Free Republic

A emocratic bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 was met with overwhelming Republican opposition in the Senate today, where it failed to garner the 60 votes needed to move past a key procedural hurdle. The bill, which was introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), would have raised the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $10.10 per hour over the next 30 months, after which automatic annual increases in the minimum wage would be executed to account for inflation. Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee was the only Republican who voted in favor of letting a debate...

A private company declared that it has found what it believes is wreckage of a plane in the ocean, but leaders of the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 are dismissing the claim. The reasons for the skepticism are obvious -- the site where GeoResonance says it found the wreckage, in the Bay of Bengal, is several thousand miles away from the current search area in the southern Indian Ocean. The Joint Agency Coordination Centre, which is coordinating the multinational search, dismissed the claim. "The Australian-led search is relying on information from satellite and other data to determine...

An Australian exploration company says it might have found the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 — and it’s not in the Indian Ocean. The company, called GeoResonance, claims that it has identified possible wreckage from a commercial airliner on the ocean floor in the Bay of Bengal, Australia’s 7News reports. The Bay of Bengal, marked on the map below, is about 3,100 miles away from the circled area of the southern Indian Ocean where authorities have been looking for the missing plane.

Knicks executive and former player Larry Johnson had a decidedly different but still strong reaction to the racially insensitive remarks Clippers owner Donald Sterling is alleged to have made. On Saturday night, Johnson tweeted: “Black people your Focusing on the wrong thing. We should be focusing on having our own, Own team own League! To For Self!!’’

It's not often that the US or UK governments weigh in on the browser wars, but a new Internet Explorer vulnerability that affects all major versions of the browser from the past decade has forced it to raise an alarm: Stop using IE. The zero-day exploit, the term given to a previously unknown, unpatched flaw, allows attackers to install malware on your computer without your permission. That malware could be used to steal personal data, track online behavior, or gain control of the computer. Security firm FireEye, which discovered the bug, said that the flaw is being used with a...

CODE RED: Central Banks Will Frantically Pound The Panic Button And Eventually Become Executioners To The World's Currencies John Mauldin, Thoughts From The FrontlineApr. 27, 2014, 9:21 AM (It is especially important to read the opening quotes this week. They set up the theme in the proper context.) “There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.” –...

Telegram: You’re going to join U.S. Sen. Susan Collins for a state party fundraiser today. She’s defended National Security Agency spying programs you oppose, and she’s also running against a Democrat, Shenna Bellows, who comes pretty close to sharing your views on that and other privacy issues. Do you support her, despite disagreement on many of those issues? Rand Paul: I wholeheartedly endorse Senator Collins for re-election. I think she’s doing a great job for Maine and for the country. ... I don’t really know, exactly, what her position is on the NSA; you’d have to ask her about that....

Via Dan Riehl, people are going nuts over this in the Headlines thread but I don’t know why. He’s not endorsing her over some tea-party primary opponent. She has no primary opponent. He’s endorsing her over the Democrat in the race, Shenna Bellows (whose civil-libertarian cred from working at the ACLU evidently gave Paul no pause).Even Jim DeMint, who once said he’d rather have 30 principled conservatives in the Senate than a 60-seat majority of RINOs, saw fit to endorse Scott Brown on the eve of his big special election upset in 2010. If Rand can hold an extra Senate...

For almost a century, Minka Disbrow tried to find out what became of the baby girl she gave up for adoption after being raped as a teenager. She hoped, but never imagined, that she would see her daughter Betty Jane again. Her only connection to the child was a black and white photograph of the baby bundled up in blankets shortly after she was born. Then in 2006, Mrs Disbrow, who turned 100 years old at the end of last month, received a call from Brian Lee who turned out to be her grandson. He then asked if she'd like...

A man has been crushed to death after a giant crucifix dedicated to Pope John Paul II collapsed, just days before a historic Papal canonisation in Rome. The 30-metre-high (98ft) wooden and concrete cross fell during a ceremony in the Italian Alpine village of Cevo, near Brescia. Another man was taken to hospital. The structure was dedicated to John Paul II on his visit to the region in 1998. In a strange co-incidence, the 21-year-old man named as Marco Gusmini by local media, was reported to live in a street named after Pope John XXIII – who will also be...

Kira Davis has been warning about the alarming growth of government for a few years now, and sounds off on the comments made by Cliven Bundy. Kira is an actress, mother, blogger and talker. She hosts a bi-weekly internet radio show called the Dark Side w/Kira Davis, Tuesdays & Sundays at 10pmET on Blogtalk Radio. She is concerned about the nation’s shift away from conservative values and constitutional principles.

