Free Republic

The 16 members of the Interior Department's new Wildlife Conservation Council — many of whom have ties to pro-hunting organizations — met for the first time Friday and found little cause for disagreement. Members agreed that hunting is necessary for conserving endangered species and impoverished communities in Africa; that illegal hunting — largely done by organized crime communities — should not to be mistaken with legal paid hunting; and that the council needed to act fast. “I believe that everyone here today has a shared interest in wildlife conservation, both in America and around the world,” U.S. Fish and Wildlife...

Quick! Somebody pass the smelling salts to CNN's Presidential Historian Douglas Brinkley. He went full blown hysterical on CNN's Tonight on Friday over the news about the firing of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. He tossed out words like "Friday night slaughter" and "paranoid" to describe President Donald Trump and he was only getting warmed up. He acted as if the firing was strictly political and unjustified. However, as we shall later hear from reknowned legal scholar Jonathan Turley, the firing was not only justified but probably mandatory.

<p>The former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in a venomous tweet Saturday, accused President Trump of political corruption and warned, "America will triumph over you."</p> <p>John Brennan's biting two-sentence statement came in response to a Friday evening tweet in which the president celebrated the ouster of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. "When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history," he wrote. "You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but will not destroy America... America will triumph over you."</p>

Parkland Update: Broward County Sheriff’s Office Training Materials Say First Officers Should ‘Confront the Shooter’ Judicial Watch Files Two Lawsuits against DOJ for Documents on Top Officials’ Ties to Clinton Dossier Creator Fusion GPS Charm City Corruption: City with Highest Murder Rate Starts Defense Fund for Illegal Aliens Parkland Update: Broward County Sheriff’s Office Training Materials Say First Officers Should ‘Confront the Shooter’ The school shooting in Parkland, Florida, just becomes more tragic as we learn new details of the local sheriff’s department response – actually, its lack of response. This week, Judicial Watch released Broward County Sheriff’s Office...

Gates was charged with $100 million in financial crimes — and pled guilty to two minor offenses, one of them highly questionable. These columns have many times observed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s failure to set limits on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. To trigger the appointment of a special counsel, federal regulations require the Justice Department to identify the crimes that warrant investigation and prosecution — crimes that the Justice Department is too conflicted to investigate in the normal course; crimes that become the parameters of the special counsel’s jurisdiction. Rosenstein, instead, put the cart before the horse: Mueller...

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Psalm 23:1-3 KJV It is time to end the MuleTrain fishing trip. Everyone on the planet knows he has found no collusion, whatever that means; and no campaign crimes or he would have leaked it, so it is time to give America back to the people. This entire fiasco is a Hillary campaign dirty trick being orchestrated by the...

This will be a weekly post. Count remains at 29 judges confirmed. Mitch back to slow-walking. Those two day work weeks must be rough!!

Clinton cares about people like her — urban, wealthy, progressive elites, people who do not compete with immigrants for their livelihoods, who call 911 instead of Smith & Wesson when matters go sideways, who do not know any active-duty enlisted men, families with five or more kids, or the names of anyone on the WWE roster, and those repelled by the name of Washington’s football team but not players kneeling for the national anthem. It’s as though the candidate imagines politics as a top-down exercise in which the office-seeker votes for a particular electorate rather than the electorate voting for...

Elections involving Cook County judges seldom are as hotly contested as races further up the ballot. But one county-wide race is drawing an unusual amount of attention. The three-way primary for the vacant seat of Circuit Court Judge Dooling is turning out to be relatively rough-and-tumble, in the usually decorous fashion of judicial politics. The race pits public defender Tim Leeming against Tom Sianis, scion of the Billy Goat Tavern, and divorce attorney Corri Diane Fetman. Sianis has a better-funded campaign, and the name recognition that comes from his grandfather, Sam “Billy Goat” Sianis, the Greek immigrant restaurateur whose legendary...

The head of a coalition of black pastors says Rep. Maxine Waters and the Congressional Black Caucus must end their “partisan hypocrisy” and denounce “leftist hate speech” such as that proclaimed by anti-Semite and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. In a press release Rev. William Owens, president of the Coalition of African American Pastors refers to Farrakhan’s statement in a recent speech: “White folks are going down. And Satan is going down. And Farrakhan, by God’s grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew and I’m here to say your time is up, your world is through.”...

