Free Republic

Jermalle Brown and Douglas Bufford were gang members hired to combat violence on the South Side through a program hatched by Gov. Pat Quinn’s administration. Paid with taxpayer funds to hand out anti-violence pamphlets, the teens were part-time foot soldiers in the governor’s $54.5 million Neighborhood Recovery Initiative, a program described as “a comprehensive and concerted effort to keep our young people safe, off the streets and in school.” Quinn launched that program a month before his 2010 election as an answer to gun carnage in the city — even though murders that year dipped to a nearly 50-year low....

So when did Ann's and Obama Sr.'s "whatever happened happened fast" wedding happen? For no apparent reason, confusion abounds among Obama's biographers over the wedding date: 1. Dreams claims that Ann and Obama Sr. were in married "in 1960"; similarly, Mendell's 2007 book claims that the couple were married "sometime in late 1960" when they "slipped off alone to the island of Maui"; and both Obamaland (2008) by Ron Jacobs (with contributor David Maraniss) and a 2007 Washington Post article claim that the two were married "late in 1960." 2. A 2007 Chicago Tribune article vaguely claims that Ann and...

House Republicans said Friday that the IRS has agreed to turn over documents and emails from Lois G. Lerner, the agency’s former employee who was at the center of the tea party targeting scandal. The announcement comes after months of jockeying between House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp and the IRS, which had said it was wading through hundreds of thousands of documents requested by House Republicans in their investigation into the targeting. Some Lerner documents have already been turned over and they have only stoked investigators’ interests, particularly because some seem to hint that the IRS was...

After the adjurnment of a hearing to investigate the silencing of political opposition to Democrat Barack Obama, Chairman Darrell Issa (R) turned off the microphone of Elijah Cummings (D) before Cummings could make a statement to further distract from the investigation. Cummings then had his apparently planned tantrum for the camera. The Democrats are now claiming outrage at being silenced by having Cummings' microphone turned off. The hypocracy of that seems lost on on the Main Stream Media based on their coverage of the event. Their coverage barely mentions the reason for the hearings or the status of the hearings...

Biden Vacations in Virgin Islands for Second Time in Three Months Daniel Halper March 7, 2014 7:01 AM The White House announced that Vice President Joe Biden would spend the weekend vacationing in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It's his second vacation there in three months. His White House schedule reads: DAILY GUIDANCE FOR THE VICE PRESIDENT Friday, March 7 – Sunday, March 9 The Vice President and Dr. Jill Biden will visit the U.S. Virgin Islands. There are no public events scheduled. And as Geoff Earle of the New York Post reported on December 27, the vice president spent New...

INCREDIBLE! Use FR's Search box to look for keyword 'Cummings' Gack! The result is like watching an above-ground sewage line explode. I never had any inkling as to how much crap Issa has had thrown at him by Cummings these past 3+ years. And the Congressional Black Caucus is demanding that Issa be stripped of his gavel? What really should be happening here is that we should all be flooding our Cong. Reps with calls to censure Cummings or at least remove him from the Oversight Committee. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and any racist Congressman representing a District (95.4% "urban")...

Like a simple parlor trick, the networks are able to make skeptical scientists vanish, at least from the eyes of their viewers. In some cases, the broadcast networks have failed to include such scientists for years, while including alarmist scientists within the past six months. ABC, CBS and NBC's lengthy omission of scientists critical of global warming alarmism propped up the myth of a scientific consensus, despite the fact that many scientists and thousands of peer-reviewed studies disagree. Neither CBS nor ABC have included a skeptical scientists in their news shows within the past 1,300 days, but both networks included...

House Republicans on Thursday slammed the former IRS official at the center of the agency’s targeting controversy for answering questions from the Justice Department after invoking the Fifth Amendment in a congressional hearing. Republicans on the Oversight Committee said that Lois Lerner’s decision to sit down with federal investigators made them wonder how seriously the Justice Department was taking the investigation into the IRS’s treatment of Tea Party groups. “Think about it: Actually, the people who can put her in jail — she’ll talk to them,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told The Hill. “But she won’t talk to a bunch...

The FBI investigates the use of politiqueras in Valley elections. In the deeply Democratic Rio Grande Valley, the primary is the election that matters. And in local races like county commissioner and district attorney a sliver of votes can make a difference between winning and losing the election. Many times, paid campaign workers called “politiqueras” deliver the votes that put a candidate over the top. Politiqueras—who are paid to turn out voters, especially in low-income neighborhoods and colonias—have been part of elections in the Rio Grande Valley for decades. But the recent suicide of a school board president in the...

