Free Republic

We've just received word that the former Delphi Tower in Saginaw Michigan has been evacuated, and that it's being treated as a HAZMAT situation. Police, Fire, and HAZMAT crews are on the scene. The building houses the Saginaw offices of US Senator Carl Levin. Little else is known, but we were contacted by one evacuee who told us that "Levin got a suspicious letter in the mail." Given the two recent Ricin-tainted letters received in D.C., we assume they're taking no chances. More as it develops.

Somerville city officials hung a large banner bearing the words “Black Lives Matter” on the front of City Hall on Wednesday morning in solidarity with the grassroots movement that has spread across the country following the recent shooting deaths of unarmed black men by police. Mayor Joe Curtatone said he worked with members of Black Lives Matter Cambridge , a local offshoot of the national organization, to create the banner and show support for their message. “We see this as an important opportunity for an important national conversation” about race, Curtatone said. He said the move was “a very clear...

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (D) has said that socialist policies characteristic of countries like Sweden should be implemented in the U.S. As a Swede, I would strongly advise against this. The worldwide socialist movement praises the Scandinavian countries for their high living standards and welfare. Easy to do for someone who has never lived in Sweden or read a book on Swedish history. First off: The success of Sweden predates the welfare state. In reality, the economy began to fall behind in the 1960s when the state rapidly expanded. Moreover, Sweden enjoyed the highest growth in the industrialized world between...

Yet Karla Dobinski is still employed at the DOJ. A federal appeals court has blasted misconduct by Justice Department lawyers in a civil rights prosecution against New Orleans police officers. The case arose in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s grant of a new trial because Justice Department lawyers — including those responsible for protecting the civil rights of the defendant police officers — engaged in an anonymous blogging campaign to taint the defendants during the trial. The court noted that Justice Department lawyers stoked a “mob mentality” against police officers....

Poor Kathleen Kane. The first woman – and first Democrat ever elected attorney general of Pennsylvania -- had a bright future ahead of her. The darling of liberals she was a powerhouse at the polls. She led the statewide ticket in 2013 and her election was seen by many as a stepping stone to the governor’s mansion, the U.S. Senate or something even more prestigious. Her career is now in ruins. How she fell so far and so fast is an object lesson for ambitious prosecutors in both parties who feel tempted to use the power of their office to...

Planned Parenthood is Likely Keeping Some Aborted Babies Alive “Until Their Hearts are Cut Out” Dr. Theresa Deisher is a world-renowned scientist in the field of stem cell research who holds patents after discovering adult stem cells in human hearts. Deisher helped the pro-life activists who spent three years recording undercover videos and capturing documents and information showing the Planned Parenthood abortion business selling aborted babies and their body parts. Now, in a new interview, Deisher says she has reviewed the information the activists collected and she is making a shocking claim that Planned Parenthood may be keeping some babies...

Illinois corruption: The state’s 20 most politically corrupt women of the 21st century Caitlin Wilson REBOOT STAFF Jul 31, 2015 We use the term “old boys network” as shorthand for the culture that breeds political corruption. A new study from the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute contends the term is gender-inaccurate. “Unsupervised, Ensnared, Relational, and Private: A Typology of Illinois’ Corrupt Women” takes a look at the women of Illinois who have been convicted for abusing their official powers. It challenges the notion that “female public officials have a deterrent effect on corruption” and examines the methods and motivations most...

Republicans are more likely to be married, less likely to divorce, and are more likely to be happy in their marriage than Democrats, sociologists W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas Wolfinger have discovered. Fifty-seven percent of Republicans are married, compared to 40 percent of Democrats; 41 percent of ever-married Republicans have been divorced, compared to 47 percent of ever-married Democrats; and, 67 percent of married Republicans say they are in "very happy" marriages, compared to 60 percent of married Democrats, they reported for Family Studies, the blog of the Institute for Family Studies. The research looked at 20 to 60 year...

Some people are just wet blankets who want to take the fun out of everything. One such Debby Downer is the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza who thinks we’re all getting a bit too carried away with talk of Democrat voters feeling the Bern or waiting for the Second Coming of Joe. You see, here we are in August of 2015, nearly six months from when the first vote will be cast in Iowa and well over a year away from the actual election, but it’s far too late for anyone to replace Hillary. No, my friends, the die has...

  The Democratic Party is bleeding California and they're rapidly running out of other people's money. So that means more taxes. More and more taxes. Governor Brown, for his part, has left the door open. His approach has changed since his previous term, when he promised to give voters the final say on tax proposals even though their assent is not required by law. "Everything is on the table," said Deborah Hoffman, a spokeswoman for Brown. Everything except cutting taxes and spending obviously. The Capitol's ruling Democrats want to hit up residents and businesses for billions of dollars as...

