Free Republic

Re: Veto Recommendations regarding "gun" legislation. Dear Governor Brown: As I have said previously, a government that does not protect us and will not let us protect ourselves does not deserve our respect or loyalty. The U-T San Diego newspaper reports a series of "gun" bills is headed to you for consideration. Sadly the State of California is presently violating its primary constitutional duty which is to protect the public from domestic threats such as criminal activity. In the 1980s, the legislature responded to the enormously high crime rate by "right sizing" the state prison system and making some overdue...

An energy company has received approval to start construction of a new natural gas processing plant in northwestern North Dakota. The Oneok company says the plant will cost $160 million and be able to process 100 million cubic feet of natural gas each day. Oneok is based in Tulsa, Okla.

Even with national Democratic leaders in the audience, Calypso Louie still doesn’t miss a beat. At 81, Louis Farrakhan is as still full of the old fire-breathing hatred of “Satanic Jews” and the “Synagogue of Satan” as ever. And he still loves President Obama, and would probably love him even more if he didn’t surround “himself with Satan … members of the Jewish community.” That was a report from the Detroit Free Press – no right-wing bastion there – about a speech the Nation of Islam leader delivered Friday night at a Detroit church. Listeners to the man Rush Limbaugh...

BRUTAL: Markets Are Getting Destroyed Around The World Sam Ro May 23, 2013, 4:59 AM European markets have been open for a few hours, and things are ugly. England's FTSE is down. 1.8%. France's CAC 40 is down 2.4%. Germany's DAX is down 2.5%. Spain's IBEX is down 2.1%. Italy's FTSE MIB is down 2.7%. This follows sell-offs in the U.S. and Asia. Japan's Nikkei fell by a stunning 7.3%. On Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that the Fed could start tapering its quantitative easing (QE) program during one of its next...

Anti-Muslim reprisals after Woolwich attack English Defence League in street battles with police in Woolwich and mosques attacked in apparent acts of revenge by Ben Quinn and Conal Urquhart The Guardian, Wednesday 22 May 2013Scores of supporters of the English Defence League threw bottles at police and chanted anti-Muslim slogans in Woolwich hours after the murder of one man and the shooting of his two suspected assailants. About 100 men, including some wearing balaclavas printed with "EDL", engaged in running battles with police for less than an hour. A police commander said officers cited section 60 of the Public Order...

The article, “Deep Divide of ‘Evil Genes" reports that evolutionary biologists at the University of Connecticut are analyzing Adam Lanza's DNA in the hope of determining if whether an evil gene caused him to go on a killing spree. (Deep divide of 'evil genes, Julia Llewellyn Smith, Age of Technology, April 11, 2013) So controversial is the idea that evil may be genetically caused that projects set up to investigate the issue have been shelved after public uproar: "Scientists are haunted by the ghosts of the pseudoscientific eugenics movement, which held that mankind could be improved by breeding out the...

Post-9/11, we in the omniscient pundit class were all Afghan experts. Post-Boston, we are all Chechen experts. Strictly between us, I can count what I know about Chechens on one leg. A couple of years ago, while I was in Copenhagen picking up an award from the Danish Free Press Society, a one-legged Chechen prematurely self-detonated in the Hotel Jørgensen while assembling a bomb. His device, using the same highly volatile TATP as in the London Tube bombings, was intended for my friends at Jyllands-Posten, publishers of the famous Mohammed cartoons, to whom I chanced to be giving an interview....

Two members of the FBI’s elite counterterrorism unit died Friday while practicing how to quickly drop from a helicopter to a ship using a rope, the FBI announced Monday in a statement. The statement gave few details regarding the deaths of Special Agents Christopher Lorek and Stephen Shaw, other than to say the helicopter encountered unspecified difficulties and the agents fell a “significant distance.” Last month, the team was involved in the arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings. And in February, it rescued a 5-year-old boy held hostage for six days in an underground bunker...

Daily investment & finance thread (5-23-13 edition) ----  Freepers lets make some cash Trying to focus on the markets for today and each day and the economic news This is where you can impart some investment wisdom to your fellow freepers.  You can complain about the big one that got away.  How Obama is out to wreck American capitalism.If you see another FR economic thread you like and want to link to it here, please do Post your favorite economic site links. Your favorite economic blogs and precious metals blogs and sitesApmex.com is a solid place with good reputation to...

