Free Republic

With the embers still raining from blackened skies choked by California’s massive wildfires, the effort turns to rebuilding Paradise — a town of almost 30,000 that was wiped off the map. But experts warn that with megafires the new normal in a warming global climate, housing in the western United States is going to need a revolutionary rethink along the lines of villages dotting Europe’s wooded slopes. “I think people are thinking about if there is a way we can design the new Paradise that can look like more of a European village or a ski town, and not have...

Millions of Americans will be barred from casting ballots in Tuesday’s crucial midterm elections due to electoral rules at the state level, which effectively exclude many minority voters to the detriment of Democrats. […] Nearly six million Americans are excluded from voting because they are imprisoned, on parole or awaiting sentencing. African Americans, who are overrepresented in the US penal system, are four times more likely to be unable to vote than the rest of the population, according to The Sentencing Project, a non-profit organization. […] There is no national identity card in the United States. Instead, each state defines...

President Trump ripped the Koch brothers one day after the political network formed by the billionaire conservative businessmen said it would not support a Republican Senate candidate in North Dakota “The globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles, are against Strong Borders and Powerful Trade,” Trump said in a series of tweets early Tuesday. “I never sought their support because I don’t need their money or bad ideas. They love my Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judicial picks & more. I made them richer. Their network is highly overrated, I have beaten them at every...

Billionaire activist Charles Koch said Sunday that his network of big-spending political groups would be more aggressive in going after Republicans who have failed to adhere to fiscally conservative principles. Speaking to a small group of reporters in a rare interview at a five-star resort in the Rocky Mountains, Koch vowed to hold GOP lawmakers accountable for their votes when they break with the network’s free-market views on issues like spending and tariffs. “I regret some of the [lawmakers] we have supported … we’re gonna more directly deal with that and hold people accountable,” Koch said. The Koch network will...

Europe “must take its fate into its own hands” faced with a western alliance divided by Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday. “The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out. I’ve experienced that in the last few days,” Merkel told a crowd at an election rally in Munich, southern Germany. “We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands,” she added. While Germany and Europe would strive to remain on good terms with America and Britain, “we have to fight for our own destiny,” Merkel...

Google and Facebook will be working with the mainstream media to tell voters “what and who to trust”, including “memes, comment threads and news sites”, in the lead up to the French elections. The two Tech giants, who have been accused of a “liberal bias”, will set up the “coalition news verification project” with 37 French and international media outlets including the BBC, AFP (Agence France-Presse), and BuzzFeed News. On an official blog post, Google claimed “CrowdTangle” had been set up “with a goal of helping the French electorate make sense of what and who to trust in their social...

The Donald Trump campaign began courting top staffers with the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity late last year, in order to bolster its ground game ahead of big primary nights in March, according to BuzzFeed News. The billionaire businessman's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, is a former AFP state director whose intricate knowledge of New Hampshire paid dividends in that primary. One top AFP staffer in a March primary state said he was approached by Lewandowski, who told him Trump "was for real. He's going all the way." "Anecdotally, I'd say a lot of people have been approached," another source close...

The Texas senator and Republican presidential campaigner Ted Cruz on Saturday told a Koch brothers-sponsored gathering he would have a busy agenda on his first day in the White House. Speaking to activists at the annual summit of Americans for Prosperity (AFP) in Columbus, Ohio, Cruz said if elected he would rescind “every single illegal and unconstitutional executive order” signed by President Barack Obama, begin investigating the women’s health organisation Planned Parenthood, “rip to shreds” the Iranian nuclear deal and order all federal agencies to end the religious persecution of Christians. Cruz – who on Friday night in Iowa was...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was the hands-down favorite of the Americans for Prosperity annual summit in Columbus, Ohio, this weekend, if the number and volume of ovations during the speeches of five presidential candidates who addressed the annual convention of tea party activists was the measure. At the other end of the spectrum was former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a newcomer to events financed by conservative industrialists Charles and David Koch. Bush was attending his first national conference of Americans for Prosperity and was greeted with respectful but restrained applause by a group that rose essentially out of Republican dissatisfaction...

Ted Cruz, the firebrand GOP presidential candidate who’s campaigning on promises to cut government spending, pitched himself as a Washington outsider and promised to reform federal taxes during a speech at Red Rock Resort today.Cruz, 44, channeled the conservative outrage with the federal government by telling tales of his battles against politicians while vowing to implement a flat tax, eliminate agricultural subsidies for corn and sugar, reform health care and end a system of federally backed business loans for purchasing overseas goods.Cruz, known for his filibusters to protest hikes in government borrowing caps, brought his brand of chutzpah to Las...

