Free Republic

The White House Correspondents' Association announced on Tuesday that comedian Hasan Minhaj will perform at this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner. The WHCD is where the White House and members of the media get together and joke about one another. The dinner is often referred to as "Nerd Prom." This year the dinner will be missing its biggest guest: President Donald Trump announced in February that he will not be attending the dinner. Trump is the first president to skip the event in decades. Vice President Mike Pence and the rest of the White House staff also announced they will...

Barack Obama's name is revered in his home state. But the Illinois House has rejected making his birthday a state holiday. Legislation to make the 44th president's Aug. 4th birthday a state holiday fell six votes short Tuesday. Chicago Democratic Rep. Sonya Harper said it would honor a man who adopted Chicago as his home and served in the Illinois Senate. But Rep. Steven Andersson of Geneva suggested it be honorary. The Republican floor leader said even Obama wouldn't want the cash-strapped state to give state workers another paid day off. He noted that Tampico native and 40th president Ronald...

Former CIA case officer Sabrina De Sousa thanked the Trump administration for intervening to save her from extradition to Italy and imprisonment in a statement on Friday. “I want to extend my deepest appreciation to the Trump administration for all their efforts on my behalf. Without their support I would be spending tonight in an Italian prison,” said De Sousa, in a statement quoted by Fox News. “The Obama administration and former CIA Director John Brennan abandoned De Sousa the last seven years, and in six weeks, the Trump team made her freedom possible,” Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) told Fox...

Federal District Judge James Robart violated the Constitution in issuing a TRO (temporary restraining order) against President Trump’s temporary entry ban for citizens of seven countries. Now a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed that stay. What we have here is a creeping constitutional coup. As long as President Obama was in charge and had a massive open door policy at our borders and at our airports, in violation of statutory law, the judiciary was content to be silent. But when Donald Trump became president and tried to use the powers of the Presidency to...

The Justice Department reached a settlement this week with the Denver Sheriff Department, after they allegedly discriminated against work-authorized immigrants by only considering the applications of U.S. citizens. “The Denver Sheriff Department discriminated based on citizenship status by requiring applicants for deputy sheriff positions to be U.S. citizens and publishing job postings with U.S. citizenship requirements, in violation of the INA (Immigration and Nationality Act),” a statement from the DOJ reads.  INA prohibits employers from limiting jobs to U.S. citizens (except where they are required to do so by law).

Cincinnati, OH — Since October 28, 2016, city sewer vehicles have been seen outside the Planned Parenthood abortion facility in Cincinnati, Ohio. First, Roto-Rooter was called out, but the problem seemed to be beyond their ability to solve. Next came the city sewer trucks, which put equipment down a manhole across the street from Planned Parenthood. On November 10, another vehicle from the city sewer department was called out. This time, workers opened a manhole in the sidewalk directly in front of Planned Parenthood, closing the sidewalk. While we don’t know for sure what the sewer problem is near Planned...

An Alabama father who shot and killed his daughter’s sexual abuser pleaded guilty Monday and accepted a 40-year prison sentence in the hopes of sparing his daughter from having to relive the experience through a lengthy trial. Jay Maynor, 43, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in the June 2014 killing of 59-year-old Raymond Earl Brooks. Brooks was a registered sex offender who was shot to death at his home in rural Cullman County, north of Birmingham. BREAK IN CASE? POLICE SEARCH FOR SUV IN RELATION TO JOGGER'S DEATH Brooks pleaded guilty in 2002 to sexually abusing Maynor's young...

As a veteran of Special Forces (and a keen observer of military affairs) I decided with my unique perspective to wade through the 800-plus pages of the Select Committee Report on the Benghazi debacle, which as we all know cost 5 Americans their lives. It is, as you can imagine, a rather daunting task; and far too much material to cover in a single post. So, instead, I will comment on those glaring errors in judgement, actions, and questions remaining as strike me (from a military standpoint) while reading the Report; here in bite-sized parts. It should be keep in...

Sick jihadists from the Islamic State (Isis) beheaded a four-year-old girl then forced her horrified mother to soak her hands in her dead daughter's blood. The latest shocking incident is said to have happened in the Daesh (Isis) de-facto capital of Raqqa, in Syria. The extremists are renowned for their shocking punishments meted out by their feared al-Hisbah police who enforce their strict version of Sharia Law on the towns and cities they conquer. Often the punishments are handed out for seemingly minor infringements and their latest example shows just how brutal they can be. According to reports, a jihadist...