Gov. Andrew Cuomo — calling job creation the state's "number-one mission" — on Wednesday unveiled a plan for dozens of tax-free zones on public college campuses across the state. The zones would be available to new businesses as well as to businesses that relocate from outside the state, and to those that create net new jobs. In the zones, they would face no business or corporate tax, no sales tax, no property tax, no franchise fee and no state income tax for the owner of the company or its employees. The breaks would last for 10 years. (...) One of...

Several major U.S. utilities are under "constant" cyberattack and haven't taken precautions to protect critical systems from Iran, North Korea and other adversaries, according to a congressional survey of more than 100 companies accounting for much of the nation's power system. The survey shows the nation's electrical grid remains "highly vulnerable" to attack after four years of failed efforts to pass major cyber-security legislation, according to an accompanying report. Industry trade groups, including the Edison Electric Institute, joined by Republicans in the Senate, opposed the bill, arguing minimum cyber-security standards would be out-of-date by the time they were implemented. "Our...

Texas outperformed every other state in the nation on jobs and growth over the past decade, according to the latest annual report on state economic performance released Thursday by the American Legislative Exchange Council. Michigan came in dead last. The rankings are based on state GDP growth, population shifts, and changes in non-farm payroll jobs between 2001 and 2011. The ALEC report also finds that Utah has the best economic outlook this year, and Vermont the worst.

A mother-of-two described tonight how she put her own life on the line by trying to persuade the soldier’s murderers to hand over their weapons.

a historic vote on the agenda that could change the iconic organization’s century-old policy and allow avowed homosexuals, some 1,400 Boy Scout leaders from across the nation who form the National Council have gathered in Grapevine, Texas. A final vote is scheduled for Thursday on a proposal that would allow openly homosexual scouts but retain the ban on adult homosexual scout leaders. Treatment for TinnitusRinging, buzzing, music in ears? There is hope in Kentucky www.kytinnitustreatment.com The Antichrist: Free BookDiscover What the Early Church Knew About Rapture & the Meaning of 666. VoiceOfElijah.org/Antichrist In the BSA’s official “Voice of the Scout”...

Our worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves, but our most dangerous lies are the ones we tell ourselves about terror. From Benghazi and Boston to Kabul and Karachi, to Fort Hood, Detroit and New York, Barack Obama and his aides have been lying about terror. The Obama Administration’s acts surpass even the maneuvers by President Richard Nixon, who used spies against political opponents while covering up for Arab terror. Nixon and Co. hid the fact that Yasser Arafat ordered the murder of three diplomats at the US embassy in Khartoum Sudan in January, 1974. The US concealed this...

Alice Walker, the author of “The Color Purple” who was also a “jurist” in the kangaroo court “Russell Tribunal on Palestine,” believes that Israel is an apartheid state. She also believes that the world is run by shape-shifting reptilian aliens who practice mind control from the Moon. I’m not sure which opinion is more bizarre. On her blog, she waxes poetic over the book that taught her so much about the aliens: that control our world: Earlier I wrote that David Icke reminded me of Malcolm X. I was thinking especially of Malcolm’s fearlessness. A fearlessness that made him seem...

The burqa and the niqab. The State Department issued a report denouncing what it called “a spike in anti-Islamic sentiment in Europe and Asia.” It said that “Muslims also faced new restrictions in 2012 in countries ranging from Belgium, which banned face-covering religious attire in classrooms, to India[,] where schools in Mangalore restricted headscarves.” The State Department report confuses religious persecution, which is to be condemned, with politicization of religions, which is a matter of debate and includes strategies of which the U.S. government should not be a part. If countries ban the right to pray, broadcast, and write about...

General Motors Co. is recalling more than 27,000 Cadillac SUVs worldwide because the wheels can fall off. The company says the recall affects the 2013 Cadillac SRX with 18-inch wheels. Canadian safety regulators say the wheel nuts may not have been tightened enough at the factory. GM says the problem hasn't caused any crashes or injuries, and no wheels have fallen from vehicles. Dealers will rotate tires and tighten the nuts at no cost to the owners. The recall affects almost 19,000 SUVs in the U.S. and another 913 in Canada. The rest were exported to other countries.

Just thought you'd like to see what a left-wing cartoonist is thinking about His O'ness this week. Yes, he gets in a shot at the GOP in the last couple of panels, but all in all I'm having fun reading this and the comments on the liberal site where it was published.

Would you like to have a "skinny" health insurance policy? Probably not. But if you're employed by a large company, you may get one, thanks to Obamacare. That's the conclusion of Wall Street Journal reporters Christopher Weaver and Anna Wilde Mathews. They report that insurance brokers are pitching and selling "low-benefit" policies across the country. You might be wondering what a "skinny" or "low-benefit" insurance plan is. The terms may vary, but the basic idea is that policies would cover preventive care, a limited number of doctor visits and perhaps generic drugs. They wouldn't cover things such as surgery, hospital...

