Free Republic

SEASIDE HEIGHTS, N.J. - November 1, 2012 -- The Fun Town Pier in Seaside Heights is now a pile of twisted metal and broken rides lying on the beach as waves lap over it. It's one of two piers destroyed in hurricane Sandy where the iconic Ferris wheels seem to be the only thing left standing. It's hard to conceive of how long that could take. Seaside Heights and nearby towns are under martial law.

NRSC: Menendez may have broken Senate ethics rules, federal campaign finance laws with alleged Dominican sex trip The executive director of National Republican Senatorial Committee said Thursday that New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez “may have violated Senate ethics rules and federal campaign finance laws” with his alleged sex trip to the Dominican Republic. The Daily Caller first reported early on Thursday that two women from the Dominican Republic are alleging Menendez paid them for sex around Easter time this year at Casa de Campo, an expensive 7,000-acre resort in the Dominican Republic. The two women claimed Menendez agreed to...

Dominican hookers, to be specific. This is what we’re hearing about the sex scandal involving a “powerful senator” in a headline being touted by Drudge, with a story by the Daily Caller promised late tonight. UPDATE: Shortly after the Drudge Report headline went up, my associate Ali Akbar got a tip that the story involved Sen. Menendez of New Jersey and at least one prostitute with whom he trysted on a taxpayer-funded trip to the Dominican Republic. Within one hour, Akbar had confirmed this with other sources, and we understand that numerous reporters in D.C. have heard similar reports. UPDATE...

Jenny is a 13-year-old 8th grader who's been interested in politics for a couple of years. She was confused about the claims of the Democrats and the claims of the Republicans. So, she decided to look at the facts and do a report card for President Barack Obama and one for Governor Mitt Romney. She compared them and now presents her findings in this video.

President Obama's campaign, with a good dose of help from the media, is pushing a claim that millionaire Mitt Romney is taxed at a "lower rate" than someone making $50,000 a year. IRS data, though, shows that Romney's effective income tax rate -- that's what he pays as a percentage of his income once deductions and other benefits are factored in -- is actually far higher than what most Americans pay. Romney's rate in 2010 -- which was also about 14 percent -- was higher than what 97 percent of Americans pay.

You work hard, stretch every penny, but chances are you pay a higher tax rate than him: Mitt Romney made $20 million dollars in 2010, but paid only 14% in taxes—probably less than you. Now he has a plan that will give millionaires another tax break and raises taxes on middle class families by up to $2000 dollars a year. Mitt Romney's middle class tax increase: he pays less, you pay more.

Rule of Law: Arizona finds itself in more hot water with the left, declining to give state benefits to illegal aliens whose deportations have been stayed as a political favor by the White House. Tell us again what "illegal" means? On Thursday, Governor Jan Brewer enraged the White House, the ACLU and open-borders activists by issuing Executive Order 2012-06, stating that her state reaffirmed the intent of Arizona law on state benefits — from driver's licenses to in-state college tuition — to illegals, which is a big fat "no" to all of the above. That was in response to the...

MILWAUKEE — The Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office released the 911 calls from the Sikh Temple shooting that took place on the morning of Sunday, August 5th. The shooting left six dead and three critically wounded. The man at the center of the shooting is 40-year-old Wade Michael Page. He died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in the moments after he shot up the temple — following a gunshot wound to the stomach fired by an Oak Creek police officer. The 911 calls give listeners a sense of the terror that took place on that Sunday morning at...

For many of us, our main understanding of the American South, slavery and the Civil War derives from countless viewings of ‘Gone with the Wind.’ New research has revealed that Michelle Obama’s forefathers include Charles Shields, a slave-owner of Irish descent, who lived in the very same county in Georgia State where the fictional Scarlet O’Hara’s family lived. This is the remarkable story of how Charles Shields and a slave girl called Melvina became ancestors of the first African-American to become First Lady of the United States.

NASA's most advanced Mars rover Curiosity has landed on the Red Planet. The one-ton rover, hanging by ropes from a rocket backpack, touched down onto Mars Sunday to end a 36-week flight and begin a two-year investigation. The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft that carried Curiosity succeeded in every step of the most complex landing ever attempted on Mars, including the final severing of the bridle cords and flyaway maneuver of the rocket backpack.