When a decorated soldier was told to turn a blind eye in the case of a child who was being repeatedly raped and beaten, he knew it was an order he had to refuse. Now, doing the right thing will cost him his career. . . .

While Washington focuses on whether President Obama will sign on to a nuclear agreement with Iran without submitting the deal for Senate approval, the administration is following a similar strategy on a global climate change policy that could leave the U.S. beholden to an International Climate Justice Tribunal. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, recently released the negotiating language for the agreement to the public. The official purpose of pursuing a “universal climate agreement” is to renew the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 deal championed by then-Vice President Al Gore but resoundingly condemned by the U.S. Senate....

The Army is moving to discharge a decorated combat pilot who intervened to stop two lesbian officers from showing excessive affection on the dance floor at an official ball at Fort Drum, N.Y. Lt. Col. Christopher Downey ended up being convicted administratively of assaulting a soldier trying to film the kissing and grabbing. Col. Downey’s lawyer, Richard Thompson, says his client merely pushed down the camera to prevent photos that could end up on social media.

The U.S. Supreme Court late Tuesday halted the execution of a Missouri man who killed a woman and her two children, citing concerns that his legal counsel was ineffective. Mark Christeson, 35, was scheduled to die by injection at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday at the state prison in Bonne Terre before the late stay of execution was issued.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was held on Tuesday for questioning into suspicions that a network of informers kept him abreast of a separate inquiry into alleged irregularities in his 2007 election campaign, a legal source said. Local media said it was the first time a former head of state had been held for questioning in modern French history. The conservative politician denies wrongdoing in a string of investigations which could derail his hopes of a come-back after his 2012 presidential election defeat by Francois Hollande. Sarkozy arrived early Tuesday to be quizzed by investigators at their offices in Nanterre,...

An Ohio high school student training to be an EMT was charged with a felony and sent to jail for 13 days because police found a pocketknife during an unauthorized search of his car. Jordan Wiser, an 18-year-old student at Ashtabula County Technical and Career Campus in Jefferson, Ohio, is an EMT trainee with a passion for self-defense and public service. He aspires to be a firefighter, and is a certified emergency vehicle operator. Wiser is comfortable with weapons, and posts Youtube videos of himself talking about law enforcement, self-defense and video games. Apparently, school administrators caught wind of the...

Exactly 70 years ago – on February 24, 1942 – 19-year-old David Stoliar terrifyingly clung to bobbing debris in the Black Sea. At first he heard screams in the frigid waters but the voices died down. It eventually emerged that Stoliar was the sole survivor of the Struma, an un-seaworthy vessel chuck-full of frantic Jewish refugees. World War II was already in fever pitch. Against the enormity of the then-unfolding Holocaust, the loss at sea of 768 Jewish lives (103 of them babies and children) was at most blithely overlooked as a marginal annotation. Moreover, although these Jews fled the...

The Department of Defense unit charged with recovering servicemembers’ remains abroad has been holding phony “arrival ceremonies” for seven years, with an honor guard carrying flag-draped coffins off of a cargo plane as though they held the remains returning that day from old battlefields. The Pentagon acknowledged Wednesday that no honored dead were in fact arriving, and that the planes used in the ceremonies often couldn’t even fly, and were towed into position. The story was first reported on nbcnews.com.

I'm just trying to get good info on TV and know already what I'd be treated to on the other channels but, I turn on Fox and there's Whorealdo, couching his language that implies Zimm was wrong. Further, he invites Judge Janine Piero and they both go on and on about Stand your Ground and the law needs to be changed because it leads to far too many vagaries and can only result in further unnecessary deaths.

The US State Department announced on Friday that nearly $500 million in aid had been unblocked for transfer to the Palestinian Authority, months after Congress froze the funds in late-2012. “To date, we have moved $295.7 million in fiscal year 2012 money… and $200 million in fiscal year 2013 assistance,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters. The announcement came on the heels of US President Barack Obama’s first trip to Israel and the West Bank since assuming office in 2009. The Palestinian Authority has been in the grips of a deep economic crisis, largely due to promised aid going...

The AP claimed this morning that Paul was set to endorse a path to citizenship in his speech today. Not so, countered conservatives on Twitter: Read his prepared remarks and you’ll see that citizenship is never mentioned. Which is true, and also irrelevant. The whole point of Paul’s speech is GOP rapprochement with Latino voters; he spends nearly two-thirds of it extolling Latinos’ work ethic, reminiscing about his friendships with Latinos growing up in Texas, name-checking Jaime Escalante and Pablo Neruda, and of course citing the ancient canard that Latinos are really just Republicans who don’t know it yet. (He...