Free Republic

Debt Up $1.59T Under GOP House—More in 15 Months Than First 97 Congresses Combined. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which took office in January 2011, has enacted federal spending bills under which the national debt has increased more in less than one term of Congress than in the first 97 Congresses combine

While proponents of immigration enforcement have been told that the federal government monitors the hiring of illegal aliens by the private sector, including adherence to the federal employment verification (I-9) program, Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department appears to have made a decision to penalize organizations that zealously comply. For example, on Thursday the Justice Department announced that it filed a civil lawsuit against the Tuscany Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, accusing the company of engaging in "a pattern or practice of discrimination in the employment eligibility verification and re-verification process."

After a contentious court hearing with convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin, conservative blogger Aaron Walker was taken into custody, The Blaze reported Tuesday. [snip] In 1981, Kimberlin was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison for a long list of crimes, including the 1978 terrorist bombing that brutally maimed Vietnam veteran Carl DeLong. He served 17 years in prison before being released. Since then, he has become a liberal activist whose work has been funded in part, by George Soros' Tides Foundation, Barbra Streisand and Teresa Heinz Kerry. On May 25, The Blaze published a lengthy expose on Kimberlin, detailing his...

AURORA, Colo. – Police have a “person of interest” in custody in connection with the robbery of the Wells Fargo back at 15301 E. Hampden Avenue Saturday afternoon. Immediately following the robbery, police closed the intersection of Iliff and Buckley after reports the suspect might have taken hostages. According to our crew on the scene, police stopped and searched nearly two dozen cars. The adult occupants of the vehicles were handcuffed during the investigation.

The Mexican ambassador to the United States told a Capitol Hill forum that his government was “kept in the dark” about U.S. government-condoned and abetted “gunwalking” operations, and also questioned the intent behind Operation Fast and Furious, The Los Angeles Times is reporting today. Appearing before “the New Democrat Network...a center-left think tank and advocacy organization, and the New Policy Institute, one of its sister organizations,” Arturo Sarukhan’s claims raise questions as to why major news outlets like The Times are just now getting around to reporting on information raised in this column and on the Sipsey Street Irregulars blog...

Desperate Dems: Vote against Scott Walker because according to an unconfirmed rumor published on some left-wing website, he fathered a love child 24 years ago With two days to go before Wisconsin’s recall election, Gov. Walker is looking very strong in the polls. According to Intrade, he has a 96 percent chance of winning on Tuesday. Democrats clearly aren’t winning on the issues, but they hope they have found something else that can turn the tide for them. Late Saturday night, a left-wing anti-Walker website reported an unconfirmed, second-hand rumor that Gov. Walker fathered a “love child” 24 years ago.

Top national and North Carolina Democrats have taken a series of unusual steps to protect their candidates in the Tarheel State — and President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign — from additional damage after a sexual harassment scandal rocked the state Democratic Party and weakened its chairman. North Carolina was already an uphill battle for Obama even before the revelation in April that the NCDP’s then-executive director, Jay Parmley, was accused of misconduct by a young male employee. Parmley resigned. But Chairman David Parker managed to hang on to his job despite calls for his ouster from top state Democrats and...

The state debt clock for Connecticut indicates that 10% of the state's population currently receives food stamps. Broken down by citizen, every state resident is approximately $11,000 in debt due to government spending. Given the state's unemployment numbers, approximately 8%, combined with tax rates and breaks, we know not all of them will pay much, if anything, in taxes. Now, meet Joelle Fishman. She is head of the state communist party and is associated with other far leftist causes and organizations. Joelle Fishman chairs the Connecticut Communist Party USA. She is a Commissioner on the City of New Haven Peace...

A pro-Walker Marine vet got into a few confrontations at Democrat Tom Barrett’s rally today with Bill Clinton in Wisconsin. The Franklin Center has video. They couldn’t handle the truth. So, union cops were called in and dragged him out of the rally and arrested him. They didn’t like what he was saying. The Marine is predicting a 10 point win for Scott Walker. I second that.

Remember when America was the world leader? Remember when it was America who would not sit idly by when outrageous evils were sanctioned by the collective negation of humanity (the UN)? Mugabe How low America has sunk under the fraud. Even the pathologically leftist NY Times has said that Mugabe should be tried for war crimes. And this just last week: President Robert Mugabe and his henchmen are accused of crimes against humanity, a British newspaper reported on Saturday, for among other things, "slowly hacking off the limbs and pulling out the teeth with pliers of his opposition's supporters. He...

