Free Republic

Remember that video of an emaciated Baffin Island polar bear that went viral last December? It became the poster bear for climate change. National Geographic made a stunning admission – it was a bit bogus. The Statement: National Geographic went too far in drawing a definitive connection between climate change and a particular starving polar bear in the opening caption of our video about the animal. We said, “This is what climate change looks like.” While science has established that there is a strong connection between melting sea ice and polar bears dying off, there is no way to know...

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions came to Boston yesterday to throw a spotlight on what he called “theft from America” by 25 mostly illegal immigrants charged with massive government fraud that’s being blamed on shoddy oversight by the Registry of Motor Vehicles. “Operation Double Trouble” accounted for $200,000 in heisted Medicare, unemployment and public housing benefits. One of the suspects, the feds said, is a convicted killer who escaped from prison in Puerto Rico. “Across this city and across America, teachers, truck drivers, construction workers are going to work and paying taxes that are being stolen from the public treasury...

Tucker Carlson commented on the apparent drastic change in Democratic Party priorities over the years, which has led to some (more like most) on the left supporting "open border" policies. Carlson said Democrats used to have a "clear focus" that "American citizens were the party's priority." Now, he said that "Americans are an afterthought," and challenged his viewership to find a Democrat running for election on the subjects of the public school "collapse", declining middle class or opioid epidemic. He said Democrats instead understand they need "reliable new voters" who won't make "difficult demands" -- and therefore, "immigration is the...

Connecticut’s official balance sheets will be noticeably worse next year due to changes in how the state reports its retiree healthcare liabilities... Truth in Accounting issued Connecticut a failing grade based on its 2017 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report and said the state is “hiding” $10.4 billion in retiree healthcare debt. “Connecticut’s financial condition is not only concerning, but also misleading as government officials failed to disclose significant amounts of retirement debt on the state’s balance sheet,” the report says. “As a result, residents and taxpayers have been presented with an inaccurate and untruthful accounting of the state government’s finances.” According...

Widespread sextortion campaign is being orchestrated by scammers who falsely claim to have webcam recordings of victims watching pornography in order to demand bitcoin payment. The culprits—who threaten to release the non-existent footage to the victims' close contacts if money is not received—have already made around $125,000 from the scheme to date, according to security researcher SecGuru, who is monitoring the bitcoin addresses used by the scammers. “Victims continue to pay, do not do this, it is a scam!” SecGuru tweeted on Monday.

The rise and fall of the Art Institute of Charleston took just 11 years, carrying with it the aspirations of hundreds of young artists — and leaving some of them struggling beneath a mountain of debt. The for-profit chain of colleges opened its Market Street location in April 2007 amid fanfare from local political leaders, including then-Mayor Joe Riley, who had invited the school to train workers for the hospitality and restaurant industries.

Pennsylvania Continues to Hide Full Scale of Alien Voting (PITTSBURGH, PA.) – July 12, 2018: The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) today released Steeling the Vote, a special report detailing how noncitizens were invited and given access to ballots in Allegheny County over the past 12 years. The ineligible registrations were discovered only after immigrants self-reported their statuses to the County. Amid federal litigation with the Pennsylvania Department of State for complete access to noncitizen voter registration records, Allegheny County election officials disclosed hundreds of pages detailing how noncitizens were regularly offered voter registration by government employees and third-party drives,...

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) has signed a controversial measure that will limit the number of college students and military personnel who can vote in state elections. The bill, signed on Friday and a source of partisan bickering in the statehouse for years, will require registered voters be permanent residents of New Hampshire, obtain a state driver’s license within 60 days of voting and register their vehicles in New Hampshire. The new law will take effect in 2019. New Hampshire is the only U.S. state that does not require registered voters to be permanent residents in order to cast...

The Mueller special counsel investigation was launched to probe charges that the key FBI officials developing evidence in the case thought were baseless. That's a bombshell accusation that appears to have been confirmed by lovebird-turned-songbird Lisa Page, according to John Solomon. It tends to confirm the suspicion that the Mueller probe is a cover-up operation to obscure the criminal use of counterintelligence capabilities to spy on a rival presidential campaign and then sabotage the presidency that resulted. Earlier reports indicated that Page has been answering questions from the House Judiciary Committee quite frankly and may even have cut a deal...

The nation's top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them. In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them....

I just turned off the local news in northern California where they just spend 20 minutes ripping on Trump and the summit. Trump is treasonous, weakening our defense, selling out our allies, siding with the enemy, etc.. The story that followed was about registering illegals aliens to vote. Seems in CA (Crazy America) illegals are allowed to register and vote for certain offices in local elections (The one they were specifically talking about was the local school board.). They were hopeful that someday illegals would be free to vote in wider elections. How can anyone lament foreign influence in an...

