Free Republic

Andrew Pollack calls the Parkland, Fla., school shooting “the most avoidable mass murder in American history.” Avoidable because of how the system refused to react rationally to years of warning signs about Nikolas Cruz. And the book Pollack, whose teen daughter was one of Cruz’s victims, has written with Max Eden shows that the same failure could occur almost anywhere in America. Excerpted in Monday’s Post, “Why Meadow Died” reveals educational records, like teacher daily diaries, tracking Cruz’s flagrantly psychotic behavior from an early age.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) told a woman whose toddler daughter died in a hospital weeks after being released from a border facility where they were held for 20 days that she had done nothing wrong and that the Trump administration has “criminalized families” and practiced “human rights abuses on U.S. soil” during a House hearing on Wednesday. The House Oversight and Reform’s Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties hearing, entitled “Kids in Cages: Inhumane Treatment at the Border,” had Yazmin Juarez as the sole witness on the first panel. Juarez’s 19-month-old daughter had died of a respiratory infection. “Ms....

New Coke was considered one of the biggest marketing blunders, but the soft drink company is now bringing back the item for a limited time as a partnership with the Netflix series “Stranger Things.” New Coke’s revival brought back memories of other product failures from major companies in the past. Here are some memorable blunders.

Democratic darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez still hasn’t paid a six-year-old tax bill left over from a failed business venture. Weeks after The Post alerted the freshman Congresswoman’s office to the outstanding tax lien from 2012, she still hasn’t paid it, state records show. Brook Avenue Press, a company set up in the Bronx to publish books about city children, owes $1,877.56 in unpaid corporate taxes. The state slapped the company with a warrant on July 6, 2017, two months after Ocasio-Cortez announced her candidacy to run against Democratic incumbent Joe Crowley for the district that encompasses parts of Queens and The...

Failed Prognostications of Climate Alarm Anthony Watts / 11 hours ago August 7, 2018 By Rob Bradley writing at IER “If the current pace of the buildup of these gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit [between now and] the year 2025 to 2050…. The rise in global temperature is predicted to … caus[e] sea levels to rise by one to four feet by the middle of the next century.”— Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warming Has Begun.” New York Times, June 24, 1988. It has been 30 years since the alarm bell was...

Caracas (AFP) - Under-fire Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro admitted his economic model has "failed" in the wake of food and medicine shortages and public service paralysis, such as Tuesday's power failure that affected 80 percent of Caracas. "The production models we've tried so far have failed and the responsibility is ours, mine and yours," Maduro told his ruling PSUV party congress, as Venezuela looks to tackle chronic inflation the International Monetary Fund predicted would reach one million percent this year. "Enough with the whining... we need to produce with or without (outside) aggression, with or without blockades, we need to...

Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski went off on President Trump on Monday morning.   The far left host told the MSNBC audience she has lost hope and her mind is closed.   Mika: I had hope and an open mind and I have lost hope completely and my mind is closed. This presidency is fake and failed.   Someone get her a tissue.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSDYfJIZ-t4

After weeks of pushing the "Russian hacking" narrative, mostly through White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, Obama is finally admitting that Hillary "lost badly" in her presidential bid by failing to make an argument to people in the Midwest that inspired them to "show up." In an "exit interview" with NPR, Obama said that Democrats face "structural problems" with their base clustered in urban areas on the coasts which requires presidential candidates to make their case to swing voters in the Midwest, something he says Hillary failed to do. Per The Hill: Of course, when pressed on whether the electorate...

Following a failed coup attempt mounted by Turkey’s military, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has reasserted his control over the country. After the botched attempt to overthrow the government which left more than 260 dead, Erdogan has set out to purge the judiciary and military. More than 2,700 judges have been removed and nearly 3,000 soldiers arrested. The Turkish military had announced late Friday night that it had taken over power from the government, declaring that a “peaceful council” had been established “in the name of democratic order.” Army units occupied two key bridges in Istanbul, shutting down traffic in...

"How a digital trailblazer and progressive powerhouse lost its way. Read more: http://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/05/the-fall-of-saloncom-004551#ixzz4A25lhJhi Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook A Facebook page dedicated to celebrating the 20th anniversary of digital media pioneer Salon is functioning as a crowdsourced eulogy. Dozens of Salon alumni have, over the past several months, posted their favorite stories from and memories of the once-beloved liberal news site described as a “left-coast, interactive version of The New Yorker,” a progressive powerhouse that over the years has covered politics with a refreshing aggressiveness, in a context that left plenty of room for provocative personal...

