Free Republic

In 2011, Gallup reported that 62% of 18-29 year olds and 50% of the general public supports the legalization of marijuana; 69% of liberals and even 34% of conservatives also support such measures. Obviously the pro-pot movement has taken root in the American populace and especially in the minds of Millennials (even managing to infiltrate the minds of the most conservative among us). Myth #1: Legalization Would bring in Enormous Tax Revenues The Heritage Foundation’s Charles Stimson published an extensive legal memorandum urging for the failure of the RCTC Act of 2010, which would have legalized pot in California. This...

“San Jose Police Detective Matthew Christian created a document, on letterhead that bore the seal of the Santa Clara County Crime Lab, which falsely stated that Michael Kerkeles’s semen was found at the alleged crime scene. The fake report purported to be authored by a technician named ‘Rebecca Roberts.’ Christian then testified under oath that the report was true.

The Transportation Security Administration isn't just in airports anymore. TSA teams are increasingly conducting searches and screenings at train stations, subways, ferry terminals and other mass transit locations around the country... The TSA's 25 "viper" teams — for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response — have run more than 9,300 unannounced checkpoints and other search operations in the last year. Department of Homeland Security officials have asked Congress for funding to add 12 more teams next year. According to budget documents, the department spent $110 million in fiscal 2011 for "surface transportation security," including the TSA's viper program, and is asking...

BOSTON -- A Peabody woman says a cupcake she tried to take on a flight with her sparked a potential security threat this week. Rebecca Hains says she was going through security at the airport in Las Vegas when a TSA agent pulled her aside and said the cupcake frosting was “gel-like” enough to constitute a security risk. She said she was able to pass through Logan International Airport security with two cupcakes, but she was stopped on the way back when she tried to return with one of them.

GULFPORT -- Spook was chained in his front yard on 20th Street when police officers with a search warrant went to the house and one of them shot the 3-year-old pit bull, witnesses said. **** She said Spook was a gentle inside dog but was outside on a chain while relatives were outside. Clark was inside when she heard the commotion. “If the officer felt threatened by my dog, he had time to back off. I kept hearing my child saying over and over, ‘Please don’t shoot my dog,’” Clark said. “My dog was my best friend,” she said. Clark’s...

When I first read this morning that the police had paid a nocturnal visit to the blogger Tallbloke to confiscate his computers I thought at first it was a non-story. Jolly annoying and inconvenient for Tallbloke, obviously, but nothing too sinister. Tallbloke was one of the first people contacted when mystery whistleblower FOIA 2011 leaked the Climategate 2.0 files onto the internet; the ongoing investigation by Norfolk police into the identity of the Climategate leaker has been singularly unsuccessful; so it seemed sadly inevitable that in their flailing desperation to be seen to be doing something, anything, to get their...

An 84-year-old grandmother in a wheelchair abused by Transportation Security Administration screeners at John F. Kennedy airport plans to sue the TSA, complaining of injuries and extreme humiliation suffered during a strip search. Homeland Security spokesmen, however, said “proper procedures were followed” and later claimed that the victim’s clothes were not fully removed. In a phone interview with The New American, the traumatized 103-pound woman, Lenore Zimmerman, warned that America was in “deep trouble” if manhandling frail grandmothers was what “security” had come to. But she plans to seek justice and has already contacted an attorney. “They stopped me to...

An 85-year-old Long Island grandmother says she plans to sue the TSA after a humiliating strip search on Tuesday by agents at JFK Airport. Lenore Zimmerman, who lives in Long Beach, says she was on her way to a 1 p.m. flight to Fort Lauderdale when security whisked her to a private room and took off her clothes. “I walk with a walker — I really look like a terrorist,” she said sarcastically. “I’m tiny. I weigh 110 pounds, 107 without clothes, and I was strip-searched.” TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said a review of closed circuit TV footage from the...

Garland wants to be your boss, your big brother, your nanny, your wet nurse and your house sitter all rolled into one. Heather Fazio, Texas Libertarian Party Membership Coordinator, issued the following Action Alert about Garland's city council meeting scheduled for November 14: Council is requested to consider the recommendation of the Building and Fire Code Board and the Plumbing and Mechanical Code Board to adopt the 2009 International Fire, Residential, Building, Energy Conservation, Plumbing, Mechanical, Property Maintenance and Fuel Gas Codes along with local amendments. What this means, Fazio explains, is that the city wants to make it mandatory...

