Free Republic

Hillary Clinton recently sat down for a "Chair Chat" with the chairman of the South Carolina Democratic party, Jaime Harrison. During the interview, as in many of her speeches to people who live in the South, she put on a Southern accent that is absent from her speeches to Northerners. We made a mashup of some of the most painfully pandering moments, and ranked the intensity of her accent with cowboy boots (1 = lowest, 5 = strongest).

Melissa Mejia, 18, was stunned and embarrassed when officials at William Cullen Bryant HS in Long Island City, Queens, told her she had met all the requirements to receive a diploma in June. She knew she hadn’t. Teachers say Melissa is just one of a number of students magically given credits for classes they failed in an effort by administrators to raise Bryant’s graduation rate. She told her story to The Post’s Susan Edelman. I don’t like receiving what I would call a handout, but that’s what happened. New York City gave me a ­diploma I didn’t deserve

Obama Appointee And Bundler Blocks More Video Releases By Group Behind Planned Parenthood Sting July 31, 2015 By Mollie Hemingway A federal judge late Friday granted a temporary restraining order against the release of recordings made at an annual meeting of abortion providers. The injunction is against the Center for Medical Progress, the group that has unveiled Planned Parenthood’s participation in the sale of organs harvested from aborted children. Judge William H. Orrick, III, granted the injunction just hours after the order was requested by the National Abortion Federation. Orrick was nominated to his position by hardline abortion supporter President...

Cook County Cook County Board Toni Preckwinkle Government and Politics Infrastructure More + Preckwinkle-seeks-pay-hikes-following-Cook-County-sales-tax-increase.com Photo by Manuel Martinez Just two weeks after raising the sales tax to pay for pensions, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle is moving to give tens of millions of dollars a year in pay hikes to county workers. Legislation introduced yesterday by the county chief would extend raises of up to 6.5 percent throughout county government. Only those who make more than $200,000 in annual salary would be excluded. The proposal, sent to a Cook County Board committee for review, extends to other unionized employees...

Medicare at 50--Still Flawed, After All These Years ST. PAUL, Minn.—This Thursday, Medicare will mark a milestone—50 years since it was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 30, 1965. Designed as part of LBJ’s “Great Society” initiative, Medicare was intended to provide low-cost hospitalization and medical insurance for the nation’s elderly. But the program has been in crisis for years and needs an escape plan, not a rescue plan, says Twila Brase, president and co-founder of Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom (CCHF, www.cchfreedom.org), a national organization dedicated to preserving patient-centered health care and protecting patient and...

Organic agriculture is an unscientific, heavily subsidized marketing gimmick that misleads and rips off consumers. The federal government should stop promoting and subsidizing it. Consumers of organic foods are getting both more and less than they bargained for. On both counts, it’s not good. Many people who pay the huge premium—often more than a hundred percent–for organic foods do so because they’re afraid of pesticides. If that’s their rationale, they misunderstand the nuances of organic agriculture. Although it’s true that synthetic chemical pesticides are generally prohibited, there is a lengthy list of exceptions listed in the Organic Foods Production Act,...

The measured US temperature data from USHCN shows that the US is on a long-term cooling trend. But the reported temperatures from NOAA show a strong warming trend....

During Thursday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the Iran nuclear agreement, Secretary of State John Kerry said the goal of the negotiations was never to dismantle Iran’s entire nuclear program but rather to prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons, despite saying in 2013 the “whole point” of sanctions was to get Iran to “dismantle its nuclear program.”

Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and Congressmen Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) issued a press release today on a startling discovery they made during a July 17 meeting with International Atomic Energy Agency officials in Vienna: There are two secret side deals to the nuclear agreement with Iran that will not be shared with other nations, with Congress, or with the U.S. public. One of these side deals concerns inspection of the Parchin military base, where Iran reportedly has conducted explosive testing related to nuclear-warhead development. The Iranian government has refused to allow the IAEA to visit this site. Over the...

President Obama won’t allow Congress to review two key aspects of the Iranian Nuclear deal, Republican lawmakers learned from international partners last week. Under the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the International Atomic Energy Agency would negotiate separately with Iran about the inspection of a facility long-suspected of being used to research long-range ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. “The Obama administration has failed to make public separate side deals that have been struck for the ‘inspection’ of one of the most important nuclear sites—the Parchin military complex,” said Representative Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) in a statement...

