Free Republic

President Obama: rolling up his sleeves for America's middle class Yet again it is the British press doing the job the American mainstream media chooses not to. The Telegraph has a story (prominently headlined on the highly influential Drudge Report) about the US president’s dog Bo, being specially airlifted to the exclusive Massachusetts resort of Martha’s Vineyard to join the First Family for their summer vacation. As The Telegraph’s Nick Allen reports: Rooms have to be found for dozens of Secret Service agents, someone has to carry a selection of presidential basketballs, and of course the family dog needs his...

Bo, the president's Portuguese Water Dog, arrived separately on one of two MV-22 Ospreys, a hybrid aircraft which takes off like a helicopter but flies like a plane.

President Barack Obama is teeing off his Martha's Vineyard vacation with his favorite pastime _ golfing. ..

The Obamas ...are staying for nine days in a six-bedroom estate owned by David Schulte, a Chicago-based corporate restructuring specialist and friend of the president. The home sits on 9 acres overlooking Chilmark Pond and the Atlantic Ocean, and has a small basketball court. ... "They’re not on the street, and when they’re in a restaurant you’ve never seen so many police cars and so many military vehicles and black SUVs. It does put off a lot of people.

There is no connection, of course, between the prosecution of Whitey Bulger and the recent spate of scandals and revelations roiling the Obama administration. Or is there? * * * The corruption of the federal government was a key element in Bulger’s trial, as it was in so much of his sadistic career. Officials charged with defending the public from gangsters like Bulger used their considerable influence to defend the gangster instead. * * * The Bulger trial, the IRS scandal, and our surveillance state are the latest reminders that even the best government in the world depends on human...

J Street attempted to cover up evidence of a failed Boston event on Friday, within minutes of a Washington Free Beacon reporter mocking the group’s inability to draw a crowd on Twitter. J Street was forced to cancel an event originally scheduled for June 20 in Boston due to a “lack of attendance,” according to the Washington Free Beacon. After a reporter for the website noted on Twitter that J Street, which bills itself as a top “pro-Israel” group, failed to attract a crowd, evidence of the failed event’s existence was removed from Facebook. The event had been named, “Drinks...

There’s a 50/50 chance that the Boston Common could become the stomping grounds for a group of topless women later this month. August 25 marks national “Go Topless” day, where women from dozens of cities across the country will bare it all in public—some risking arrest—to advance a woman’s right to walk around half-nude. The annual “Go Topless” day always falls around the time of Women’s Equality Day, which marked the passage of the 19th Amendment, in 1920, allowing women to vote. Now, the movement is trying to reduce the gender gap when it comes to accepting that females have...

Boston’s top cop wants drones hovering over next year’s marathon, but getting his hands on one may be easier said than done. More than 30 states, including Massachusetts, are rushing to restrict the use of drones by law enforcement, with some seeking to ban it in all but the most extreme circumstances. Even if unmanned aerial systems could have shortened the search for the terrorists who wreaked havoc on Boston last week, many people are deeply skeptical about giving authorities carte blanche to use potentially dangerous technology. “It’s not surprising that you have law enforcement agencies rushing out to use...

More than one-third of MBTA employees getting pensions retired before the age of 55 and a thousand-plus left in their 40s, according to a Herald review of a massive database that was finally released yesterday after a series of stories that challenged the T retirement board’s refusal to disclose the payouts. A Herald review of the database showed: • More than half of the 6,300-plus people listed in the database retired before the age of 60, and 35 percent — or 2,240 — left before 55. •   Another 1,129 retirees, or 17 percent of the system, opted out in their 40s....

BOSTON (Reuters) - A grand jury on Thursday indicted two students from Kazakhstan on obstruction of justice charges, alleging they helped hide evidence related to the April Boston marathon bombing that killed three and injured 264, the U.S. Attorney's office for Massachusetts said. Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, both 19, were college friends of surviving bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. They are charged with removing a backpack containing fireworks and a laptop from Tsarnaev's dorm room after the FBI released pictures of Dzhokhar and his older brother Tamerlan in an effort to learn the names of the bombers.

