Free Republic

I happened to catch a jaw-dropping incident on the Fox News Channel air yesterday, as Shepard Smith’s breaking news coverage of the Baton Rouge police ambush brought on Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal for telephone comments. In the course of attempting to heal the raw nerves, Gov. Jindal said “all lives matter” and was rebuked by the crew-cut newsman. Kristinn Taylor of Gateway Pundit captured the exchange:

Much of downtown Baton Rouge lost power during the lunch hour and Entergy officials say the outage could last hours. The heart of the Central Business District lost power around 12:40 p.m., says Entergy spokesman David Freese, after a “non-Entergy contractor” damaged an underground cable. Entergy is currently assessing the damage, which will take hours to repair, says Freese, cautioning it’s impossible to provide an accurate restoration time until Though City Hall is impacted, Chief Administrative Officer Darryl Gissel says the city-parish government building is operating on backup generators and will remain open. City-parish officials urge caution traveling in the...

While there’s been much discussion about the pending plan to widen Interstate 10 through Baton Rouge, the $360 million earmarked for the project is not expected to cover all four phases of the work. Following a speech to the Baton Rouge Rotary Club today, Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development Secretary Shawn Wilson said state officials are confident the first two phases of the project—first widening and replacing the aging elevated portions of the highway from the I-10/I-110 merge to the City Park Lakes, then replacing the bridges over the lakes—can be completed within four years using federal Grant Anticipation...

The National Education Association thinks Colin Kaepernick is an ideal role model. Many members, however, may take their loyalty elsewhere. And frankly, they should. On July 1, the NEA honored Kaepernick, along with several other persons and organizations, with a “Human and Civil Rights” award in recognition of the former pro-football star’s campaign “to fight racial oppression through education and social justice activism.” The born-again political revolutionary, who these last couple years has been peddling the idea that police are conducting a nationwide pogrom against innocent blacks, accepted the honor with predictable melodrama. “To me, this is bigger than football...

<p>Acadiana lost $26.6 million in proposed construction projects with the stroke of Gov. John Bel Edwards veto pen Wednesday.</p> <p>Twenty-nine projects were part of the 40 items struck from the state’s annual construction budget by Edwards using his line-item veto authority.</p>

Two Louisiana lawmakers got into a fistfight at a Baton Rouge bar, evidently over a disputed bill in the Legislature, Greg Hilburn with the USA Today Network reports. State Rep. Stuart Bishop, R-Lafayette, and Sen. Norby Chabert, R-Houma, were involved in a dispute on the House floor Tuesday (May 15) and squared off later that night at the River Room on Laurel Street. Bishop said Chabert "punched me several times" but he didn't throw any punches back. Chabert said he "loved Stuart like a brother" and regretted the incident. Police were called to the bar, but Bishop and Chabert had...

A young black transgender woman was shot dead in a Louisiana motel this week, becoming at least the seventh transgender woman known to have been killed in the United States this year, rights advocates said. The woman, Amia Tyrae, 28, was killed Monday at about 1:15 a.m. at a motel on Airline Highway, according to the Baton Rouge Police Department. Dr. William Clark, the East Baton Rouge Parish coroner, ruled Ms. Tyrae’s death a homicide, caused by a gunshot wound to the chest. The Police Department said Friday night that Dedrick Butler, 22, of Denham Springs, La., had been arrested...

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry announced Tuesday prosecutors will not bring criminal charges against the two Baton Rouge police officers who fatally shot Alton Sterling. Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, was shot by two white police officers in July 2016 outside a convenience store. "This decision was not taken lightly," Landry said in a news conference following a meeting with Sterling’s five children. “We came to this conclusion after countless hours of reviewing the evidence.” The officers' actions were "well-founded and reasonable," he added. The officers — Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II — were responding to a call that...

“You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers… until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere…” - ​​​​​​Fethullah Gulen Later this month, organizations affiliated with the Turkish-based Gulenist Islamist movement will hold a reception lobbying Louisiana’s lawmakers. Why would a Turkish-based Islamist movement seek to lobby lawmakers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA? For the same reason they have conducted similar influence operations in almost every state capitol...

Brittany Monk's rapist received just 5 years of probation for repeatedly sexually assaulting her when she was a child. Baton Rouge, LA – A Louisiana man said he is “not sorry” that he murdered a man who raped his girlfriend when she was a child, because he believed that the justice system “failed” her. Jace Crehan, 23, admitted to having stabbed and strangled Robert Noce Jr., 47, less than two weeks after Noce was convicted for sexually assaulting Crehan’s girlfriend, 20-year-old Brittany Monk, the New York Daily News reported. A jury found Crehan guilty of the July 4, 2015 second-degree...