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Stock futures were pointing to a down day on Wall Street Thursday on worries that the Federal Reserve may be heading for a wind-down of quantitative easing. Furthermore, data in China indicated a slowdown in the Asia economic engine on signs of an unexpected contraction in manufacturing activity. All overseas markets were down on the developments, with the Nikkei 225 in Japan suffering its steepest drop since the aftermath of the tsunami and nuclear disaster in March 2011, closing down 7.3%.

Not that I go there much, but: Anyone else see that the IRS and Benghazi and AP scandal stories are always absent from Google News headlines? More "backward watchdog" press behavior--the Google News dog protecting its elite masters from potentially meddlesome little people.

Hi, I'm not the most devout of folks out thee, but am a believer and do believe God answers prayer. Several verses have become popular over past years because of the hope they evoked...remember the Prayer of Jabez and 2Chron 7:14 with Promisekeepers? Well, I have been praying for another promise to be seen in our time, that of Job 5:12. I read it and wrote it down and pray it every day...it sure reads like a promise. Any believers out there let's see if we can get it to catch on in this really troubled time in our nation's...

This time of year, as college students return home for the summer, many parents may notice how many politically correct ideas they have acquired on campus. Some of those parents may wonder how they can undo some of the brainwashing that has become so common in what are supposed to be institutions of higher learning. The strategy used by General Douglas MacArthur so successfully in the Pacific during World War II can be useful in this very different kind of battle. General MacArthur won his victories while minimizing his casualties -- something that is also desirable in clashes of ideas...

When you get right down to it,the political targeting and stalling of tax-exempt applications by the IRS was an effort to defund the Tea Party. Rick Santelli,one of the Tea Party founders and my CNBC colleague,was the first to make this point. I’ve taken it a step further: The IRS was taking the Tea Party out of play for the 2012 election,as it looked to avoid a repeat of 2010 and another Tea Party landslide.… But there can be only one reason for the stalled-out approval process for conservative groups. The IRS was trying to put them out of business....

The terrible events in Woolwich today were a reminder of something very few are willing to accept: we are at war. Despite what Islamic extremists may claim, this war is not being waged against all Muslims. However they may feel about British foreign policy or perceived injustices towards Muslim peoples around the world, most British Muslims accept this simple fact. But many don’t. They see oppression where there is none and they respond not with reason or argument, but with violence. ‘Why?’ is a dangerous question, but it’s one we must ask. And where we find fault, criticisms must be...

As the Obama scandals surround the White House, some conservatives are suggesting that -- finally -- the media are "getting tough" on Obama. Don't count on it. All our modern experience suggests tough reporting on a Democratic president is more of a temporary sensation than an ongoing trend. The news media honestly believe they were tough on Team Clinton. It is simply not true. There was a seemingly endless supply of Clinton administration (and Clinton pre-administration) scandals, yet can you name one that was resolved? The floating FBI files. The illegal fundraising. Whitewater. On and on they went, and the...

Government is now so huge, powerful and callous that citizens risk becoming proverbial serfs without the freedoms guaranteed by the Founders. Is that perennial fear an exaggeration? Survey the current news. We have just learned that the Internal Revenue Service before the 2012 election predicated its tax-exempt policies on politics. It inordinately denied tax exemption to groups considered either conservative or possibly antagonistic to the president's agenda. If the supposedly nonpartisan IRS is perceived as scoring our taxes based on our politics, then the entire system of trust in self-reporting is rendered null and void. Worse still, the bureaucratic overseer...

SPRINGFIELD— — An Illinois House version of legislation to allow people to carry concealed weapons that emerged Wednesday would not let Chicago have its own set of rules and could make it easier to get a permit. The latest proposal is an attempt to address concerns of gun rights advocates who balked last week at a more restrictive Senate concealed carry bill favored by gun control supporters. Backers, including Democratic Speaker Michael Madigan, hope the House version finds enough common ground between the two sides to clear the General Assembly and meet the standards of a federal appeals court ruling...

If you were to suddenly appear this weekend at the numerous barbecues or pool parties, without any knowledge of our nation's history, it might be hard to understand the real meaning of Memorial Day. Is it a day to sell cars, clothes and mattresses? Is it a day off of work, a time to join with family and friends, and grill out? For our family, Memorial Day weekend marks the start of summer. School is out, and we transition from the school year to summer activities. But, oh, it is so much more. Memorial Day can be traced back to...