Calling it “too late” for a legislative solution, proponents of expanding the state’s 5-cent bottle deposit law to more types of beverage containers said they are taking their decade-long fight to the people, filing a ballot petition with the attorney general Wednesday afternoon. Referencing unsuccessful attempts to push the proposal through the Legislature, Janet Domenitz, executive director of MassPIRG, said people who favor adding the deposit to sports drinks, water and other juice drinks have been patient for long enough. “It is time for the citizens’ voices to be heard,” she said standing in front of the state office tower...

The parade of bad GOP candidates since Reagan has one thing in common: they were all rich men with no skin in the game, for whom victory was optional. The Bushes of Connecticut and Texas, the McCains of Arizona and the Romneys of all over the place had no downside to an electoral loss; they were all just as well-off as they were before the start of their campaigns, and could return to their multiple homes with no sense of personal loss, just a little chagrin at letting the team down. By contrast, the Democrats have fielded a succession of...

In the past week, The New York Times Co. announced it was selling the Boston Globe to Boston Red Sox owner John W. Henry, and Washington Post Chairman Donald Graham announced Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos was buying the paper that Graham's family has run for decades. Both papers went cheap. The Times bought the Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion and is now selling it for $70 million. The price tag on the Post was just $250 million. The combined $320 million market value of these two big-city dailies is about as much as the federal government now spends in...

Cop cardboard cutout used to cut crime at Massachusetts transportation hub Published August 06, 2013 | Associated Press CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – The burly officer watching over the bike racks at a Boston-area transportation hub is a real stiff. As part of an effort to cut crime at the Alewife MBTA subway and bus station in Cambridge, transit police placed a cardboard cutout of a police officer in the bicycle cage. Hundreds of people use the racks daily. Deputy Chief Robert Lenehan says the fake cop, along with video cameras and a new lock, has cut bike thefts by 67 percent.

A Cadillac-driving OUI suspect — charged with running a Boston Globe delivery truck off Interstate 93 and onto the Leverett Connector — was carrying three EBT cards, mocked a cop “for paying for food when she gets it for free” and threatened to put a voodoo curse on him, according to a police report. “I questioned her as to why she had other peoples (sic) EBT cards and she 
began screaming that I was a ‘dumb (expletive)’ for paying for food when she gets it for free,” trooper William Koko­cinski wrote of Vivencia 
Bellegarde, 25, of Everett, noting she had...

On Wednesday and Thursday, law school graduates aspiring to practice in the Commonwealth gathered in Boston and Springfield to take the 16-hour bar exam, broken into several parts. During the morning portion of the test Thursday, recent graduate of the University of Michigan Law School Iman Abdulrazzak was handed a note from an exam proctor asking her to remove her headscarf. As many Muslim women do, Abdulrazzak wore a hijab, covering her head and chest, during the exam held at the Western New England University School of Law. The note, written in capitalized block letters read, "Headwear may not be...

The New York Times Company may be facing some serious scrutiny over its planned sale of the Boston Globe to Boston Red Sox owner John Henry for a mere $70 million, after having paid $1.1 billion in 1993. The owner of the San Diego Union-Tribune, Douglas Manchester, is alleging that his higher bid was rejected by the company. John Lynch of the Boston Herald writes: A losing Boston Globe contender is claiming his San Diego media company outbid Red Sox owner John Henry - and would have gone even higher - a bombshell allegation that he says could delay the...

Aaron Hernandez is jonesin' for the Internet ... according to a new letter he wrote to a fan.

Time Warner Cable's blackout of CBS continued Saturday, and neither side indicated a resolution of their dispute over fees is imminent. Time Warner dropped CBS Friday in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and several other cities, leaving three million customers without the network's programs. The issue is fees that the cable company pays CBS to air its programs. Each has accused the other of making unreasonable demands ... The CBS stations that went dark are WCBS and WLNY in New York; KCBS and KCAL in Los Angeles; KTVT and KTXA in Dallas; WBZ and WSBK in Boston; KDKA, WPCW-CW in...

The giant mural in Dewey Square that caused controversy and racially charged commentary is coming down. The colorful artwork, painted on the utility building housed above the Interstate 93 tunnel by Brazilian brothers Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, who go by “Os Gemeos,” will be replaced by a new mural beginning in the fall. The mural, which went up in July 2012, is withering and fading, and officials have decided it’s time for something new, according to Charlie McCabe, director of public programs for the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, the non-profit entity tasked with providing public artwork along the strip...