A civil rights activist is suing Fox News and network host Jeanine Pirro, alleging that she made "false and defamatory statements" about him while discussing the Black Lives Matter movement. DeRay Mckesson, one of the movement's leaders, said that Pirro defamed him when she claimed during a "Fox & Friends" segment that he directed protesters to commit violence against police officers, according to The Baltimore Sun. The lawsuit centers around remarks Pirro made on Sept. 29 while discussing the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by a police officer who was injured during protests in Baton Rouge, La. "Pirro's statements are untrue and further a...

BATON ROUGE, LA. — A federal judge has ruled that Black Lives Matter is a social movement that can't be sued over an officer's injuries during a protest following a deadly police shooting in Baton Rouge last year. A Baton Rouge police officer sued Black Lives Matter and DeRay Mckesson, a prominent activist in the movement. But U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson ruled Thursday that Black Lives Matter is not "an entity of any sort," and like the tea party or civil rights movement, it can't be sued.

A 23-year-old white man was arrested Tuesday and accused of cold-bloodedly killing two black men and shooting up a black family's home in a string of attacks last week that police say may have been racially motivated. A law enforcement official said authorities found a handwritten copy of an Adolf Hitler speech at Kenneth James Gleason's home, and investigators said surveillance footage and DNA on a shell casing link him to the crimes. Authorities said he would be charged with first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of a homeless man and a dishwasher who was walking to work. In each...

A 23-year-old white man whom police call a "person of interest" in the fatal shootings of two black men in Baton Rouge has been released from jail after his arrest on drug charges. Baton Rouge Police Sgt. Don Coppola, a department spokesman, said Monday that Kenneth Gleason "has not been cleared" and remains a "person of interest" in the investigation of the killings.

The Florida man who allegedly ambushed and killed two Kissimmee police officers Friday night is a self-professed member of a black extremist group who appears to have been upset by last week’s events in Charlottesville, Va. Everett Glenn Miller, 45, was arrested and charged with first degree murder in the killing of Officers Sam Howard and Matthew Baxter. Miller, who goes by the name Malik Mohammad Ali on Facebook, allegedly ambushed and shot the officers as they were responding to a disturbance call.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A lawsuit accuses Black Lives Matter and five of the movement's leaders of inciting violence that led to a gunman's deadly ambush of law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge last summer. DeRay Mckesson and four other Black Lives Matter leaders are named as defendants in the suit filed Friday on behalf of one of the officers wounded in the July 17 attack by a black military veteran, who killed three other officers before he was shot dead. The suit doesn't name the officer, but its description of the plaintiff matches East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's...

Seven people were arrested during a clash between Baton Rouge police and marchers commemorating the one-year anniversary of Alton Sterling's death, authorities said. Baton Rouge Police Department spokesman L'Jean Mckneely Jr. said a crowd of roughly 30 people, some of them members of the New Black Panther Party, were followed by a camera crew as they marched from the Triple S convenience store where Sterling was fatally shot by a Baton Rouge police officer, to the department's headquarters, 900 Airline Hwy. The confrontation took place outside headquarters. Mckneely said protesters were repeatedly told to remain behind a barricade, but were...

The military veteran who killed three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge last summer left behind a suicide note, a prayer from an Islamic holy book and an online trail of his rage against police. Two days after a white police officer shot and killed a black man in Louisiana’s capital, Gavin Long searched the internet for addresses, phone numbers and other personal information belonging to the two officers involved in the July 5 shooting of Alton Sterling, a prosecutor’s report revealed Friday. Less than two weeks later, the 29-year-old black man from Kansas City, Mo., traveled to Baton Rouge...

A Louisiana high school quarterback died Saturday after a shooting at a graduation party, a coroner said. Bryant Lee, 18, was shot while attending the party a few blocks from his home in North Baton Rouge. Baton Rouge police said Lee was shot once in the head, while two others received minor injuries. "It's a sad situation," Ken Hilton, head football coach at McKinley High School, told WBRZ-TV. "He was going to graduate in three days with a 3.5 GPA." Baton Rouge police spokesman Sgt. L’Jean McKneely said investigators were still searching for a motive and that the shooter was...

<p>The Justice Department has decided not to bring charges against the officers involved in the death of Alton Sterling, whose videotaped shooting by police in Baton Rouge last summer prompted unrest across the city, and is planning to reveal in the next 24 hours that it has closed the probe, according to four people familiar with the matter.</p>