A new poll released by Fox News holds some surprises for both parties. On the rise in the new survey are Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Ted Cruz. Falling are Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul. Businessman Donald Trump still leads the field for the Republican nomination. He gets 25 percent among GOP primary voters. He was at 26 percent before the debate. TrumpÂ’s support among women went from 24 percent two weeks ago to 21 percent now. He mostly held steady among men (28 percent).The real-estate mogul maintains his first-place status despite also being judged in the...

Democrats Freak Out in Response to Trump’s Immigration Plan That Puts Americans Before Foreigners Jim Hoft Aug 16th, 2015 5:06 pm 151 Comments pablo Pablo Manriquez, DNC Director of Hispanic Media, with Michelle and Barack Obama The Democratic Party freaked out today after businessman Donald Trump released his immigration plan that included deportations and wall paid for by Mexico. Breitbart reported: The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is panicking in response to billionaire and 2016 GOP frontrunner Donald Trump’s immigration reform plan, which is designed to get Americans back to work instead of putting foreigners and special interests ahead of Americans...

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is panicking in response to billionaire and 2016 GOP frontrunner Donald Trump’s immigration reform plan, which is designed to get Americans back to work instead of putting foreigners and special interests ahead of Americans as so many politicians do. The DNC was so freaked out at Trump’s plan, they rushed out a statement from Pablo Manriquez—their “Director of Hispanic Media”—filled with grammatical errors. The statement, which is nothing more than typical Democratic Party talking points in favor of illegal aliens, accidentally doesn’t capitalize “Trump” in one instance and does the same thing when talking about...

Presidential candidates are hitting the road and doing everything to impress ordinary Iowans. BuzzFeed UK’s Jim Waterson attempts to understand US politics. DES MOINES, Iowa – American politics reached a new level of weird for me when Donald Trump arrived at Iowa’s state fair Saturday and proceeded to destroy everything in his path. The Republican presidential candidate cantered onto the site flanked by his private security detail, his route through a crowd of thousands of corndog-eating Iowans cleared by state police, his “TRUMP” branded helicopter hovering overhead like some political take on Apocalypse Now, his entourage blocking movement across the...

...Trump’s rise and persistence as a presidential candidate has been credited to name recognition, to voter anger and to a specific contempt for the Republican Party establishment. But he is also the candidate talking most directly about the loss of manufacturing jobs to foreign countries.... Woodruff, a sometimes Republican, was impressed by Trump. “I watched the debate,” he said. “Fox singled him out in that opening question. They said they asked hard questions of all the candidates, but they went after him because he’s touching a nerve. If Republicans can capitalize on that, they’ll do pretty good.” What nerve was...

GOP presidential hopeful Dr. Ben Carson and leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement clashed this week following Carson's assertion that BLM is "creating strife." As Carson sees it, "Blacks have been led down a dead-end road to dependency and murder via abortion by Democrat policies." "The message that Democrats are sending by their support for the welfare state is that Blacks can't make it on their own efforts," Carson argued. "This is ridiculous. Blacks are as capable as whites if they apply their God-given talents to the world around them." The candidate was even more critical of Democrats' unwavering...

# I've got to give credit where it's due, I adapted this from this meme.

The progressive movement that has overtaken the Democratic Party gains its moral authority in a morally relativistic world in part based on its support of the “oppressed” over the “oppressor.” As Joshua Muravchik ably argues in his Making David Into Goliath, in this construct, Israel has morphed into the oppressor, swapping roles with the Muslim countries that have wished to destroy her from the time of her founding. The Leftist-Jihadist nexus of which Andy McCarthy writes, on display from elite college campuses to the president’s cabinet, is perhaps stronger than it has ever been. It believes in punishing the ultimate...

The financial ties between Planned Parenthood and Democrats run deep, with the taxpayer-funded women's health care and abortion provider's employees and political arms donating at least $25 million to party lawmakers over the past 15 years, according to a FoxNews.com analysis. The money, which flowed through an extensive web of Planned Parenthood employees, political action committees and soft-money donors accounts for 99 percent of all political donations linked to Planned Parenthood, leaving little doubt about the partisan preference of the organization. Amid calls for ending the organization's roughly $500 million in annual federal funding, Planned Parenthood may need its political...

“I think it's a bad deal and I've said so for several weeks now. I think we need to put country ahead of party,” Senator Jim Webb said. "It troubles me when I see all this debate about whether this is disloyalty to the president or the Democratic Party.” Webb is a Democrat and he joins a number of other Democrats in criticizing a bad deal that even Obama admitted will allow Iran to get nuclear weapons after a number of years. Obama and his cronies have pursued an extraordinary campaign of vilification against Republicans and Democrats who dared to...