Free Republic

Shortly after the Supreme Court declared affirmative action college admission policies unconstitutional, President Joe Biden said his administration would direct the Department of Education to scrutinize how "practices like legacy admissions … expand privilege instead of opportunity." The department could start by examining how politically connected families like the Bidens get their children into Ivy League schools. In 2018, Hunter Biden tapped his father and a number of Biden family connections to help get his daughter into the University of Pennsylvania. Text messages and emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, show how Joe and Hunter...

The U.S. military mission to evacuate American citizens and foreign allies from Afghanistan was hampered by continuous appeals for help from an array of advocates including White House officials, members of Congress, veterans of the war, media outlets and even the Vatican, according to the operation’s senior commander.

Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told Breitbart News Sunday this weekend that billionaire left-wing financier George Soros told then-President Barack Obama to investigate someone. Dershowitz would not identify who, precisely, the target of the investigation was, but said that the name would soon emerge in in a lawsuit that had yet to be filed. “President @BarackObama personally asked the @FBI to investigate somebody on behalf of #GeorgeSoros…” –@AlanDersh on @BreitbartNews Sunday with @joelpollak. For #dershowitz's full commentary on #WilliamBarr, #RogerStone, and the #Impeachment trial, go to @siriusxm OnDemand! pic.twitter.com/KM7szKoH3s — SiriusXM Patriot (@SiriusXMPatriot) February 17, 2020 The revelation...

Today’s long-awaited announcement that former Vice President Joe Biden is running for president is expected to instantly catapult Lunch Bucket Joe to front-runner status in a crowded Democrat primary field. For weeks, polls have shown the 76-year-old serial groper holding steady as the 2020 favorite of more than a quarter of his party’s voters. CNBC’s Christina Wilkie reports a Monmouth University poll of Democrats nationwide, released Tuesday, shows Biden leads the rest of the party’s field, with 27% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters saying they would support him for the Democratic nomination. In the same poll a month ago, Biden...

Numerous FBI agents accused of leaking appear to have improperly received benefits from journalists, reflecting a “cultural attitude” flaunting Bureau policies on unauthorized media contacts, the Justice Department Inspector General report concluded. The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General made the discovery as it struggled to identify possible FBI agents improperly transmitting to reporters, according to its report released Thursday on the agency’s handling of the 2016 probe into Hillary Clinton’s unsecured, private email server. According to the watchdog report, investigators had “profound concerns about the volume and extent of unauthorized media contacts by FBI personnel that we have uncovered...

A few months after Hillary Clinton took over as U.S. secretary of state in 2009, a longtime associate with connections to the Clinton Foundation insisted that her senior aides give a job to an unidentified male associate. “Important to take care of [name redacted],” Douglas Band, President Bill Clinton’s former right-hand man, wrote to Clinton aides Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and Nora Toiv in an April 22, 2009, email. “We have all had him on our radar,” Abedin responded. “Personnel has been sending him options.” The subject line on the email read “A favor…” The email exchanged was uncovered by...

The Post reports, “A federal appeals panel court on Thursday unanimously affirmed the public corruption convictions against former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell, writing in an 89-page opinion that the onetime Republican rising star ‘received a fair trial and was duly convicted by a jury of his fellow Virginians.'” Of most relevance and interest to other pols, McDonnell’s attorneys argued he had not performed any “official acts” in exchange for bribes. The court nixed that complaint: The appeals court panel disagreed, asserting that the government had “exceeded its burden” of proof on the topic of official acts. The opinion cited...

Six years ago, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid celebrated what he called a "love fest" of government support for the construction of a proposed 150,000-home community in the Nevada desert and the lobbyist-turned-developer behind it, Harvey Whittemore. Last week, a federal grand jury charged Mr. Whittemore with making illegal political contributions to Mr. Reid, a Democrat. Even before the indictment, Mr. Reid and other politicians had begun to distance themselves from Mr. Whittemore—long one of Nevada's most powerful lobbyists—by pledging to charity money to offset donations they had gotten from him. ~~snip~~ The allegations against Mr. Whittemore stem from a...

The Center for Public Integrity released a new report on Obama’s 2012 bundlers yesterday: Dozens of Obama’s elite donors — many of them wealthy business figures — have been appointed to advisory panels and commissions that can play a role in setting government policy. Others have been invited to a range of exclusive White House briefings, holiday parties and splashy social events. And some have snagged lucrative government contracts that benefit their business interests or investment portfolios, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found. Here’s the breakdown: At least 68 of 350 Obama bundlers for the 2012 election or...

