Free Republic

“There’s a constitution that I swore and oath to so don’t’ freakin mess with it with these citizens! Do you understand me”

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s attorneys, who appear to be crafting a defense based around casting the older brother as a bullying mastermind of the Boston operation, renewed their push for evidence on Friday arguing the government had previously said the case was “might be relevant if Dzhokhar were aware of it.” They then pointed to a letter they received from prosecutors on Aug. 15, 2014, saying the government had a witness prepared to testify that “Dzhokhar had such an awareness.” The developments come just days before both sides are scheduled to release their initial list of witnesses in the bombings trial, which...

DeKalb County Police say they were caught off-guard Sunday by the unsanctioned party at a public park that ended with two women being shot. “This came really as a surprise to us,” the county’s public safety chief Cedric Alexander told reporters on Monday. But Alexander vowed that they would be prepared in the future. “We’re going to monitor social media going forward so that we can try to get ahead of them as quickly as we can and intervene and try to make sure those illegal crowds do not converge upon a crowd and become a threat to anyone,” he...

In both cases, presidents undertook ambitious projects: to remake part of the world, or a huge portion of the economy, along the lines that our government wanted. Redesigning Iraq proved to be impossible, and reorganizing health care may prove impossible as well. It is at least proving to be very difficult. The anti-war movement warned that fighting in Iraq would produce blowback terrorism against American civilians and chemical-weapons deaths among American troops. What actually happened — the disintegration of the Iraqi state followed by America’s desperate attempt to pick up the pieces — did not feature heavily in the opposition’s...

(CNSNews.com) – Although no group has claimed responsibility for Monday’s deadly bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon, a leading al-Qaeda ideologue last year recommended that jihadists in America include sporting events in their list of prospective terror targets.

Before you look to do harm to Chief Justice Roberts or his family, it’s important that you think carefully about the meaning – the true nature — of his ruling on Obama-care. The Left will shout that they won, that Obama-care was upheld and all the rest. Let them. It will be a short-lived celebration. Here’s what really occurred — payback. Yes, payback for Obama’s numerous, ill-advised and childish insults directed toward SCOTUS. Chief Justice Roberts actually ruled the mandate, relative to the commerce clause, was unconstitutional. That’s how the Democrats got Obama-care going in the first place. This is...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama says there are multiple ways to resolve the debt ceiling mess, but it has to be bipartisan and it has to happen fast. The president urged Democrats and Republicans in the Senate Friday to come together on a plan that can pass the House and that he can sign.

More than 70,000 Minnesota homeowners were behind on their mortgages and received pre-foreclosure notices last year, a warning that the housing market still faces serious hurdles in 2011. About 71,665 struggling homeowners got the notices in 2010, up 8 percent from 2009, according to the Minnesota Home Ownership Center, which released the numbers Thursday. The number of notices rose 3 percent in the Twin Cities metro area, but 15 percent elsewhere in Minnesota. The numbers suggest that despite glimmers of hope in the job market, the state could see more people lose homes this year than they did last year,...

One fine messBy Colin McNickle, PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW Sunday, January 2, 2011 Never have so few worked so recklessly to shaft so many. Welcome to Pittsburgh, that unnavigable intersection of government hot air, buffoonery, incompetence, stupidity, arrogance and just about any other unflattering descriptive you can conjure up. Harsh? Why, yes. And necessarily so. Desperately trying to appease its public pocket-picking union bosses while concomitantly deferring any meaningful fiscal restructuring, Pittsburgh City Council hatched a cockamamie "present day/future day value" plan (versus real cash held in an unencumbered trust) -- a hocus-pocus mumbo-jumbo paper plan based on future collections from what's...

The closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison and civilian trials for terrorists were more than policy changes proposed by Barack Obama as a presidential candidate. They were presented as a return to constitutional government - a dividing line from an uncivilized past.

If you serve our nation and your ballot came too late or wasn’t counted, let PJM know so we can get the message to Congress. Send your stories to story@pajamasmedia.com. The military voting mess of 2010 isn’t over. In some states, ballots continue to roll in. Whether or not these late ballots will be counted remains to be seen. I have learned that voters deployed across Iraq and Afghanistan received ballots far too late to be effective. The MOVE Act of 2009 was designed to fix this problem, but may have failed. One reason for the failure: open contempt inside...

