Free Republic

Actress and liberal activist Susan Sarandon is still blaming America’s homeless problem on Ronald Reagan. The actress, probably best known for her role in the 1988 baseball hit movie Bull Durham, was invited on the May 13 edition of PBS’s Tavis Smiley to plug her son’s 2014 documentary, Storied Streets, that is now available on AMC’s streaming service. When Smiley asked Sarandon why the issue of homelessness was no longer on the “radar for discussion” she blamed former President Ronald Reagan, as seen in the following exchange: TAVIS SMILEY: There was a time that I recall where the issue of...

Despite fury from lawmakers the day before, Colorado’s health exchange board voted on Thursday to collect millions of additional dollars from all Colorado health insurance customers, even those who have nothing to do with the exchange. On top of that “broad market assessment,” the board also voted to more than double the user fees levied on people who buy insurance through Colorado’s exchange. .. The higher broad market fee is projected to allow Connect for Health Colorado to scoop up about about $20 million in 2016. It has been set at $1.25 per member per month on all health insurance...

The Wall Street Journal reported on the Stephanopoulos scandal on Friday, and found another national TV anchor in the database. “Judy Woodruff, the co-anchor and managing editor of PBS NewsHour, gave $250 in 2010 to the foundation’s aid efforts for victims of the Haiti earthquake.” She was a senior correspondent then, before Jim Lehrer retired. Woodruff initially recalled the donation as being for $1,000, but based the $250 amount as the one on her 2010 tax return. Woodruff tried to make it sound bipartisan: “I made the gift in response to an urgent joint appeal from former President Clinton and...

The mysterious deaths of four people found in a burning house in Northwest Washington on Thursday afternoon prompted police to ask the public for help in investigating what they called a highly suspicious fire. Police said that three adults and a child, whose identities were not released, were found on the second floor of a home on Woodland Drive NW, just north of the vice president’s residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory. Police did not say how they died. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said that detectives were trying to track the movements of a blue 2008 Porsche, with D.C....

A child and three adults were found dead after a house fire in the affluent suburbs of Northwest D.C. that is being investigated as a homicide. The spacious $2 million family home, a short walk from Joe Biden's home on Embassy Row, is owned by Savvas Savopoulos, president and CEO of American Iron Works, the leading manufacturer of building works in the United States. Savopoulos, 46, lived with his wife Amy, two teenage daughters Abigail and Katerina, 10-year-old son Philip, and two house keepers in the exclusive neighborhood alongside numerous ambassadors. Friends of the Savopoulos family told DailyMail.com fourth-grader Philip...

(CNSNews.com) – Attorney General Loretta Lynch vowed on Tuesday to continue the Obama administration’s push for public schools to abandon their “zero tolerance” discipline policy, because critics claim it is aimed disproportionately at minority students and other “at risk” youth, including migrants and LGBT students. “We are working with our partners in the private sector, and of course, the federal government, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, to end the school to prison pipeline that sends too many children on the well-worn path from the schoolhouse to the jailhouse,” Lynch said at the National...

Law enforcement officers at Washington, D.C.’s annual Police Week tell The Daily Caller that the anti-police climate is taking its toll on the men and women in uniform and that morale is low in departments across the country.

She might be married to the most powerful man in the free world, but it’s a tough gig to be Michelle Obama. While speaking to graduates at Tuskegee University in Alabama, Obama described times she has been the recipient of racist and sexist remarks and the media has been super-mean to her and really hurt her feelings. Politically, it was tough to be a Democrat, married to a guy with the middle name Hussein, and, you know, winning elections like a boss. Like the time she and Barack Obama had a “on-stage celebratory fist bump” after a primary win and...

At least 50 people were hurt after an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia Tuesday night, according to officials. Read more: http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Amtrak-Derailment-Philadelphia--303536331.html#ixzz3ZypyykBM Follow us: @nbcphiladelphia on Twitter | nbcphiladelphia on Facebook

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) says with budgets like the GOP plan, “the have-nots of this country will rise up like the people in Baltimore.” […] “What happened in Baltimore stems from deeper economic issues and if you would take a ride down the streets of some of the greatly impoverished areas of Baltimore where change has not come, where things are the same as they were 50 years ago and have been allowed to grow worse then you will understand the lack of hope of which those riots are born from.” “So are you saying, when you say ‘rise up...