VIDEO Interview 4:47 minutes NLPC Associate Fellow Paul Chesser was interviewed on Fox Business Network's Willis Report on Thursday. Here's a transcript: Gerri Willis : Joining me now, Paul Chesser, Associate Fellow at the National Legal and Policy Center. Hey Paul, welcome back to the show, always great to have you here. Paul Chesser : Great to be here. Gerri Willis : Let me tell you, this is crazy, is it not? I want to just show folks with some of these companies that got loans from the Department of Energy - the jobs that were promised but never delivered....

The Obama campaign has been running the below ad all over the internet. When I saw it, something about it caught my eye. Upon closer inspection, I discovered what it was. The Y-axis distance from 0 to -200,000 jobs is 15 pixels, but the distance from 0 to +200,000 is 20 pixels. What the Obama campaign has done – in a very subtle way – is to visually and fraudulently inflate their job creation record by a third. And they thought we were too stupid to notice. “Chocolate rations have been increased from thirty grams to twenty grams.” --- The...

Gun rights advocates recently discovered that the gun control group Mayors Against Illegal Guns has burrowed its "gun violence prevention coordinators" (read "anti-gun lobbyists") into city payrolls from Augusta, Maine to Seattle, Washington, at taxpayer expense. MAIG is the brainchild of New York City's zealous anti-gun billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who formed the group at a 2006 gun control summit held in Gracie Mansion and co-hosted by Boston Mayor Thomas Menino. MAIG touts an agenda of "commonsense reforms" that gun rights advocates see as being somewhere on the far side of repealing the Second Amendment. With a membership that started...

President Obama will jump-start what looks to be a major June fundraising push with six money events today in Minneapolis and Chicago - the most fundraisers he's held in a single day since launching his bid for a second term. Obama is expected to raise more than $7.2 million total for the Obama Victory Fund (OVF), according to figures provided by the campaign. Flying to Minnesota under the banner of "official business" - an event at a Honeywell factory in a Minneapolis suburb - Obama will quickly turn to politics, lunching with three separate sets of donors at the downtown...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla – Federal authorities are demanding that Florida halt its push to remove ineligible voters from the voter rolls. In a move that comes just months before the state could play a pivotal role in the 2012 presidential election, the U.S. Department of Justice contends that the state is violating federal law in its effort to identify and remove ineligible voters. The state's effort has already come under fire from local election supervisors who belong to both political parties, as well as Democratic members of Congress and voting rights groups. Chris Cate, a spokesman for the Florida Department of...

That's because the law requires health plans to cover individuals, such as adult children, that they did not cover in the past; it bars health plans from putting lifetime and annual dollar limits on benefits; and it requires plans to provide preventive care services -- including contraceptives in a few months' time -- at no out-of-pocket cost to the enrollee, Edward Fensholt told the House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions.

With an exquisitely poor sense of timing, District Council members voted last week to give themselves another full year in which to file their 2011 financial disclosure forms. As The Examiner's Liz Farmer reported, the council's little gift to itself came in the form of a line item tucked into the city's 2013 budget that moves the deadline from early this month to next May -- months after the November election. The city's toothless Office of Campaign Finance will be handling any financial disclosures for the rest of 2012, instead of the highly touted but still vacant ethics panel it...

Attorney General Eric Holder recently told a group of black clergymen that the right to vote was being threatened by people who are seeking to block access to the ballot box by blacks and other minorities. This is truly world-class chutzpah, by an Attorney General who stopped attorneys in his own Department of Justice from completing the prosecution of black thugs who stationed themselves outside a Philadelphia voting site to harass and intimidate white voters. This may have seemed like a small episode to some at the time, but it was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The...

URGENT: Judge orders deadlocked jury in John Edwards federal corruption trial to continue deliberations after they failed to reach a verdict on all but one of six felony counts...

After a lengthy deliberation, a North Carolina jury has reached a verdict in the John Edwards mistress-and-money trial. The verdict is expected to be read shortly. The jury began deliberating on May 18 after a month of testimony, which at times sounded more like a steamy soap opera than a trial on the intricacies of campaign finance rules. Charged with six counts of violating federal campaign laws, Edwards was accused by the government of soliciting nearly $1 million from wealthy backers to finance a cover up of his illicit affair and illegitimate child while running for president in 2008.

Bo Xilai is down, but not out yet Thursday, May 31, 2012 By David Kan Ting, Special to The China Post The oft-quoted Chinese saying, “people's eyes are snow-brilliant,” (人民的眼�是雪亮的) has a ring of truth, after all. The adage, attributable to Chairman Mao Zedong, asserts that the eyes of people are piercing and sharp, able to see the difference between right and wrong, and to penetrate the smoke and mirrors of the reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries. The chairman seems to have got it right again this time as mainland China is rocked by scandal after scandal. Time magazine called the country...