Do not LOVE the world or anything in the world. If anyone LOVES the world, the LOVE of the Father is not in him. 1 John 2:15 Most people in America think Oregon is this beautiful state on the Pacific coast that has forested mountains with lakes full of trout. They imagine this state somewhere in the west that is a place to vacation and get away from the big city to escape city life with all of its fast pace and dog eat dog world. Nothing could be further from the truth, it is a natural wonderland but this...

GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has gotten himself into hot water with the Arab world, and with the Palestinian Authority over an interview he gave to The Jewish Channel. Gingrich last week told the Jewish cable television station that the claim of Palestinian Authority Arabs to be "a people" is not legitimate, and that diplomatic efforts by the Obama administration in fact "favored the terrorists." The former Speaker of the House of Representatives said in the interview, "Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire" until the early 20th century. "I think that...

The man accused of shooting and killing a Georgia State Patrol trooper may have gone in and out of the Fulton County jail's revolving door for eleven years, but Gregory Favor's latest trip to jail is likely to be his last. Legal experts say that the slaying of Trooper First Class Chadwick LeCroy meets all the requirements for prosecutors to seek the death penalty in Georgia. Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard has yet to comment on the case. But killing a law enforcement officer in the line of duty is generally regarded as one of the most heinous crimes...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Americans now favor Republicans over Democrats on handling critical issues like the economy, taxes, terrorism and the budget deficit, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday. One month after a sweeping Republican victory in congressional elections, public confidence in Democrats has plummeted from a year ago on the issues that matter most, the survey found. "Republicans have really recovered from their post-election 2008 low and now have a very strong lead on the issues that are most important to the American people -- the economy, taxes, the deficit," Ipsos pollster Julia Clark said. "Republicans are positioning...

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. Federal Reserve should do "much more" monetary easing to spur a sluggish economic recovery, a top Fed official said in an interview published on Tuesday. "In the last several months I've stared at our unemployment forecast and come to the conclusion that it's just not coming down nearly as quickly as it should," Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Evans told the Wall Street Journal. "This is a far grimmer forecast than we ought to have," he said, for which reason he favors "much more accommodation than we've put in place." The U.S. unemployment...

After getting frustrated out of the lemons his problems gave him, David Miller made his own corporate lemonade. Due to the frustration of always having to call technical support to solve his own frequent hardware problems, he started taking the initiative to educate himself.

While a congressman, Emanuel asked for trades with embattled gov. ### President Barack Obama's chief of staff, then a congressman in Illinois, apparently attempted to trade favors with embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich while he was in office, according to newly disclosed e-mails obtained by The Associated Press. Emanuel agreed to sign a letter to the Chicago Tribune supporting Blagojevich in the face of a scathing editorial by the newspaper that ridiculed the governor for self-promotion. Within hours, Emanuel's own staff asked for a favor of its own: The release of a delayed $2 million grant to a school in...

Oh but I am not buying it! Even though I am a Republican, I still hope that Obama will change the culture in Washington. But I have to report in this area of Ambassadorships, Obama has turned into a Bush clone. I have written previously about how Bush gave Ambassador posts as a reward (Bush once gave a posting to the CEO of Ameriquest Mortgage to the Netherlands after his company went out of business and was sued over 160 times for help causing the sub-prime meltdown) for raising money for him, and Obama seems to have forgotten his promise...

(CNSNews.com) - Under the Senate Finance Committee version of the health-care bill, health insurance companies would be allowed to charge tobacco users premiums up to 50 percent higher than those of non-users, while marijuana and crack cocaine smokers could not be penalized with higher premiums. According to provisions spelled out in the Senate Finance Committee's summary of the bill--the so-called "chairman's mark"--insurance issuers selling policies to individuals could only vary premiums based on three characteristics: tobacco use, age and family composition.

The California Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a Northern California timber company that plans to clear-cut more than 1,000 acres in the Sierra Nevada. In an unanimous ruling Thursday, the state's high court said the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection had acted properly in approving logging plans submitted by Sierra Pacific Industries. Those plans call for clear-cutting about 1,100 acres near Calaveras Big Trees State Park in Calaveras County. Sierra Pacific, California's largest private landowner, has indicated it wants to replicate the same forest-clearing practice on 70 percent of its holdings. The Anderson-based company owns 1.6...

Same-sex couples from New York whose marriages in Massachusetts faced a legal challenge there have valid marriages in that state, a Massachusetts court found last week, meaning their marriages are presumably legal in New York as well, lawyers say. The court's judgment affects what lawyers say is at least dozens of New Yorkers who married in Massachusetts between May 2004, when Massachusetts began marrying same-sex couples, and July 2006.