Matthew Spaulding says he and his family were terrorized at their own home by police who slammed his grandmother to the ground and shot his dogs-- missing his head by less than an inch. "Told us to get on the ground. I got on the ground they put me in handcuffs," Spaulding recalls, "Then they threw my dad to the ground and my dog Sadie was right here sniffing my head. She was next to me. They shot her. The blood got on my face and then she took off running behind me and they shot her like three more...

(NaturalNews) It is the latest case of extreme government food tyranny, and one that is sure to have you reeling in anger and disgust. Health department officials recently conducted a raid of Quail Hollow Farm, an organic community supported agriculture (CSA) farm in southern Nevada, during its special "farm to fork" picnic dinner put on for guests -- and the agent who arrived on the scene ordered that all the fresh, local produce and pasture-based meat that was intended for the meal be destroyed with bleach. For about five years now, Quail Hollow Farm has been growing organic produce and...

A former NYPD narcotics detective snared in a corruption scandal testified it was common practice to fabricate drug charges against innocent people to meet arrest quotas. The bombshell testimony from Stephen Anderson is the first public account of the twisted culture behind the false arrests in the Brooklyn South and Queens narc squads, which led to the arrests of eight cops and a massive shakeup. Anderson, testifying under a cooperation agreement with prosecutors, was busted for planting cocaine, a practice known as "flaking," on four men in a Queens bar in 2008 to help out fellow cop Henry Tavarez, whose...

An internal U.S. Department of Homeland Security document indicates that a controversial program designed to predict whether a person will commit a crime is already being tested on some members of the public voluntarily, CNET has learned. If this sounds a bit like the Tom Cruise movie called "Minority Report," or the CBS drama "Person of Interest," it is. But where "Minority Report" author Philip K. Dick enlisted psychics to predict crimes, DHS is betting on algorithms: it's building a "prototype screening facility" that it hopes will use factors such as ethnicity, gender, breathing, and heart rate to "detect cues...

Apple's team searched the home, car and computer files, while police waited outside, the reports say. The investigators reportedly told the man that they had traced the phone's GPS signal to his house. When asked, he said he had been at the same bar where the phone was reportedly lost but that he didn't have it, the report says. One of the investigators, who identified himself as Tony, gave the man living in the house a phone number and told him to call with any information about the lost phone, the report says. When the SF Weekly reporter called, a...

The front page of last Tuesday's Times-Dispatch carried a startling photo: Richmond police officers taking a suspect into custody. What was startling was the display of force. The officers, accompanied by a robot and decked out in full riot gear with shield and combat helmets, could have been mistaken for American soldiers on patrol in Iraq. Yet they were going up against a single man — and they were not even sure was armed. Regrettably, this is not a new development. In recent years police forces across the country have become increasingly militarized. To a small degree, that trend represents...

A Concord man giving away lemonade at a farmer's market was threatened with wiretapping charges last Saturday when he refused to stop filming a police officer and a fellow vendor. Garret Ean didn't have a permit to sell lemonade, which drew the ire of the president of the Concord Farmer's Market. Ean filmed the confrontation, and continued to film when a Concord cop showed up and threatened to arrest him for wiretapping. Photojournalist Carlos Miller (who we interviewed for the November issue of Reason about the war on photography) has the story: The man, whom Ean identified as Steve Blasdell,...

Federal agents with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service shut down the Gibson Guitar factory in Downtown Memphis today to serve search warrants in an ongoing investigation, officials said. Nicholas Chavez, special agent in charge for U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Region 2 in Albuquerque, N.M., said agents also served a search warrant on Gibson Guitar in Nashville. In November 2009, agents for the service searched the guitar maker's manufacturing plant in Nashville, reportedly during an investigation of use of woods banned from commercial use for environmental reasons.

Organized crime cannot exist without public corruption, and there's no freakin' way the Mexican drug cartels can move $50 billion in bulk product and bundled cash each year throughout the United States without a little help from well-placed friends. Indeed, in the last sixteen months nine South Texas lawmen have been charged with "using their badges to sneak drugs or guns through the U.S.-Mexico border region from Laredo to Brownsville" as reported by Dane Schiller for the Houston Chronicle: Interviews and court records and testimony show the South Texas cases often involve one officer at a time pulled to the...

