Free Republic

Former President George W. Bush says he isn’t interested in playing on the national political stage any longer. But for family, he’s making an exception. Asked in an interview with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer whether he thinks his brother former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush should run for president in 2016, the ex-president was unequivocal. “He’d be a marvelous candidate if he chooses to do so. He doesn’t need my counsel ’cause he knows what it is, which is ‘run,’ ” the elder Bush brother said about Jeb’s possible candidacy, in an interview that first aired Wednesday on “World News with...

Early on a December morning, Robert Coogan pulled his red Chevy hatchback into the parking lot of the state prison in Saltillo, Mexico. It was frigid outside, the sun had not yet cleared the reddish mountains, and Coogan lingered, staring at the tall black letters on the prison’s high walls: “CERESO” — Centro de Reinserción Social, the place where criminals are supposed to be reformed. Coogan, who has served as chaplain at the prison for a decade, slowly pulled himself from the warm car. In dark jeans, brown boots and a thick gray sweater, he looked more like a factory...

CHICAGO — Mexican drug cartels whose operatives once rarely ventured beyond the U.S. border are dispatching some of their most trusted agents to live and work deep inside the United States — an emboldened presence that experts believe is meant to tighten their grip on the world's most lucrative narcotics market and maximize profits. If left unchecked, authorities say, the cartels' move into the American interior could render the syndicates harder than ever to dislodge and pave the way for them to expand into other criminal enterprises such as prostitution, kidnapping-and-extortion rackets and money laundering. Cartel activity in the U.S....

President Obama approved a temporary spending bill this week that averted a government shutdown but also riled a slew of groups that say one provision protects Monsanto and other makers of genetically modified seeds and crops from federal courts. The so-called Monsanto Protection Act essentially requires the Agriculture Department to approve the growing, harvesting and selling of such crops, even if the courts rule environmental studies are incomplete -- undermining the judicial review system and posing potential health risks, critics say.

Andrea Mitchell isn't about to let a good hurricane go to waste in her push for economy-wrecking climate change regulations. On her MSNBC show today, Andrea Mitchell claimed that recent weather events including Superstorm Sandy have "taught us if nothing else, that we have a real climate problem and that we have to deal with this here even if the rest of the world isn't going to deal with it in China and elsewhere." View the video here.

It's an amazing show of absolute hypocrisy or a terribly cold-blooded power play. Either way, the Obama Administration is showing a shocking lack of common sense and prudence with its latest push for comprehensive gun control. As late as 2011, the Department of Justice was giving automatic assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels... This tremendous stupidity had the precise consequences you might expect: as of September 2011, US assault weapons connected to Fast and Furious were found at 170 crime scenes in Mexico. As of March 2011, 150 Mexicans had been shot because of Fast and Furious. US Border Patrol...

MEXICO CITY — As a U.S. Marine, Jon Hammar endured nightmarish tension patrolling the war-ravaged streets of Iraq’s Fallujah. When he came home, the brutality of war still pinging around his brain, mental peace proved elusive. Surfing provided the only respite. “The only time Hammar is not losing his mind is when he’s on the water,” said a fellow Marine veteran, Ian McDonough. snip--- But Mexican prosecutors who looked at the disassembled relic in the 1972 Winnebago motor home dismissed the U.S. registration papers Hammar had filled out. They charged him with a serious crime: possession of a weapon restricted...

A former Carnegie Mellon University trustee pleaded not guilty on Thursday to conspiring to launder $600 million for a Mexican drug cartel during a federal court hearing in El Paso. ... The university named a graduate fellowship for Hispanic students in public policy for Delgado and pledged $250,000 in matching funds to it after Delgado gave CMU $250,000 in 2003.

Stopping price hikes during disasters may sound like a way to help people, but all it does is exacerbate shortages and complicate preparedness. Price controls in an emergency have the same results as they do any other time: They lead to shortages and overconsumption. Letting merchants raise prices if they think customers will be willing to pay more isn’t a concession to greed. Rather, it creates much-needed incentives for people to think harder about what they really need and appropriately rewards vendors who manage their inventories well. For customers to suffer from a gasoline shortage even while gasoline sat idle...

Look at these photos of miles-long lines for gasoline in New Jersey and you'll see that there's a real issue here. The Christie administration fined a gas station for breaking price gouging rules back in September, and issued a press release before Sandy hit noting that case and explicitly warning retailers not to respond to the hurricane by raising prices. The failure to allow prices to adjust doesn't magically eliminate the supply side problems, it just means that the gasoline is misollacated and lots of people need to waste time in line. You can also see that the combination of...

