to retirees over the next 40 years or so. But what if those returns fail to materialize? Moving PERA from the current defined benefit plan to a defined contribution or cash balance-style plan would remove much of the burden of returns falling short from taxpayers, while helping along the long-term financial health of PERA. Coloradans got a taste of that this past year, when PERA achieved a paltry 1.5 percent return on...

MISSOULA – U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy ... Putnam said he’s attended several Oath Keepers rallies in the past, including three in Portland, Oregon and several at a memorial on the highway outside Burns, Oregon where LaVoy Finicum was killed by law enforcement in a standoff following the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife refuge. ... Jason Van Tatenhove, a Eureka-area man who serves as the national media director for the Oath Keepers, said he had doubts about the performance of Robertson’s federal public defense attorney, Michael Donahoe, saying he had refused, for example, to push to get an...

Orange County congresswoman Loretta Sanchez let loose on resident Obama for endorsing her rival in California’s U.S. Senate race, accusing him of being part of the “entrenched political establishment” that has failed California voters. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden announced their support for U.S. Senate candidate Kamala Harris early Tuesday morning, praising her record as California’s attorney general and a prosecutor. Harris has been a longtime political ally of the resident. Sanchez said she was “disappointed” that Obama would intervene in a Senate race between two Democrats, ... I believe that California voters are deeply concerned about the entrenched...

The head of a Cleveland police union reacted to the shooting of multiple officers in Baton Rouge by going off on resident Obama and a media culture that helps boost anti-cop narratives. Detective Steve Loomis ... said that Obama has “validated the false narrative and the nonsense that Black Lives Matter and the media are pressing out there,” and he said the president has “blood on his hands” that he won’t be able to wash off.

While Western elites are flapping their tongues praising Islam and warning us to do the same, jihadis are setting the world on fire. The blood is still in the streets of Nice and Muslim soldiers are setting off bombs. “France: Another truck bomb parked near Nice defused, Muslim suspect arrested,” ... All-out war. All-out jihad. But France, says its Prime Minister, is just going to have to get used to it. ... The French Special Forces defused an explosive-laden truck parked on a highway near Nice, local media reports. A bomb disposal operation was conducted on a highway near Nice...

You may not see Andrea Tantaros on-air, but that doesn't mean the Fox News analyst isn't still doing what she does best.. tell it like it really is. ... Anyone who follows the Fox News analyst just knew she'd have something to say about Bernie Sanders jumping ship and siding with the woman who goes against the grain of everything he's fought for. ... So, what does Andrea have to say about this latest turn of events in the Democratic Party? She tweets, "Guess Bernie got tired of having someone start his car for him every morning." It's this sense...

Dr. Sebastian Gorka .. about the massacre in Nice, and the role terrorism plays in the Islamist drive for global supremacy... Islamists have been telegraphing mass-casualty attacks using vehicles as weapons for a very long time ... if people in the West would ever “wake up” to the ISIS caliphate’s determination to impose Islamic law on the entire world... Fox viewers understand it. The military that I have the honor of working with, and the FBI agents that I work with, they get it. That’s not the problem,” said Gorka. “The problem is the decision-makers, the people sitting in the...

AUGUSTA, Maine —Officials in Maine's capital city say bedbugs were found in three city offices. ... A bedbug-detecting dog confirmed there were bedbugs in that office and in the offices of community services ... Bedbugs had been reported at two privately owned boarding houses in May. City councilors adopted an emergency law requiring tenants to alert landlords of bed bugs. Landlords must also give the city a decontamination plan.

our political class is still violating our sovereignty and security with endless migrants from the Middle East. We have so many emergencies within our national security apparatus and military that can and should be addressed within the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), yet the GOP-Senate chose to focus on more immigration as their final act before recess. The Senate passed the Shaheen, D-N.H. (F, 2%) motion to instruct the conference committee negotiating the House-Senate differences in the NDAA to authorize a potentially unlimited amount Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) for Afghanis. Only 12 Republicans opposed the motion, which is non-binding, but...

Millionaire slams feckless, molly-coddled youngsters who live off the bank of mum and dad. The millionaire lifestyle guru Martha Stewart has issued a stinging criticism of the millennial generation and claimed youngsters are too LAZY to get ahead. Too many members of “Generation Snowflake” are still living with their parents rather than getting out into the world and making something of their lives, the celebrity businesswoman raged. She is the latest person to rail against a mollycoddled generation who have turned universities into “safe spaces” to avoid testing their ideas in the crucible of debate and called on conference attendees...

End-to-end encryption vexing to some officials . Facebook says it has begun to offer users the option of securing their messages with end-to-end encryption, a service that soon may allow more than a billion account holders — potentially including jihad and other terror groups — to message one another below the radar of law enforcement surveillance. ... By implementing end-to-end encryption, Facebook aims to give its users a way of communicating over the network’s proprietary Messenger application in a manner intended to make correspondence undecipherable to anyone other than the sender and recipient, a possibility that alarms law enforcement officials....