While Abenomics has been an unmitigated disaster for Japan's ordinary population, where the soaring stock market has benefited the top decile of the population while everyone has been slammed by a record 25 consecutive months of declining real wages and soaring input costs, there had been one bright spot: corporate earnings, which unlike in Europe or even the US, have been growing at a steady double-digit clip. What was surprising is that Japan was perhaps the one place where currency debasement was leading to an immediate flow through to rising EPS.Then on Friday, a report out of Reuters caught...

**snip** Although she didn’t know it immediately, Ms. Sung had stumbled on a fraudulent scheme involving false borrower income verifications and documentation. The bank began investigating and Mr. Yu was fired the following Monday. The discovery put an end to the scheme at Abacus. But it was only the beginning of a five-and-a-half-year odyssey through the New York State criminal justice system for the Sung family and the community lender the family had built from nothing. Bank officials uncovered the fraud, fired the mastermind, investigated and reported it to regulators and provided New York State prosecutors with over 900,000 pages...

Integrity: An undercover operation shows how ridiculously easy it is to defraud ObamaCare. Even after officials learned investigators had set up several bogus accounts in June of last year, they failed to catch any of them.

Barack Obama scolded a reporter at his Wednesday briefing after getting a critical question about the nuclear deal with Iran. CBS News's Major Garrett pressed the president on the imprisonment of Americans in Iran. "As you well know, there are four Americans in Iran—three held on trumped-up charges, according to your administration, one whereabouts unknown. Can you tell the country, sir, why you are content, with all the fanfare around this deal, to leave the conscience of this nation, this strength of this nation, unaccounted for in relation to these four Americans?" Garrett asked. "I've gotta give you credit, Major,...

Wright's message of the pervasiveness of racism was spot on... and it still is. America's refusal to deal with its racism is eating away at its very core, but nobody wants to talk about it.... Today, however, we see racism in rare form. The shootings of black people by white officers with no accountability, the massacre of the nine innocent people in Charleston, South Carolina, and the burnings of black churches gives the actions of racism front and center stage once again.

Just a few weeks after Rachel Dolezal transfixed the nation with her bogus claims to black heritage, yet another professor stands accused of falsely claiming a different racial identity to advance her career. Andrea Smith, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside, has started to draw attention in the wake of the Dolezal incident from those who say she has for years falsely claimed to have Cherokee blood. The case is arguably much more significant, though, because while Dolezal was a relatively undistinguished academic at Eastern Washington University, Smith is recognized as a significant scholar in her field. She...

The big joke Tuesday was that comb-over reality TV star Donald Trump announced that he’s running for president in 2016 as a Republican. As if it isn’t funny enough that he’s given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic Party and the Clinton Foundation, he also said he wants Oprah Winfrey as his VP. And just in case you aren’t convinced of his conservative credentials, it turns out he’s left quite a liberal footprint of anti-gun, pro-abortion, redistribution of wealth, Obam-esque socialism. Back in 2000 The Don was flirting with running for president as a Reform Party candidate... Here’s...

Dr. Farid Fata put hundreds of people through hell in order to line his own pockets, and now federal prosecutors are seeking to put the Detroit-area oncologist away for 175 years. Fata has admitted that he misdiagnosed patients — 553 of them, according to prosecutors — and ordered chemotherapy and other unnecessary treatments for patients who didn’t even have cancer, report NBC News, which says some 9,000 needless injections or infusions were allegedly given.

Campus Reform Correspondent Cabot Phillips played "Candidate's Cribs" with young people in front of the White House. After trying to guess which Presidential candidate has lived in a series of mansions, many of them were shocked to find out that Hillary Clinton had lived in all four of them.

SANTA FE – Dr. Roy G. Heilbron, 51, a self-described “holistic” cardiologist in Santa Fe, has been charged with health care fraud and wire fraud in a 24-count federal indictment. The indictment, announced Wednesday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Albuquerque, alleges that Heilbron executed a scheme to defraud Medicare and other health care benefit programs from January 2010 to May 2011 by submitting false and fraudulent claims. Heilbron entered a not-guilty plea in federal court Wednesday and was released on his own recognizance. His medical license had been suspended by the New Mexico Medical Board for three months last...