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So, then, what are we supposed to think when the governor of Texas dispatches National Guardsmen to the state border with Mexico in order to deflect the onrush of illegal border-crossers? What are we supposed to do? Do? A strange concept these days. Do something about the Russians and their depraved allies for shooting down a passenger plane? Do something about the depraved crowd of terrorists who provoked Israel into assaulting the tunnels in which they skulk? Do something about those equally depraved Iraqi terrorists now rounding up and expelling Christians from their midst? Do something about the kidnappers of...

Killing people is a brutal and messy business and if Americans can't deal with that, they shouldn't be condemning people to death, a top federal judge says. In a strongly worded dissent in an Arizona lethal-injection case, Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals, calls the current system "inherently flawed" and says states that want to execute inmates should return to more "primitive—and foolproof—methods" of execution, NBC reports. "The guillotine is probably best but seems inconsistent with our national ethos. And the electric chair, hanging and the gas chamber are each subject to occasional mishaps,"...

New Zealand’s first same-sex “marriage” is shaping up to become the country’s first same-sex divorce. Less than a year since they became the poster girls for the country’s new legal definition of marriage (last August) the NZ Herald reports that Melissa Ray, a former Ferns football player, and Natasha Vitali, a sales rep, are “believed to have split”. The main source of the story appears to be Ms Vitali’s Facebook page on which the following poem appeared yesterday: Drink it down, laugh it off, Avoid the drama, take chances, And never have regrets Because at one point everything you did...

To be clear, in America's polite upper-middleclass circles, gay domestic violence is the hatred that dare not speak its name. Ditto "progressive" Australia. For the media class, at least, would prefer to talk about white picket fences, rainbow flags and same-sex wedding cakes. The message: Think pretty things. Still, even MSNBC can't wish away ugliness. As one underreported UCLA study found: Although reported incidences of intimate partner violence, or IPV, are widespread, especially among women and certain ethnic groups, reported IPV was surprisingly high among lesbians, gays and bisexuals in California, who are almost twice as likely to experience violence...

Gov. Jerry Brown has signed a gun control measure eliminating an exemption for certain semiautomatic pistols from California’s unsafe handgun law, Brown’s office announced Friday. Assembly Bill 1964, by Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, D-Sacramento, is designed to limit the exemption for single-shot pistols from the state’s unsafe handgun roster, excluding semiautomatic pistols altered to not fire in semiautomatic mode. :snip: The measure was one of 15 bills Brown announced signing Friday. In another gun measure, Brown signed legislation requiring local courts to notify the Department of Justice more quickly when actions are taken that would result in a person being prohibited...

To direct the Federal Trade Commission to prescribe rules prohibiting the marketing of firearms to children, and for other purposes.

Georgia Republicans will pick their nominee for Senate in a runoff Tuesday, ending Democratic nominee Michelle Nunn’s nine-week wait for an opponent in the open-seat contest. The Senate contest has reverberated around the Peach State, creating three open-seat House races with GOP runoffs that will also be decided Tuesday. In the statewide race, many Republicans said Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., has a small edge over former Dollar General and Reebok CEO David Perdue. Both of whom have spent millions on the anticipated low-turnout contest, and polls close at 7 p.m. In May, Perdue came in first in a seven-candidate Republican...

I believe government at the national level is not going to get any better until the congressional good old boys’ club is shut down and closed for good. The antique fossils in both chambers are not the solution to today’s problems. They are a big part of the problem. I ask you to vote for anyone running for the U.S. Senate other than Sen. Pat Roberts. Forty-seven years in office have kept him overpaid and underworked. DALE CRAFTS, Topeka

Tennessee's Lamar Alexander is one of a number of incumbent Republican senators caught in the cross hairs of Tea Party groups, taking on several challengers in next month's GOP primary. But while Tea Party groups may be optimistic about the race, challengers like Joe Carr face an uphill battle to unseat the two-term senator. Carr's campaign office is just across the street from Murfreesboro's antebellum courthouse. An American flag hangs out front, and in the window a big campaign sign calls on Tennessee Republicans to vote for "Carr, not Lamar." Carr, a 56-year-old state representative, says there are a lot...

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and a key immigration hawk, took to the Senate floor on Monday afternoon to attack the efforts by President Barack Obama to grant amnesty via executive order to millions of illegal aliens. During his floor speech, Sessions endorsed a bill from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) that aims to curb the president’s executive amnesty efforts—and called on his colleagues to cosponsor it. Sessions said: Senator Cruz has a bill that would stop this presidential overreach. Sessions said. It’s very simple. It lays out that we won’t spend money providing...