Government critics deserve their day in court. You wouldn't think Aaron Tobey and Donald Rumsfeld have much in common. Tobey is the guy who stripped down to his shorts at the Richmond, Virginia airport last December. Rumsfeld is the former Defense Secretary under George W. Bush. Tobey, who was protesting the invasive airport screening practices that have outraged a good portion of the traveling public, is a stickler for constitutional rights. Rumsfeld? Not so much. The two of them, however, are united by a common case: Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents. The other day a federal appeals court said...

From certain precincts on the left, notably Barney Frank, to certain precincts on the right, notably the editorial page of National Review, we are witnessing a new push to end the so-called war on drugs and legalize drug use, starting with marijuana. Indeed, Ron Paul, Barney Frank's co-sponsor in the latest legislative effort, said recently he would go so far as to legalize heroin. It's a bad idea. My friends at National Review begin their case by stating the illegalization of drugs has "curtailed personal freedom, created a violent black market and filled our prisons." But the legalization of drugs,...

Americans must to decide if, in the name of homeland security, they are willing to allow TSA operatives to storm public places in their communities with no warning, pat them down, and search their bags. And they better decide quickly. Bus travelers were shocked when jackbooted TSA officers in black SWAT-style uniforms descended unannounced upon the Tampa Greyhound bus station in April with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and federal bureaucrats in tow. A news report by ABC Action News in Tampa showed passengers being given the signature pat downs Americans are used to watching the Transportation Security...

The lasting impact of the raid on Gary Adams' home became clear in a comment from his 3-year-old granddaughter during a recent trip to the pharmacy. "She said, 'Granddad. Police. Hide,' " Adams, 57, of Bellevue recalled Wednesday while discussing the federal lawsuit he filed against the officers who burst into his home March 3. Led by FBI Special Agent Karen Springmeyer, about a dozen officers used a battering ram to enter Adams' rented Orchard Street home in a search for Sondra Hunter, then 35. But Hunter hadn't lived at that address for almost two years, while Adams and his...

“He [a federal agent] had his knee on my back and I had no idea why they were there.”--Anthony Wright, victim of a Dept. of Education SWAT team raid The militarization of American police--no doubt a blowback effect of the military empire--has become an unfortunate part of American life. In fact, it says something about our reliance on the military that federal agencies having nothing whatsoever to do with national defense now see the need for their own paramilitary units. Among those federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions are the State Department, Department of Education, Department...

"Kenneth Wright does not have a criminal record and he had no reason to believe a S.W.A.T team would be breaking down his door at 6 a.m. on Tuesday."

Thursday they released hundreds of pages of search warrant documents, with a few lines redacted, but giving a much clearer picture of what led authorities to the Guerena home.

The county, through Chief Deputy District Attorney Stephanie Barker, argued to be dismissed from the case because Metro is an independent legal entity that adopts its own policies, procedures and rules. Barker told the judge that under state law the county isn’t liable for Metro’s conduct.

Records released by the Pima County Sheriff's Department this week show that the four houses served with search warrants the morning of May 5 - when Jose Guerena was shot and killed by a SWAT team - are less than four miles apart and are all connected to the Guerena family. And while initial reports were that doctors told the Guerena family that Jose had been shot 60 times, the Pima County medical examiner's preliminary report says he was shot 22 times. In its sole briefing on the incident, the Sheriff's Department said SWAT team members fired 71 rounds. Aside...

TUCSON (KGUN9-TV) – Video of the SWAT raid and deadly shooting of former Marine Jose Guerena has raised many questions from 9 On Your Side viewers who wanted to know how much force police are legally allowed to use when serving a search warrant. 9 On Your Side Reporter Steve Nuñez sat down with Criminal Defense Attorney Michael Bloom to show him the raw footage of the raid. The Pima County Sheriff's Department released the video to the media on Thursday. "I'm sure everyone's reaction first of all, it's horrible," said Bloom as he watched SWAT officers fire 71 bullets...

TSA strip searches young boy.

Kathryn, there’s no need to go through the drug debate all over again, but I did read what Bill Bennett and the others had to say, and I am afraid I was left shaking my head. After the destruction that the drug warriors have caused in this country and others (not to speak of their disastrous contribution to the war in Afghanistan), a little more humility on their part would go a long, long way. We’ve yet to see it. No matter. I had a look at the report cited by Mr. Bennett and, having done so, I can only...

The California State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) announced their “unconditional support” of Prop 19, the initiative to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana, at a news conference last week.

