Free Republic

ST. LOUIS (KMOX) – St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay has requested 400 members of the National Guard to help in the city after the grand jury’s decision is announced in the Michael Brown case. He has also agreed to some of the Don’t Shoot Coalition’s proposed rules of engagement. In a letter to the St. Louis Board of Aldermen and the Public Safety Committee, the mayor said he considers “rules of engagement” a military term, and would prefer to call them “rules of conduct.” He has agreed to let protesters occupy public spaces and even be “disruptive but not violent.”...

Sen. Ted Cruz’s piece in Politico Magazine on Wednesday has drawn a lot of attention, not all of it kind. In the piece, the Texas Senator charges that President Obama’s impending executive action on immigration “is lawless” and that if he makes the move, “he will be acting as a monarch.” Since his election in 2012, Cruz has vocally opposed comprehensive immigration reform. A fellow Republican in the Texas congressional delegation said that Cruz’s energetic opposition to comprehensive immigration reform doesn’t adequately represent his constituents. “I don’t think it’s reflective of Texas as a whole,” said Rep. Gene Green, chuckling....

Vietnam veteran John McCain began his career in the US army and survived five brutal years as a prisoner of war, years after his release he moved into the world of politics. Currently serving as senior United States Senator from Arizona, McCain is known for his maverick style and straight-talking attitude. In 2008 he was nominated as the Republican presidential candidate alongside his contentious running mate Sarah Palin, losing out to President Barack Obama. Today McCain is reputed for his long-standing criticism of the Obama administration, in particular his foreign affairs and defence policies. McCain has lashed out at Obama...

On Tuesday, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) said President Barack Obama’s forthcoming unilateral action on immigration is not “amnesty” and declared that America would be “selfish” to deny illegal immigrants temporary work permits and amnesty. Speaking on the House floor, Jackson Lee, who handed out candy to illegal immigrant juveniles this summer at detention centers, mentioned that Texas has 1.3 illegal immigrants and said she loves “living in a country that is known around the world for its humanitarian generosity.” She said the illegal immigrants are working, paying taxes and love their children, some of whom are U.S. citizens or...

BOCA RATON, Fla. — Texas Gov. Rick Perry said the Lone Star State might sue Barack Obama’s administration over the president’s planned executive order to grant relief to as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants. “I think that’s probably a very real possibility,” Perry said during a panel here at the Republican Governors Association’s annual meeting. Perry, who is considering another presidential bid in 2016, said the cost of illegal immigration is “extraordinary.” He said his state spends $12 million a month on securing the border. Perry remarked that state Attorney General Greg Abbott, who was recently elected governor, has...

* Seven-minute YouTube video by 'friends of Darren Wilson' attacks President for not supporting the officer * Video calls Attorney General Eric Holder and Revs Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson 'antagonistic' * Recording uses inflamatory language, calling dead teenager Michael Brown a 'thug criminal' * Ferguson already on a knife-edge as it awaits grand jury decision on indicting officerSupporters of the white cop who shot dead a black teenager in Missouri have published a slick video attacking Barack Obama for failing to back the officer’s family. The seven-minute clip says that the President should have got in touch with Darren...

In an attempt to game the ref prior to President Obama’s expected immigration reform announcement Thursday (tomorrow), Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) accused, “It is lawless. It is unconstitutional. He is defiant and angry at the American people.” The Republican shutdown king from Texas, dubbed a “wacko bird” by Republican Senator John McCain, took to the pages of Politico Magazine on Wednesday in an effort to demonize President Obama’s actions on immigration reform before he even announced them. While Cruz is highly educated, he runs a good game playing obtuse. And thus we get passages like: "To be clear, the dispute...

In an op-ed entitled "Obama is Not a Monarch" posted on November 19 in Politico, Senator Ted Cruz made the essential constitutional argument that all too few other Republicans have been willng to make: the Constitution was drawn to stop exactly the kind of arbitrary unilateral executive action President Obama has time and again imposed upon the American people. As Senator Cruz wrote in Politico: The Constitution designs a system of checks and balances for our nation, and executive amnesty unilaterally decreed from the White House would seriously undermine the rule of law. Our founders repeatedly warned about the dangers...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) ALEX WAGNER, MSNBC: Is the sense that Republicans in Congress will try to unwind this [Obama administration executive action on immigration] in the budget process? LUKE RUSSERT, NBC NEWS: That is certainly an option, Alex, and it is something that they will address while they are in the lame duck to some capacity. I basically heard three things are a possibility. That they would actually try to strip the funds available to the president to carry out this executive action within the actual budget bill, of course it is due by December 11th, then that would be sent over...

President Barack Obama announced on Wednesday that he will use a primetime address to the nation tomorrow night to announce his plan to protect up to five million undocumented immigrants from deportation using executive action. In response, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has published a defiant article in Politico calling on Republicans to block all nominees, executive and judicial, “so long as the illegal amnesty persists.” Under the headline, “Obama Is Not a Monarch,” Cruz writes that the president’s plan is “lawless” and “unconstitutional” and accuses Obama of being “defiant and angry at the American people.” Cruz then lays out his...

