Free Republic

Things that I could give up once or twice this month to keep freerepublic free . 1. 100 rounds of 9mm ~$12 (I'll still send 200) 2. Overpriced coffee ~$10 (yeah, those guys) 3. Breakfast at work ~$10 (cereal's OK) 4. A 12 pack of beer ~$10 (I could fudge on this one.) 5. 1 upper deck seat ~$15 (minor league game)

They are the models who could bring down a senator. Sen. Robert Menendez mobilized his staff to secure a visa for a Brazilian actress who posed nude on the cover of Sexy magazine; he stepped up for a sultry Ukrainian student who wanted a plastic-surgery consult; and he directd a staff member to “call Ambassador asap” in order to reverse a visa denial to a 22-year-old Dominican model. The young women were all paramours of Dr. Salomon Melgen, 60, a married eye doctor and one of Menendez’s biggest donors, prosecutors charge. The New Jersey Democrat’s efforts on behalf of Melgen’s...

Matt Rhoades’ vaunted oppo research team was featured on this week’s on Fox News Sunday… (SNIP) To recap, this is fmr. Romney campaign manager and crony capitalist Matt Rhoades… (SNIP) LMFAO @ “And this is the presidential research team…” Literally watching YouTube all day… I know what you’re thinking: "They don’t even look like they’re trying! Matt Rhoades raises millions of dollars! That office looks like it costs twenty grand, tops! What happened to the rest of the money!?" (SNIP) Matt Rhoades and Karl Rove swindle naive, low-information Republicans out of hundreds of millions of dollars under the guise of...

Detectives Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were killed on patrol on Dec 20 Entrepreneur contacted a Chinese newspaper with plan to donate $1m The money was wired to New York's Detectives Endowment Association Donor requested that Liu's father receive $100,000 a year for 5 years, and Ramos' sons have $500,000 put into their educational fund Both families wept as they gathered to receive the gift in Manhattan An anonymous donor from Hong Kong has given $1 million to the families of the two NYPD officers shot dead last month. Detectives Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were murdered on patrol in...

A defense contractor and top campaign contributor to House Appropriations Committee chairman Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) is in the running to get a contract to print millions of IDs and other government documents associated with the president’s planned executive amnesty, Breitbart News has learned exclusively. The contractor, General Dynamics, is on the list of “interested vendors” for a draft solicitation that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), sent out to vendors in October. If the president goes through with an executive amnesty for millions of illegal aliens and General Dynamics gets...

LOS ALTOS HILLS -- President Obama hit the Bay Area for a fast cash-and-grab fundraising drive Wednesday, but there were signs that even in one of the nation's most reliable Democratic ATMs, donor fatigue is setting in. There was no listed price for tickets for Obama's morning appearance at a roundtable in San Francisco for the House Majority PAC - the type of intimate gathering for which admission is usually $32,400 per person, the legal maximum. Some donors said tickets had been offered for a deep discount. And in Los Altos Hills, the heart of Silicon Valley big money, the...

... At any rate, ever since our suggestion that you might like to help out in this manner, we've had a steady stream of emails from readers explaining that this is all well and good but it's taxable income and what I really need to do is set up a 501(c)3 or 501(c)4 or 501(c)87 or some such as a vehicle for this campaign. To which the answer is: well, we certainly considered the possibility, and a few years ago I might have entertained the notion. But not anymore. The National Organization for Marriage, which was founded to protect the...

A high-dollar Obama donor who was caught on video brutally beating his girlfriend got off with 25 hours of community service last week after he pled guilty to domestic battery charges. CCTV footage caught Gurbaksh Chahal, the CEO of San Francisco tech startup RadiumOne, kicking his girlfriend 117 times, including blows to the head, and trying to smother her with a pillow during a vicious 30-minute assault. He faced 45 felony charges until the footage was deemed inadmissible. As a result, Chahal has managed to avoid jail time, the Daily Mail reported on Thursday.

Old and busted: How dare the Bush administration politicize the Department of Justice by asking for resignations from political appointees! New hotness: Let’s put donors and political allies in charge of high-profile investigations! The first such case this week comes as Reps. Darrell Issa and Jim Jordan demand to know how the DoJ managed to select a donor to the Obama campaign to investigate political targeting within the IRS: House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) issued a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Wednesday demanding the department remove DOJ trial...

On Saturday, the Washington Post revealed further details on a scheme investing in the pending deaths of terminally ill patients which attracted the capital of Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe. Earlier this month, Breitbart News reported that McAuliffe admitted he was a "passive investor" in an investment fund organized by his friend and donor, Joseph Caramadre, that preyed on terminally ill patients. Caramadre's fund would pay terminally ill patients a small amount of cash before their death and, at the same time, would purchase life insurance policies on them. When the patient died, Caramadre and his investors reaped huge...