In the world of White House politics and the politics of handling the White House press corps, the president's press secretary is the most visible target and often the first to fall when the media turns on an administration. And it appears that press secretary Jay Carney may well be approaching the point at which his deft handling of the media in past years suddenly becomes a liability in the middle of not just one but multiple presidential controversies. I have known a few other past presidential press secretaries, but not Carney. As a rule of thumb, I would say...

Carol Platt Liebau and Eliana Johnson aren't exactly Woodward and Bernstein --yet. But if both reporters keep up their relentless focus on the details of the IRS scandal --"Targetcon," "Targetgate," "Senseless in Cincinnati" --their names will be far and widely known as the first two serious reporters to take the burgeoning scandal seriously. Liebau labors at Townhall.com, and most her work appears first there in its "Tipsheet" column and eventually ends up easy to find and comprehensively categorized at CarolLiebau.com. Johnson's work appears most frequently in "The Corner" at National Review Online, though her work on the IRS is getting...

A specter has been haunting the Western Hemisphere since mid-summer 2012, the specter of China's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) routinely patrolling the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. At first sight, it might seem that Beijing is truly laying the groundwork for its foothold in the Atlantic Rim. Not least, Chinese government signed a free-trade agreement with Iceland in April and PLAN vessels recently made a month-long trip in the Mediterranean Sea and Eastern Atlantic. Even so, China's strategic projection in the Atlantic is still far from becoming reality. The whole psychodrama unfolded at the end of June 2012, when...

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Prosecutors are pursuing rape charges against a 40-year-old Malaysian who allegedly had sex with a 13-year-old girl and then married her. Restaurant manager Riduan Masmud was charged with committing statutory rape in a parked car in Borneo in February, but his lawyer said he has since married the girl. Rights activists have long criticised Malaysian laws that allow very young Muslims to be wedded with the permission of Islamic courts. Attorney General Abdul Gani Patail said late Wednesday that authorities remain firmly against statutory rape and were compiling a DNA report and other evidence in Riduan's...

“How many isolated incidents does it take to make it not isolated?” Stephen Coughlin on the events in Europe over the last couple of days. Yesterday’s barbaric attack on a British Soldier on a London street & muslim riots in Sweden... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX6PW6hESPQ

Listen to the Quinn & Rose Morning Show from 6:00 to 9:00 Eastern on: www.wpgb.com (104.7 Pittsburgh, Pa) http://wysl1040.com/ (Rochester, NY) http://www.talkradio560.com/ (Frostburg, MD) http://wicofm.com/ (Salisbury/Ocean City, MD) http://www.wobx.net/ WOBX - Outer banks NC WVTT 96.7 - Olean, NY http://www.wncoam.com/main.html (Ashland, OH) And now on 166 XM http://tunein.com/radio/The-War-Room-p34761/

Conservatives have alleged that progressives have been engaged in a callous attempt under this plutocratic administration in creating artificial crises so that the plutocracy can abridge citizens' rights. I mean further than they’ve already abridged them. And until now the press has ignored this vast right wing conspiracy theory time after time: Fast and Furious, Solyndra, TARP, HARP, Benghazi, the IRS, Gun Grabbing, Libya, Iran, Syria, Russia, stimulus spending, the Boston Bombing and the phony math on Obamacare. Wisconsin’s Jim Sensenbrenner summed it up during a House hearing on Fast and Furious when he said: "There is really no responsibility...

The Army psychiatrist charged in the deadly 2009 Fort Hood attack wants to represent himself at his upcoming murder trial, which means he could question the nearly three dozen soldiers he’s accused of wounding in the shooting rampage. Maj. Nidal Hasan’s request, announced Wednesday by Fort Hood officials, is to be considered at a pretrial hearing next week. The request prompted the military judge, Col. Tara Osborn, to delay jury selection to June 5, about a week after it was scheduled to start. Hasan, an American-born Muslim, faces the death penalty or life in prison without parole if convicted of...

  The European Parliament met Tuesday to discuss the issue of tax evasion throughout the UK and the Eurozone, and how the European Parliament might clamp down on those attempting to protect their well earned wealth from government confiscation.    All was going according to plan, until UKIP member Nigel Farage was given the floor.    Farage immediately launched into a classic rant against Barroso and the rest of the EU bureaucrats, stating that it is not the average man on the street that is engaging in tax fraud, but the European Parliament members themselves:    If we look at the...

