Free Republic

Female G20 protestors sue Toronto police for $1.4MILLION after they were 'profiled for having hairy legs' A group of women is suing the Toronto police, saying they were profiled and arrested for having hairy legs during the G20 summit in 2010. The women are part of a $1.4 million lawsuit filed by seven friends, men and women, who were locked up during the protests against the gathering of world leaders. The lawyer for the friends, who had traveled to Toronto from their hometown to take part in the demonstrations, said police use of 'hairy legs' as a cause for detention...

The Bill Press radio show returned to mocking Ann Romney and her dressage horse on Friday. Dave Zirin, a sports writer for The Nation began with "Dressage, a word so many of us didn't even know before a few months ago." Bill Press replied, "And Thursday here poor Ann Romney is there with Rafalca...Doesn't get to dance until Thursday and Mitt Romney is not even going to be there."

"The More Context You Get, The Worse It Sounds"

The quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative. They are sent by e-mail from the Obama headquarters in Chicago to reporters who have interviewed campaign officials under one major condition: the press office has veto power over what statements can be quoted and attributed by name. Most reporters, desperate to pick the brains of the president’s top strategists, grudgingly agree. After the interviews, they review their notes, check their tape recorders and send in the juiciest sound bites for review. The verdict from the campaign — an operation that prides itself on...

Karl Rove said Rep. Nancy Pelosi was "dead wrong" when she suggested Wednesday that she could have had him arrested. "The only way I could have been arrested is if the House adopted the resolution, which it did not," the Republican operative and former adviser to President George W. Bush told Fox News on Wednesday night. "So, it's nice to know that Speaker Pelosi wanted to have me arrested. It's nice to know that she thinks she had the power to, but we're still a nation of laws and she has no authority to do so and had she attempted...

Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc'-ra-cy) - a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers. syn- socialism.

In light of the May Day arrests of the Cuyahoga 5, the Occupy Wall Street–affiliated group of men who planned to blow up a bridge in Cleveland, Ohio, I called the Southern Poverty Law Center to find out of they had any plans to start tracking the Occupy movement. The first person I spoke to was so shocked by the question that she paused for a good 15 seconds before promising to put me in touch with a representative. This she eventually did, however, and after a game of cat-and-mouse — the person she’d found for me was busy “hosting...

Oklahoma’s proposed anti-abortion Senate Bill 1433 states a fetus “at every stage of development (has) all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state.” In response, pro-choice Oklahoma State Senator Constance Johnson introduced an amendment......

Down in the Polls, Obama Seeks to Ride Occupy Movement’s “Populist Wave”By Morgan Korn | Daily Ticker – 1 hour 52 minutes ago President Barack Obama's speech Tuesday in Osawatomie, Kan. attacked Republicans, assailed Wall Street and defended the middle class while evoking President Teddy Roosevelt. In his 55-minute speech at Osawatomie high school, Obama underscored the growing inequality in this country and vowed to fight against it. "This is the defining issue of our time," he said to the packed high school gymnasium. "This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class and for all those who are fighting...

How To Identify A Zombie (Updated) How to Tell the Difference Between Zombies and #Occupy Protesters. Hope it helps.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Supporters of seven people charged Sunday with breaking into an unoccupied building in downtown Chapel Hill on Monday denied the allegations of a break-in. Police said more than 70 attendees from an anarchist book fair broke into the former Yates Motor Co. building, at 419 W. Franklin St., on Saturday. Police monitored the group until the crowd reached a more manageable size, and then a tactical team moved in late Sunday and arrested seven people.

The union that represents Twin Rivers School District Police Officers is apologizing tonight for putting something on a T-shirt that puts the department in a bad light. The shirt shows a terrified child, behind bars, and bears the caption : “U Raise ‘em, We Cage ‘em. [sic]” Mean-spirited at best, and at worst, well... the ramifications are unsettling. The T-shirt, put out by the Twin Rivers Police Officer's Association, has been rejected by even those who made it. "We agree that it wasn't sending the right message, and it certainly doesn't represent the views and opinions of the men...

Over the weekend, a convention of political scientists met in Seattle. The idiots. The last weekend of summer, all of America celebrating a holiday, and they schedule a meeting. At which, it seems, their prime purpose was to provide political fodder against the tea party. A genuine social phenomenon occurs in our day, it impacts American elections, and those who presumably study such things are so wedded to partisan objective that they don’t study it, they propagandize against it. They are an echo of so-called weather scientists who, living through a global warming cycle, do not study it, but seek...

Two weeks ago, when billionaire Warren Buffett called for higher taxes on rich people like him, the liberal media predictably gushed and fawned. Yet when Americans for Better Government revealed last week that Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway has been in an almost decade-long dispute with the IRS over how much taxes it owes, these same press members couldn't care less: According to Berkshire Hathaway’s own annual report — see Note 15 on pp. 54-56 — the company has been in a years-long dispute over its federal tax bills. According to the report, “We anticipate that we will resolve all adjustments...

I’ve written before about the crisis of inequality in the United States and about the quasi-religious abhorrence of “wealth redistribution” that causes many Americans to oppose tax increases, even on the ultra rich. The conviction that taxation is intrinsically evil has achieved a sadomasochistic fervor in conservative circles—producing the Tea Party, their Republican zombies, and increasingly terrifying failures of governance. Happily, not all billionaires are content to hoard their money in silence. Earlier this week, Warren Buffett published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he criticized our current approach to raising revenue. As he has lamented many...

Rising greenhouse emissions may tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report for Nasa It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim. Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth's atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain. This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by scientists at Nasa and Pennsylvania State...

Pop quiz. Who uttered the famous maxim, 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs?' A) Karl Marx B) Papa Smurf C) Both A and B The correct answer is “C” ...More evidence: The Smurfs replace everyday nouns and verbs with [a]...thought-controlling Newspeak lexicon to rival that of the totalitarian state in George Orwell’s “1984.” Papa Smurf wears red...

Some refreshing words from the Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner this morning on Meet the Press. He had this to say: (15:20 into this clip) Note: An 8 second clip of Tim's words: Link We don’t have the ability (because of the overhang in housing and the problems in the financial sector) to engineer artificially a stronger recovery. Imagine that! Geithner acknowledges what I (and many others) have felt all along. The structural issues in the economy trump the government’s ability to engineer a recovery. The Fed has taken extraordinary measures on the monetary front. Since 2009 we have had $1.2...

The president’s failure to demand a reckoning from the moneyed interests who brought the economy down has cursed his first term, and could prevent a second. fter 9/11, Rudy Giuliani went on Saturday Night Live to give New Yorkers permission to laugh again. But Mayor Bloomberg never did tell us when we could resume conspicuous consumption after the crash of 2008. And so, as we stumble through the second year of the official “recovery,” it’s been an improvisational return to high-end carousing in Manhattan. A case in point was the late-May celebration of the centennial rededication of the New York...