Free Republic

One in a series of occasional articles examining how President Trump’s ascendance and early moves have altered expectations and reality. This story is the second of three gauging those effects in one Pennsylvania county.]Chad Eisenhart glanced at the image on his phone: a white, beefy face, partially obscured by ski goggles. The man wore a military-style helmet, backpack, and white polo shirt and was marching in loose formation with other men in helmets. Charlottesville, Eisenhart quickly realized. He looked closer with growing unease. The marcher looked familiar, like one of Eisenhart’s employees at Carryout Courier, a small business that shuttles...

Fake news tweets and social media posts that flooded the internet leading up to the 2016 presidential election came from a Russian troll factory that works around the clock like any IT facility—except lies were pumping out to control the American mind and put Donald Trump in the White House. The Internet Research Agency, which works on behalf of Russia inside a guarded, concrete building in St. Petersburg, has day and night shifts and hundreds of former journalists and bloggers creating thousands of posts with false and controversial information to reach certain quotas It was "a merry-go-round of lies," Vitaly...

Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, told a security conference in Nova Scotia that he would refuse to obey an "illegal" order from Donald Trump to launch nuclear weapons. Asked if he has given much thought to how he would handle a nuclear strike order from President Trump that he thinks is unlawful, Hyten, who oversees the U.S. nuclear arsenal, answered, "I think some people think we're stupid. We're not stupid people. We think about these things a lot. When you have this responsibility, how do you not think about it?" "I provide advice to...

As we watch Roy Moore thumping his Bible to defend himself from accusations of child molestation, let me toss out a verbal hand grenade: To some degree, liberals practice the values that conservatives preach. This is complicated terrain with lots of exceptions, and the recent scandals involving Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. and Al Franken underscore that liberals can be skunks as much as anyone else. Yet if one looks at blue and red state populations as a whole, it’s striking that conservatives champion “family values” even as red states have high rates of teenage births, divorce and prostitution. In contrast,...

The top U.S. nuclear commander said Saturday he would push back against President Trump if he ordered a nuclear launch the general believed to be "illegal," saying he would hope to find another solution.

A U.S. warship collided with a Japanese commercial tug boat in Japan's Sagami Bay on Saturday, marking the fifth time this year that a ship in the U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet in the Pacific has been involved in a crash. The Japanese tug boat lost propulsion and drifted into the USS Benfold during a towing exercise. The U.S. guided-missile destroyer sustained minimal damage, and there were no reported injuries on either vessel, according to a press release from the U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet. The USS Benfold, which is awaiting a full damage assessment, remains at sea under its own power....

A U.S. Navy destroyer was involved in a minor collision with a Japanese tugboat Saturday during a scheduled exercise, according to the U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet. The USS Benfold, a guided-missile destroyer, sustained minor damage when a tugboat lost propulsion and drifted into the ship, the Navy said. No one was injured on either vessel and an initial assessment of the damage showed that the destroyer only sustained minimal damage including scrapes. But the accident comes at a time when the Navy's 7th Fleet and the U.S. Pacific Command have come under increased scrutiny after several deadly collisions in the...

An FBI report on the rise of black “extremists” is stirring fears of a return to practices used during the civil rights movement, when the bureau spied on activist groups without evidence they had broken any laws. The FBI said it doesn’t target specific groups, and the report is one of many its intelligence analysts produce to make law enforcement aware of what they see as emerging trends. A similar bulletin on white supremacists, for example, came out about the same time. The 12-page report, issued in August, says “black identity extremists” are increasingly targeting law enforcement after police killings...

The latest weird failure of fact by proponents of a disarmed public is offset somewhat by a refreshing honesty of stated desire. The opinion piece is in a university paper, written by a student, so they deserve a gentler treatment than a professional journalist.Right or wrong, the differentiation between editorials and factual articles has been mostly destroyed in the last 20 years. The article is from the University Press at Lamar University. Lamar University is located near Houston, in Texas.From lamauniversitypress.com: Unfortunately, the conversation about gun control only arises after an incident where several people are killed at one time....

Does money roll downhill? In their drive to cut taxes, President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are betting it does. Behind their legislation is a theory long popular among conservatives: Slash taxes for corporations and rich people, who will then hire, invest and profit — and cause money to trickle into the pockets of ordinary Americans. The White House says the plan’s corporate tax cut alone would eventually raise average household incomes by $4,000 a year. The tax plan’s “trickle-down” approach was popularized in the 1980s during the Reagan administration, though it dates back at least to a 1932 wisecrack...