RENO, Nev. (AP) -- A Nevada powerbroker who headed a billion-dollar real estate company and pulled the strings of state politics as a prominent lobbyist for more than a decade was convicted Wednesday of making illegal campaign contributions to U.S. Sen. Harry Reid. Harvey Whittemore, 59, could face up to 15 years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines after a federal jury returned guilty verdicts on three counts tied to nearly $150,000 illegally funneled to Reid's re-election campaign in 2007. Later in the day, U.S. District Judge Larry Hicks declared a mistrial on a count of...

Harvey Whittemore, a Reno, Nevada, businessman has been found guilty on three counts of making illegal campaign contributions to Nevada Senator and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid...

A group members of the U.S. House of Representatives have sent Secretary of the Department of Human and Health Services, Kathleen Sebelius, a letter questioning her reported actions of soliciting donations from non-profit organizations that are “directly implementing” Obamacare. Florida’s Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Jeff Miller, Bill Posey and Trey Radel are among the 26 members of Congress who penned their signatures on the letter to Sebelius. The letter asks Secretary Sebelius if she indeed made the calls,how many did she make? In addition, Sebelius was asked if Department resources were used, and how much money was raised?

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama on Thursday will nominate a longtime fundraiser to run the Commerce Department and a top economic adviser as the next U.S. Trade Representative, a White House official said. Commerce nominee Penny Pritzker, a businesswoman, philanthropist and Hyatt hotel heiress, is Obama's final pick to fill vacancies among Cabinet secretaries in his second term. The Commerce post has been vacant since last summer, when former Secretary John Bryson resigned after he said he suffered a seizure that led to a series of traffic collisions. USTR nominee Michael Froman is one of Obama's senior economic advisers and a former...

Unnamed sources speaking with Bloomberg News say the hedge-fund manager is considering relocating to Puerto Rico for tax reasons, to benefit from a new law that the wire says lets new residents pay no local or U.S. federal taxes on capital gains. The story goes on to relate, via those unnamed sources, that Paulson & Co.would remain in New York:

Employees of Obama donor Leo Hindery Jr.’s media conglomerate Intermedia Partners, which now owns most of the top gun-culture media outlets in the country, believe that Hindery plans to gut and destroy all of them as part of a business plan that has already led to numerous layoffs and the virtual shuttering of prominent television production facilities in Minnesota and Montana. Hindery, an Obama donor who was considered for secretary of commerce job in the Obama administration, is managing partner of Intermedia Partners. The New York-based media private equity fund owns Intermedia Outdoor Holdings, which publishes 17 hunting, fishing, and...

Prominent Democratic donor Leo Hindery is facing conflict of interest accusations from shareholders of an apolitical television network that he is trying to merge with one of his own pro-gun media properties, according to Buzzfeed. Hindery, who has donated to the campaigns of Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Bob Menendez, Sherrod Brown, Kirsten Gillibrand and other pro-gun control Democrats, is a managing partner of InterMedia Partners LP. That company owns the Sportsman Channel, a hunting and fishing-themed network that runs advertisements, and thus gains revenue, from the National Rifle Association, while reportedly broadcasting a pro-gun viewpoint and featuring interviews with NRA...

Embattled New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez visited the swanky Casa de Campo resort in the Dominican Republic in August 2006 and stayed at Dr. Salomon Melgen's posh villa, according to an interview Menendez gave (in Spanish) with the Dominican daily Listin Diario. The news report Aug. 22, 2006 included a photo of Menendez, with the caption: “Bob Menéndez, the senator from New Jersey, gave an interview to Listin Diario at the residence of the Dominican doctor Salomón Melgen, at Casa de Campo, La Romana.” Menendez has only acknowledged visiting Melgen’s villa on three occasions, all in 2010. He paid Melgen...

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) defended his relationship with Florida doctor and political donor Salomon Melgen in an interview with Univision on Friday, saying he didn’t do anything on his friend’s behalf that he doesn’t regularly do for others. Melgen, a close friend of Menendez’s, reportedly overbilled the U.S. government by almost $9 million in Medicare payments, inviting a federal audit. Menendez acknowledged contacting officials to complain that the Medicare billing rules were unclear, but the senator denied that his close ties to Melgen had anything to do with him raising the issue. “The fact that someone is a donor does...

On Thursday, Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively that they have been informed that one of the reasons that President Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has not turned over requested documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a group purportedly called “Friends of Hamas.” Yesterday, 25 senators sent a letter to Hagel demanding information on his foreign funding. Hagel has refused all such requests, prompting the senators to state, “in the judgment of the undersigned, a Committee vote on your nomination should not occur unless and until you...