Free Republic

2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney will be hosting two rival Republican presidential contenders at a holiday sleepover Friday evening. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio will both be staying over at Romney’s property in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, an aide to Romney confirmed. The aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of what the aide called the private nature of the event, said the former governor and his wife opened their home to the Christie and Rubio families after hearing they would be in town for the holiday weekend. Both candidates are scheduled to march...

A top GOP strategist and pollster for newly re-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is warning that New York Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, "will pay a heavy price" at the polls next year if they don't break with President Obama's policies on Israel and reject any deal he makes with Iran. "Hillary Clinton, [Sen.] Chuck Schumer, [Reps.] Nita Lowey, Steve Israel, Jerry Nadler, Eliot Engel and others are about to get a whole new wave of pressure from Republicans on whether they agree or not with Obama on Israel," New York-based national GOP pollster and strategist John McLaughlin told The Post....

Hillary Clinton and her campaign cronies saw something frightening yesterday: a fired-up crowd of ten thousand people in Madison, Wisconsin, packing the Veterans Memorial Coliseum to the rafters in support of a candidate best known as Not Hillary. The previously fairly obscure Senator Bernie Sanders is drawing the same kind of enthusiasm that Eugene McCarthy sparked in 1968 when he drive an even more inevitable nominee from the Democratic ticket, incumbent President Lyndon Johnson. It is clear that the progressive base of the Democratic Party is fed up with Hillary Clinton, the cozy-with-Wall-Street party insider who parlayed political connections into...

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) upstaged ‘em all at a rally in Madison, Wis., on Wednesday night.In fact, he put the number of people who showed up for Hillary Clinton’s official campaign announcement to shame.Sanders nearly filled the Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the Alliant Energy Center, which seats 10,231 people; the Associated Press put a 10,000 estimate on the crowd. About 5,500 people were on New York’s Roosevelt Island for Clinton’s carefully orchestrated launch.“Tonight we have made a little bit of history,” Sanders told the crowd with a simple blue Bernie banner backdrop. “Tonight, we have more people at a meeting...

Hillary Clinton will attend a fundraiser in New York on Tuesday hosted by Facebook millionaire and vertically integrated media company caretaker Chris Hughes, who recently described himself in a Vanity Fair profile as “the Antichrist, or something pretty close to it.” Hughes is best known for being Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard and for pioneering the “poke” button feature on the popular social media website Facebook. His husband, Brown graduate Sean Eldridge, was the worst candidate of the 2014 election cycle. Eldridge ran for Congress in New York’s 19th Congressional district after Hughes bought him a mansion there. He ended...

A brazen 4 a.m. anti-Olympics protest by Black Lives Matter activists outside Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s Dorchester home has City Hall officials mulling beefed-up security as the demonstrators vow to continue their battle in the escalating standoff over the Summer Games bid. “I think it’s always a concern when there’s a certain line that is crossed, when there is something outside his house. As of now, we’re just kind of assessing if and what kind of security measures we take to make sure the mayor is safe,” a Walsh administration source told the Herald. “The mayor does not at all...

BOSTON (CBS) – A Christopher Columbus statue in Boston’s North End was vandalized Monday with red paint and the phrase “Black Lives Matter.” Red paint was poured over the top of the statue on Monday night, while Black Lives Matter was sprayed on the back using black paint.

During recent meetings with Chinese officials, Secretary of State John Kerry agreed to establish a "U.S.-China Civil Space Cooperation Dialogue." A State Department spokesman says the first meeting will be held before the end of October, but could not provide any other details. The lengthy list of "outcomes" from the seventh round of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) held in Washington, DC June 22-24, 2015, includes a section on cooperation in science, technology and agriculture. Under that heading, the two countries agreed as follows: "101. Space: The United States and China decided to establish regular bilateral government-to-government consultations...

It’s time to play a game of “Let’s denounce stuff.” What are we denouncing? Stuff! Why are we denouncing it? Because we’re progressives!Do we understand what the stuff is? Silence. You sound like a reactionary! We’re denouncing stuff in order to denounce stuff. We’re getting rid of all the flags. Especially the ones that confuse us. Like the Massachusetts flag. [1]We don’t know what’s going on here, but there’s an Indian in it so it’s probably racist [2]. Here’s the Boston Globe. What exactly is going on here? There’s the blue shield on the white field. And a white...

