Free Republic

There is no more insufferable authoritarian lout in the world than a woke college student. I feel the same way about them that I felt about some of the politically active hippies when I was in college: you want to grab them by the shoulders and try to shake some sense into them.It wouldn't do any good. They're woke and you're not and that makes them oblivious to reason and the truth. At the University of Florida, the sins of the father can apparently be visited upon the son. The student body president is being threatened with impeachment for...

The student body president of the University of Florida is facing impeachment calls for alleged misuse of funds to bring Donald Trump Jr. and presidential campaign adviser Kimberly Guilfoyle to campus last month, according to reports. Michael C. Murphy received a formal impeachment resolution on Tuesday for allegedly conspiring with a Trump campaign consultant to bring Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle to the Gainesville campus on Oct. 10, the Tampa Bay Times reports. Those who support Murphy’s removal claim that emails first obtained by the school’s newspaper, the Independent Alligator, show that he agreed to pay the pair $50,000 in publicly...

WASHINGTON — A bare majority of the U.S. Supreme Court appeared likely Tuesday to let the Trump administration follow through on its plan to shut down DACA, the federal program that has allowed nearly 800,000 young people, known as dreamers, to avoid deportation and remain in the U.S. With hundreds of DACA supporters rallying outside — so many that police shut down the street in front of the Supreme Court — the justices heard nearly an hour and a half of oral arguments. Based on their questions, it appeared that the court's five conservatives were inclined to rule that the...

[snip] Four drivers couldn’t get away. As officers approached, they saw that one — Yuniet Fuentes — had a handgun in his pants, and they watched him toss a small Louis Vuitton bag onto the ground. Fuentes was arrested. Inside the bag officers found 16 gift cards, each encoded with stolen credit card numbers. Yunior Rodriguez Rivero, the driver of another truck, had 64 stolen credit cards on him.

Mexico has made an unspecified number of arrests over last week’s massacre of three women and six children of dual U.S-Mexican nationality in the north of the country, Security Minister Alfonso Durazo said on Monday. “There have been arrests, but it’s not up to us to give information,” Durazo told reporters in Mexico City. The women and children from families of U.S. Mormon origin who settled in Mexico decades ago were killed last Monday on a remote dirt road in the state of Sonora by suspected drug cartel gunmen, sparking outrage and condemnation in the United States. Durazo said that...

Watch the video at the link. Ted Cruz won the fifth Republican debate in Las Vegas on Tuesday, but Donald Trump held his own and Chris Christie "helped himself," political strategist Dick Morris told Newsmax TV. "Cruz was the big winner tonight," Morris said on the "Newsmax TV Post-Debate Special," hosted by Steve Malzberg. "He was terrific in his speeches. He was aggressive, forceful and really hit it out of the park three or four times. ..."Trump did very well, not as well as Cruz — but he clearly held his own and showed people why he is so popular,"...

Rep. Adam Kinzinger said on Friday that he was not sure if — "God forbid" — Donald Trump became the Republican presidential nominee and that he needed to surround himself with the best experts on foreign policy. (SNIP) The three-term congressman, who supports former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, said that Trump lacked solid leadership traits, including harnessing voter anger to effectively advance his agenda. (SNIP) "A leader doesn't have to be angry on behalf of himself. When [Trump] gets mad, it's because he's personally offended. That's not the traits of a leader."

The main lawyer representing the family of Trayvon Martin in the George Zimmerman murder trial said on Saturday that it was “offensive” that defense attorney Mark O’Mara had launched personal attacks on him in an interview with CNN. “It’s somewhat offensive when you think about personal attacks,” the lawyer, Benjamin Crump, told CNN in an interview. “I have never personally attacked attorney Mark O’Mara or any other lawyers in this matter.” In an interview aired earlier on Saturday, O’Mara said his client would have never been on trial if he had not been “victimized” by Crump and other Martin family...

It's no secret in Hong Kong that I was with my boss (Jimmy Lai, the owner of Apple Daily) and a few others recently walking the halls of government in Washington D.C. Saw Speaker Pelosi and other leaders in the House and Senate. Visited the State Department. Met some folks from administration, the think tanks, and of course always see the very switched on human rights groups. This week I shot down to D.C. and saw a few folks in a follow-up. All staffs and officials. Working level folks have best info. Both trips to D.C. were in regard to...

Good Morning /Afternoon,MEGATHANK-YOUToBothOurVeteransAndPresentDayServingMillitaryForYourService!DITTOS!

