Free Republic

QUITMAN, GA (WALB) - 12 former Brooks County officials were indicted for voter fraud. The suspects are accused of illegally helping people vote by absentee ballot. State officials launched an investigation after an unusually high number of absentee ballots were cast in the July 2010 primary election. "As a result of their grand jury findings 12 individuals were indicted in that particular matter and we will be trying that case in a court of judicial law instead of a court of public opinion so that will be pending this next year," said District Attorney Joe Mulholland

Officials with the revamped ACORN office in New York -- operating as New York Communities for Change -- have fired staff, shredded reams of documents and told workers to blame disgruntled ex-employees for leaking information in an effort to explain away a FoxNews.com report last week on the group’s involvement in Occupy Wall Street protests, according to sources. NYCC also is installing surveillance cameras and recording devices at its Brooklyn offices, removing or packing away supplies bearing the name ACORN and handing out photos of Fox News staff with a stern warning not to talk to the media, the sources...

The new acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said Wednesday he was reassigning 11 of the agency's top officials in a bid to rebuild ATF after Operation Fast and Furious, in which agents let U.S.-purchased guns slip into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. ATF Acting Director B. Todd Jones said the reshuffling will help the agency focus on its "core missions of violent crime and public safety" and bring about "a certain level of accountability" in the wake of the controversy. "We're going to hit the reset button," said Jones,

U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis admitted Thursday morning during a congressional hearing that she and the Obama administration believe driving a bus that happens to run on “clean energy” should count as a “green job.” Florida Republican Rep. Connie Mack, questioning Solis during a House oversight committee hearing about why she and the Obama administration consider a man driving a “clean energy” bus to have a “green job,” pushed her on the absurdity of her argument. “Driving a bus is driving a bus, right?” Mack asked her. “I mean, you turn the wheel, you push the gas, you use...

Obama administration officials refused to say Wednesday whether anybody would be fired over the decision to award solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra LLC a half-billion dollars in loansbefore it went bankrupt and saw its headquarters raided by the FBI. During a hearing in which two top administration officials defended the $535 million loan deal to Solyndra in 2009, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee questioned whether Americans could expect any government officials to be fired. The FBI raided the company after it filed for bankruptcy last week

Chicago Union Leaders Grab Millions in Pension Loophole Updated: Tuesday, 23 Aug 2011, 6:42 AM CDT Published : Monday, 22 Aug 2011, 8:38 PM CDT By Dane Placko, FOX Chicago News Chicago - How would you like to get a 25 percent annual return on your retirement investment? It's a great deal, and it's not available to regular folks. But it is -- legally -- available to union officials who started their careers working for the City of Chicago. Take Tim Foley, who's the head of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 134. Under a little-known provision of the...

San Francisco - Transit officials said Friday they blocked cell phone reception in San Francisco stations for three hours to disrupt a planned demonstrations over a police shooting. Officials with the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, better known as BART, said they turned off the electricity to cell phone towers in four stations from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday. The move was made after BART learned that protesters planned to use mobile devices to coordinate a demonstration on train platforms. (Snip) The statement noted that it’s illegal to demonstrate on the platform or aboard the trains. BART said it

The majority of Russians remain dissatisfied with the progress of democratization in Russia, a new poll has found. The Moscow Times reports that 62 percent of people recently polled in an All-Russia Public Opinion Research Centre survey answered that they are “dissatisfied with the development of democracy in Russia.” This number, however, is down marginally from the 73 percent who were dissatisfied with domestic conditions twenty years ago. Meanwhile, those who believe the country is showing progress are largely supporters of the ruling "United Russia" party, are under 45 years of age, and generally active Internet users. [Editors’ Note: Given...

DALLAS — At least eight people were hurt when thousands of housing voucher applicants rushed the doors at the Jesse Owens Memorial Complex in Dallas, Texas. An estimated 5,000 applicants waited for hours to receive applications for one of the 3,800 available vouchers. The waiting applicants became a frenzied stampede when officials opened doors to the housing voucher offices earlier than expected. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaoiegq52y8

In promising a U.S. military pullout from Afghanistan will begin in July, President Barack Obama is permitting his commanders to decide critical details, including the number of troops to depart first and whether any of those will be combat forces, administration and military officials said Sunday. Providing that leeway is important to Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. It allows him to pace this year's phase of the withdrawal in a way that preserves combat power through the end of the traditional fighting season in October or November.