Bloomberg Politics managing editor Mark Halperin apologized to his “Republican sources” Monday after it was revealed that MIT economist Jonathan Gruber had a much bigger role in shaping Obamacare than the White House had previously admitted to. “I owe all my Republican sources an apology because they kept telling me he was hugely involved, and the White House played it down.” Halperin told Morning Joe co–host Joe Scarborough on Monday, “They were right, the Republicans were right.” When asked by Scarborough if he thought the White House had lied about Gruber’s Obamacare role, Halperin said that he thought “they were...

With lawmakers preparing to vote on a bill blocking parents from skipping vaccinations for their children, prominent vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. arrived at the Sacramento screening of a film linking autism to the vaccine preservative thimerosal and warned that public health officials cannot be trusted. “They can put anything they want in that vaccine and they have no accountability for it,” said Kennedy, who walked onto and left a Crest Theater stage to standing ovations, of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Wall Street Journal’s influential editorial board rapped New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on the knuckles for “meandering” on vaccines. “The real public health problem isn’t a lack of parental choice but a lack of common sense about vaccines,” the Journal said in a late-Monday editorial. It added that lawmakers should do more to promote vaccine use.

A Nation of Islam leader believes that the vaccine could harm black boys and compares it to the Tuskegee syphilis study. But a coalition of other black organizations says the vaccines are needed and the fears are unfounded.Nation of Islam Western Regional Minister Tony Muhammad warns members of the California Legislative Black Caucus of a political backlash from their community if they support a bill that would mandate childhood vaccinations, according to the Los Angeles Times. Voting in favor of the bill, which may come up in the Assembly on Thursday, would be “a traitorous act,” Muhammad said, according to...

The Kennedy family name is laden with history and brings to mind a definite set of characteristics: glamor, power, intelligence, wealth, influence. Kennedys have had their name on a president, numerous senators, representatives, ambassadors, and other high office holders. The Kennedy dynasty, if you wish to call it that, has seen its share of triumphs and disasters, of course. I need not go into detail; scores of books have been written about them, from putting humans on the Moon and the championing of civil rights to personal tragedies of assassination, death, scandal, and more. Most of these issues are in...

The California Legislature’s debate over whether to make childhood vaccines mandatory has attracted another high-profile personality: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the late U.S. senator and nephew of former President John F. Kennedy.

SACRAMENTO (CBS SF) – As lawmakers at the State Capitol consider a bill that would no longer allow parents to opt out of vaccinating their children over personal beliefs, vaccination critic Robert Kennedy Jr. waded into the debate at a Sacramento appearance. Kennedy spoke to a crowd Tuesday screening a film that claims a link between autism in children and thimerosal, an ingredient in vaccines, according to the Sacramento Bee. “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone,” Kennedy reportedly told...

The decade-long debate over what has caused this country's frightening spike of childhood autism once again is exploding… Reigniting the debate is the much-publicized book "Evidence of Harm" by David Kirby, as well as the report titled "Deadly Immunity" by environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In brief, Kirby and Kennedy argue that federal health officials, with the help of vaccine-makers and some in Congress, have deliberately downplayed, even covered up, evidence that thimerosal - a preservative containing mercury - in childhood vaccines is the prime trigger behind the explosion of autism in U.S. children the last 15 years. Although...

Having trotted out just about every conspiracy theory in the book against the tightening of vaccination laws in California, the opponents of Senate Bill 277 have come up with a new and truly cynical angle – race.

..... Jennifer Rogers, the sister of a police officer killed by the brothers after the bombing, also testified. She branded Tsarnaev a "leech abusing the privilege of American freedom," and added that he had spat in the "face of the American dream." ..... Thought he remained largely impassive during the proceedings, when Tsarnaev's turn came to speak he "apologized" for his crimes. "I am sorry for the lives I have taken, for the suffering that I have caused you, for the damage I have done, irreparable damage," he said. The 21-year-old terrorist also thanked his lawyers and "Allah." But victim...

A choked-up Dzhokhar Tsarnaev apologized in court Wednesday to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, then was formally sentenced to die for the attack. "You told us just how unbearable it was, this thing I put you through," Tsarnaev said at a hearing in Boston. "Now, I am sorry for the lives that I have taken." "I ask Allah for his mercy for me and my brother and my family," he said. Tsarnaev stood as he spoke, and the courtroom was extraordinarily quiet. He paused at each sentence and appeared to tremble. Some victims had gathered in court to...