Americans for Prosperity is hosting a discussion with special guest, Senator Ted Cruz. Cruz will discuss AFP's Reform America 2015 agenda, which is critical for putting our country back on track. Watch the live stream!

Conservative think tank Americans for Prosperity (AFP), co-founded by principals of Koch Industries, sued in federal court to prevent ultra-liberal California Attorney General Kamala Harris from using her office to disclose the names and addresses of their 90,000 donors. Harris may have a problem with AFP being a major force behind the Tea Party movement and its support of free markets, entrepreneurship, lower taxes, and limited government spending and regulation. As a federally registered 501(c)(4), not-for-profit educational organization, Americans for Prosperity is allowed under federal law to raise and spend money educating the public regarding issues associated with political campaigns...

The mild-mannered head of AFP relishes the president’s attacks. Dallas — Tim Phillips loves peanut butter. The president of Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a free-market advocacy group, is in the midst of his annual “Defending the Dream Summit,” which this year brought more than 3,000 grassroots activists to the Lone Star State. We’re sitting at a table in Dallas’s Omni hotel, sharing a piece of peanut-butter pie, and it’s hard to compute that the mild-mannered guy in front of me is the force behind AFP, the bête noire of Senate majority leader Harry Reid and the Democratic party writ large....

Last week’s standoff at Bundy Ranch is still reverberating in Washington today. According to Kate Sheppard at Huffington Post, Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) has sent a letter to Mary Kendall, acting Inspector General for the Department of the Interior, asking her to investigate whether legislation pushed by the Koch brothers-linked American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been aimed at undermining the agency’s work.Two member affiliates of the Koch-supported Americans For Prosperity (AFP) organization gave their blessing as armed ‘Patriot’ militias showed up to confront agents of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) doing the dangerous, difficult job of removing Bundy’s trespass...

Americans for Prospertiy, a conservative tax-exempt organization, has a new 60-second television ad running in Michigan that criticizes Democratic congressman Gary Peters for his vote and continued support of Obamacare. The ad features Michigan citizen Julie Boonstra, who describes how she was diagnosed with leukemia but lost her health insurance coverage this year because of Obamacare's regulations. "I was doing fairly well fighting the cancer, fighting the leukemia, and then I received a letter. My insurance was canceled because of Obamacare," says Boonstra. "Now, the out-of-pocket costs are so high, it's unaffordable. If I do not receive my medication, I...

CORALVILLE, Iowa -- After an election season unlike any other in this town’s – and probably Eastern Iowa’s – history, Coralville voters Tuesday chose to stick with the status quo. And that earned congratulatory phone calls from Vice President Joe Biden, who spoke Tuesday night with mayor-elect John Lundell and City Council member Tom Gill, who won re-election. The message in his five-minute conversation, Lundell said, was “to congratulate Coralville for smashing Americans for Prosperity, and he was really proud of our city.” Americans for Prosperity is a national organization founded by the conservative billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch....

The rise of the “mostly secular” Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has had a decidedly non-secular effect: Persecution of Egypt’s Coptic Christians is on the rise. In the latest bout of civil unrest, the Brotherhood torched three churches. Copts are a minority in Egypt. They don’t control the military government any more than they controlled Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government. But notice how AFP characterizes the burnings.Supporters of deposed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi torched three churches in central Egypt on Wednesday in reprisal attacks as police dispersed demonstrations in Cairo, reports said.“Reprisal attacks”? They’re attacking Christians, who are largely powerless in Egypt,...

A “secret” Facebook group of foreign correspondents and human rights activists quickly devolved into an anti-Israel hate-fest on Tuesday following the release of a new Israeli government report that cleared the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of wrongdoing in the 2000 death of a Palestinian boy. The Israeli government report contests the claim that the IDF killed a Palestinian boy, Muhammad al-Durrah, in a famous 2000 incident in Gaza that helped ignite the Second Intifada. Journalists and activists mocked the report, attacked the IDF, and claimed pro-Israel lobbyists were influencing the media coverage, in a private Facebook group for foreign correspondents...

The Syrian army destroyed an Israeli armoured vehicle that violated the country's border, Syrian agency SANA reported on Tuesday with reference to the Armed Forces Command.

Politics: The union mob that tore down that tent outside the Michigan state capitol was aiming at a free-market advocacy group on the president's enemies list promoting right-to-work and other pro-growth measures. In an editorial headlined "Drinking the Kochs' Kool-Aid," the Detroit Free Press, a newspaper in a decaying city with 18.9% unemployment, opined it was pressure from the Koch brothers, David H. and Charles G., who head a Kansas-based conglomerate with 50,000 U.S.-based employees, that moved Michigan Republicans to make the state adopt right-to-work legislation. Randy Richardville, majority leader of the state Senate, and Gov. Rick Snyder may have...