Free Republic

Joseph Rivers, an aspiring artist from Michigan, had his dreams shattered by federal agents. On a train to California, where he was going to start a video production business, he had his $16,000 in life savings seized by the Drug Enforcement Agency under the mere claimed suspicion that it was going to be used as drug money. A hunch or suspicion is enough for some law enforcement agents to seize someone's property and hold it until they prove themselves innocent. As the Albuquerque Journal, which first reported Rivers' case, quoted the DEA agent in charge: "We don't have to prove...

Trump pro-amnesty? Walker stands firm against pro-amnesty ambush. Lots of changed Presidential immigration ratings. Donald Trump, Scott Walker and Rick Santorum revealed important things about themselves in high-pressure moments this past week, surrounded by the cameras and tape recorders of national media. Trump on national TV and on the Arizona border stumbled and let himself get boxed into saying he would offer amnesty to the illegal aliens who aren't the "bad ones." He seemed to be defensive and trying to prove that he isn't hostile to immigrants by also indicating he would like to see legal immigration increased. But Walker...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Family Leadership Summit. Donald Trump is still the clear front-runner of the 2016 GOP presidential field. A new Economist/YouGov poll released on Friday actually showed Trump gaining support in the last week, despite a controversy over his comments questioning Sen. John McCain's (R-Arizona) status as a "war hero." According to the poll, the number of registered Republican primary voters who responded that Trump is their first choice jumped from 15% at the beginning of July to 28% last week. Another 10% of voters pick him as their second choice. That puts the real-estate...

Inside El Chapo’s secret Mexican prison escape tunnel (VIDEO) 7/27/15 | by Chris Eger Vice News traveled south of the border and dropped down the most famous underground tunnel in the world– that used by a Mexican drug lord to vacate the premises. The figurehead of the Sinaloa cartel, drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, released himself on his own recognizance on July 11, via a tunnel from Mexico’s only maximum-security prison in Mexico. It took him a year to arrange his self-parole and Vice went to Altiplano prison– where they found a different tale than what the local media...

Jeb Bush hasn't campaigned for himself in this part of Florida since 2002, but on Monday, he will return here to reconnect with former supporters and make an overt appeal to the region's fast-growing Latino population. In a first as a presidential candidate, the Republican plans to sit for a Spanish-language interview with a Telemundo news anchor. He will meet with dozens of mostly Hispanic evangelical pastors at a mega-church, visit a small business owned by a Mexican immigrant and try to introduce himself to the hundreds of thousands of people who have moved to this transient region in the...

Disappointing, but not surprising. The depressing reality though that is that most of the Republican field has endorsed amnesty in one form or another. So this isn't much of a surprise. Trump is using his own vocabulary, but he's echoing the same amnesty talking points you could hear from Marco Rubio... or Barack Obama. During Friday's interview, Trump said the U.S. should take a two-step approach to the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the country. "Well, the first thing we do is take the bad ones — of which there are, unfortunately, quite a few," said Trump,...

A federal judge in California has ruled that the Obama administration’s detention of children and their mothers who were caught crossing the border illegally is a serious violation of a longstanding court settlement, and that the families should be released as quickly as possible. In a decision late Friday roundly rejecting the administration’s arguments for holding the families, Judge Dolly M. Gee of Federal District Court for the Central District of California found that two detention centers in Texas that the administration opened last summer fail to meet minimum legal requirements of the 1997 settlement for facilities housing children. -snip-...

The case of the execution-style Black-on-White murder on a Hollywood street this past Fourth of July weekend took a bizarre turn Friday night with the arrest of the suspect who is now being held on $1 million bail. Ezeoma Obioha, the 31-year-old man arrested by Los Angeles police for the murder Carrie Jean Melvin, also 31, was known to police—as a civilian member of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Wilshire Area Community-Police Advisory Board with the title of Secretary. Obioha was a rapper and entrepreneur who presented himself as being “all about protecting the community” and helping stop young minorities...

California Attorney General Kamala Harris will review whether the nonprofit organization behind controversial Planned Parenthood videos violated state law, her office said in a letter Friday. Four Democratic congresswomen on Wednesday asked Harris and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to determine if officials from the Irvine-based Center for Medical Progress broke any laws when they posed as workers for a biotech company while recording Planned Parenthood physicians without their consent. Reps. Jan Schakowsky, Zoe Lofgren, Jerry Nadler and Yvette Clarke cited reports that founder David Daleiden filed paperwork to create a phony entity. They also asked the state’s top law...

