Free Republic

Justice: It's not often that the victims of IRS abuse find satisfaction, but the Tea Party groups mistreated by the tax collector will get a shot. Maybe next will be an audit of the IRS — which apparently hasn't changed its ways. On Tuesday, Day 978 of the unresolved IRS scandal, a federal judge granted class-action status to as many as 300 conservative groups that have been affected by the agency's practice of unduly scrutinizing small-government organizations that sought tax-exempt status but which the IRS saw as dangerous dissidents. U.S. District Court Judge Susan Dlott's ruling also opens the door...

The “zoo” is located near the town of Gyumri in Armenia “[The animals] display all the signs of creatures slowly being driven mad by their unnatural existence.”—Allan Hall “The World’s Saddest Zoo” Cruising the “Drudge Report” yesterday, I noticed the photo of a forlorn looking bear peering out from behind bars with the accompanying headline “The World’s Saddest Zoo,” which linked to an article by Allan Hall in the UK’s “Daily Mail.” News headlines often depict a crazy and cruel world, and perhaps I’ve become too jaded and cynical regarding the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” – but Hall’s...

Parents of a five-year old "transgender" child are asking the school's kindergarten class to take up the task of educating students on gender dysphoria, the condition of identifying as a sex that is opposite of one's biological makeup. The request has prompted opposition from a number of parents, while several others have voiced their support. According to the Daily Caller, it began when the parents of a gender-confused boy, who remains unidentified, sent their child to Nova Classical Academy, a charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota, wearing a girl's jumper and pink shoes. The parents, Hannah and Dave Edwards, indicated...

OLYMPIA, Wash. - A new bill in Washington state seeks to create a statewide registry of people convicted of animal abuse. Senate Bill 6234, sponsored by Republican Sen. Joe Fain, is modeled on a law that recently took effect in Tennessee. Under the measure, the registry would be posted online by the state Attorney General's office and would include the names, addresses and photos of people convicted of first or second degree animal cruelty, animal fighting or poisoning. Convicted animal abusers would remain on the registry for 10 years after conviction.

Eight-year-old Ethan Wilwert wanted one special thing for Christmas—not a puppy, nor, thankfully, a hoverboard. Ethan wanted an in-person makeup tutorial at the MAC Cosmetics store in his family’s local Florida mall. “A couple of months before Christmas, he and I were at the mall, and we went into the MAC store,” Ethan’s mom, Season Wilwert, told The Daily Beast. “He’s always been interested in makeup. It’s something he likes to do creative-wise. It’s something he gets excited about. He watches a lot of online tutorials.” In fact, Wilwert laughed that Ethan is already helping her do her own. “He...

The moment a rescue dog was stroked for the first time has been captured in a heartbreaking video.

Donald Trump launches scathing attack on Bill Clinton over his alleged affairs and calls him 'one of the great abusers' Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump sought to assail Democrat Hillary Clinton on Wednesday by calling her husband, former President Bill Clinton, 'one of the great abusers of the world.' Speaking to about 2,000 supporters at a rally, Trump again invoked the ex-president's alleged extramarital affairs and accused Bill Clinton of engaging in 'tremendous abuse' of women. Dismissing Hillary Clinton's accusation that Trump himself engaged in sexism, the real estate magnate and reality TV star said: 'And she wants to accuse...

Excerpts from the program transcript (and I've added a few notes for explanation): [Family in a doctor's office] 00:14:09 The medications are very expensive, and so they can be $15,000 to $25,000 a year for some of these things, which is cost prohibitive for most people. 00:14:19 So we have worked on an option that we have, we can offer here now actually, which is called Vantas. 00:14:24 And its FDA approval is for men with prostate cancer, but this has been used successfully by pediatric endocrinologists taking care of kids like Daniel, and it seems to work just as...

Climate: Want to know the latest global warming news? Don't bother looking in U.S. media. They can't be bothered with stories that contradict the man-made climate change narrative. But the truth is out there. Let's start with a new paper from NASA — a distinctly American organization — that was covered by the British Express. The newspaper tells us that our space program has "found the Earth has cooled in areas of heavy industrialization where more trees have been lost and more fossil fuel burning takes place." This is, of course, the opposite of what we've been told for decades.

A new food cart in Portland, Oregon, El Diablito, staged its grand opening celebration by featuring dancers and a Donald Trump pinata. A banner on the stage read “El Diablito” which means “the little devil.” Little kids and adults lined up to take turns battering the effigy, which they say they were destroying to “promote peace” and “fight hate.” One little kid screams out “I want to kill him!” when he takes his turn beating the Trump piñata. The food cart owner claimed this wasn’t about politics.

