Free Republic

Donald Trump has backed out of moderating a Republican debate because, he says, he’s still considering running for president as an independent candidate. In a statement on Tuesday, Trump said that GOP candidates are “very concerned” that he will announce an independent candidacy after “The Apprentice” ends, and that they won’t agree to a debate with him unless he rules that out. Which he won’t do. “It is very important to me that the right Republican candidate be chosen to defeat the failed and very destructive Obama Administration, but if that Republican, in my opinion, is not the right candidate,...

Federal officials are investigating a wave of hair-cutting attacks by members of the Amish community in Ohio, CNN reports. FBI spokeswoman Vicki Anderson confirmed to CNN that the FBI is investigating the attacks, which led to the arrest of five members of the Bergholz clan, a breakaway Amish gang. According to officials, in a series of six incidents, members of the clan would break into the homes of mainstream Amish, and cut off their hair and beards, which are symbols of faith in the Amish community. The men were charged with aggravated burglary and kidnapping. The Bergholz clan is headed...

Texas has warmest summer on record of any state The blistering heat experienced by the nation during August, as well as the June through August months, marks the second warmest summer on record according to scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C. The persistent heat, combined with below-average precipitation across the southern U.S. during August and the three summer months, continued a record-breaking drought across the region. The average U.S. temperature in August was 75.7 degrees F, which is 3.0 degrees above the long-term (1901-2000) average, while the summertime temperature was 74.5 degrees F, which is...

WASHINGTON -- Huge increases in deportations of people after they were arrested for breaking traffic or immigration laws or driving drunk helped the Obama administration set a record last year for the number of criminal immigrants forced to leave the country, documents show. The U.S. deported nearly 393,000 people in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, half of whom were considered criminals. Of those, 27,635 had been arrested for drunken driving, more than double the 10,851 deported after drunken driving arrests in 2008, the last full year of the Bush administration, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data provided...

GOULD, AR - "I couldn't believe that it was real when I first read it," said UALR School of Law Dean John DiPippa. Disbelief is a common reaction to Gould's latest city ordinances. "The truth is the city of Gould doesn't have the authority to tell anyone that they have no right to petition them, no right to speak and no right to exist in their city," said DiPippa. But that's just what the ordinances do - disbanding a citizens group, forbidding the Mayor from meeting with people and stopping any groups from forming if members discuss the city without...

Playing the presidential card has paid off for Donald Trump. The real-estate mogul and reality-TV host -- who kept viewers and the NBC network guessing until the last minute whether he would make a serious run at the Oval Office -- got a sizeable pay raise to renew his contract to host "The Celebrity Apprentice" for another two years. NBC Universal, which was acquired by cable-TV giant Comcast this year, agreed to pay Trump and co-producer Mark Burnett an estimated $160 million over two years, according to sources familiar with the contract. Trump, who was in Scotland yesterday touting his...

DES MOINES, Iowa -- In a move designed to propel her closer to a presidential run, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will set out on a bus tour of the country on Sunday, making stops at symbolic sites along the way. "Starting this weekend, Sarah Palin will embark on a ‘One Nation' tour of historical sites that were key to the formation, survival, and growth of the United States of America," SarahPAC treasurer Tim Crawford said in a statement to RealClearPolitics. "The tour will originate in Washington, D.C. It will proceed north up the east coast." Details were still being...

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) has been working the phones in conversations with top banking executives to explain the politics of next week’s planned debt limit vote in the House, sources tell POLITICO. The vote will be on a measure to raise the $14.29 trillion debt limit with no spending cuts. With the GOP majority and many Democrats opposing this “clean vote” approach, it will fail. But Camp has made the case to Wall Street that the vote is just a political marker intended to make clear that significant cuts will be required to get an...

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – Saudi Arabia says three al-Qaida members have returned from abroad and turned themselves in. Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Mansour Al-Turki says the three are not on the nation's most wanted list. In a statement Wednesday, he did not identify them, say from where they returned or when. Some al-Qaida members have fled from Saudi Arabia to Yemen. Al-Turki said the three contacted the security authorities from abroad and expressed their wish to come home. The three have been reunited with their families, he said, and the government is considering their cases.

with the President, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) described in more detail what they saw when, as President Obama said last night, "Gabby opened her eyes for the first time." Gillibrand: Well, we were very excited that we were even going to have the chance of getting to visit her hospital room. We didn't know when we first came whether we had that opportunity. And so when we did have the chance, we were so excited to get to see her. And when we came in the room, the doctor was there, her parents were...

