Free Republic

Two massive Twitter threads contend that serious computer fraud two years ago in Texas, which turned strong red districts blue, was essentially a trial run for what's been playing out across America in this election. This post summarizes the core claims in those threads, along with interlineations of information I found. One Twitter thread comes from Roscoe B. Davis, the other from Bad Kitty. Scytl is a Barcelona-based company that provides electronic voting systems worldwide, many of which have proven vulnerable to electronic manipulation. Scytl has (or had) Soros and Democrat party connections. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital has...

The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) approval of the GE9X follows thousands of hours of testing, and clears the engine for life aboard the world’s largest twin-engine aircraft, the Boeing 777X. Before that maiden flight even took place, GE Aviation said it had hundreds of orders on the books from a range of customers in the aviation space, but its primary focus has been the forthcoming family of wide-body planes from Boeing. Developed to power these next-generation 777X passenger jets The GE9X engine itself is as wide as a Boeing 737 fuselage, and is 10 percent more efficient than the GE90...

The reported rat rate increased from fewer than 10 rats per 1,000 residents in 2002 to 60 per 1,000 in 2009, according to Baltimore CitiStat. A Baltimore City Health Department report that year noted that “the rodent infestation rate in Baltimore is six times the national average.” More recently, 19,869 residents called the city’s 311 number to complain about rats between Jan. 1, 2010, and April 4, 2013, with a slight bump from 7,579 in 2011 to 8,436 in 2012. (This compares to the District’s 311 calls regarding rodents, which rose from 2,820 in 2011 to 3,010 in 2012.) Personally,...

U.S. President Donald Trump was unfazed on Tuesday by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s threat that he has a nuclear launch button on his desk. “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” tweeted Trump. .....

EL Trumpo says that his movement is bigger than Reagan’s, because why not say you’re better than the greatest president in the last generation? From Bloomberg: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he’s building a movement bigger than that of former President Ronald Reagan. “I think that the closest thing I can think of is Reagan, but I don’t think it’s the intensity that we have,” the billionaire told Mark Halperin and John Heilemann of Bloomberg’s With All Due Respect just minutes after he finished a rousing speech to a capacity crowd of 10,000 inside a Pensacola, Florida, arena on...

Seven years ago in his first speech to a joint session of Congress, President Barack Obama declared that he did not believe in “bigger government.” “As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President's Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets, not because I believe in bigger government--I don't--not because I'm not mindful of the massive debt we've inherited--I am,” said Obama in his Feb. 24, 2009 speech to a joint session. A week before this speech, Obama had signed the American Recovery and...

The magnitude 4.4 earthquake that struck near Westwood is the most significant shake in Southern California since a 5.5 earthquake hit Chino Hills in 2008, a U.S. Geological Survey seismologist told reporters at a news conference Monday morning. Robert Graves said there have been at least six aftershocks since the 6:25 a.m. earthquake. The largest so far has been a magnitude 2.7 earthquake that struck five miles northwest of Westwood.

Our Universe is an enormous place; that’s no secret. What is up for discussion, however, is just how enormous it is. And new research suggests it’s a whopper – over 250 times the size of our observable universe. Currently, cosmologists believe the Universe takes one of three possible shapes: It is flat, like a Euclidean plane, and spatially infinite.It is open, or curved like a saddle, and spatially infinite.It is closed, or curved like a sphere, and spatially finite. While most current data favors a flat universe, cosmologists have yet to come to a consensus. In a paper recently submitted...

The chart below (found also here), from Big Government contributor Veronique de Rugy clearly shows that federal employment has grown by 98,000 jobs since the start of the recession. This bears repeating, because lefty columnist Paul Krugman is furiously spinning that the increase in employment is due to Census hiring. Krugman: But anyone paying attention knew why public employment had risen — and it had nothing to do with Big Government. It was, instead, the fact that the federal government had to hire a lot of temporary workers to carry out the 2010 Census — workers who have almost all...

Over millions of years dogs have developed bigger brains than cats because highly social species of mammals need more brain power than solitary animals, according to a study by Oxford University. For the first time researchers have attempted to chart the evolutionary history of the brain across different groups of mammals over 60 million years. They have discovered that there are huge variations in how the brains of different groups of mammals have evolved over that time.

WASHINGTON -- The Federal Communications Commission began to lay the groundwork for a bigger federal role in the broadband business Wednesday, outlining the hurdles the U.S. needs to overcome to improve the availability of high-speed Internet access. The FCC identified a number of issues the government should address, including the high cost of laying new broadband lines in rural areas, a lack of airwaves for wireless Web access and ill-informed consumers. "This focus on broadband is a reflection of a recognition that the U.S. is lagging behind," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Wednesday at the agency's monthly meeting.

