Free Republic

With the midterm elections approaching, Texas senator Ted Cruz penned an editorial in USA Today this week detailing what he’d like a potential Republican-controlled Congress to prioritize in 2015. As you might expect, the list is full of Tea Party staples: repealing Obamacare, cutting taxes, and slashing funding for federal programs. What makes Cruz’s list of Congressional priorities interesting is that it essentially previews what a Cruz 2016 presidential campaign agenda might look like–and it’s not pretty. As Ted Cruz’s multiple trips to Iowa have suggested, Texas’ junior senator is all-but-confirmed to be running for president in 2016. Though his...

In two weeks, voters decide which party will control the Senate and House, as well as choosing 36 governors and 6,049 state legislators.In some places voters will also be making transportation policy directly through ballot initiatives and referenda.A common factor in three states, Texas, Maryland and Wisconsin, is the attempt to ensure that some tax revenues are used only for transportation and aren’t diverted to other purposes.Texas voters will decide the fate of Proposition 1, a constitutional amendment that would earmark revenue from the state’s oil and gas severance tax to the state highway fund. (You can see a TV...

If Republicans gain control of Congress, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) wants more guest-worker visas for high-tech and low-skilled workers in addition to a piecemeal immigration reform. Hensarling, the House Financial Services Committee Chair whom the pro-amnesty Wall Street Journal touted as the "leading candidate to eventually succeed John Boehner as Speaker," would "like to see immigration reform that allows more H-1B visas for high-tech workers and also creates a 'vibrant guest-worker program' for low-skill workers who want to come here to work in agriculture." The Journal also noted that Hensarling "believes a good guest-worker program is a form of border...

ISIS’ call for “lone wolf attacks” has hit North America. The attack took place while two soldiers were standing in a parking lot in Montreal. One soldier was wearing his uniform. The man behind the wheel, 25-year-old Martin Roulea, intentionally hit the armed forces members and then attempted to make a getaway from police in pursuit. However, Roulea lost control of his getaway car during the chase and flipped. As Roulea made his exit from the vehicle, police exercised the use of deadly force. One of the soldiers Roulea hit didn’t survive. ... one thing is vividly clear: From the...

The recent questionably unconstitutional moves by the Houston city council to subpoena the sermons of five area ministers, as well as internal correspondence dealing with social issues, should have the American Civil Liberties Union and everyone else who believes in free speech and religious freedom up in arms. We as Americans must guard every aspect of our Constitution and recognize when it is being threatened. One of the great dangers in America today is extreme intolerance in the name of tolerance. For example, in this Houston case, it is presupposed that the pastors in question may have said something that...

FORT WORTH, Texas — The family of the first Ebola victim to die in the United States says the hospital that cared for him has refused for weeks to release lab results showing the effects of an experimental drug treatment, fanning their suspicions that the facility mishandled the case. They believe that information is being withheld, along with additional medical records, by Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, where Thomas Eric Duncan died Oct. 8....

Responding to the Ebola crisis that gripped Dallas, Governor Rick Perry announced on Tuesday the creation of a containment facility in North Texas to treat individuals with the deadly virus. Perry's hope is that such a facility will protect health care workers and prevent Ebola from spreading to the greater public. A designated space at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston will additionally be utilized as a containment facility. The governor said in a statement provided to Breitbart Texas, "In the event of another diagnosis this facility will allow us to act quickly to limit the virus’ reach...

Nelson Bunker Hunt, one of the most famous Texas oilmen and dealmakers, died Tuesday in an assisted living facility in Dallas after long battles with cancer and dementia. He was 88. ... The second son of oil legend H.L. Hunt, Bunker was briefly thought to be the richest man in the world with his discovery of a Libyan oil field in partnership with British Petroleum. Those interests were later nationalized by Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. ... Despite his apparent Midas touch, Hunt lived modestly. He flew coach, wore mass-merchandise clothing and drove nondescript automobiles. Many noted that his personal spending...

Immigrant rights groups filed a Freedom of Information Act court action in Washington, D.C. Tuesday to compel the release of documents regarding the use of the expedited removal process against families with children, including those detained at the family detention center in Artesia, N.M. The groups, in a news release, said the government has not publicly released critical information about the procedures governing its operations at the facility, despite the potentially life-threatening consequences for the women and children detained there.

Gov. Rick Perry announced Tuesday that UT Southwestern Medical Center will head up one of two designated treatment centers for Ebola patients in Texas. “The goal of these facilities is to rival the most advanced facilities in the world,” the governor said at a news conference at the Dallas hospital. “I don’t think there is a better institution in the world” than UT Southwestern. The state’s other treatment facility will be at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. UT Southwestern will staff and provide other expertise for the treatment facility, but it won’t be on the hospital’s campus...

