Free Republic

The co-founder of the opposition research firm behind the Steele dossier, Glenn Simpson, will invoke his First and Fifth Amendment privileges to avoid testifying before Congress next week, his lawyer has told Congress. According to The Hill, Simpson’s attorney, Joshua Levy, told House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte that Simpson will not appear for a deposition because the congressional investigation “is not designed to discover the truth.” The Virginia Republican subpoenaed Simpson on Sept. 29 after Levy said his client would not appear voluntarily for an interview before members of the House Judiciary and House Oversight & Government Reform...

The Path to IgnoranceOne common denominator characterizes almost all unrest on college campuses: the demands to create more “-studies” courses (black, Latino, feminist, gay, etc.) and thus to hire more -studies professors. An empiricist from Mars might observe that the chief beneficiaries of the protests are -studies academics. They alone will win more jobs and classes, which otherwise few students wish to attend and from which fewer gain any factual knowledge, written and oral speaking skills, or improvement in inductive thinking. A good leftist would cite conflict of interest: the more -studies professors egg on students to protest for more...

On Meet the Press this morning, Donald Trump insisted that: he was "100 percent right" when he said he saw thousands of Muslims in Jersey City, New Jersey, cheering the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, even though fact-checkers have debunked his assertion. In a phone interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," Trump said he has heard from "hundreds of people that agree" that there were televised Muslim celebrations of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which he used as evidence to show his remarks were true. "I saw it. So many people saw it," said Trump, who, in the...

In recent years, Goldman Sachs has become renowned as one of the savviest players on Wall Street. This week, however, the mighty US bank was forced into an embarrassing admission. In a rare unplanned investor call, the bank revealed that a flagship global equity fund had lost over 30 per cent of its value in a week because of problems with its trading strategies created by computer models. In particular, the computers had failed to foresee recent market movements to such a degree that they labelled them a “25-standard deviation event” – something that only happens once every 100,000 years...

A retired French professor sent dog feces to her congresswoman's office after becoming angry with receiving too many mailings and her lawyer says she had a constitutional right to do it. Kathleen Ensz faces a misdemeanor charge of "use of a noxious substance" after taking dog feces from her backyard, wrapping it in a political mailer from Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, and leaving the putrid package at the Republican's office, according to court documents. Ensz, a Democrat, was angered by repeatedly receiving mailings from Musgrave. Her lawyer calls the poo delivery a form of free expression, protected by the First Amendment....