The Internal Revenue Service said it will monitor churches and other houses of worship for electioneering in a settlement reached with an atheist group. The settlement was reached Friday (July 18) in federal court in Madison, Wis., where the initial lawsuit was filed in 2012 by the Freedom from Religion Foundation, a Wisconsin-based atheist advocacy group that claims 20,000 members nationwide. The suit alleged the IRS routinely ignored complaints by the FFRF and others about churches promoting political candidates, issues or proposed legislation. As part of their tax-exempt status, churches and other religious groups are prohibited from engaging in partisan...

The Legacy Lives On! Mark’s Lost Dog & Cat Rescue Foundation “Conservatism is the antidote to tyranny precisely because its principles are the founding principles.” --Mark Levin in Liberty and TyrannyWelcome to “The Levin Lounge”… Step in and have a virtual FRink.Taking the country by storm, one radio station at a time – and kicking the BUTTS of the competition! Welcome all, to the most FUN LIVE THREAD on FreeRepublic.com! You can call Mark’s show: 1-877-381-3811

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) indicated today that if President Barack Obama takes actions that exceed his constitutional authority, the House of Representatives has no plans to use its own constitutional authority to withhold funding from those actions. At his weekly press briefing, CNSNews.com asked Boehner: “You’ve said you disagree with calls to impeach the president over abuse of power via executive actions. But under the Constitution the House actually has the power of the purse. So, if the President takes actions that exceed his Constitutional authority, will you withhold funding for those actions in the next must-pass appropriations bill?

In a recent confrontation between protesters against the illegal flood of unaccompanied children into the United States and counter-protests by some Hispanic group, one man from the latter group said angrily, "We are as good as you are!" One of the things that make the history of clashes over race or ethnicity such a history of tragedies around the world is that — regardless of whatever particular issue sets off these clashes — many people see the ultimate stakes as their worth as human beings. On that, there is no room for compromise, but only polarization. That is why playing...

We’ve reached a sufficiently high level of implausibility now, I think, that this story technically qualifies as a news-of-the-weird palate cleanser, not actual news.Assuming the data isn’t recovered and no one is punished, as seems likely, this is a get-out-of-jail-free card for the next president’s administration, no? If some Democratic Senate oversight committee demands to see e-mails from President Christie’s underlings and the reply comes back that the hard drives were all corrupted, what’s the grounds for complaint? IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel Thomas Kane said in transcribed congressional testimony that more IRS officials experienced computer crashes, bringing the...

Tomorrow morning, July 22, 2014, Rear Admiral Jeremiah A. Denton, Jr. will be laid to rest with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va. The services will begin at 8:45 AM at the Old Post Chapel where Senator Jeff Sessions and Representative Sam Johnson are expected to give remarks. The ceremonies will also include a 13 cannon-salute, a 21 gun-salute and a military fly-over. Admiral Denton, a retired Naval rear admiral and former U.S. senator who survived nearly eight years of captivity in North Vietnamese prisons, and whose public acts of defiance and patriotism came to embody...

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It used to be that blaming America for crisis abroad was largely the province of liberals. That folk wisdom appears to be changing—just ask Ron Paul. In the days after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the former House member has been quick to attack the West and President Obama for pointing any fingers in the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Honduran President Juan Hernandez blamed U.S. drug policy for sparking violence in Central American countries and driving a surge of migration to the United States, according to an interview published on Monday. Hernandez, who took office in January after winning on a pledge to be tough on crime, said only a drop in violence would curb the wave of families and unaccompanied minors fleeing Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras who have overwhelmed temporary detention facilities on the U.S. border. "Honduras has been living in an emergency for a decade," Hernandez told Mexican daily newspaper Excelsior. "The...

IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel Thomas Kane said in transcribed congressional testimony that more IRS officials experienced computer crashes, bringing the total number of crash victims to “less than 20,” and also said that the agency does not know if the lost emails are still backed up somewhere. The new round of computer crash victims includes David Fish, who routinely corresponded with Lois Lerner, as well as Lerner subordinate Andy Megosh, Lerner’s technical adviser Justin Lowe, and Cincinnati-based agent Kimberly Kitchens. “You stated at the time that document was produced to Congress, the document, the white paper in Exhibit 3[the...