The federal government has quietly been completing an audit of U.S. gold stored at the New York Fed. The effort included drilling small holes in the bars to test their purity. The Treasury Department has refused to disclose what the audit has revealed so far, saying the results will be announced by year's end. But as one former top Fed official said recently, the testing may finally prove that "Goldfinger didn't sneak in at night" and take the gold. "The calls for audits are saying, 'We don't trust the government for the last 200 years,'" said Ted Truman, a former...

(CNN) - Mitt Romney on Thursday pushed back against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's allegations that the presumptive GOP nominee has not been paying his taxes. "It's time for Harry to put up or shut up," Romney said on Sean Hannity's radio show. Reid stood by the allegations on Thursday while speaking on the Senate floor. "The word's out that he hasn't paid any taxes for 10 years," he said. "Let him prove he has paid taxes because he hasn't." Romney has made public the full 2010 tax return and an estimate for 2011, with a pledge to release the...

Law students in 1990 also poked fun at plan to run for Oval OfficeA publication produced by Harvard law students in 1990 confirms Barack Obama wore a ring on his wedding-ring finger before he married Michelle in 1992. A reference to Obama wearing a wedding ring appears in an annual satirical edition of the “Harvard Law Revue,” published for the 130th anniversary banquet of Harvard Law School. WND reported last week that photographs of Obama at Occidental College in Los Angeles and in New York City in the years when he was supposed to have attended Columbia University show him...

Edwin M. Truman explains why the spreading LIBOR scandal has the potential of raising new doubts over the reputations for honesty of many large financial institutions.

Iran has expanded its terror network and now has tens of thousands of agents in Latin America, according to a former Iranian official who has witnessed the regime’s crimes against humanity inside Iran and has knowledge of its terror network targeting the West. In interviews with the opposition outside Iran, the official revealed that more than 40,000 of the regime’s security, intelligence and propaganda forces successfully have been placed over time in Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Venezuela. These forces consist mostly of former interrogators, torturers and security forces along with the members of the Quds Forces. Many of...

Did he attend classes at Columbia? Henry Franklin Graff, professor emeritus of history at Columbia for 46 years, has cast doubt on claims Obama attended classes at the New York City university. “I have no recollection of Barack Obama at Columbia, and I am sure he never attended any of my classes,” Graff told WND in a telephone interview. “For 46 years, I taught political history, diplomatic history and one of the pioneering courses on presidential history, and every future politician of note who went through Columbia in those years took one or more of my classes – every one,...

Where have all the workers gone? Since Barack 0bama has taken office, the population of the United States has grown by over nine million people, yet according to the United States Department of Labor, the labor force has only grown by only 1.5 million over the same period. The fact is, the DOL's Bureau of Labor Statistics does not do accurate counting of unemployed people. It's numbers do not come from the State's unemployment offices. All of it's numbers are calculated from a sample survey conducted each month that includes less than 0.02% of our country's population. How valid are...

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- A federal judge on Sunday temporarily blocked enforcement of a Mississippi law that could shut down the only abortion clinic in the state. U.S. District Judge Daniel P. Jordan in Jackson issued a temporary restraining order the day the new law took effect. He set a July 11 hearing to determine whether to block the law for a longer time. "Though the debate over abortion continues, there exists legal precedent the court must follow," Jordan wrote. The law requires anyone performing abortions at the state's only clinic to be an OB-GYN with privileges to admit patients...

Attorney Larry Klayman told WND he had expected an “uneventful” hearing in the ongoing case, which returned before Judge Terry Lewis yesterday, but instead found a legal tangle that he believes means Lewis will “have to make a decision, have to put it on record.” “Lewis would have to reach a decision; he would have to put it on record,” Klayman said. “By amending for declaratory relief, we’re pulling the rug right out from Obama and the Florida secretary of state.” “This judge can’t get out from under his legal requirement,” Klayman said. “If he screws around, he’s violating law.”...

It appears that We-the-People, the US Constitution and the USA are now sunk. CJ Roberts has now shown his true stripes as a leftist. In order to do away with the true argument that the Congressional ruling establishing ObamaCare would be charged as a fee for being born and living in the USA, Roberts changed ObamaCare to a tax—which Obama had argued previously and intensely stated was NOT a tax—in order to mollify and please his true leader. However, during the oral arguments, Obama’s lawyers ruled it IS a tax. In what I view as an act of brazen disregard...