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked U.S. courts from being used to collect a $9 billion Ecuadorean judgment against Chevron for rainforest damage, saying lawyers poisoned an honorable quest with their illegal and wrongful conduct. "Justice is not served by inflicting injustice. The ends do not justify the means," U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote. The judge said it was a sad outcome to have to rule that the Ecuadorean court judgment "was obtained by corrupt means," because it will likely never be known whether there was a case to be made against the San Ramon, Calif.-based oil company…....

Former HUD-OIG Special Agent In Charge Indicted on Mortgage Fraud Charges Herschell Harvell, Jr., 53, Conyers, Georgia, made his initial appearance in federal court on charges of making false statements to a bank to obtain a mortgage loan and conspiring to obstruct an investigation into his real estate transactions by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Inspector General (HUD-OIG). Until he was terminated in 2013, Harvell was the Special Agent in Charge of HUD-OIG’s Atlanta office, which encompasses several southeastern states. Harvell’s co-defendant and nephew, Tavus A. Wright, 32, Milledgeville, Georgia, also made his initial appearance...

Largo police have apologized for entering a home without a search warrant and kicking in a bedroom door at a transitional housing property where they believed vagrants had taken over an empty home, according to a Sergeant who was there at the time. The incident happened around noon on Sunday at a home located on 128th Lane N., in Largo, according to dispatch records. "We explained to them why we were there and why we were in the house," said Sgt. Andrew Hill. "(We) immediately told them that we were absolutely sorry for coming into the house." Tenant Keith Montgomery...

Washington, D.C. may have the highest number of certified green buildings in the country, but research by Environmental Policy Alliance suggests it might not be doing much good.The free-market group analyzed the first round of energy usage data released by city officials Friday and found that large, privately-owned buildings that received the green energy certification Leadership in Energy Design (LEED) actually use more energy than buildings that didn’t receive this green stamp of approval.LEED is the brainchild of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), a private environmental group.

No matter how much I pontificate about Washington corruption, there’s no way I can get across the true extent of the DC establishment’s self-serving behavior. Washington is rich because government is big and the beneficiaries of this system are enjoying their status as America’s new gilded class. It’s even gotten to the point where children and other family members also put their hands in the cookie jar. I guess we can call this a system of hereditary corruption. Heck, maybe we can even create hereditary titles for this new elite. The Duke of Pork. The Earl of Sleaze. The Marquise...

Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the architects behind Obamacare, is now claiming that “insurance companies as we know them are about to die.” Critics of President Barack Obama’s signature health care law have long alleged that one of the real goals of law was to put private insurance companies out of business.

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – The New York Police Department has issued changes to how its officers deal with fare beaters following an internal review and a controversial arrest made in the Bronx last week. As TV 10/55′s Don Champion reported Friday, a tense cellphone video has not only gone viral, but also sparked changes within the NYPD. “I just thought somebody needs to see this,” said Dariel Reyes, who shot the cellphone video. Moments before the video started, officers had approached the man at the center of the incident and asked to see his bus receipt as he exited the...

A smaller and smaller percentage of adults are working to support the entire state population. Why does this matter? Because a booming economy provides the benefits of opportunity and upward mobility. But not only that. Growing the number of taxpayers is essential for funding core government services and pension bills. The only other tools legislators have are tax hikes, which have done more to chase away taxpayers than to fund the government. The percentage of the working-age population that is employed fell by 5.6 percentage points, from 65 percent in January 2008 to 59.4 percent in December 2013. This percentage,...

Cary woman charged with financial exploitation of elderly woman in her care Mar 01, 2014 5:21 AM CST CARPENTERSVILLE, Ill. (Sun-Times Media Wire) - A northwest suburban woman hired to be a caregiver for an elderly resident with Parkinson's disease is facing criminal charges for allegedly using the 86-year-old victim's credit cards without her permission, running up thousands of dollars in charges. The Kane County State's Attorney's office charged Lalaine Regencia, 46, of Cary, with financial exploitation of the elderly and two counts of theft, all Class 2 felonies, Carpentersville Police Commander Timothy Bosshart told the Elgin Courier News. Regencia...