President of the European Jewish Congress Dr. Moshe Kantor spoke Sunday about the fact that Jews feel less welcome and more insecure in large parts of Europe during the release of the findings regarding the situation of anti-Semitism worldwide in 2013. Kantor was speaking at a press conference where the annual findings for 2013 were released by The Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Moshe Kantor database for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University, in cooperation with the European Jewish Congress. Results from the 2013 survey show that anti-Semitic attacks...

The Citizens Commission on Benghazi, a self-selected group of former top military officers, CIA insiders and think-tankers, declared Tuesday in Washington that a seven-month review of the deadly 2012 terrorist attack has determined that it could have been prevented – if the U.S. hadn't been helping to arm al-Qaeda militias throughout Libya a year earlier. 'The United States switched sides in the war on terror with what we did in Libya, knowingly facilitating the provision of weapons to known al-Qaeda militias and figures,' Clare Lopez, a member of the commission and a former CIA officer, told MailOnline. She blamed the...

Senator Harry Reid told reporters the Bundy Ranch dispute is not over. “Something will happen.” ... Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says “something is going to happen” to get Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy to stop letting his cattle graze on federal land. “It’s obvious that you can’t just walk away from this. And we can speculate all we want to speculate to what’s going to happen next,” Reid told KSNV-TV. “But I don’t think it’s going to be tomorrow that something is going to happen, but something will happen. We are a nation of laws, not of men and women.”...

I’ll cut to the chase. Dan changed GORUCK for the better, forever. Fate smiles on those she loves kind of deal. Dan and I are both Green Berets, which means we share a bond I would best describe as brotherhood with all the fights and all the smiles. But truthfully it’s all smiles. Dan was meant to find GORUCK. And vice versa. Back in March of 2011 at Class 017 in Raleigh no shit there he was. Except, of course, I didn’t understand who he was.

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, in his new book, recommends six rewrites to the U.S. Constitution. He would restrict gun ownership to militia members; ban the death penalty; and allow government to set "reasonable limits" on campaign financing, among other things. But Stevens says he's no radical: "I think every one of my proposals is a moderate proposal," Stevens told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in an interview that aired Sunday on ABC's "This Week." One of Steven's proposals would add five words to the Second Amendment, which would then read: "...the right of the people to keep and bear...

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — The UAW announced today it is withdrawing objections filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) regarding February's vote at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, effectively terminating the NLRB review process. UAW President Bob King said the decision was made in the best interests of Volkswagen employees, the automaker, and economic development in Chattanooga. King said the UAW based its decision on the belief that the NLRB’s historically dysfunctional and complex process potentially could drag on for months or even years. Additionally, the UAW cited refusals by Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam and U.S. Sen. Bob Corker to...

Black students at Washington and Lee University have demanded that the board of trustees denounce one of the two namesakes of the Virginia school, Confederate general Robert E. Lee, or face acts of civil disobedience. The students are calling for the school to apologize for Lee’s “racist and dishonorable conduct,” remove Confederate flags from the chapel, and ban Confederate reenactors from the campus on Lee-Jackson Day (a state holiday), according to the Washington Post. General Lee, who served as the school’s president after the Civil War, is buried on the school grounds beneath the campus chapel. The tension stemmed from...

Even if racism were wiped out tomorrow, we'd still need to address pervasive racial wealth inequality. Here's why Although the Civil Rights Act, the landmark legislation which just reached its 50th anniversary, made great strides in desegregating the economy, economic discrimination is still widespread, and anti-discrimination legislation alone can never rectify the economic damage inflicted upon blacks by slavery and our Jim Crow apartheid regime. The Civil Rights Act was a mild reform, all things considered, but one conservatives fought with vigor and one many conservatives are still bitter about to this day. When the Civil Rights Act passed in...

Boehner says he's 'hell-bent' on passing immigration legislation this year Published April 19, 2014 The Wall Street Journal House Speaker John Boehner and his Republican leadership team are telling donors and industry groups that they want to pass immigration legislation this year, despite the reluctance of other party members to tackle the divisive issue before the November elections. Many lawmakers and activists have assumed the issue was off the table in an election year. But Boehner, R-Ohio, said at a recent Las Vegas fundraiser that he was "hell-bent on getting this done this year," two people in the room told...