Seeing their toddler playing with scissors can be a terrifying sight for any parent but for Kerry McFadyen it was a moment that changed everything. The 32-year-old came across the scene in the bathroom of her home in Strathspey, Scotland, when three-year-old son Daniel said he wanted to cut off his penis so he could be a girl. It led to his parents making the difficult decision to allow Daniel to become Danni, in what is believed to be the UK's youngest case of a child wanting to change sex.

The Department of Energy (DOE) announced $125 million in new spending Monday to fund 41 green energy projects ahead of the United Nations global warming summit set to take place next week. DOE is funding dozens of green technologies through the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, program to find technological solutions to fighting global warming. ARPA-E projects are ones the government thinks show promise, but aren’t yet commercially viable. “As we look beyond COP21, the energy technologies the Department of Energy invests in today will provide the solutions needed to combat climate change and develop a global low-carbon economy...

In 2014, Sister Hatune Dogan had been rescuing Christian and Yazidi girls from ISIS captivity for eight months, but she was desperate. If only the world could see the harm being done, understand that rescues were possible, people would open their hearts and their wallets, [so she] found an independent British filmmaker, Edward Watts.. In an email dated February 6, 2015, Watts’s producer, Rosie Garthwaite, wrote: "Hatune you will be the lead story in a documentary about women living under IS.” Watts spent nine days in Germany, Turkey, and Iraq with Sister Hatune. She introduced him to Sheikh Khaire, the...

MAUI (HawaiiNewsNow) - Major League Baseball player Jose Reyes, the shortstop for the Colorado Rockies, was arrested on Halloween after allegedly assaulting his wife in their Maui hotel room, sources say. Reyes and his wife, Katherine, were allegedly arguing in their Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea room that afternoon. His wife told responding officers that Reyes grabbed her off the bed and shoved her. Sources say she also told police that he grabbed her throat and shoved her into the sliding glass balcony door. Security called police and Reyes was arrested for abuse of a family or household member....

California Governor Jerry Brown insisted that “there’s nothing wrong with what I did.” What he did was ask employees of the California Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources—a state agency—to tell him whether there is oil on his private property. “I didn’t ask for any special treatment,” Brown asserted. “I did what any citizen of the state might have done.” “Well, I suppose that any citizen could’ve asked for the same thing,” an employee said in an “off-the-record” interview. “But we wouldn’t have prepared that citizen a 51 page report. When the Governor ‘asks’ you hop to if you...

To keep up with the adventures of the Keswani family, visit PEOPLE.com/keswanis. It's been a big year for the transgender community, thanks in large part to Caitlyn Jenner. But not every member of the community is 66: Devina Keswani, the youngest of three children in PEOPLE's new web series, The Keswanis: A Most Modern Family, and a proud Girl Scout, is just 6. "One [of my classmates] hates transgender, and he hates me because I'm transgender," Devina says, adding, "Before that he liked me, but now he hates me. He spits at me and pushes me."

Flashing lights and sirens from a police vehicle interrupted a routine Saturday morning walk in my golf-course community in Corinth.

A 25-year-old mother told police alcohol and anger over her boyfriend's rejection of her sexual overtures led her to assault her baby son. Tabatha A. Coons was arrested Wednesday after giving police a statement about what happened to her 15-month-old child on the night of Oct. 3. Coons said she went out drinking with friends to celebrate her birthday that night, came home and wanted to have sex with her live-in boyfriend, Cameron Lewis, but he turned her down. She said she stayed awake wondering why. "Cameron and I haven't had sex in a few days and I was still...

 A substantial number of those ensnared in "The Gay Lifestyle" were sexually abused as children.  In The Syndemic of STDs and AIDS among MSM, sympathetic author Dale O'Leary, author of One Man, One Woman: A Catholic's Guide to Defending Marriage, mourns the fact of the high incidence of childhood sexual abuse against those who later end up in a homosexual lifestyle. Childhood Sexual Abuse and Other Adverse Events  MSM are more likely to have been victims of childhood sexual abuse. Stall and associates note that a history of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) has been linked to increase risk of HIV infection....

Channel 9 has obtained video from a Seminole County courtroom where an emotional domestic violence victim was sentenced to three days in jail for failing to show up for her abuser's trial. During her contempt of court hearing in July, the woman told the judge she had been having anxiety for months after she was attacked by the father of her child. She said she told the state's victim's advocate that she wanted to drop the charges and move on with her life rather than testify, but she was still called in to court. After she failed to show, she...