BOSTON -- The New York Times Co. says it has agreed to sell The Boston Globe to the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox for $70 million, a massive drop from the record $1.1 billion it paid for it. Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy confirms the sale of the Globe and other media properties to businessman John Henry. The Times bought the Globe in 1993. Newspapers have faced difficulties in recent years as advertisers have moved more ads online. The Times announced in February it was putting the Globe up for sale. The company's CEO said at the time selling...

Accused is son of Danvers wedding-brawl momRemember that wedding reception at Danversport Yacht Club last year that ended with a brawl and the mother of the groom being arrested? In April, Darlene DeIorio of Revere admitted to taking part in the brawl and was placed on a year of supervised probation for the April 28, 2012, incident. Now her son, the groom, is in trouble, charged by Revere police with kidnapping and beating a man in the head with a baseball bat over text messages the man purportedly sent to his new bride. Anthony Weiner, 25, of Revere, is charged...

The MBTA’s retirement board is defying the law and keeping a lid on its secret pension records — and has gone so far as to hire a lawyer, in a move watchdogs say is a slap in the face to taxpayers who help fund the monthly checks to retired transit workers. “This isn’t stonewalling. This is breaking the law,” said Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute, adding that the debt-plagued T just hit up state taxpayers for $115 million to balance its books. “It is amazing to me that the T will come to the taxpayers and say...

The F.B.I. has concluded that there was little its agents could have done to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings, according to law enforcement officials, rejecting criticism that it could have better monitored one of the suspects before the attack. That conclusion is based on several internal reviews that examined how the bureau handled a request from a Russian intelligence agency in 2011 to investigate whether one of the suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had been radicalized during his time in the United States. … Members of Congress have contended that the F.B.I. should have done a more extensive investigation of Mr. Tsarnaev...

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is losing part of his arsenal of local leaders as more and more long-time members of his gun-control group Mayors Against Illegal Guns say they aren’t happy with the coalition’s trajectory and want out. While the group apparently is growing in membership overall amid an effort to assume a larger profile in the national gun debate, it's turning some members off. In the past five months, 50 members of the group have quit. Many say they did so because the organization abandoned its mission statement of going after illegal guns, and instead used its political...

About 100 neighbors, labor union members and politicians attended a rally Thursday to protest Walmart's plan to open a supercenter on Whiting Farms Road. "Walmart, Holyoke isn't for you. We don't want it. Holyoke can do better," said Jason Garand, business manager of Local 108, New England Regional Council of Carpenters. A 160,000-square-foot Walmart would clog already traffic-congested streets in the area near the Holyoke Mall at Ingleside, especially at the holidays. It also would add light and noise pollution, said Gordon Drive resident Terri Laramee, of the anti-Walmart group Holyoke First. "This is all combined to be an increased...

Sioux City Mayor Bob Scott is among a growing number of city leaders across the nation pulling out of a group call Mayors Against Illegal Guns. The group, spearheaded by New York City Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, has been an active advocate for gun control measures. Scott, who joined the group after taking office last year, said he unsubscribed because their political views have exceeded his. ... “They’re not just against illegal guns, they’re against all guns.” Both Buzzfeed and the New York Post have reported that Mayors Against Illegal Guns has lost nearly 50 members since...

BOSTON (WHDH) -- Boston police released a picture hoping it will help them find the suspect in the death of a South Boston woman who was kidnapped and killed. Police said Amy Lord, 24, was kidnapped, carjacked, robbed and murdered on Tuesday. For 47 minutes, investigators say Lord was forced to withdraw money from her bank account at five different Boston-area ATMs, each one taking her further from her South Boston apartment. Police said Tuesday around 6 a.m. at least one man forced her into her car. Investigators found her car burned just after 8 a.m. She was reported missing...

Cops are counting on an ATM video freeze-frame from Amy Lord’s terrifying last morning alive to help them catch the cold-blooded killer who carjacked the beloved 24-year-old, stabbed her to death and dumped the body in a park — an apparently random, broad-daylight attack that horrified young women in South Boston and shocked her western Massachusetts hometown of Wilbraham. The photograph, released by police last night, shows Lord, clad in workout clothes and neon shoes, exiting her black SUV to take money from an ATM — one of five such stops cops say her attacker forced her to make in...