A total of $332 million would be devoted to new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) enforcement efforts, including $128.1 million to add nearly 800 new IRS employees to combat offshore tax evasion and improve compliance with U.S. international tax laws by businesses and high-income individuals. Another $130 million would go to bolster the security of the IRS information technology, improve the efficiency of its business systems and upgrade its fraud detection capabilities. Although not directly under the jurisdiction of this Subcommittee, our Budget also includes funds to meet our international obligations to help us in mounting a global response to the...

The fifth annual Israel Apartheid Week, which ended on Sunday, was a more popular, better attended, and more aggressive series of anti-Israel rallies and lectures than ever before. SLIDESHOW: Israel & Region | World "Forty-four international cities held IAW events, which is twice as much as last year, and in Toronto thousands of people attended events. Almost every building was filled to maximum capacity," Golda Shahidi, spokeswoman for Students Against Israel Apartheid, told The Jerusalem Post by phone from Toronto on Wednesday. The rise in participation was largely due to the world's reaction to the recent war in Gaza, said...

I would imagine that Generals fighting wars have to occasionally 'step back' from the individual battles they are fighting, to check on the overall progress of the total campaign against the enemy. Of course, for fiscal conservatives, the 'enemy' is growth in size and scope of spending of government at every level -- or put another way, the goal of the war is to preserve, and in fact 'win back' freedom and liberty for the people. When California voters stepped up in 2003 to ceremoniously recall now-disgraced Governor Gray Davis, that effort was led by a strong coalition of people...

In his refreshingly short State of the State speech Tuesday evening, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger boasted of his commitment to transcend partisan divides and to work together, Republicans and Democrats, toward achieving a California agenda. The state government can avoid the partisan gridlock of Washington, D.C., and move forward, he said, "because the future does not wait." While those words make for decent political rhetoric, we were less than heartened by the big and bold agenda the governor detailed. ... The mountain he has pledged to climb with the Legislature looks a lot like a mountain of debt and regulation. If...

There is always a good excuse for big government. I thought I would spend some time to catalogue some of those excuses, just to put them down on the record. Whether it is on the floor of the Senate or Assembly, in budget or other committee hearings in the Legislature, these excuses pop up from time to time. In this era of term limits, it is rare for those in decision making positions to hang around long enough to hear these excuses repeated, so this article can act as a chronicle, since I have now heard many of these excuses...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 24, 2006 – With reports circulating of a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said quelling the Taliban is only part of the bigger response needed for a secure and peaceful country. “It’s not eliminating the Taliban. It’s ending terrorist violence in Afghanistan,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” today. “We have defeated (terrorists, but) to defeat them completely, to take them off the agenda, for us that is the purpose.” President Bush will meet in Washington with Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf later this week to discuss the best way to accomplish this....

A project aiming to create an easier way to measure cosmic distances has instead turned up surprising evidence that our large and ancient universe might be even bigger and older than previously thought. If accurate, the finding would be difficult to mesh with current thinking about how the universe evolved, one scientist said. A research team led by Alceste Bonanos at the Carnegie Institution of Washington has found that the Triangulum Galaxy, also known as M33, is about 15 percent farther away from our own Milky Way than previously calculated. The finding, which will be detailed in an upcoming issue...

Meth still No. 1 drug problem, study findsBy SAM HANANEL, Associated Press Writer 28 minutes ago A pouch containing crystalized methamphetamine and a homemade pipe are shown March 21, 2006 in Window Rock, Ariz. A survey says Meth abuse continues to fuel an increase in crimes like robbery and assault. (AP Photo/Matt York, FILE) WASHINGTON - Meth abuse continues to fuel an increase in crimes like robbery and assault, straining the workload of local police forces despite a drop in the number of meth lab seizures, according to a survey Tuesday. Nearly half of county law enforcement officials consider methamphetamine...

(March 2) -- Special Agent Frank Marwood was showing a visitor the half-mile long, 80-foot deep smuggler's tunnel his agents discovered beneath the U.S.-Mexican border at Otay Mesa when his cellphone interrupted. An agent was reporting in with a startling new find: another tunnel, this one shorter and more crudely built, but big enough to provide yet another subterranean port of entry into the USA. These are busy days for the men and women who guard the nation's border - particularly for the team of federal agents charged with rooting out border tunnels.