President Trump’s recently announced adoption of Florida as his home state over his native New York follows a rich tradition of high-profile financiers who have ditched northeastern states for warmer climes with lower taxes. ... In 2017, Connecticut’s top 100 filers, out of a base of 1.8 million, paid $1.13 billion in income taxes, the equivalent of 12% of the state’s income-tax revenue for fiscal year 2018. New Jersey and Connecticut tax officials said it is too early for state revenue data to show whether the 2017 tax law Mr. Trump signed imposing a $10,000 cap on state and local...

A bridge-building disaster should be incomprehensible in today’s technical world. Humans have been building bridges for centuries. The science should be well sorted out by now — and for the most part, it is. But the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation of the March 2018 collapse of the FIU pedestrian bridge highlighted basic design flaws and a complete lack of oversight by every single party that had responsibility to either identify the design errors or stop work once it was clear that there was a massive internal failure. We all know “what happened” here. But the “why” is more elusive....

Legal group finds hundreds of double voting cases, thousands of deceased voters on rolls in Palm Beach County An election integrity watchdog has found 24,000 instances of irregularities among the voter rolls in Palm Beach County, Fla., according to a new report. The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a group that litigates to protect election integrity, discovered double voting by the same registrants, double registrants across state lines, deceased voters on rolls, and apparent noncitizens previously registered to vote in Palm Beach County following a three-month investigation involving office visits, records inspections, and voter roll audits. The findings raise concerns...

An orangutan named Sandra, at the center of a landmark ruling in Argentina that said she is a "non-human person" entitled to some of the same rights as humans, is making her way to a Florida sanctuary where great apes enjoy those privileges without benefit of a court order. Once Sandra is there, the 33-year-old orangutan will have the company of others in her species for the first time in many years. Sandra left her solitary world at a zoo in Buenos Aires in late September and is currently in Kansas, where she'll remain in quarantine until she's cleared to...

While Illinoisans will be paying higher taxes, Gov. J.B. Pritzker says he’s going to give state lawmakers at least a $1,600 pay increase because they’re hard workers. Pritzker said he’ll sign the budget bills being sent his way, despite the ire from taxpayers that lawmakers gave themselves a raise while doubling the state’s gas tax. Pritzker was asked multiple times in Chicago Tuesday if he’d line-item veto more than $280,000 in lawmaker pay increases when he gets the budget that was passed in overtime session. “Look, this was a highly negotiated budget,” Pritzker said. “We had the Republicans and Democrats...

New York state lost more residents last year than any other state in the U.S. Newly reported data from the U.S. Census Bureau places New York at the top of the list of just nine states that lost residents between 2017 and 2018. New York lost 48,510 people while Illinois was close with a drop of 45,116 residents. New York is the fourth most populous state in the country, trailing only California, Texas and Florida. As a percentage of total population, New York’s 0.25 percent loss was less significant than that of West Virginia, Illinois, Alaska and Hawaii. But the...

Cuomo blames weather for New York's population decline Posted: Sep 25 2018 03:25PM EDT Updated: Sep 25 2018 03:31PM EDT ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo blamed the upstate weather for prompting New Yorkers to flee to other states. Cuomo told reporters Tuesday that while job losses and high taxes once drove people to leave New York, his administration has ended that trend and improved the local economic situation. He said many of the New Yorkers leaving the state now are doing so for personal reasons or decisions that he called "climate based." The comments came after Cuomo's...

The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service of the University of Virginia analyzed Census Bureau population projections to estimate each state’s likely population in 2040, including the expected breakdown of the population by age and gender ... we see that, in fact, the [US] population will be heavily centered in a few states. Eight states will have just under half of the total population of the country, 49.5 percent, according to the Weldon Cooper Center’s estimate. The next eight most populous states will account for an additional fifth of the population, up to 69.2 percent — meaning that the 16...

States with high taxes are at risk of losing people, business and money. In fact, conservative economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore argue that up to 1.3 million people will leave California, Connecticut, New Jersey, Minnesota and New York over the next three years and move to states with lower taxes. The impact of tax migration is particularly interesting to examine in a state such as Florida, a low-tax swing state that is expected to pick up two Electoral College votes. While the northern area around Orlando contains large communities of conservative-leaning Midwestern migrants, Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton see...

TALLAHASSEE — In light of Key West banning the sale of sunscreens that contain chemicals believed to harm coral reefs, Florida lawmakers are fast-tracking proposals that would undo the local regulation. Sen. Rob Bradley, R-Fleming Island, said Monday that Key West is sending “mixed signals” to people about the importance of sunscreen and that his bill is meant to send a clear message to the “country and the world” that the use of sunscreen is encouraged in the Sunshine State. “Unfortunately, with all of the wonderful things that come with our beaches and our sunshine, we also rank second in...