Star witness Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi has spent hours in lurid description of how he and his old partner, James "Whitey" Bulger, tortured victims, yanked out teeth with dental tools and buried bodies in secret graves. But Flemmi stammered and hesitated Monday. Bulger's lawyers were asking the questions on cross-examination and they opened with the January 1985 murder of 26-year old Deborah Hussey – a stepdaughter Flemmi is accused of having sexually abused.

Who was that familiar face on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” recently, holding forth about the banking industry? The super-earnest guest argued that “banking should be boring,” and wants to bring back the Glass-Steagall Act, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era reform bills. Ah yes; the hundred-megawatt smile; the Dos Passos-era haircut; the broad vowels redolent of her Oklahoma birthplace. It’s Senator Elizabeth Warren, a.k.a. the Big Noise.

LYNN — A teenage couple recalled Sunday how they had asked a woman with a baby for directions. Moments later, they said, they watched in horror as a minivan struck and killed the woman.“I just kept telling him to get out,” Moises Baez, 18, of Chelsea, said of the driver. “And she was with the baby, who was crying, and we were just like yelling at him to stop.”Lynn Police said the woman was killed when she was struck at approximately 5:38 p.m. Sunday in a parking lot near the intersection of Boston and Hamilton streets at the Lynn and...

The first family is returning this summer to Martha’s Vineyard, the third time the Obamas have vacationed on the exclusive Massachusetts island in the past four years. President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama will arrive August 10 and stay through August 18, the White House said earlier this month. The vacation is drawing some criticism about the president relaxing among the rich and famous while drastic cuts to the federal budget known as sequester kick in with full force, including the start this month of furloughs for 85 percent of the Defense Department’s civilian workforce.

Link only because of the rules.

Over the last several weeks we have heard Congress caterwauling, stonewalling, stalling and wailing about so called "bank reform". So, cover your eyes and get the kids of out the room because this is about to become bi-partisan.* Here it is: According to both parties- I know you'll find this hard to believe- banks apparently aren't reformed enough. Yes, the problem that Barney-Frank and Chris-Dodd supposedly fixed with huge Democrat majorities from 2000-Obama to 2000-O'Tea Party, apparently isn't fixed, both Democrats and Republicans agree. For example, the other day we heard Barney-Frank both defend and condemn the Dodd-Frank banking reform...

Murphy’s photographs show the bloodied bomber carefully emerging from the boat as a police sniper trains a laser on his forehead. [Photo in Comments]

Corrupt FBI let mobster Whitey Bulger keep killing—and it cost innocent lives. You'd hardly know it from the wall-to-wall coverage of the George Zimmerman case, but there's another trial going on that's at least as worthy of national attention. That's the 32-count federal racketeering indictment against James "Whitey" Bulger, a Boston mob kingpin linked to at least 19 murders, captured in 2011 after 16 years on the lam. Bulger, a former "Top Echelon Informant" for the FBI, is a monster, but he's hardly the only villain in a story where "gangster government" leaves the realm of metaphor. As Boston Globe...

A Japan Airlines 787 Dreamliner flying from Boston to Tokyo turned around not long after taking off and has returned safely to Boston:

Rakes, 59, of Quincy, had been attending Bulger's racketeering trial in Boston and, at one point, was expected to be called as a witness for the prosecution. Rake's body was found around 1:30 p.m. Wednesday in the area of Mill Street in Lincoln, Mass., according to Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan

A Massachusetts state police photographer angered by Rolling Stone magazine's latest cover of Boston boming suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has released never-before-seen photos of Tsarnaev just before he was taken into custody. Pictures taken by Sgt. Sean Murphy, and first published by Boston Magazine, show a bruised and bloody Tsarneav emerging from the backyard boat he hid in after a confrontation with authorities that left his older brother and alleged bombing accomplice dead.