In its most recent 8K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Li-ion battery maker A123 Systems said a number of circumstances have raised “substantial doubt on [its] ability to continue as a going concern.” On 26 March, A123 launched a field campaign estimated to cost US$51.6 million to replace battery modules and packs that may contain defective prismatic cells produced at A123’s Livonia, Michigan manufacturing facility. The defect could have resulted in premature failure of the battery module or pack, including a decrease in performance and reduced battery life. (Earlier post.)

MAY 30, 2012 The Chicago Way Obama’s coterie of insiders is worth a closer look this time around. By John Fund Every president comes to Washington with a coterie of outside advisers, friends, and fixers they’ve picked up during the course of a career. Eventually one or more of them becomes controversial. Richard Nixon had Bebe Rebozo. Jimmy Carter had his brother Billy and Bert Lance. Ronald Reagan had Mike Deaver. Bill Clinton had many trailing after him — they became the menagerie implicated in Whitewater and Monicagate. But Barack Obama’s inner circle has almost completely escaped close scrutiny since...

Good video that explains the Smudges that the Teaparty Power Hour claims were discovered last week. Mark Gillar, from the Tea Party Power Hour, claims that smudges that appear on the edge of Obama's long form Birth Certificate Pdf, are supposed to prove that that it's a forgery. In the end, this is much to do about nothing. Yes, the document is a fraud, but, the smudges prove nothing. You can read in the comments that the Tea Party Power Hour really got in a latter over the simple explaination, and they were finally blocked from posting because they starting...

A state representative blew his top Tuesday on the floor of the Illinois State House of Representatives, flinging a copy of a new pension reform proposal into the air and telling his stoic colleagues that they “should be ashamed” of themselves. “I’m sick of it!” state Rep. Mike Bost yelled, saying the bill was too long for lawmakers to read before voting on it. “These damn bills that come out here all the damn time, come out here at the last second. I’ve got to try to figure out how to vote for my people. … You should be ashamed...

When prominent Democrats maintain the philosophy that government should never let a serious crisis go to waste it’s no surprise that they assume government has to react to every market hiccup, particularly after the Great Recession. What they don’t think about is perhaps doing nothing is as good as, if not better than drafting expansionist policies. JP Morgan’s much maligned $3 billion hedging failure is the crisis of the day and there hasn’t been a shortage of pundits and Democratic policymakers who urge action in the face of this “crisis.” Paul “Blame Bush” Krugman wrote that the situation means reform...

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, California lawmakers sought a way to channel the patriotic fervour and use it to help victims' families and law enforcement. Their answer: specialty memorial license plates emblazoned with the words, 'We Will Never Forget.' Part of the money raised through the sale of the plates was to fund scholarships for the children of California residents who perished in the attacks, while the majority - 85 per cent - was to help fund anti-terrorism efforts. But an Associated Press review of the $15 million collected since lawmakers approved the 'California Memorial Scholarship Program' shows only a...

While Army Sgt. Matthew Corrigan was sound asleep inside his Northwest D.C. home, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) was preparing to launch a full-scale invasion of his home. SWAT and explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) teams spent four hours readying the assault on the English basement apartment in the middle of the snowstorm of the century. (This is part two of a four part series on Sgt. Corrigan's case. Click here to read the first story.) The police arrested the veteran of the Iraq war and searched his house without a warrant, not to protect the public from a terrorist or...

Twenty-four hours after a police officer shot Lily, a 5-year-old Border Collie-English Setter mix, its owners still don't understand why the police officer was on their property and why he used lethal force. ... had just returned from a shopping trip and their two dogs had slipped into their truck, then into the garage, before re-emerging when an officer walked up the driveway... Asked by the officer to control his two dogs, Mark Boling urged him not to advance, but he did. "My dogs don't bite, They're not going to hurt you," Boling, 52, an electronics technician with a defense...

MONTEREY, Tenn. -- "If somebody told me this happened to them, I absolutely would not believe this could happen in America." "You live in the United States, you think you have rights -- and apparently you don't," said George Reby.

Here's a great way to reduce overhead and be effective at running a national organization dedicated to infringing on the gun rights of everyday people all at the same time... Have cities hire your people for you so that tax payers cover 1/4 of your people’s salary and benefits, pay for most of their operational costs, and finance all of their other resources! It also embeds your people as leaders in city government so that you don’t have to lobby there! Sounds like another conspiracy theory from the tinfoil hat brigade... Right? Back in March, while researching the repeal of...