Los Angeles County, in response to rural non-compliance of environmental ordinances, has formed what they call the “Nuisance Abatement Team”. The enraged locals call it the NAT squad. The name sounds innocuous enough but its name camouflages what it is and does. The County has given the “Team” broad authority to come on your land and force compliance with draconian environmental law, literally at the point of a gun.

WASHINGTON — D.C. police are investigating after an officer shot and killed a dog that allegedly attacked him while serving a search warrant at a Northwest Washington home Tuesday night. Marietta Robinson, who lives at the address, said police were unjustified in killing the dog, which she put in the bathroom before police entered the home. Police were searching for her grandson, who the woman said hasn’t lived there in so long, not even her 13-year-old dog knew what her grandson looked like. An officer entered the bathroom over the 62-year-old woman’s protests and shot the dog, named Wrinkles. As...

A patient, believed to be having a stroke, says an officer with the Chattanooga Police Department blocked her husband from taking her to the emergency room at Erlanger Wednesday night. Aline Wright is a cancer survivor, amputee and a newlywed. Wednesday night she began to show signs she was having a stroke. "I started feeling some left arm numbness and a facial droop," said Aline. "It appeared to me that I was probably having a stroke." That's when her husband of four days, Jesse Wright, put her in the car and rushed her to the Erlanger Medical Center. Wright knows...

Imagine your telephone ringing in the middle of the night. The caller informs you that he is a police officer. He wants to "get you the help and appropriate resources you need." But wait, you have not asked for any help, don't need any help, and certainly don't want this "help" in the middle of the night. But this offer of "help" and "appropriate resources" is an offer you can't refuse. You see, your home is surrounded by SWAT teams from multiple jurisdictions. There are men in helmets with machine guns everywhere. Snipers are aiming at your home. You are...

As I’ve long suspected, “health care reform” has emboldened the Justice Department to take a more active role in enforcing government price controls against physicians. Today the Antitrust Division, joined by Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden, forced a a group of Boise orthopedists to accept price controls for worker’s compensation and HMO contracts as part of a settlement accusing the doctors of “price fixing”: According to the complaint, the conspiring orthopedists engaged in two antitrust conspiracies, which took place from 2006 to 2008. In the first conspiracy, through a series of meetings and other communications, the orthopedists agreed not to...

Unbelievable http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo91XS5pVj8&feature=player_embedded What does this have to do withy the "war on terror"?

To hear them tell it, the officers who apprehended 39-year-old David Pyles on March 8 thwarted a mass murder. The cops “were able to successfully take a potentially volatile male subject into protective custody for a mental evaluation,” the Medford, Oregon, police department announced in a press release. The subject had been placed on administrative leave from his job not long before, was “very disgruntled,” and had recently purchased several firearms. “Local Law Enforcement agencies were extremely concerned that the subject was planning retaliation against his employers,” the press release said. Fortunately, Pyles “voluntarily” turned himself over to police custody,...

Updated: Sunday, 16 May 2010, 11:09 AM EDT Published : Sunday, 16 May 2010, 8:44 AM EDT DETROIT - A spokesperson for the Detroit Police Department says a 7-year-old girl named Ayana Jones was accidently shot and killed by a DPD officer. Watch the latest video report by Fox 2's Roop Raj. It happened in the 4000 block of Lillibridge at 12:40 Sunday morning. According to Detroit Police , officers went to the house to arrest a murder suspect, with a valid search warrant. The suspect was wanted in another crime that happened on Friday in Detroit. A 17-year-old high...

To police investigators, the double-wide in rural Polk County was the hiding place of a drug trafficker. But to her family, it was merely the longtime home of a 76 year old widow named Helen Pruett. "All she did was go to church, go to Walmart, go to the beauty shop, and that's it," said Machelle Holl, Pruett's daughter. Tuesday morning, police dressed in black paramilitary fatigues, armed with weapons and an arrest warrant surrounded Pruett's home, knocked on the door and demanded to be let in. Helen Pruett's family says she saw them through the window, was frightened, and...

SEATTLE, Wash. -- A female Seattle police officer, caught on videotape stomping on a detainee’s leg, has been accused of police brutality in the past. The details are laid out in a 2005 federal civil lawsuit, uncovered by KIRO Investigative Reporter Chris Halsne. Cries of police brutality against a Seattle police officer caught stomping on a downed suspect's leg - have surfaced before. Use-of-force photographs, taken shortly after Seattle police arrested Raymond Edward Nix tell quite a story. Nix has a bloody face, swollen eye, bruises, and a skin-scraped elbow. Federal Court records show he was beaten nearly to death...