"How can the [U.S.] solve its long-term problems—deficit spending, an underfunded Social Security system, spiraling health-care costs—when voters seem so uncertain which party should lead the charge?" ----- Voters this week look set to do something not seen since the early 1950s: Oust a substantial number of sitting House lawmakers for the third election in a row. The apparent Republican resurgence suggests the country is caught in a cycle of political volatility witnessed only four times in the past century, almost all during war or economic unease. [..] In many cases, [voters are] returning to the same candidates they rejected...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-run mortgage giants, share much of the blame for the foreclosure crisis. Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee $5.5 trillion of mortgages -- more than half of all US home mortgages. Major banks -- Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase -- service the loans for Fannie and Freddie for fees. And when they do, they do what Fannie and Freddie tell them to do. To that end, Fannie and Freddie have long issued "Servicing Guides." Fannie's latest update (Aug. 31) noted that Fannie "has established time frames within which routine...

California is the nation's shameful example of what happens when Democrats influenced by big-government labor rule the statehouse for forty years. With 12.5% unemployment (up from 4.5% a mere three years ago) and a "recognized" budget deficit of $21 billion, California has just found that out it is in much, much more financial trouble than anyone, especially a Democrat, really wants to admit. California's governor Schwarzenegger commissioned a study by Stanford University, which has found that California's three public employee pension funds (The California Public Employees' Retirement System [CalPERS], California State Teachers' Retirement System [CalSTRS], and University of California...

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama keeps reassuring the nation that stopping the Gulf oil spill and limiting the fallout on the region are his top priority. Yet so is protecting the country against attack. And getting people back to work. Presidencies usually don't allow for a dominant priority — just a list of priorities. During another hectic week, Obama made this promise: "This entire White House and this entire federal government has been singularly focused on how do we stop the leak and how do we prevent and mitigate the damage to our coastlines." From the Gulf Coast on Friday,...

GRAND ISLE, Louisiana (AFP) – President Barack Obama unveiled a commission Saturday to probe the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as the growing environmental catastrophe blackened Louisiana's fragile wetlands and beaches. With the federal government facing accusations of lax supervision of lucrative offshore oil drilling, Obama vowed to hold Washington accountable and warned that the future of the industry hinges on assurances such a disaster "never happens again." As frustration grew that the huge spill gushing from a ruptured well nearly a mile (1,500 meters) below the surface was still not capped more than a month into...

Gavin Newsom loves Twitter. The San Francisco mayor is convinced his hometown microblogging service will change the world. How heartbreaking it must be, then, to read that a key Twitter coder can't wait to escape his "filthy... disastrous" town.

A married man who planned to rendezvous with one of his handful of lovers at an eastern Wisconsin motel instead found himself bound, blindfolded and assaulted by a group of women out for revenge, according to court documents. Four women, including his wife, eventually showed up to humiliate the man, who ended up with his penis glued to his stomach in a bizarre plot to punish him for a lover's quadrangle gone bad, according to the documents filed in Calumet County

Fending off criticism from human-rights and civil-rights groups at a private White House meeting Wednesday, a frustrated President Obama complained about the "mess" he'd been left by his predecessor. The exchange came during an hour-and-15-minute "off the record" session in the White House cabinet room that highlighted growing tensions between the president and his liberal base. While the White House session was billed as an effort by the president to listen to his critics on the left, some of them left disappointed. According to three sources who attended the meeting, Obama reiterated his intention to retain a version of the...

Don’t blame GOP for this messWednesday, April 8, 2009 Hoover most certainly did not ignore the problems. Hoover (contrary to his fundamental beliefs) took action. Unfortunately, as explained in Amity Schlae’s “The Forgotten Man,” Hoover “by intervening in business, signing into law a destructive tariff, and by assailing the stockmarket” did damage on all three fronts. You also are apparently unaware of the massive public projects at federal and state level that Hoover pushed for as part of his program to retain employment and high wages. The Republicans did not have a program of “doing nothing” as you stated. The...