Free Republic

On Friday’s Morning Joe, the MSNBC show’s hosts and guests spent most of their broadcast mourning the announced resignation of Minnesota Senator Al Franken from Congress in the wake of over half a dozen allegations of sexual assault against him. In a stunning display of hypocrisy, MSNBC’s liberal morning pundits went to extraordinary lengths to cast doubt on the women who have accused Franken of sexual misconduct, violating the network’s own oft-repeated standards for Republican and conservative politicians.New York Times writer Bari Weiss was even brought on to complain about how “some innocent people are going to go down” as...

America is having a reckoning and it’s long overdue. I’m talking about the movement to hold sexual harassers accountable for their actions. This important movement is now shaking the halls of power in Congress and state capitols and I am determined to help lead it. I remember my first year in the Tennessee House of Representatives. It was 1998, and having spent my career as a nurse and an educator, I had a lot to learn about the legislative process. I immediately figured out that the state House had a “good ol' boy” culture - and learned about the inappropriate...

Los Angeles detectives said Tuesday they are investigating a woman’s claim that Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski molested her in 1975, when she was 10 years old. But the allegations are so old that criminal charges couldn’t be brought, even if proven. Although the statute of limitations has long expired, law enforcement officials may be able to use any evidence they collect to help prosecute other cases. Authorities are now probing the case because Los Angeles detectives “will always take a report from any victim and then determine if the case is within the statute of limitations,” police spokesman Josh Rubenstein...

Antolin Garcia Torres, the convicted killer of Morgan Hill teenager Sierra LaMar, was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Garcia-Torres, 26, was convicted in May of first-degree murder in the 15-year-old girl's death and the attempted kidnappings of three women in 2009. On Tuesday, he was also ordered to register as a sex offender. The sentencing, which was originally scheduled to take place in September, was delayed as the court considered a challenge from the defense to remove Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Vanessa Zecher from the case. Garcia-Torres and his attorneys claimed that...

Full title: Pelosi claim that GOP invites violent criminals to carry concealed weapons gets her 'Three Pinocchios'Nancy Pelosi earned “Three Pinocchios” from The Washington Post's Fact Checker over a tweet claiming that House Republicans are inviting violent criminals, domestic abusers and convicted stalkers to carry concealed weapons. The House minority leader sent the tweet last week after House Republicans passed the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, sending it to the Senate by a 231-198 vote. “Inviting violent criminals to carry concealed weapons doesn’t save lives,” Pelosi tweeted. “Inviting domestic abusers to carry concealed weapons doesn’t save lives. Inviting convicted stalkers to...

"Journalist photographs heartbreaking scene of a starving polar bear in Canada." "Tragic Video 'Rips Your Heart Out of your Chest'" "The bear was just skin and bones as it wandered on ice-free land on Baffin Island." "Warming climate depletes the ice that's the bears' normal hunting grounds." "Polar bears are often the first arctic animals to feel the effects of higher climate temperatures."

On Friday, an army of firefighters in Ventura County hoped it was finally beginning to turn the tide on the Thomas fire. After burning hundreds of homes, the fire was slowing as Santa Ana winds calmed down. But over the weekend, the fire reemerged with a vengeance, pushing into Santa Barbara County and destroying more homes. Here’s a look at the fire that has refused to die.

In what is the first successful prosecution in the scandal involving Planned Parenthood, the abortion industry, and the sale of aborted baby parts, two companies that sold aborted baby parts for the nation’s biggest abortion company have been forced to close down. The two California-based companies reached a settlement with the Orange County District Attorney’s office of almost $8 million dollars. As a result of the settlement the two companies will close up shop over the next couple of months and will no longer be selling parts from babies killed in abortions for Planned Parenthood or anyone else. This is...

Mayor of San Francisco and major sanctuary city proponent died "suddenly" in hospital, surrounded by family.

CA Gov. Jerry Brown’s War Against the Truth All Hell is breaking loose in California as residents are being burned out of their homes, neighborhoods and businesses, while Gov. Jerry Brown is jetting around the world spouting climate change propaganda. He calls this California’s ‘new normal.’ “With climate change, some scientists are saying Southern California is literally burning up, and burning up as maybe a metaphor or a description not just to the fires right here, but what we can expect over the next years and decades,” Brown said. I say ‘propaganda’ because Brown loves to cloak himself in false...

SAN FRANCISCO -- When British Prime Minister Tony Blair attends a reception in his honor at George Shultz's San Francisco home tonight, it will be the only social event of his four-day visit to the Bay Area. From the time he arrived on his British Airways charter at 5:30 Friday evening until the reception with the former secretary of state, Mayor Gavin Newsom and business and community leaders, Blair has been holed up at the Fairmont Hotel, working on his speech to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles on Tuesday and handling government affairs at long distance. "I know...