Union Statistics: What You May Not Know | LaborUnionReport.com Monday, May 28th, 2012 HomeLaborUnionReport Updates DAILY NEWSGeneral NewsProject Labor AgreementsPublic Sector UnionsUnion BossesUnion HypocrisyUnion OrganizingUnion StrikeUnion Violence Legal UpdatesNLRB Watch National Right to Work Political Updates EconomyEnvironmentalismHealth CareImmigrationMarxism/Socialism Union Corruption Union Corruption Report The Blogroll Filed Under:  LaborUnionReport Updates Union Statistics: What You May Not Know September 15th 2011   ·   1 Comment Tweet Sharebar Tweet The folks at UnionFacts.com have a ‘vital statistics‘ page that provides some good information about unions that many Americans may not know. Here is just some of the information:Financial Information Annual Dues Paid to Unions: $8,217,838,676 Total...

After nearly two weeks of heated debate over whether President Obama should attack Republican Mitt Romney’s tenure at a private-equity firm, Democratic leaders across the country say they are largely united behind the strategy, even as some concede an uncertain outcome and new polls show Obama has lost ground nationally. The Democratic leaders, in numerous interviews over the last week, said they are hearing little or no resistance among the party faithful in their states to a strategy that Republicans have characterized as anti-capitalist. And Obama has no plans to back off; his campaign will roll out more stories in...

On Thursday, MSNBC's Al Sharpton took the race card to a whole new level by falsely claiming Republicans are like Hitler, and are prepared to kill African-Americans en masse. "It seems like they [Republicans] act as though, some wiping out of people, some of the right-wing, is all right, it’s not all right to do to any innocent people. If you had war and people that’s one thing, but to wipe out innocent people just because of who they are like what was done in Hitler’s Germany or what was done to Native Americans is not justifiable," he said....

Sen. Ron Johnson said Thursday that every member of the state legislature in Wisconsin received an email that said “we’re going to put a bullet in your head. We know where you and your family live.” Johnson, speaking in Washington, D.C. at America’s Future Foundation’s annual gala, said that at the height of Gov. Scott Walker’s fight against the unions, every member of the state legislature was threatened. “The story really wasn’t told properly — we had every member of the state legislature get an email that said, ‘We’re going to put a bullet in your head. We know where...

North Las Vegas released 70 inmates from its jail Thursday, part of a plan to reduce the size of the facility brought on by a rash of correctional officers calling in sick last weekend, a city official said Friday. The release of inmates — all of whom were nonviolent offenders — comes days after city leaders told corrections officers their jobs were in jeopardy as the city tries to balance its budget. Nearly 50 shifts were not covered for three days last weekend due to correction officers calling in sick, he said. The sick calls forced the city to cover...

Here’s a riddle: What comes in group of four and is the color of French’s Mustard? After a week of deliberations, the four alternate jurors have become the prime distraction for the assembled press corps and spectators in the courtroom. On Thursday the alternates – three women and one man – caused something of a stir when they showed up in matching bright yellow shirts, hardly bothering to suppress their snickering as the judge addressed the main panel of jurors. Today they are all wearing red. For nearly four weeks, 16 jurors heard all the evidence in Edwards’ case....

Barry was quite the accomplished marijuana enthusiast back in high school and college. Excerpts from David Maraniss' Barack Obama: The Story dealing with the elaborate drug culture surrounding the president when he attended Punahou School in Honolulu and Occidental College in Los Angeles. He inhaled. A lot. A self-selected group of boys at Punahou School who loved basketball and good times called themselves the Choom Gang. Choom is a verb, meaning "to smoke marijuana."

For decades, it was presumed that having blacks in positions of political leadership on the local, state and national levels would serve as a safeguard to preserve the victories of the civil rights movement and ensure that the people on whose behalf those battles had been fought could benefit from the new opportunities that those victories afforded. But in time, just the opposite has happened. In an era where race has begun to serve as both a shield (rebuffing legitimate criticism as evidence of racism) and a sword (attacking dissenting opinions as racist) many black officials have entered zones of...

Two months ago, Barack Obama decided he could intimidate the United States Supreme Court into finding his namesake healthcare plan Constitutional. Overturning the Affordable Care Act “…would amount to an unprecedented, extraordinary step of judicial activism” said the President at a rare White House news conference, adding “…I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected congress.” (1) Though someone with the hyper-arrogant mentality of the Manchurian Candidate doesn’t really need a reason to direct this sort of...