A secretly drafted bill to block release of photos, tapes of 911 calls and death certificates related to the Dec. 14 Newtown elementary school massacre could be acted on in the General Assembly as early as the end of the week, officials said Wednesday. Family members of victims would have discretion over release of some of the records. A draft of the bill was released Wednesday afternoon by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's office, which has been working behind the scenes in recent weeks on drafting the language with legislative leaders and the office of the state's top prosecutor, Chief State's...

HARTFORD— A coalition of gun owners, gun dealers and firearms rights organizations have sued the governor and members of the state's attorney's office, contending that the gun law passed in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings violates the Constitution. State officials have been expecting a challenge to the legislation, which Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed into law April 4. The law, opposed by many gun owners and others who say it is an infringement of Second Amendment rights, drew support from Republicans and Democrats. "The act was rushed through the legislature without thorough debate or meaningful public...

Sky sources: military commanders tell soldiers not to wear uniform in public until further notice.

At first I thought the IRS scandal was leaked to distract from the Benghazi scandal. But that didn't make sense because the IRS scandal is a more obvious abuse of power than the White House lying about the murder of four Americans in Libya. Before I had resolved which scandal was distracting from which, we found out the Department of Justice was spying on The Associated Press -- not to protect national security, but to prevent the AP from scooping the White House. Then, this week, it broke that the Department of Justice was also spying on Fox News for...

Toronto police are searching for a suspect accused of stealing the purse of a woman who jumped to her death in a subway station Wednesday morning. Police say the woman left her purse on the subway platform before jumping in front of a train at College station. She was taken to hospital where she was pronounced dead. Police say they have not been able to identify her because another woman stole the purse and any identification that might have been inside.

The FBI is calling this a drug deal gone bad, but considering that both money and drugs were left behind, it doesn’t sound like drugs were the issue at all. And considering the date, the 10th anniversary of September 11 and the identities of the victims, there is a more obvious explanation. But here’s the official story… Dead Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and another man — who was killed by the FBI on Wednesday — murdered three people in Massachusetts after a drug deal went wrong in 2011, law enforcement sources tell NBC News. Sources say that what began...

The swarming of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is entirely understandable; the mayor, caught on video allegedly smoking crack, has a lot to clear up. But there are as many unanswered questions on the other side of this bizarre international confluence of drug dealers, politics, comedy shows, news media and blogging low-lifes such as gawker.com. Questions about the video, the role of newspapers, organized crime, crowdsourcing social media, and the implausibility of a shock-blog like gawker raising $200,000 in ransom money that will have to be run through a money laundering operation to reach the drug dealers. The ethics of it...

An East Palo Alto man turned the tables on two suspects during a home invasion robbery Wednesday afternoon. Two men entered a residence in the 2200 block of Capitol Avenue at about 2:39 p.m. and tried to rob the resident inside, East Palo Alto police Acting Detective Sgt. Angel Sanchez said. "They assaulted the victim with a handgun, pistol whipping him and asking for money and guns," Sanchez said. "At one point the victim was able to retrieve a gun, and they saw that and fled." As the would-be robbers ran away, the victim, who was in his 30s, fired...

They stole 60,000,000 medical records – And won’t give them back. Last week news broke that the IRS was facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges. In a case involving solely a tax matter involving a former employee of the company, these agents stole more than 60,000,000 medical records of more than 10,000,000 Americans, including at least 1,000,000 Californians. The lawsuit by John Doe Company against 15 John Doe IRS agents is seeking punitive damages for constitutional violations,...

As multiple scandals have simultaneously engulfed the Obama administration, a number of political observers have cautioned Republicans against overreaching. Liberal blogger Greg Sargent writes over at the Washington Post that, “the current scandal-mania gripping the GOP risks bringing about a rerun of 1998, when the frenzy amid the Monica Lewinsky revelations led the GOP to overreach, resulting in backlash.” Charlie Cook reaches a similar conclusion: Red-faced Republicans, circling and preparing to pounce on a second-term Democratic president they loathe, do not respect, and certainly do not fear. Sound familiar? Perhaps reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s second term, after the Monica Lewinsky...

Washington - India and the US have called upon all nations - without naming any country - to take effective steps to work toward eliminating sanctuaries and infrastructure that supports terrorism and to increase efforts to counter violent extremism. The call was made in a joint communiqué issued after the Second US-India Homeland Security Dialogue here Tuesday co-chaired by Indian Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde and US Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. The communiqué reaffirmed the two nations' own "commitment to, and importance of, bilateral homeland security cooperation on common challenges faced such as terrorism, and countering violent extremism." India...