R.J. Hillhouse, a former professor, Fulbright fellow and novelist whose writing on intelligence and military outsourcing has appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times, made the same main assertions in 2011 about the death of Osama bin Laden as Seymour Hersh’s new story in the London Review of Books — apparently based on different sources than those used by Hersh. Bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011. Three months later, on August 7, Hillhouse posted a story on her blog “The Spy Who Billed Me” stating that (1) the U.S. did not learn about...

Citing interviews with “a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad” and American sources who “had access to corroborating information,” Hersh writes that the American government did not act alone in locating and killing Bin Laden, as it has consistently claimed. On the contrary, Hersh’s sources say that senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI)—Pakistan’s equivalent of the CIA—knew as early as 2006 that Bin Laden was in Abbottabad, and cooperated with the U.S. in the assassination. Specifically, the story says that top Pakistani Army Gen. Ashfaq...

For close to 20 years now, I’ve been observing and reporting on a disturbing trend in law enforcement – the federalization and militarization of local police forces. Until recently, practically no one noticed what was happening. But with the focus on police shootings and the civil disturbances that have followed – sometimes involving tanks, military-style gear and Kevlar – it’s hard not to notice that local cops don’t exactly look like Officer Joe Bolton anymore. It was none other than Al Sharpton (I won’t call him reverend) who suggested recently that the answer to the use of excessive force by...

Former Obama Admin Aide Rapes 2 Women, Gets No Jail Time for INSANE Reason May 10, 2015 By Colleen Conley FacebookTwitterMore926 With the aid of a complicit media, liberals have become untouchable when it comes to nefarious and even criminal behavior under the Obama Administration. A serious double standard now exists; conservatives involved in scandals and crimes are still held accountable, while Democrats, more often than not, get a free pass. Case in point: last year, Donny Ray Williams, a former Democrat congressional aide, pleaded guilty to raping two women. According to reports, in 2010, Williams subdued his first victim,...

Dignitaries and veterans commemorated the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe at a ceremony at the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. Speakers included White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice and author and World War II historian Alex Kershaw. The ceremony was followed by a flyover by dozens of World War II aircraft. May 8, 1945, marked the formal acceptance by the Allied forces of Germany’s unconditional surrender.

Likely Republican presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham predicted Thursday that the GOP will lose the 2016 presidential election unless they win over Hispanic voters by supporting a “long, hard path to citizenship.” “If I were president of the United States, I would veto any bill that did not have a pathway to citizenship,” the South Carolina Republican told USA Today. “You would have a long, hard path to citizenship … but I want to create that path because I don’t like the idea of millions of people living in America for the rest of their lives being the hired help....

Sally Kohn is a hard left pundit on MSNBC. She took to Twitter yesterday to give a shout-out to a D.C. MTA cop for saving her when she forgot her wallet and couldn’t pay for the subway. But she also couldn’t help but impute political and racial motives for the gesture: Forgot my wallet. MTA officer let me on subway for free. #classprivilege #whiteprivilege It was the hashtags on her post that got her taken to the Twitter woodshed. She assumed she’d received the favor because of her race and class. Followers let her have it: -snip- Recently, Kohn gave...

I didn't realize this was happening until I ran across it on a search. 70 vintage planes flying over the most restricted airspace in the world. Should be cool. For the first time since 21 Jan 2009, I wish I was in DC.

Buzzfeed reports on the shoddy attendance record of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) : Cruz’s attendance at both committee hearings and in the Senate generally has come under criticism recently. Politico reported that Cruz missed 21 of the 135 roll call votes taken in the Senate this year. In addition, the same review noted that Cruz was present at 17 out of 50 public Armed Services committee meetings, and had “below average” attendance at his other committees. “If you are making the point he can’t talk about such topics because he wasn’t at these two hearings that is utterly ridiculous,” a...

Mark Levin believes blackmail or something may be going behind the scenes in the Senate. Here’s why: NATIONAL REVIEW – The rumors began trickling in about a week before the scheduled vote on April 23: Republican leadership was quietly pushing senators to pull support for subpoenaing Congress’s fraudulent application to the District of Columbia’s health exchange — the document that facilitated Congress’s “exemption” from Obamacare by allowing lawmakers and staffers to keep their employer subsidies. The application said Congress employed just 45 people. Names were faked; one employee was listed as “First Last,” another simply as “Congress.” To Small Business...