A 41-year-old San Francisco plumber who was on a losing streak at local casinos and faced eviction for not paying his rent was found guilty Monday of slaughtering a family of five inside their Ingleside neighborhood home after targeting them for robbery. On its seventh day of deliberations, the San Francisco Superior Court jury found Binh Thai Luc, an undocumented Vietnamese immigrant with a violent criminal past, guilty of five counts of murder in the massacre of the Lei family on March 23, 2012. ---------------------------- Before the killings, Luc was convicted in 1998 of committing an armed robbery at a...

Talk show legend Larry King has been accused of groping an ex-wife of singer Eddie Fisher on two separate occasions, according to a report Monday. Terry Richard told the Daily Mail on Monday that the now-84-year-old Larry King Now and Politicking host groped her in 2005 and 2006, with both alleged incidents coming during baseball awards dinners at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. Richard, 63, had reportedly been working as a photographer for the local Tolucan Times when she saw King, whom she had met some months before, at the 2005 dinner. The photographer had reportedly wanted a photograph of...

California Gov. Jerry Brown and former Vice President Al Gore lead the list of those blaming climate change for Southern California’s devastating wildfires, calling them “the new normal,” but others insist the science just isn’t there. That includes climate scientists such as University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass, who moved to extinguish the “now normal” narrative by arguing that the data “strongly suggests there is no credible evidence” that global warming is fueling this fall’s California coastal wildfires, and that claims to the contrary are “baseless, if not outright wrong.” “The bottom line of all this is that observations and...

Three of President Trump's female accusers spoke with NBC's Megyn Kelly Monday about their experiences, all claiming he took advantage of them sexually. Former beauty pageant contestant Samntha Holvey alleged that Trump made her feel like "a piece of meat," Rachel Crooks, a former receptionist, claimed he forcibly kissed her, and Jessica Leeds, a traveling saleswoman, says he groped and kissed her on an airplane. The White House has dismissed them as "false claims," as Kelly reiterated on her show.These women's stories, however, were enough to convince Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) that the president needs to step down "immediately." Should...

The body of a woman who was found dead in the water along a trail in Sunnyvale on Thursday has been identified as a 23-year-old software engineer. Police said a bicyclist spotted the body of 23-year-old Chuchu Ma in the water along Bay Trail Thursday morning. The Google software engineer was reported missing in Mountain View that same day. Body found in water along Sunnyvale trail identified According to Ma’s LinkedIn page, she graduated with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from the University of Texas, Austin, where she received a National Merit Scholarship. She worked as an engineer at Google...

SNIP The proposal from the California Association of Realtors would expand Proposition 13, the landmark constitutional amendment passed by voters in 1978 that has kept homeowners’ property taxes artificially low over the years, even as their home values have doubled or even quadrupled. Under the initiative, homeowners who are over 55 or severely disabled would be able to keep those lower tax obligations for life, regardless of how many times they move, as long as they stay in California. SNIP

Republicans are hesitant to switch from our winner-take-all state laws allocating electors to the electoral college to using the National Popular Vote. The National Popular Vote Plan would award all of a state’s electors to the candidate who wins the most popular votes in all 50 states. There is a fear that such a move will benefit Democrats, since Democrats won the popular vote even though they lost the elections in 2000 and 2016. But the truth is, Republicans are likely going to lose their ability to win the necessary swing state of Florida in the future, and they can...

San Joaquin County’s chief forensic pathologist resigned Tuesday, one day after the release of memos alleging Sheriff-Coroner Steve Moore interfered with death investigations to protect law enforcement officers. Dr. Bennet Omalu, and his colleague Dr. Susan Parson, who perform autopsies for the county, have accused Moore of trying to influence their medical findings, especially in cases where officers were involved in a person’s death. Omalu, a Nigerian-born neuropathologist, rose to national prominence in 2005 after he published his discovery in football players of a degenerative brain disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE. His discovery was documented in the 2015...

The so-called Thomas fire has burned about 200,000 acres and is only 15 percent contained, Fox 11 reported. The fire grew by more than 25,000 acres during the day, the Los Angeles Times added...Officials handed out masks to residents who stayed behind in Montecito, the wealthy hillside enclave that’s home to celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bridges and Rob Lowe. “Our house is under threat of being burned,” Ellen DeGeneres tweeted at midday Sunday. “We just had to evacuate our pets. I’m praying for everyone in our community and thankful to all the incredible firefighters.”