Video at link: 46 seconds. (CNSNews.com) -- At a meeting of Tea Party conservatives in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, conservative talk radio host Mark Levin said President Barack Obama “doesn’t have the constitutional authority to do half of what he’s doing,” and added that the “Republican leadership” has not taken any steps to stop Obama's unconstitutional actions. CNSNews.com asked Levin, “Do you believe Obama has the constitutional authority to address climate change or minimum wage without congressional approval?” Levin said, “Of course not. He doesn’t have the constitutional authority to do half of what he’s doing.” “But nobody appears to...

A six-month-long investigation in central California culminated this week with the arrests of five members of the King City Police Department, the former police chief and the owner of a local towing company. According to the Monterey County district attorney, for at least three-and-a-half years the city's top police officers participated in a scheme that took advantage of poor area Hispanics by essentially stealing their cars for profit. Investigators say King City police ordered hundreds of vehicles to be impounded — most often those driven by Hispanic immigrants — and then either kept the cars for themselves or re-sold them...

Evidence is accumulating of a corrupt bureaucratic culture in many, if not all, federal agencies. Revelations of lavish meetings at fancy hotels, featuring stupid but expensive custom-made videos emerged in the last couple of years. But even worse, cases of bureaucrats stealing from taxpayers by taking time off while still being paid high salaries have been reported recently, with their supervisors knowingly turning a blind eye to the taxpayer rip-off. The EPA’s highest-paid employee pretended to be a CIA agent and defrauded the taxpayers of about $900,000 in salary and travel expenses (often first class airfare and five star hotels)....

The Chamber of Commerce and 635 big businesses, including Facebook, sent a letter on Tuesday to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) urging "legislative action to seize this opportunity to fix our dysfunctional immigration system by enacting meaningful immigration reforms this year." Saying they are encouraged by the House GOP leadership's "immigration principles" that they consider "guideposts," the business organizations wrote that they are "united in the belief that we can and must do better for our economy and country by modernizing our immigration system." They also pressed for amnesty by writing about the need to respect "family unity.""Done properly, reform...

Officials in two Treasury Department bureaus fraudulently enriched themselves at taxpayer expense. The assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Public Debt who supervised 108 employees in the bureau's West Virginia office “was committing egregious time and attendance fraud," depriving taxpayers of nearly $100,000 in salary for hours she did not work, according to one of several Treasury Department inspector general documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, most of which had previously gone unreported.

Arizona governor's veto aimed at own party's right Feb 27, 2014 By BOB CHRISTIE PHOENIX (AP) - Republican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer slapped down the right wing of her own party, vetoing a bill pushed by social conservatives that would have allowed people with sincerely held religious beliefs to refuse to serve gays.

CARDINAL George Pell’s appointment to a top Vatican post is ‘‘unsettling’’, ‘‘disappointing’’ and ‘‘a deadset shocker’’, say victims of the Catholic Church’s child sexual abuse crisis and their families. The cardinal’s move to Rome at the end of March after he gives evidence at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse shocked people who campaigned for the historic inquiry.

While advocates for more money for public schools say school districts are facing a financial crisis, one point they concede is underplayed: the districts claiming distress overwhelmingly have declining enrollments. So, should a district that has fewer students to teach each year receive more money? While districts with as differing demographics as Alpena and Detroit and Ashley and Flint ran deficits, they shared one common characteristic — declining enrollment. In fact, 39 of the 47 conventional public schools in deficit in 2012-13 had declining enrollments from 2008-09 to 2012-13. The state has increased overall state funding to K-12 education from...

PAEDOPHILE Derby priest Francis Cullen was “an arrogant man who thought he was better than others”, says a former work colleague. Les Barr worked with the now 85-year-old former Derby Catholic at a newspaper in Tenerife. He said Cullen was employed to sell advertising for the fortnightly Island Connections newspaper for English-speaking ex-pats and tourists on the holiday island. But unbeknown to him his colleague was on the run from the police and the courts and had a perverted past that has now been thrust into the spotlight.

Your 2014 tax return will ask if you had insurance coverage or qualified for an exemption. If not, you may owe a shared responsibility payment when you file in 2015.

Prosecutors confirmed Tuesday that five King City police officers, including the former and acting chiefs of police, were arrested early this morning. Chief Assistant District Attorney Terry Spitz said details of the arrests and charges against the officers would be announced at a press conference at 2 p.m. in Salinas. The officers arrested were longtime Chief Nick Baldiviez, who retired in September, Acting Chief Bruce Miller, Sgt. Bobby Carrillo and officers Mario Mottu Sr. and Jaime Andrade.