GPS has a new job. It does a great job of telling us our location, but the network of hyper-accurate clocks in space could get a fix on something far more elusive: dark matter. Dark matter makes up 80 per cent of the universe's matter but scarcely interacts with ordinary matter. A novel particle is the most popular candidate, but Andrei Derevianko at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Maxim Pospelov at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada propose that kinks or cracks in the quantum fields that permeate the universe could be the culprit. If they are right,...

* Gun sales in one store near Ferguson, Missouri have increased 700% as a grand jury is expected to decide whether or not to indict Darren Wilson * Metro Shooting Supplies owner Steve King says he has sold 250 firearms this week, and claims everyone is buying them because of Ferguson * Officer Wilson is waiting to see if he will be indicted in the August 9 shooting death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown * The FBI has already warned that the grand jury verdict 'will likely' lead to violence, and Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has declared a state of...

As we await the inevitable in Ferguson, here's one way for black folks to find joy -- and galvanize the movement. A state of emergency has been declared in Ferguson, Missouri, while a nation awaits a grand jury decision concerning the indictment of Michael Brown’s killer. That hundreds of thousands of dollars in new military equipment has been purchased by the police in anticipation of the decision suggests that Officer Darren Wilson will get away with his crimes. Ferguson activists have been actively preparing themselves for the inevitable for weeks now, but as young preacher and activist Nyle Fort remarked,...

It’s been some time since Roy Clark could bound out onto a stage like a puppy just turned loose, brandishing an electric guitar and a joyous smile, ready to captivate a crowd with his personality and talent. Friday night, it took him a number of slow and careful steps, and the assistance of a cane and a couple of colleagues, to make his way to a chair on the small stage of Tulsa’s Spotlight Theater. Once he settled himself, Clark said, “I have to be careful I don’t...,” and he gave audience a comically knowing look, “...make an entrance. Which...

The Ebola outbreak has taken more than 5,000 lives in West Africa and infected more than 14,000 individuals in just eight months. During the outbreak crisis, many organizations are clamoring to produce the first cure for the disease. However, an expert from the World Health Organization says that the key to surviving the fatal disease is as simple as drinking water. Dr. Simon Mardel, a veteran relief physician who is consulting on the crisis in West Africa says hydration is most effective way to fight the deadly disease until more extensive and potent treatment options like medicines and vaccines are...

The 53-year-old, identified as an Israeli tourist, was called a ‘dirty bloody Jew’ and a ‘[expletive] Jew’ by his assailants, one of which beat him with his own umbrella in Williamsburg at the Marcy Ave. station before 4 p.m. Monday. The three fled on a Manhattan-bound train after a bystander intervened and was also attacked.Three brutes beat a man while hurling anti-Semitic insults at him at a Brooklyn train station, cops said Tuesday. The 53-year-old Orthodox Jewish man was waiting for a train at the Marcy Ave. station near S. Ninth St. in Williamsburg just before 4 p.m. Monday when...

Congress has voted to remove the child tax credit, the earned income tax credit and the mortgage interest deduction from the tax code starting with the 2014 fiscal year. The move is almost assured to solidify the perception of the 113rd Congress of the United States as deeply disconnected from the struggles and desires of the populace it is supposed to serve. The move, long championed by entitlement reform advocates like congressman Paul Ryan R-Wisconsin and Ted Cruz R-Texas, will cut entitlement payouts by a staggering 177 billion dollars. 54.33 billion dollars in savings will be realized from discontinuing the...

According to one Democratic lawmaker in Washington, D.C., President Barack Obama has "attempted" to work with the Republican Party on comprehensive immigration reform. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., during an appearance on ABC's "This Week," said the immigration reform executive action should occur now than wait for the new Congress in January. Gutierrez said the GOP were told Democrats wanted to work with them on handling immigration but also Obama had attempted to work with Republicans. According to Gutierrez, Republicans continued to refuse to compromise despite concessions on behalf of the Democrats. "We passed a Senate bill," said Gutierrez. "When the...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Okay. I mentioned the plummeting oil price, and there are a lot of people trying to figure out, why is this happening? There are a lot of people that do not understand what it is that's driving down the crude oil price. What explains it? When it happens and it's a mystery, people look to traditional explanations, "Well, are people driving less? Is the demand for gasoline down? The economy bad? What's going on?" And in this case that's not the answer The simple explanation for much, not at all, but for much of the drop in...

They'd be better off with "less scope for choosing the wrong plan."In a 2009 paper, “Choice Inconsistencies Among the Elderly: Evidence from Plan Choice in the Medicare Part D Program,” Obamacare advisor Jonathan Gruber argued that there were too many Medicare Part D plans for seniors to choose from, which led them to make bad decisions when enrolling in a plan. In the paper, written for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Gruber wrote with Jason T. Abaluck that the privatization of the public Medicare program had resulted in dozens of private insurers offering a wide variety of insurance products...