It is a felony offense to know or have reason to know that seditious activity is underway and do nothing about it. The term used in the U.S. Code for such a crime is “misprision of treason.” Counterterrorism expert Patrick Poole reveals today that political appointees in the Obama-Holder Justice Department would appear, at a minimum, to be candidates for prosecution for obstruction of justice and perhaps guilty of violating this statute. In a Pajamas Media article headlined “Did Obama and Holder Scuttle Terror Finance Prosecutions?”, Poole reports that two Justice Department sources confirm that the

Online retail sales keep climbing, big box retailers keep wondering what to do with all their space, and small stores struggle to survive at all. As a result of that nasty brew, Malls Face Surge in Vacancies. Mall vacancies hit their highest level in at least 11 years in the first quarter, new figures from real-estate research company Reis Inc. showed. In the top 80 U.S. markets, the average vacancy rate was 9.1%, up from 8.7%. The outlook is especially bad for strip malls and other neighborhood shopping centers. Their vacancy rate is expected to top 11.1% later this year,...

How much should a college education cost? According to the College Board, the average cost of earning a degree at a private, 4-year university is now more than $100,000. If tuition prices continue to rise as quickly as they did during the past decade, a college degree will cost more than $200,000 by the time today’s third-graders are applying. That price tag is enough to cause most parents to break into a sweat. Is a college degree really worth this cost? Some bright minds think Americans are paying way too much. In fact, Bill Gates--one of the country's most famous...

They’re not just blindly defying the order here. The argument, as it was last week when the Legislative Reference Bureau published the law, is that the TRO only names certain parties and therefore only those parties are enjoined by it. There’s no mention of the Department of Administration in the order, so hey — the Department of Administration’s going to go right on ahead and execute the CB law. Grassroots conservatives will love that, but if Wisconsin were chock full of grassroots conservatives, Mickey Kaus wouldn’t be writing posts like this. Now that the judge has doubled down on the...

Just days after Gov. Scott Walker introduced his budget repair bill, public-sector-union leaders said they would accept Walker’s financial demands as long as he kept collective bargaining intact. However, in the time bought by the flight of 14 Democratic state senators, local governments have been quickly adopting new contracts in advance of Walker’s bill becoming law. In effect, the unions are spraying their benefits with Walker repellent. (In fact, an investigative report shows that there may have been collusion between the missing state senators and City of Madison officials to delay the bill so contracts could be signed.) Three days...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Monday finally had enough of President Obama's hectoring. (Obama at the National Governors' Association meeting on Monday pronounced, "I don't think it does anybody any good when public employees are denigrated or vilified or their rights are infringed upon.") In a statement, Walker reminded Obama -- and the country -- of some key facts: "I'm sure the President knows that most federal employees do not have collective bargaining for wages and benefits while our plan allows it for base pay. And I'm sure the President knows that the average federal worker pays twice as much...

Industry officials warn 7.3million American jobs will disappear if U.S. President Barack Obama's administration tightens regulations in a bid to reduce smog. The industry-sponsored researcher who came up with the number cautioned, however, that there was uncertainty surrounding that number. Although economist Don Norman pointed out: 'Even if the numbers are half of that, the number is huge.'

A Charles Manson follower has been ordered to remain in prison after parole board officials rejected her claim she was a changed woman. The two-member panel said the viciousness and notoriety of Patricia Krenwinkel's crimes outweighed her efforts at rehabilitation behind bars. Krenwinkel, now 63, wept and apologised during the hearing, but officials said the deaths of seven people in the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders 'remained relevant'.

So claims the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which just concluded a five-year study on the American public’s knowledge of its foundational legal document. The bad news: the general public gets an F, with just a 49% average on the 33-question civics test. The worse news: those who identified themselves as public officeholders scored an average of five points worse than the general public: The survey asks 33 basic civics questions, many taken from other nationally recognized instruments like the U.S. Citizenship Exam. It also asks 10 questions related to the U.S. Constitution. So what did we find? Well, to put it...

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Friday three top Russian officials should spend New Year's Eve in the dark after failing to fulfill their promise to repair damaged power lines. "You said everything would be fine by 1800 (1500 GMT)," Russia's de facto number one said in nationally televised comments to the three. "You should not have said anything if you were not sure," he added during a meeting that included the governor of the Moscow region as well as federal energy minister and the head of the local power utility. The televised comments were followed an hour later by news...