It wasn't long after news of the Tucson, Ariz., tragedy broke that the words "paranoid schizophrenic" entered the conversation. Armchair psychiatrists across the country looked at Jared Loughner -- 22, history of antisocial behavior, with a cache of rambling YouTube videos on government mind control -- and diagnosed him. But is there any truth to this? And if so, how does it help make sense of his horrific actions? To try and untangle the influences that might lead one lone gunman to fire his Glock at a political rally, we turned to Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, respected psychiatrist and one...

An obviously deranged man killed six people with a legally purchased and legally carried pistol on Saturday, and the only thing we're arguing about is whether he was listening to Sarah Palin. The debate over what caused Jared Lee Loughner to do what he did is a waste of time. He was obviously suffering from paranoid schizophrenia or a similarly destabilizing emotional disorder; parsing out the particular determinants of his apparent belief that grammar is mind control will not solve any puzzles. The thing about genuine craziness is that it rejects parsing, invents its own reasons, and resists explanation. Accusing...

A longtime friend of Jared Lee Loughner, the suspect in custody following the murder of six people in an apparent assassination attempt on Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, said there was a mysterious, significant change in him a year before the shooting. More Video 1 2 3 4 PreviousNext VIDEO: A total of 19 people were wounded by gunman Jared Lee Loughner's attack. Watch: Tragedy in Arizona: Timeline of Rampage VIDEO: Dr. Steven Rayle and Ken Penner describe the scene at the Safeway supermarket in Tucson, Arizona. Watch: Eyewitness Accounts of Arizona Shooting VIDEO: Tilman Fertitta talks about Rep. Gabrielle Giffords'...

NAZARETH ILLIT, Israel (AFP) – The mayor of a Jewish suburb of Nazareth sparked outrage on Wednesday after refusing to allow Christmas trees to be placed in town squares, calling them provocative. Jesus is said to have spent much of his life. It has a sizable Arab Christian minority, as does mostly Muslim Nazareth itself. "The request of the Arabs to put Christmas trees in the squares in the Arab quarter of Nazareth Illit is provocative," Mayor Shimon Gapso told AFP. "Nazareth Illit is a Jewish city and it will not happen -- not this year and not next year,...

At a stroke, Medicare chief Donald Berwick has revived the "death panel" debate from two summers ago. Allow us to referee, because this topic has been badly distorted by the political process—and in a rational world, it wouldn't be a political question at all. On Sunday, Robert Pear reported in the New York Times that Medicare will now pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling as part of seniors' annual physicals. A similar provision was originally included in ObamaCare, but Democrats stripped it out amid the death panel furor. Now Medicare will enact the same policy through regulation. We hadn't heard about...

Medieval warfare was just as terrifying as you might imagine. THE soldier now known as Towton 25 had survived battle before. A healed skull fracture points to previous engagements. He was old enough—somewhere between 36 and 45 when he died—to have gained plenty of experience of fighting. But on March 29th 1461, his luck ran out. Towton 25 suffered eight wounds to his head that day. The precise order can be worked out from the direction of fractures on his skull: when bone breaks, the cracks veer towards existing areas of weakness. The first five blows were delivered by a...

Members of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus may tout their commitment to cutting government spending now, but they used the 111th Congress to request hundreds of earmarks that, taken cumulatively, added more than $1 billion to the federal budget. According to a Hotline review of records compiled by Citizens Against Government Waste, the 52 members of the caucus, which pledges to cut spending and reduce the size of government, requested a total of 764 earmarks valued at $1,049,783,150 during Fiscal Year 2010, the last year for which records are available. "It's disturbing to see the Tea Party Caucus requested that...

Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget Today, you’re in charge of the nation’s finances. Some of your options have more short-term savings and some have more long-term savings. When you have closed the budget gaps for both 2015 and 2030, you are done. Make your own plan, then share it online.

Lusby, Maryland (CNN) -- A conservative activist known for making undercover videos plotted to embarrass a CNN correspondent by recording a meeting on hidden cameras aboard a floating "palace of pleasure" and making sexually suggestive comments, e-mails and a planning document show. James O'Keefe, best known for hitting the community organizing group ACORN with an undercover video sting, hoped to get CNN Investigative Correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat filled with sexually explicit props and then record the session, those documents show. The plan apparently was thwarted after Boudreau was warned minutes before it was supposed to happen. "I never...

UNITED NATIONS — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran made a series of incendiary remarks in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, notably the claim that the United States orchestrated the Sept. 11 attacks to rescue its declining economy, to reassert its weakening grip on the Middle East and to save Israel. Related * With Warning, Obama Presses China on Currency (September 24, 2010) * The Lede Blog: 9/11 Conspiracy Theory Not as Popular as Ahmadinejad Says (September 23, 2010) * The Lede Blog: Ahmadinejad Asks U.N. to Investigate 9/11 (April 13, 2010) * The Lede: Ahmadinejad...