GOP elites have blown $65 million on Jeb Bush so far this campaign cycle and have another $30 million to blow on his failed campaign. Roll Call reported: The spectacular bust of Jeb Bush's campaign for president so far is as much a story about Bush himself as it is about the failure of Right to Rise, the shock-and-awe super PAC that was supposed to launch him into the lead and keep him there. Right to Rise raised $103 million in 2015 and has spent more than $65 million so far. But nine months after he got into the race,...

One of the benefits of being 91 is you don’t have to hold back anymore—you can say what you want. And in a new biography, former President George H.W. Bush tells Jon Meacham just what he thinks about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld’s work in his son’s administration, as reported by Fox News and The New York Times. “He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with,” the elder Bush said of the man who served as his secretary of defense. “Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys...

LATHRUP VILLAGE — According to the Michigan Attorney General’s Office, the state has suspended the license of a local clinic where abortions are performed after authorities discovered several health code violations. On Nov. 21, Women’s Center of Southfield, located at 28505 Southfield Road in Lathrup Village, had its surgical outpatient facility license suspended for violating seven health codes, according to state officials. According to a document sent to the facility by the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, the center failed to maintain a sterile facility and inform a patient of risks, consent or complications of a procedure. Workers allegedly...

US Special Forces reportedly carried out a failed rescue mission in Raqqa to save the captured Jordanian pilot held prisoner by Islamic State (ISIS) militants. The operation is believed to have taken place on 1 January. US Special Forces were attempting to rescue Muadh al-Kasasbeh, the Jordanian pilot who ended up in the hands of ISIS after his F-16 crashed in Raqqa on 24 December. The operation failed after US forces came under heavy fire from the ISIS. The rescue mission was confirmed by local activists,who claimed that on the day of the operation, the coalition carried out over 13...

Former Massachusetts Governor and failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney believes Republicans should "swallow hard" and pass a permanent amnesty bill in the wake of President Barack Obama's executive amnesty that even Romney conceded would encourage more illegal immigrants to enter the country.

A personhoood amendment failed by a lopsided margin for a third time in Colorado, despite efforts by backers of the amendment to change the language and approach of the amendment in an effort to gain additional support. Despite the language changes, the latest version of the Colorado personhood amendment would not have stopped abortions or protected pregnant women and their unborn children from violence because it would have been overturned in court even if approved. Colorado voters defeated Amendment 67, or the Brady Amendment, by a vote of 64-36%, with 69% percent reporting. colorado5In 2008, a wave Democratic election year...

The short-attention span generation has birthed the shiny-object election. The theme of the 2014 midterms — to whatever extent one is discernable — has been an explosion of one crisis after another, each of which demands an enormous amount of media attention before fading for the next one. From the Secret Service to ISIS, Ebola to immigration, mistreated veterans to Ferguson and race relations, candidates and the president have been forced to react to the controversy du jour. Strategists and experts say the result has been bad news for Democrats, who have had a tougher time underscoring their preferred campaign...

Rep. Tony Cardenas on Sunday defended President Obama against charges that he betrayed Hispanic voters when he decided to delay executive action on immigration until after the midterm elections. Cardenas, a California Democrat, conceded that Hispanics were frustrated with Obama and disappointed with his decision. But the congressman blamed House Republicans, who have blocked consideration of a bipartisan immigration reform bill that passed the Senate last year, for “forcing” Obama into the position of having to take potentially unpopular unilateral action to legalize a portion of the 11 million illegal immigrants currently residing in the U.S.

Mere hours after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas swore in a government backed by the Islamic extremist Hamas group, the US State Department legitimized the arrangement, declaring that it would work with the new government because it “does not include members affiliated with Hamas.” What was saddest about Washington’s insistence on accepting Abbas’s paper-thin veneer over his government’s new nature — his “technocrat” ministers were all approved by Hamas — is that it represents only the Obama administration’s latest abrogation of leadership, logic and leverage at Israel’s expense. Rather than rushing to embrace a Palestinian government in which an unreformed...