Frank G. Bowne is a hunter by profession. Bowne is a K9 handler and SWAT operator with the Post Falls, Idaho Police Department. He and his canine companion, a German Shepherd named Koda, occasionally pursue criminal suspects. More frequently they can be found in pursuit of cash and other property that can be seized through “asset forfeiture” as part of the demented exercise called the War on Drugs. Law enforcement agencies have found this practice to be very lucrative in sparsely populated northern Idaho. Since the agencies conducting those seizures don’t have to prove that the property owner committed a...

BRISBANE, Feb 21 – A culture of protecting the church existed in a diocese where a Catholic teacher raped and molested 13 girls, an inquiry has heard. Teachers were repeatedly told not to compromise the bishop, but the culture of protection wasn’t sinister, a former principal told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Brisbane. Two Catholic Education Office staff and the principal of a Toowoomba school learned of abuse claims against a teacher in 2007, but failed to act.

What are we to make of this sudden rash of banker suicides? Does this trail of dead bankers lead somewhere? Or could it be just a coincidence that so many bankers have died in such close proximity? I will be perfectly honest and admit that I do not know what is going on. But there are some common themes that seem to link at least some of these deaths together. First of all, most of these men were in good health and in their prime working years. Secondly, most of these "suicides" seem to have come out of nowhere and...

State Sen. Ronald S. Calderon (D-Montebello) was taken into custody Monday after surrendering to federal authorities in Los Angeles,...

Judge Ciavarella, who sentenced around 3,000 children in a similar manner, was later sentenced himself to 28 years in prison for financial crimes related to his acceptance of $2.2 million as a finder’s fee for the construction of a for-profit facility in which to house these so-called delinquents.

What do Democrats do when a hard-hitting anti-Obamacare ad threatens the electoral prospects of a Democrat Congressman? Well… You unleash the lawyers. With any luck, you might even be able to use the weight of the FCC to muscle local stations into denying the ad any air time. Because, obviously, using government regulatory agencies to strong arm broadcasters into censoring political advertisements, is a tactic in total compliance with the intent of the First Amendment. Julia Boonstra is currently suffering from Leukemia. And, until the implementation of Obamacare, she had insurance coverage that provided her with desired benefits. In fact,...

‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ Was this Samantha Power baffling Daniel Pearl tweet evil or stupid? Samantha Power@AmbassadorPower Daniel Pearl's story is reminder that individual accountability & reconciliation are required to break cycles of violence. @DanielPearlFNDN

Unarmed citizens in Ukraine taking sniper fire from their own government. Sadly, they aren't allowed to own guns like we are. And people here wonder why we value our Second Amendment? (Taken from Guns Across America on facebook)

I was thinking just now about Huey P. Long, and how the hard times of the 1920s, and the so-called “Bourbons” — the elites that ruled Louisiana back then — produced Long’s governorship. Mind you, Long was an extremely savvy politician and peerless orator. He played the peckerwood on the stump, but he was so intelligent that he finished Tulane Law School in a single year and passed the state bar. He never went to college as an undergraduate; despite winning a debate scholarship to LSU, he couldn’t attend because he couldn’t afford the textbooks. Anyway, Long had a matchless...

Years ago, members of my extended family were gangsters connected with the Genovese crime family. They had the ability, which they used, to place people in favored positions within the New York City Police Department. I know this, because my father was offered one of those slots. --SNIP-- It's the old problem of "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"—"Who watches the watchmen?"

The real mystery behind the FCC's now abandoned "study" to police American newsrooms is why the mainstream media refused to raise holy hell over it. While Obama's lapdogs refused to bark, it was conservative media who fought for newsroom independence and got the FCC to finally back down. Other than the media's natural obedience to Obama, the fact that the fingerprints of left-wing billionaire George Soros have been found on the FCC study might also help to explain the media's silence. ... The media's hands-off policy with Soros is nothing new ... The mainstream media not only shares Soros' hard-left...

What else can we do with the $1.25 trillion we'll save by eliminating these obsolete financial middleman parasites? A lot. Technology has leapfrogged the banking sector, rendering it as obsolete as buggy whips. So why are we devoting 9% of our economy to an obsolete parasite? Financial sector profits now total a staggering 4.5% of GDP (gross domestic product), while the expenses generated by financial churning account for another 4.5% of the economy....

