Free Republic

Justice Neil Gorsuch took his first major action on the U.S. Supreme Court by casting the deciding vote to let Arkansas begin executing a group of death-row inmates. In a series of orders Thursday night, the high court cleared the state to execute Ledell Lee, one of eight convicted murderers that Arkansas has been trying to put to death before one of its lethal-injection drugs expires at the end of the month. Arkansas executed Lee minutes after the court rejected the last of his requests. Gorsuch joined his four fellow Republican appointees -- Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence...

A bill in the Tennessee Legislature to remove the ban on gun mufflers (silencers, suppressors) has passed the senate with an overwhelming vote, 28-1 on April 3rd, 2017.SB 921 is the companion to HB 0011 in the House. The bill simply  removes  the sections of Tennessee statutes that define and include “silencers” as prohibited weapons. Here is the summary of the bill. From legiscan.com: As introduced, enacts the “Tennessee Hearing Protection Act,” which deletes the prohibition on possession, manufacture, transport, repair, or sale of a firearm silencer. – Amends TCA Section 39-17-1301 and Section 39-17-1302. Those sections would be...

Brandenburg / H. That the sex of the 23 year old Turks from Brandenburg / Havel was violent and the woman was four hours his victim, do not doubt the prosecutor and the Judge Court Brandenburg / Havel. Nevertheless, the 23-year-old was released from the accusation of rape. The lawyers did not recognize him. "I believe Mrs. G. every word," said the judge, according to her verdict. But her tormentor probably did not know what he was doing to her when, on the night of August 18, 2016, he fell victim to his acquaintances in his apartment and carried on...

A leading researcher on a ridiculed taxpayer-funded study of duck penises is now using her expertise on orca whales and is going to the "March for Science" to protest budget cuts. Patricia Brennan, a visiting lecturer at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, worked on the duck penis study that received $384,949 from the National Science Foundation, a grant that was funded through the 2009 stimulus package. The study looked at the differences in the corkscrew-shaped penises of ducks.

What happened to you white people? Really, please tell me what happened to the people that have achieved so much but have now become wimpy, pansies cowering in fear of someone not liking them. White people today are seeking safe places when there was no safe place from them 100 years ago. I wrote “It’s OK to Leave the Plantation” to help black people leave the inner city oppression. Now I need to write a book to help white people leave the outer city oppression. Granted, I am glad most of you saw through that slavery thing and that 360,000...

Valerie Jarrett, former senior adviser to then-President Barack Obama, said Thursday that the 2016 election result was “gut-wrenching,” and she did not see the election results coming. “Elections have consequences,” Ms. Jarrett said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I actually didn’t see the election coming out the way it did.” Ms. Jarrett said she will continue her work on issues she cares about from the private sector, saying the former president and first lady will also likely remain in the private sector. When asked if she had any discussion with former first lady Michelle Obama about a possible run for office,...

In 2013, it was first reported that the Clinton State Department had called off eight separate internal investigations into alleged misconduct by the diplomatic corps. When whistleblowers attempted to highlight the wave of coverups, they were subjected to a harassment campaign by the State Department. The law firm representing the former State Department employee who publicized the misconduct was broken into and key evidence stolen in an apparent effort to further obfuscate efforts to ensure a proper investigation into the crimes was carried out. The event was not given widespread attention by the media when it first emerged. ADVERTISING I....

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is having a difficult time with his latest tweet assailing the wealthy. First, Sanders, who ran a progressive presidential campaign criticizing Wall Street and the rich, tweeted out a message Thursday evening with what seems to be a typo, telling billionaires: "You can have it all." After deleting the initial tweet and replacing it with a new one, swapping "can" with "can't", Sanders was mercilessly mocked for questioning how yachts and cars billionaires need when he and his wife bought their third house — a $600,000 beachfront residence — in August.

Before Hillary Clinton puts more miles on her comeback tour, Democrats should let her know she's done enough damage and it's time to pack it in. That won't stop her, since even after losing to Donald Trump she fancies herself some misunderstood martyr, but it might slow her down a bit. While they crawl out of the wilderness that both Clinton and President Obama left them in, any moments Democrats spend amusing their failed 2016 nominee as she tries to find a way back to some sort of relevance is more than wasted energy -- it's self-sabotage. Last week Clinton...

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly says construction of President Trump’s promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border will “move forward” this summer. “I think something in the neighborhood of 100 counties from across the nation have shown interest and are starting to put together their prototypes,” Kelly said Wednesday on Fox News’s “The First 100 Days.” “But I think by late spring, early summer, we’ll have some prototypes and then we’ll be able to move forward into the summer. We’re going to get at it as quick as we can.” Kelly appeared alongside Attorney General Jeff Sessions as the pair conducted...