Don't get into a pissing match with walls in San Francisco. The city's Public Works agency is testing a pee-repellant paint on walls in areas that have been saturated with urine. Anyone urinating on the specially treated walls will get the spray splashed back onto them. [Snip] "The urine will bounce back on the guys pants and shoes. The idea is they will think twice next time about urinating in public," said Rachel Gordon, a Public Works Department spokeswoman. She said the super-hard coating made the "bounce back" effect much stronger than when peeing on a regular wall.

TV bounty hunter Duane “Dog” Chapman knows there are some fugitives even he can’t bring to justice. The star of CMT’s “Dog and Beth: On The Hunt” admits he probably would not be able to capture escaped Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán — and doesn’t even plan to try.

On July 24, California Attorney General Kamala Harris (D) announced she will investigate whether the Center for American Progress broke any laws in videoing Planned Parenthood’s (PP) Dr. Deborah Nucatola. On the video, Nucatola discussed PP’s sales of baby livers and the practice of “partial-birth abortions to supply intact body parts” to those who want them.

... And one person either took the advice or instinctively knew to do it on her own, and that's Carly Fiorina, who, by the way, she's just, I think, kicking butt all over the country, folks. Every stop never gets off message. She handles the media with aplomb and skill and it's obvious she enjoys doing it, and she's schooling people. She's showing how it's done.

A 4.3 earthquake was reported Saturday morning near Fontana, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 5:54 a.m. The quake was felt over a wide area of the Inland Empire, Orange County and eastern Los Angeles County, according to the USGS. There were no immediate reports of damage or injury. According to the USGS, the epicenter was near the intersection of Sierra and Fontana avenues. It was followed by two small aftershocks.

Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric isn’t making him a lot of friends among his fellow candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, but it’s winning him converts in California. “If I walked into a poll booth right now, and I had to cast my vote, I would vote for Donald Trump,” said Robin Hvidston, the executive director of the Claremont-based We the People Rising, a grass-roots organization pushing for stronger enforcement of existing immigration laws and the enactment of stricter immigration laws. “I wouldn’t have said that three weeks ago. ... Both parties are so ingrained in political correctness and both...

California Attorney General Kamala Harris will review whether the nonprofit organization behind controversial Planned Parenthood videos violated state law, her office said in a letter Friday. Four Democratic congresswomen on Thursday asked Harris and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to determine if officials from the Irvine-based Center for Medical Progress broke any laws when they posed as workers for a biotech company while recording Planned Parenthood physicians without their consent. Reps. Jan Schakowsky, Zoe Lofgren, Jerry Nadler and Yvette Clarke cited reports that founder David Daleiden filed paperwork to create a phony entity. They also asked the state’s top law

Donald Trump may be thousands of miles from Washington on the Texas-Mexico border, but on Capitol Hill he's center stage in the fight over illegal immigration. The bill, which is formally called the "Enforce the Law for Sanctuary Cities Act," would block states and cities from receiving federal law enforcement funding if they have so-called “sanctuary city” practices in place, blocking the enforcement of certain federal immigration laws. It passed today in the House with overwhelming Republican support in a 241-179 vote, with only six Democrats joining the majority. Democrats have pejoratively labeled the legislation “The Donald Trump Act,” tying...

RUSH: Today is Thursday. Last weekend was four days ago. Depending on which day of the weekend you go back to, it could be five days ago. And if you have wishful thinking about weekends it could be six days ago, all the way back to last Friday. What happened last weekend? Donald Trump supposedly took himself out of the presidential race with one sentence about John McCain. I mean, that's what the conventional wisdom told us. From the moment it was reported that Trump said he wasn't impressed with McCain because he's not impressed with people that get captured,...

Gov. Jerry Brown arrived in Rome for climate talks this week with the smallest of entourages – three – and the most comfortable of accommodations. Brown, who typically flies Southwest Airlines in California, flew to Italy with real estate developer George Marcus and his wife, Judy, in their private plane. Brown is combining his trip to a conference here with a vacation with those friends.

Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier who was released in a prisoner exchange in Afghanistan for five Taliban detainees, wound up in the middle of a pot raid earlier this week in northern California. Captian Greg Van Patten with the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office told Fox News Thursday that the county’s marijuana eradication team encountered Bergdahl on Tuesday while serving a search warrant on a home in Redwood City, Calif.