But for the first time Agent Zapata’s partner Victor Avila spoke out about the attack that left Agent Zapata dead and him wounded. His twin sister Magdalena Avila-Villalobos spoke for him in the Univision special on Fast and Furious. Avila is so scared and hurt by the attack he did not speak out until he knew he was in a secure location. No one knows for sure why Agent Zapata and Agent Avila, assigned to the US Embassy, were asked to travel on road 57, a road controlled by the Zeta Cartel and extremely dangerous. They didn’t even know why...

How high up did the weapons of Operation Fast and Furious go in the cartels? This high: When Mexican authorities took Juarez drug cartel carnage king Jose Antonio Acosta Hernandez — better known as “El Diego” — into custody, he had weapons from Operation Fast and Furious on his person, the English-language transcript of the Spanish-language television network Univision’s special investigation into the scandal shows.“According to investigations, ‘El Diego’ forms the link between this massacre and Fast and Furious,” an anchor read on air in Spanish Sunday evening, referring to two different mass killings drug cartel operatives used Fast and...

The city may be nearly 2,000 miles from Mexico, but the country’s drug cartels are so deeply embedded in Chicago that local and federal law enforcement are forced to operate as if they are “on the border,” according to Jack Riley, special agent in charge for the Chicago Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Because of Chicago’s location in the heart of the United States, its large Mexican population and its abundance of street gang activity, drug cartels have designated the city as one of its main hubs of operation in America, Riley told TheBlaze in an exclusive...

In September 2011, the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a warning to local law enforcement agencies throughout Arizona, informing them that they were being targeted by the powerful and violent Mexican drug cartels. The DOJ’s 2011 Drug Market Analysis for Arizona stated the cartels "have begun to threaten local police officers to deter their enforcement activities. Violent criminal groups often referred to as border bandits, rip crews, or bajadores, operate along trafficking corridors in remote locations, preying upon law enforcement officers and smugglers who transit their territories." The report also detailed the expanded use by the cartels of street gangs...

High-ranking cartel member speaks on Operation Fast and FuriousVincent Zambada-Niebla of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel was arrested for drug trafficking, but claims he should not have been because of an arrangement with the US government. Michael Kelley, Business Insider August 10, 2012 16:55 A high-ranking member of the Sinaloa drug cartel currently in US custody alleges that Operation Fast and Furious was part of an agreement to finance and arm the Sinaloa cartel in exchange for information used to take down rival cartels, according to court documents. **SNIP** From the court document: "[T]he United States government at its highest levels entered...

No big deal....despite the fact that a stash of AK-47s was found along a hiking trail in not Colombia, not Mexico but in....Arizona. A hiker in the Madera Canyon area found three assault rifles in a black trash bag one mile north of Old Baldy Trail. After receiving a report of the discovery on Wednesday, June 20, the Pima County Sheriff’s Office determined that the rifles were found in Santa Cruz County, and notified the local sheriff’s office. Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s deputies then went to the site and recovered what turned out to be a stash of AK-47 assault...

by John HillStand With Arizona The border is “safer than ever”. So says DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. Again and again. Barack Obama has mocked those who say the border is unsafe: “Maybe they’ll need a moat. Maybe they’ll want alligators in the moat. They’ll never be satisfied.” But for Texans, the Rio Grande is wide open - thanks to Federal failure to secure it  - and is a growing threat to the safety of citizens and law enforcement, on land and water. In January we chronicled how ranchers in the Rio Grande Valley were stocking up on AK-47s to defend their property and lives...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Fourteen mutilated corpses and a threatening message aimed at a drug cartel were found inside a truck in the parking lot of a supermarket in a northern Mexico city, local media reported on Saturday. Mexico's attorney general's office could not immediately confirm the reports of the grisly discovery in Mante and police officials in the crime-ridden city were not immediately available for comment. Mexican media said the body parts belonged to 10 men and four women and the message was directed at the Gulf cartel.

RUIDOSO, N.M. – In the stables at a prominent quarter horse track in New Mexico, workers quietly nicknamed Jose Trevino Morales's stables as the "Zetas' stables" and say they often saw people show up with bags of cash to buy the horses. On Tuesday, authorities raided those stables and a horse ranch in Oklahoma accusing Trevino and others of running a sophisticated money-laundering operation connected to one of Mexico's most powerful and ruthless drug cartels. Federal authorities accuse Trevino's older brother, Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, a key figure in the Zetas drug operation, of setting up the horse operation that...

A drug cartel lieutenant has been arrested over a series of firebomb attacks on Mexican potato-chip company Sabritas, a subsidiary of U.S. food giant PepsiCo. The gang-related bombings are believed to be the first time a multinational company has been targeted in Mexico's 5½-year-long drug war. Experts suggested that the attack may be linked to the company's apparent refusal to hand over protection money to the gangs which have terrorised local residents and businesses.