Alabama voters want a candidate who will represent their state with honor -- and they think Doug Jones has strong moral character and Roy Moore doesn’t....    Jones is up by eight points over Moore among Alabama likely voters, 50 percent vs. 42 percent, in a Fox News Poll conducted Monday through Wednesday evenings.  His lead is outside the poll’s margin of sampling error (±3.5 percentage points).  Nine percent are undecided or plan to vote for someone else. Alabama voters decide who will fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a December 12 special election. ...

The driver of a pickup displaying an expletive-filled message to President Donald Trump and his supporters in the Houston area was arrested Thursday on an outstanding warrant. Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office records show Karen Fonseca was arrested about 2 p.m. Thursday on an outstanding fraud warrant issued in August by the Rosenberg Police Department. She remained in the county jail Thursday night with bond set at $1,500. A sheriff’s spokesman has not answered a message seeking details behind the warrant. Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy Nehls had threatened Fonseca with a disorderly conduct charge over the decal. However, District...

A Thursday afternoon CNN Newsroom panel showcased political tribalism as three liberal journalists downplayed the disturbing sexual misconduct allegations against Democratic Senator Al Franken (Minn.) by harping on the fact that Franken was “just a comedian” while those against Roy Moore and President Trump were far more serious. “But just out of the gate, the fact that you have Gloria, you know, Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer, right, from the left and right, both saying there needs to be an ethics investigation. I realize that this was years and years ago, this story, and he was a private citizen at...

You’ve heard the statistics before: Americans have more guns per head than any nation on earth – along with gun violence rates that are dramatically higher than other rich, developed countries. But these big-picture facts can be misleading. Not every American is packing heat and gun violence is intensely concentrated in small neighbourhoods. Here’s a look at the dramatic concentration of America’s guns – and America’s violence:

A Georgia family is under fire for allowing a seventh grader to wear a T-shirt that mocked liberal news network CNN on a school field trip to CNN’s Atlanta headquarters -- but the boy's parents think the school violated the First Amendment by making their son take it off. Nancy and Stan Jester, of Dekalb, are both local elected officials, she a county commissioner and he is a member of the local school board. Their son, seventh-grader Jaxon, wore a shirt mocking the CNN logo as “FNN” with the caption, “Fake News Network.”

Liberal comedian Chelsea Handler apologized on Wednesday to the Arkansas woman who accused Bill Clinton of raping her in a Little Rock hotel room in the 1970s. “I apologize to you for not knowing your story,” Handler told Juanita Broaddrick on Twitter. “I believe you,” she added. Handler, a Hillary Clinton supporter, was responding to a tweet Broaddrick posted over the weekend in which she called out the celebrity for ignoring her allegations about Clinton. Broaddrick, a retired nursing executive, alleged that Clinton, who then served as Arkansas’ attorney general, raped her in a Little Rock hotel room in 1978...

Gena Richardson says she was a high school senior working in the men’s department of Sears at the Gadsden Mall when a man approached her and introduced himself as Roy Moore. “He said, ‘You can just call me Roy,’ ” says Richardson, who says this first encounter happened in the fall of 1977, just before or after her 18th birthday, as Moore, then a 30-year-old local attorney, was gaining a reputation for pursuing young women at the mall in Gadsden, Ala. His overtures caused one store manager to tell new hires to “watch out for this guy,” another young woman...

Roy Moore, the GOP Senate candidate in Alabama, faces another woman accusing him of sexual misconduct. She says that in the early 1990s, he grabbed her buttocks during a meeting at his law office. Tina Johnson, who was 28 years old in 1991, told AL.com, that she went to Moore's law office in Gadsden, Alabama with her mother. "He kept commenting on my looks, telling me how pretty I was, how nice I looked," Johnson told the news outlet. "He was saying that my eyes were beautiful." She said she was at Moore's office to sign over custody of her...

I stumbled across this and had a wonderful laugh. This is an interview Tom Brokaw did with John Kerry just before the election in 2004 when he F-in' lost miserably to George W. Bush. Enjoy the historical laughs.

Gena Richardson says she was a high school senior working in the men’s department of Sears at the Gadsden Mall when a man approached her and introduced himself as Roy Moore. “He said, ‘You can just call me Roy,’ ” says Richardson, who says this first encounter happened in the fall of 1977, just before or after her 18th birthday, as Moore, then a 30-year-old local attorney, was gaining a reputation for pursuing young women at the mall in Gadsden, Ala. His overtures caused one store manager to tell new hires to “watch out for this guy,” another young woman...