The U.S. has ways to shut down Kim Jong-un’s nuclear-missile program short of war. The crisis with North Korea may appear trumped up. It’s not. Given that Pyongyang has had nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles for more than a decade, why the panic now? Because North Korea is headed for a nuclear breakout. The regime has openly declared that it is racing to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach the United States — and thus destroy an American city at a Kim Jong-un push of a button. The North Koreans are not bluffing. They’ve made significant progress with...

Series of antisemitic tweets claim that Kushner is manipulating Trump and leading the United States into war for Israel’s benefit. Antisemitic invective against Jared Kushner has shot up recently, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL report, published Monday, documents a series of antisemitic tweets from white supremacists directed at Kushner, an Orthodox Jew and President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law. The tweets, sent by leading antisemites like David Duke and Richard Spencer, claim that Kushner is manipulating Trump and leading the United States into war for Israel’s benefit. “#FireKushner No one voted for Kushner,” Spencer...

Even today, Turkey does not allow dead Armenians to rest in peace. What is the most at is the most horrible crime against humanity in history? To Henry Morgenthau Sr., who served as the US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1913 and 1916, it was the Armenian genocide. Morgenthau wrote in 1919: “I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.” Up to 1.5 million Armenians were wiped...

JNS.org –Israel’s female soldiers seem to break barriers on a consistent basis. In January, new figures revealed that the number of women serving in combat roles in the IDF’s Home Front Command is up 38 percent this year. And last month, the IDF launched a pilot program in which women will be trained as tank operators for the first time. Indeed, the Jewish state takes pride in being an oasis for gender equality in a region largely bereft of women’s rights; this attitude extends to Israel’s military. At the same time, for a nation facing ever-present security threats both internally...

Senate Democrats want White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon to clarify recent contact he's had with Breitbart News, the conservative outlet he once ran.   The senators also want to know if Bannon's contact with the site complies with ethics rules.   Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Ed Markey (Mass.), Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) sent letters Thursday to Bannon and Stefan Passantino, the White House's designated agency ethics official. 

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk on Thursday confirmed plans for his newest company, called Neuralink Corp., revealing he will be the chief executive of a startup that aims to merge computers with brains so humans could one day engage in “consensual telepathy.” Speaking to writer Tim Urban on the explainer website Wait but Why, Mr. Musk confirmed a Wall Street Journal report last month that Neuralink aims to implant a tiny brain...

America’s surgical strike on Syrian regime targets a week and a half ago — and this past Thursday’s “mother of all non-nuclear bomb” attack on Sunni terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan — garnered surprisingly widespread bipartisan support, but put some of US President Donald Trump’s critics in a bit of a rhetorical quandary. How could they word their defense of Trump’s bold yet not extreme warning shots without putting a dent in their distrust of the new occupant of the Oval Office? Coming up with a solution to this problem turned out not to be so difficult for those pundits and...

During the Navy League's Sea-Air-Space 2017 exposition held recently near Washington D.C., Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) was showcasing its "Future Surface Combatant" based on a LPD-17 / San Antonio-class hull form. HII's LPD-Based Future Surface Combatant Concept Could Replace Ticonderoga-class CruisersHII's Future Surface Combatant at Sea Air Space 2017. According to an HII representative, the scale model is representative of what a future surface combatant could look like based on future fleet architecture studies by the US Navy and various think tanks. "It is increasingly clear that they are going to need a combatant with a very large radar to...

As part of the bilateral military co-operation between Egypt and France, Dassault Aviation, a multinational Rafale fighter manufacturing company named based in France, delivered three Rafale fighters to Egypt on Wednesday which represents the third batch of the total deal of 24 fighters, according to a statement released by the official army spokesperson on Facebook. This Egypt-France deal is the first of its kind. For France to sell Rafale fighters to any country, as was the case in February 2015, was unprecedented. The deal also includes training Egyptian fighter pilots in these imported Rafale fighters in France. The Egyptian pilots'...

Who really believed in the objectivity of journalists? As students we used to debate which was preferable: the Western system of arbitrary rich men owning newspapers, motivated by self-interest and the flow of advertising in determining what sells and what is news, or the communist system of a group of party ideologues deciding what should be published for the public good in Pravda or Izvestia? We knew perfectly well that each side was doctoring the news one way or another. In the Britain of my youth, we knew where the Manchester Guardian, the News Chronicle, and The Times stood on...