Houston recently passed an ordinance through its city council that has sparked quite a bit of controversy amongst conservative evangelicals. The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), a broad-sweeping, left-leaning law trumpeted by the City of Houston and its openly gay mayor, Annise Parker, is supposed to protect gay, lesbian and transgender people from discrimination. All well and good, but according to the Independent Journal Review, the ordinance to ensure nondiscrimination, discriminates against those of faith who oppose it. Five pastors, members of Houston's conservative, evangelical base, oppose HERO, as does the liberal Americans United for the Separation of Church and...

Body camera footage from a Texas cop’s perspective shows the officer making kissing noises at two dogs, who wag their tails at the human, before he opens fire and kills one. The second pit bull, tracked down in Cleburne, Texas, was captured without incident by an animal control officer – but the killing of the dog has the city investigating the incident after an uproar in the city of 30,000 people some 30 miles south of Fort Worth. The 22-second clip, uploaded Friday onto YouTube, shows a brown pup and another dark colored dog milling about in a grassy ditch...

It all started in September, when Houston Mayor Annise Parker and City Attorney David Feldman issued an "overly broad" subpoena for the sermons of select ministers who opposed the city's equal rights ordinance. Because of intense national opposition from even Texas' attorney general, this past Wednesday, Parker and Feldman appeared to recant or at least reduce their flagrant overreach and disregard of the ministers' legal protections under the First Amendment. By the weekend, however, the truth came out that they were only using political smoke and mirrors to try to simmer the patriotic fury; they were not changing course to...

Yeah this new Ebola Czar appears more and more to be a ‘perfect’ pick. He said this in 2008 when asked what the top leadership issue challenging our world today: “I think the top leadership challenge issue in our world today is how to deal with the continuing, growing population in the world and all the resource demands it places on the world and burgeoning populations in Africa and Asia that lack the resources to have a healthy, happy life,” Klain said.“We’ve got to find a way to make the world work for everyone,” Klain said. “Climate change is...

The logic of Black rebellion is lost on much of the privileged white population and the corporate media, which perceive Black rage as irrational. However, the Black response to white supremacy “is not ‘senseless’ or ‘visceral’; it is the product of a life full of experiences that have tried to beat them down to their knees.”“I wanted revenge on those racist bullies who had joyfully traumatized a pair of 9-year-old boys walking to the store.” On a crisp, Fall evening in 1992, while I was a freshman at a SUNY (State University of New York) school, the campus erupted after...

It is beyond refute that the United States is a world leader, and exceptional, in several categories, although not in those that portray the richest nation in the world in a favorable light. Oh, it is true that America’s military is without peer, American corporations pay some of the lowest tax rates in the world, and the wealthy elite holding most of the nation’s wealth pay minimal taxes compared to most other countries. However, the United States also leads the world in the number of citizens incarcerated, number of guns in the population, number of gun-related homicides, lowest median income...

Build a militant, mass movement for liberation! On July 17, Eric Garner, an African American father of six, was choked to death by New York City police, who then went through his pockets instead of calling an ambulance. Three weeks later, Michael Brown was shot at least six times and killed by policeman Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. His body was left in the street and no medical help was called. For more than a week the police refused to release Officer Wilson’s name and turned in no official police report. All of this shows that another cover-up is underway...

On 24 April 1974 then US Secretary of State under George Bush Snr said ‘depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the Third World’. Juxtapose that with Ghanian Nana Kwame’s allegation that people started dying only after the Red Cross vaccinations is certainly food for thought especially when he goes on to say that Ebola is a CIA invention to allow western troops on African soil. Ebola incidentally is a genotype weapon that is designed to kill only blacks and the vaccine serum only works on white people (Centre for Disease Control)! In the meanwhile US is...

The Ebola crisis has gripped the American media, and by extension the imagination of the public, punctuated by breathless pronouncements from TV news reporters of the medical status of actual and potential victims of the disease; hysteria-inducing magazine covers, like this issue of Bloomberg Businessweek sporting the message “Ebola Is Coming” in blood- smeared letters; and Facebook feeds dominated by click-bait images of microscopic photos of the virus with eerie back-lit tangles of fat worms symbolizing the foreign bodies that could invade us all. But the foreign bodies of the Liberian man, Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to have...

Baylor University is holding a forum Tuesday after a group of freshman named their intramural team “Ferguson PD,” something school officials now say staff should not have approved. Elizabeth Palacios, dean of student development at Baylor, said the forum event is meant to raise awareness and sensitivity after the students named their football team in honor of the Ferguson, Missouri, police department, which has come under scrutiny for the Aug. 9 shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer. The team was ordered to change its name Thursday, the day after the mishap was discovered, and the students...