Despite receiving billions of dollars in taxpayer money, Medicaid insurers are lax in ferreting out fraud and neglect to tell states about unscrupulous medical providers, according to a federal report released Thursday. The U.S. Health and Human Services’ inspector general’s office said a third of the health plans it examined had referred fewer than 10 cases each of suspected fraud or abuse to state Medicaid officials in 2015 for further investigation. Two insurers in the program, which serves low-income Americans, didn’t identify a single case all year, the report found. Some health plans terminated providers from their networks for fraud...

Most SNAP recipients spend ... early it increases food insecurity. 39% spend 2/3 of monthly benefit in the first 4 days. 14% of GA households are food insecure. Over 1.6 million (16%) utilized $2.54b in SNAP in GA. Few statistically significant differences explain why spending patterns are so different. We hoped we would be able to find something that said the ‘patient’ people do this and ‘impatient’ people do that, but we did not, Dorfman said. I guess it comes down to personality. Many households are connected to SNAP through local food banks and caseworkers at state agencies, DFCS, Camardelle...

Embattled FBI agent Peter Strzok suggested during an open hearing Thursday that the ongoing congressional investigation into political bias within the FBI would severely damage the institution of American law enforcement. “This entire exercise comes at a cost,” said Strzok, who was removed from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. “We are doing things that are going to, in the future, tear down the underpinnings of what represents law and order in this country. And there is not a robust, thick wall there. I think people don’t appreciate how tenuous the balance of...

Abdel showed up at his local Pennsylvania motor vehicle office to take his driver’s license test — and walked out having registered to vote, even though he is not a citizen. He said his command of English isn’t good and the computer system was unclear, but he somehow managed to sign up even though he knew he shouldn’t. Then there was Angelo, who figured he could vote because he joined the U.S. military, even though he wasn’t a citizen. He, too, signed up at the Pennsylvania motor vehicle bureau and registered as a Democrat. He then voted nearly every year...

A coalition of Latino civil rights organizations asked Thursday a judge in Alabama to include them as co-defendants in a lawsuit brought by the state against the federal government, seeking to exclude undocumented immigrants from the 2020 Census. The groups, led by the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF) and Birmingham civil rights attorneys James U. Blacksher and Edward Still, said they don't trust the Trump administration to mount a defense to Alabama's lawsuit. “One legal outcome of the Civil War was a Constitution that abandons the previous ‘3/5 rule’ and treats all persons as full ‘persons’; that Alabama, of...

Those on the left who are angry about anything and everything related to President Donald Trump have, in some instances, published contact information for administration officials and urged their peers to call and harass those with ties to the White House. This form of tantrum throwing has been largely criticized by most people who still value decorum in pubic debate. But in Alabama, there’s a new twist on the dialing-direct method of airing grievances. Alabama Sec. of State John Merrill is fed up with claims by opponents of the state’s voter ID law that tens of thousands of Alabama citizens...

A single tip-off on a sham marriage in March last year led officers from the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) to uncover one of the largest sham marriage syndicates to date. In all, 17 syndicate members were identified between March and July last year, ICA said during a media briefing at its headquarters on Tuesday (Jun 19). A sham marriage, or marriage of convenience, is a ruse to help foreigners enter Singapore or extend their stay here. The act was criminalised in 2012. Of the 17 syndicate members, 12 have been convicted, two left Singapore before investigation started, one was...

**SNIP** I sat flabbergasted in the courtroom in Washington as the plea agreement was entered. I spent the last year interviewing hundreds of people and chasing leads for my upcoming book –titled “Spies in Congress” – about the alleged spy ring believed led by Awan that may have operated in the offices of more than 40 Democratic members of Congress. If not for my extensive research on this case, I might have assumed the government just couldn’t find enough evidence to make a solid case against Awan on more serious charges than bank fraud. When I asked Justice Department prosecutor...

Voters hate phoniness. And, well, the Democrats' new golden girl, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now embodies it, with revelations that "Sandy from the block," "the tough girl from the Bronx," isn't quite what she said she was. Actually, far from the gritty streets of the Bronx, Ocasio grew up in leafy Westchester, home of the upper-middle class, and exactly the sort of place a cosseted Democratic Socialists of America member headed to an Ivy League college is likely to come from. Bleagh. This is a dramatic turnaround. Ocasio's youth, hipsterly pert campaign literature, and fresh-faced good looks had, up until a few...