NSA whistleblower, anonymous  At the very least, for the past few months to a year it has become increasingly evident that--although not all--many agencies of the US Federal government have become increasingly dirty, perverse and corrupt and require a deep and thorough cleaning. The US Secret Service has previously been exposed as “including claims of involvement with prostitutes, leaking sensitive information, publishing pornography, sexual assault, illegal wiretaps, improper use of weapons and drunken behavior” and the IRS was caught and admitted to denying Obama’s political enemies (aka “TEA Party, Christians, religious Jews, conservatives) their Constitutional rights while allowing “progressive” groups...

Three former Barclays bank employees have now been charged with “conspiracy to defraud” in the continuing LIBOR scandal, bringing the total to 13 people charged in America and the U.K. It has been reported that three ex-ICAP brokers are next on the list for helping traders manipulate interest rates. Three former Barclays bankers have been charged “in connection with the manipulation of Libor” interest rates, the Serious Fraud Office said. The SFO alleges the three – Peter Charles Johnson, Jonathan James Mathew and Stylianos Contogoulas – "conspired to defraud between 1 June 2005 and 31 August 2007". They will appear...

Respected fellow Thai citizens and dear rice farmers, I wish to begin by reaffirming that over the past two years since being appointed Prime Minister, I have been committed to serve the people of Thailand with honesty, integrity and every determined effort, as I have always been conscious of the mandate entrusted to me by the Thai people. I shall therefore not let them down; in particular the responsibility to protect the interests of the Thai people and uphold our democratic system with His Majesty the King as the Head of State. [snip] My fellow Thai citizens, I wish to...

The National Republican Senatorial Committee points out that North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan and other vulnerable Senate Democrats are now whacking the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid… for enacting changes required by Obamacare. Hey, Senator Hagan, if you want to blame someone, blame the foolish or dishonest lawmakers who voted for the law! Wait a minute, that’s you! In 2009, Senator Kay Hagan (D-NC) promised North Carolinians who depend on Medicare that she was going to “protect Medicare” and that they would “not see a drop in their Medicare coverage.”
 But in 2010 Kay Hagan voted to slash Medicare Advantage...

A plan by the Federal Communications Commission to study how news organizations select stories has prompted about 10,000 people to sign a petition saying “no government monitors in newsrooms.” That’s according to the American Center for Law and Justice, which announced the petition Wednesday and said it reached that number within the first two hours. The agency announced a Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs last year, explaining that it wanted to understand the process of which stories are selected, station priorities, content production, populations served, perceived station bias, and perceived percent of news dedicated to each of the “critical...

Yesterday our old friend Craig Shirley, chronicler of Ronald Reagan’s five-decade war of ideas against liberalism and communism, defined the national Republican Party this way in an interview with Brietbart’s Michael Patrick Leahy: "The Washington Republican party is no longer a political party in the way we understand political parties. It more resembles a crime family than a movement of ideas." Shirley was commenting on the charge that the reason Congress has not gotten to the bottom of the IRS targeting of conservatives and Tea Party movement groups is because the establishment GOP wants the IRS to hobble these groups...

An investor-visa program Congress wants to permanently extend was rife with fraud and corruption from its start more than two decades ago, with hundreds of millions of dollars improperly diverted as government officials lamented a persistent lack of oversight and an inability to investigate or prosecute the perpetrators. ... in December that the Obama administration overruled career Homeland Security officials and expedited visa applications for about two dozen foreign investors for a politically connected Las Vegas casino hotel after repeated pressure from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, and his staff.

A federal investigation has found numerous instances of “unallowable, unreasonable and unsupported” spending by the Brown Foundation of Education Equity, Excellence and Research. Cheryl Brown Henderson was the founder and executive director of the foundation, as well as superintendent of the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, when a National Park Service audit in 2011 questioned $620,871 in expenditures from October 2008 to September 2011. The audit findings prompted an investigation. With Brown Henderson as superintendent, NPS provided federal funds to the Brown Foundation through a cooperative agreement, and the Foundation employed Brown Henderson’s boyfriend, Donald Cameron, as...

I mentioned Saturday that Obama took a long fossil fueled plane trip all the way to Fresno, California to complain about “climate change” and announce a $1 billion “climate change” slush fund. Part of the trip was to whine about the drought in California. His “science” adviser, John Holdren ( a believer in Malthusian prophesy), even went so far as to say that it wasn’t about reservoirs (which some were calling to be built), but about the lack of water to fill the reservoirs. Actually, he’s half right, and there’s a reason for that