An estimated 8.5 million Americans will receive rebates from their health insurers this summer thanks to the Affordable Care Act, which says companies that fail to spend at least 80 percent of premiums on health care must refund the difference to consumers. Obama today touted the benefit as part of his mid-summer push ... The amount of the individual rebates varies widely by state and insurance company, depending on whether a consumer's insurer was in compliance with the law. The largest average rebates will be seen in Washington state, where 3,007 consumers will receive an average $512 this summer. In...

Mayor Thomas M. Menino today wrote to the publisher of Rolling Stone, telling him the decision to put accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover of next month’s edition “rewards a terrorist with celebrity treatment” — treatment the magazine should have given to the survivors. “The survivors of the Boston attacks deserve Rolling Stone cover stories,” Menino wrote in a letter to Jann Wenner, ”though I no longer feel that Rolling Stone deserves them.” Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said today: "I'm disgusted by it. They should have given the victims more consideration."

Stephen "Stippo" Rakes, a possible witness in the murder trial of alleged crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger, has been found dead, authorities said. The body of Rakes, 59, had "no obvious signs of trauma" and an autopsy is being performed to determine the cause of death, Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan and Lincoln, Mass., Police Chief Kevin Mooney announced today. The corpse was found on Mill Street in Lincoln yesterday at 1:30 p.m., police said.

The body of a key witness in James 'Whitey’ Bulger's racketeering trial was found dead on the side of a road Wednesday by a jogger in Lincoln, Mass., which is just west of Boston. The body belonged to Stephen "Stippo" Rakes, 59, who was allegedly extorted by Bulger and considered one of the most determined alleged victims who waited a decade to testify, The Boston Globe reported. The Globe reported that Rakes has been a fixture for six weeks at Bulger's trial and was told recently that he would not get the chance to testify. The Middlesex County district attorney's...

Rolling Stone has defended its controversial new cover featuring Boston Marathon bombings suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev after triggering a firestorm of comments. The August issue of the music magazine features a story and photo of Tsarnaev and is titled: "The Bomber: How a popular, promising student was failed by his family, fell into radical Islam and became a monster." After a flurry of negative comments online -- and some commercial stores vowing to refuse to sell this month's issue -- Rolling Stone released a statement defending the cover. "Our hearts go out to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, and...

Speaking in fairly definitive terms, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick said on Tuesday that he will not run for president in 2016, and he also suggested that he had no plans to become the next attorney general, the Washington Post reports. "I am not running for president in 2016," Patrick told reporters at UMass Boston, according to a transcript obtained by the Boston Globe.

Rolling Stone magazine is drawing fire for putting Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on its cover, in a glam shot that critics say continues to blur the line between fame and infamy. The picture, which accompanies a story titled "Jahar's World," shows the accused murderer with his long, curly hair tousled and the hint of a goatee, reminiscent of the magazine's iconic shots of rock 'n' roll royalty like The Doors' Jim Morrison. The cover could send a dangerous message to Tsarnaev's warped supporters, according to one critic. "If they want to become famous, kill somebody," Northeastern University criminologist...

It’s interesting, and infuriating. We’ve already seen the rise of what Twitchy calls the “Jaharem� of admirers of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect, in custody since murdering a police officer and engaging in a firefight with law enforcement, then hiding and bleeding in a boat the rest of the day until he was discovered. Now Rolling Stone offers a profile of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving brother of the duo who killed three and injured hundreds of others at the event, including an eight-year-old boy shredded by their bomb.Why not give Tsarnaev the soft focus treatment for that, huh?RS at least...

The cover of Rolling Stone magazine has most often been the domain of musicians, actors, comedians, and the occasional politician. But this week,the periodical has raised eyebrows by letting Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev grace the famous front. The issue, which hits newsstands Friday, features an picture of an unsmiling Tsarnaev above the bolded legend "The Bomber." The subhead promises to reveal "[h]ow a popular, promising student was failed by his family, fell into radical Islam, and became a monster."

(Reuters) - A Boston-area man accused of threatening to blow up an airplane allegedly had all the materials needed to build a pressure-cooker bomb before this kind of weapon was used in the Boston Marathon attack in April, according to comments made by the man's mother in a recently unsealed police affidavit. While investigators working with the FBI are looking to see if there are any links between the two cases, they have drawn no conclusions, according to two law enforcement sources. Prosecutors and the FBI declined to comment.   The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force said it is investigating...