Twitter is hiding a tweet from the official Drudge Report account that features President Trump’s 2020 campaign slogan, “Keep America Great.” .@Twitter censors @realDonaldTrump’s 2020 campaign slogan as “sensitive material” ὄ @DRUDGE_REPORT @dcexaminer pic.twitter.com/suK0lgBeIb — Amanda House (@AmandaLeeHouse) March 11, 2018 When Twitter users navigate to the page of the Drudge Report with their “sensitive content” filter enabled, they are unable to see the Drudge Report’s full tweet. For new Twitter users, the “sensitive content” filter is enabled automatically and has to manually switched off. Instructions on how to do this can be found at the bottom of this piece....

Legislative Director Marc Short took the White House briefing podium on Friday to call out “historic obstruction” by Democrats for requiring 30 hours of debate over Trump administration nominees at a rate far beyond that which prior administrations faced. Short repeatedly pointed to Democrat Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for “…the historic obstruction that we have faced by Sen. [Chuck] Schumer and Senate Democrats in confirming our nominees to enable us to fill out our White House.” “The Senate obviously has the constitutional responsibility for advice and consent,” said Short who then proceeded to describe “what that looks like in...

Which is more harmful: Being given a friendly (but arguably distasteful and ill-timed) greeting or being knocked to the ground?  The answer is obvious to anybody with common sense but, in the mainstream media, the former is currently being reported on with great outrage while the latter is ignored. Both events happened on Thursday during and just after Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke testified before a congressional committee. You can see the "horror" of Zinke's greeting below as well as an ABC report on the subsequent outrage:

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - Sheriff Mike Williams announced Tuesday the results of a multi-agency, undercover investigation into the exchange of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits for cash and, in at least one case, cocaine. From 2012 to 2017, Jacksonville Sheriff's Office detectives, working with federal and state agencies, documented more than 22,000 fraudulent transactions involving $3.7 million in taxpayer money. "These people are selling or stealing money from hardworking taxpayers right here in our community, and they are abusing a program that is meant to help people," Williams said. WATCH: More than a dozen arrested in Operation Half-Back Williams said that...

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway laughed off Hillary Clinton’s comments that white married women felt pressured by the men in their lives to vote for President Trump. “She basically is again insulting half of the country,” Conway told “Fox & Friends” on Thursday. “Let me tell you something, lady, the idea that I or other women like me have to ask our husbands how to vote, it’s really a joke.” Conway then told Clinton to stop acting like she’s an advocate for women. “Stop pretending you’re a feminist, you’re for equality, you’re for fairness to women, and then running around...

Republican leadership is going to fund sanctuary cities in the must-pass spending bill next week, giving Democrats a huge victory while simultaneously undercutting conservatives who put them in power, a senior GOP aide told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “House and Senate leadership has rolled over and played dead on border security. When it comes to a border wall, they say it is not our problem. When it comes to funding sanctuary cities, they say it is not our problem. What they are essentially saying is we are going to pass bills with more Democrats than Republicans,” the aide told...

Stoneman Douglas HS student activist David Hogg has a new video out to promote the March 24 “March For Our Lives” in Washington, D.C. and he asks right up front, “What if our politicians weren’t the bitch of the NRA?” How adorable of him:

It sounds like the kind of legislation that should easily breeze through a statehouse, even in these politically divided times: a resolution denouncing white nationalists and neo-Nazis. It didn't even make it out of committee. The resolution was written by Democratic state Rep. John Ray Clemmons. It doesn't name any particular group. It calls on law enforcement to go after white nationalists and Neo-Nazi groups with the same "fervor" as other forms of terrorism.

“MASON CITY: To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new.” — Robert Penn Warren, “All the King’s Men” (1946) WASHINGTON — Appropriately, Warren began the best book about American populism, his novel based on Huey Long’s Louisiana career, with a rolling sentence about a road. Time was, infrastructure — roads, especially — was a preoccupation of populists, who were mostly rural and needed roads to get products to market, and for travel to neighbors and towns, which assuaged loneliness. Today, there is no comparably sympathetic constituency clamoring...

U.S. Capitol Police have arrested a male Democratic operative for assaulting a female Interior Department communications official following a House budget hearing Thursday. The assault happened after Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke finished testifying on the department’s 2019 budget proposal before the House Committee on Natural Resources. The suspect identified himself as a reporter with American Bridge and pushed a female Interior Department communications official to the floor, chasing after Zinke, The Daily Caller News Foundation learned. Interior communications director Laura Rigas was “greatly alarmed and extremely irate that a female senior member of my DOI Communications team was physically assaulted...