A former Gwinnett County police officer was indicted Wednesday for allegedly stunning a Waffle House employee with a Taser as a prank. A grand jury indicted Cpl. Gary Miles on charges of aggravated assault and violation of oath of office. He resigned from the department last June. Miles is out of jail awaiting trial on $8,100 bond. The waiter, Daniel Wilson, 23, told investigators that Miles was a frequent patron of the restaurant at 2725 Grayson Highway in Loganville. Wilson said he was chatting with two other Gwinnett County officers on Feb. 16, 2009, when Miles came up from behind...

The video of a Columbia, Mo., SWAT team shooting and killing a dog during a drug raid is now available online, due in part to the efforts of the Columbia Daily Tribune. The video shows members of the Columbia Police Department executing a narcotics raid on the home of Jonathan Whitworth. While the raid, which occurred in February, only turned up a misdemeanor amount of marijuana and a glass pipe, the Columbia PD was able to charge Whitworth with second-degree child endangerment because a child lives in the home. That same child, age 7, was present when the Columbia PD...

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - A northern Indiana man has filed a lawsuit blaming the U.S. government for his wife's suicide three days after Internal Revenue Service agents raided their home, saying she couldn't go on living in fear of the agency's trumped-up accusations. "Being innocent is simply not enough for the government," Denise Simon, a 50-year-old mother of six, wrote in a suicide note posted on a memorial Web site set up by her widower. In documents filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Fort Wayne, government attorneys denied any responsibility for Simon's death. Department of Justice spokesman Charles Miller could...

America's experiment with banning alcohol created problems that persist to this day. BY THOMAS FLEMING On Dec. 5, 1933, Americans liberated themselves from a legal nightmare called Prohibition by repealing the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. Today most people think Prohibition was fueled by puritanical Protestants who believed drinking alcohol was a sin. But the vocal minority who made Prohibition law believed they were marching in the footsteps of the abolitionists who sponsored a civil war to end another moral evil—slavery. At least as important was the belief that Prohibition would produce health and wealth. Yale economist Irving Fisher, the...

Police shoot, kill woman during "welfare check." Story at http://www.kctv5.com/video/23013661/index.html

A Christian who prayed in a public park with six other people is serving a nine-day jail sentence for disorderly conduct even though his case is under appeal and charges against the others were dismissed or overturned. Julian Raven of Elmira, N.Y., said he was "surprised by police at his office," handcuffed and taken into custody this week, according to the Alliance Defense Fund, which is defending Raven. "According to his wife, police escorted him out of a court hearing … in handcuffs in front of his crying children to begin serving his nine-day jail sentence," the organization said in...

This story on the First Lady taking the kids to a Broadway show in New York has an interesting element: a warning by the Secret Service that anyone taking their picture would have their cameras confiscated. Perhaps the Secret Service General Counsel could point us to where in the Constitution and federal law the Secret Service has the authority to ban photographs by the public and the confiscation of cellphones and pictures to enforce the ban. Michelle Obama – with Sasha, 8, and Malia, 11, and about a dozen other people in tow – attended the matinee performance of “Memphis”...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), apparently unable to distinguish between real guns and replicas, seized a shipment of 30 toy guns in a February bust at the Port of Tacoma in Washington. Airsoft guns, which fire little plastic balls, are used by a growing number of loyal enthusiasts (think paintball, only not as messy). In addition, thanks to their realistic look, weight, and feel, these guns are often used for training purposes by National Guard units and law enforcement. It was this realism that led CBP agents to seize the shipment—which was destined for Airsoft Outlet Northwest in Cornelius,...

It was every businessperson's nightmare. Arriving at Harv's Metro Car Wash in midtown Wednesday afternoon were two dark-suited IRS agents demanding payment of delinquent taxes. "They were deadly serious, very aggressive, very condescending," says Harv's owner, Aaron Zeff. The really odd part of this: The letter that was hand-delivered to Zeff's on-site manager showed the amount of money owed to the feds was ... 4 cents. Inexplicably, penalties and taxes accruing on the debt – stemming from the 2006 tax year – were listed as $202.31, leaving Harv's with an obligation of $202.35.