Deputy Attorney General James Cole releases a statement without a hint of factual backing. The congressional investigations into the gunwalking plot known as Operation Fast and Furious largely faded from the public eye over the past month, yet there is a growing conviction among legislators of both parties that a grueling political battle is ahead.Those determined to uncover the truth behind Fast and Furious are being opposed by Democratic congressmen and Obama administration officials such as Deputy Attorney General James Cole. Cole has objected to the House Oversight Committee’s investigation and the actions of Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa. His recent...

For most of the past decade, North Las Vegas was one of the fastest-growing cities in America. Construction crews couldn’t build houses quickly enough. New schools, parks and neighborhoods popped up seemingly overnight. Restaurants and shopping plazas overtook desert stretches, and plans were drawn for “casino alley,” a mini-Strip of gaming resorts. Most residents welcomed the growth. A 2009 survey found that half the population rated the quality of life in North Las Vegas as excellent or good. Three-quarters of residents said they’d recommend living in the city.

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) seems to have it out for our military. The department is using the city’s pointless firearm registration mandate to harass, arrest and jail servicemen. Army 1st Sergeant Matt Corrigan was woken in the middle of the night, forced out of his home, arrested, had his home ransacked, had his guns seized and was thrown in jail -- where he was lost in the prison system for two weeks -- all because the District refuses to recognize the meaning of the Second Amendment. This week, the city dropped all charges against Sgt. Corrigan, but the damage...

Though the Obama campaign has repeatedly attacked Mitt Romney for his career at Bain Capital, President Obama still accepted $7,500 in campaign contributions from three Bain executives. His campaign press secretary, Ben LaBolt told The Politicker the president has no intention of giving the money back. “No one aside from Mitt Romney is running for President highlighting their tenure as a corporate buyout specialist as one of job creation, when in fact, his goal was profit maximization,” said Mr. LaBolt. ”The President has support from business leaders across industries who have seen him pull the economy back from the brink...

The Environmental Protection Agency held 12 hours of stacked hearings in Washington, D.C. and Chicago on Thursday in favor of a regulation that analysts have concluded would kill the building of new conventional coal plants in the U.S. Among the participants scheduled to testify in consecutive five minute blocks throughout the day were multiple representatives from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and environmental activists from the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace. The proposed rule, reported by The Washington Post in March, limits the amount of greenhouse gases emitted...

What's green and blue and grabby all over? President Obama's new pressure campaign for Congress to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST). The fight over LOST goes back three decades, when it was first rejected by President Ronald Reagan. He warned that "no national interest of the United States could justify handing sovereign control of two-thirds of the Earth's surface over to the Third World." According to top Reagan officials William Clark and Ed Meese, their boss believed the "central, and abiding, defect" was "its effort to promote global government at the expense of sovereign nation states --...

Climategate, the 2009 exposure of misconduct at the University of East Anglia, was a terrible blow to the reputation of climatology, and indeed to that of British and American science. Although that story hasn’t been in the news in recent months, new evidence of similar scientific wrongdoing continues to emerge, with a new scandal hitting the climate blogosphere just a few days ago.And central to the newest story is one of the Climategate scientists: Keith Briffa, an expert in reconstructing historical temperature records from tree rings. More particularly, the recent scandal involves a tree-ring record Briffa prepared for a...

Republicans in Congress better wake up and start freezing some of their own targets against the left if they hope to see a GOP victory in November. The level of corruption, from murdered federal agents to looting taxpayer monies got green companies like Solyndra to the war on religion should be enough to have our elected representatives up in arms. Yet, there are still legislators who remain squeamish in the face of our constitutional republic's impending demise. Sarah Palin got it right on Monday while on Fox News' "Hannity." "This phony, hypocritical, one-sided call for a cease-fire by the left...

WASHINGTON (CBSDC) – With the use of domestic drones increasing, concern has not just come up over privacy issues, but also over the potential use of lethal force by the unmanned aircraft. Drones have been used overseas to target and kill high-level terror leaders and are also being used along the U.S.-Mexico border in the battle against illegal immigration. But now, these drones are starting to be used domestically at an increasing rate. The Federal Aviation Administration has allowed several police departments to use drones across the U.S. They are controlled from a remote location and use infrared sensors and...

A bill that would close an IRS tax credit loophole that allows the IRS to funnel over $4 billion to illegal immigrants is being held up by Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV). Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, has been vocal in his disdain for the blatant misuse of taxpayer monies: I’m disappointed that the Majority Leader objected to our effort today to prevent billions in tax credits from being wrongly sent to illegal immigrants claiming they have dependents, many of whom do not live in...