Free Republic

"...6 Republican candidates hit double digits when it comes to who voters within their party want to be their nominee. Scott Walker leads with 18% to 15% for Marco Rubio, 13% for Mike Huckabee, 11% for Ted Cruz, and 10% each for Jeb Bush and Ben Carson. Chris Christie (6%), Rand Paul (5%), and Rick Perry (3%) round out the field. Walker has the slight overall edge on the Republican field due to his strength with voters who identify themselves as 'very conservative.' He gets 28% to 18% for Cruz, 16% for Huckabee, and 10% for Rubio. Rubio's greatest strength...

Video at the link as a reminder. She knew and lied about it anyway as the bodies were returned home.

On life support as of early Thursday morning, President Barack Obama’s trade agenda has found new life. In a dramatic vote critical to the future of the president’s goal of securing new trade deals with Pacific Rim and European countries, the Senate on Thursday broke a bipartisan filibuster of legislation to give the president “fast-track” authority to negotiate new trade deals. The 62-38 vote preserves the possibility that the Senate can finish the trade bill before the Memorial Day recess, which would be a major boon to Obama and Republican leaders in the House and Senate. It came after a...

EXPLOSIVE NEW DETAILS EMERGED TODAY FROM EMAIL SENT AND RECEIVED ON HILLARY'S PERSONAL ACCOUNT.

Pearls Before Swine is one of my favorite comic strips. While I normally read it for the daily laugh, today's strip did the immense public service of reminding me how silly our government can be:

Comparing Operation Choke Point to Tom Cruise’s “Minority Report,” a film where police use “psychic technology” to arrest alleged murderers before they actually commit a crime, Sen. Mike Crapo today made another attempt to end the Justice Department’s controversial program. “To explain [Operation Choke Point], I want to remind everybody of a movie that came out in 2002. It’s called ‘Minority Report,’” Crapo, R-Idaho, said during a Senate Banking Committee hearing this morning. “[T]he Department of Justice has engaged in a program where it has actually designated not companies, not individuals, but business types or industries that are entirely legal...

Fifty years ago, African-Americans were denied the right to vote. Now the vast majority of Americans are being denied the rightful value of their vote.In November 1963, Evelyn Butts, a seamstress and mother of three from Norfolk, Virginia,
filed the first lawsuit in federal court challenging her state’s $1.50 poll tax. Annie Harper, a retired domestic worker from Fairfax County, filed a companion suit five months later. In March 1966, the Supreme Court overruled two previous decisions and overturned Virginia’s poll tax, stating that economic status could not be an obstacle to casting a ballot. “Fee payments or wealth, like race,...

Why Do Some People Accept Dependence? I had a thought I wanted to share regarding why some people accept dependence on government handouts as a way of life. My idea of success is for a person to go through life without becoming a burden on their fellow citizens. This is not always possible but once you do become a burden, your every sense should be to unburden your fellow citizens. Explaining the benefits to mind and body rooted in independence isn’t enough to cause some people to risk the comfort of a handout for the difficult path to independence. The...

Before Officer Michael Griffin was indicted on federal charges for using excessive force and lying under oath, he cost the city of Minneapolis $411,864.78. The city paid $140,000 in 2014 to settle a lawsuit filed by Ibrahim Regai, who Griffin allegedly knocked unconscious at a Minneapolis night club in 2010, while he was off duty. That same year, a federal jury in a civil trial ruled the city must pay Jeremy Axel, Michael Mitchell and their attorneys $271,864.78. Griffin allegedly kicked Mitchell in the chest and punched Axel in the back of the head, knocking him unconscious outside a club...

At some point in the 1970s, a man in Manchester, New Hampshire asks his friend, “What do you think about Mo Udall for president?” The other man replies, “I don’t know, I only met him twice.” Or so goes John McCain’s oft-repeated joke about the Granite State’s brand of personal politics. Now it appears that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is starting to get on New Hampshire’s nerves for being impersonal. The Nashua Telegraph published an editorial Thursday that said a conference call by Clinton’s campaign with local media was “the antithesis of what NH is about.” According to the Telegraph, the...

May 21, 2015 The Central Intelligence Agency is shutting down a research program that offered classified data to scientists to examine the link between climate change and global security threats. A CIA spokesman confirmed that the agency had ended its MEDEA program, a 1990s-era intelligence program restarted in 2010 under President Obama. The collaboration gave scientists access to intelligence assets like satellite data to study climate change and inform on how its impacts could inflame conflicts. CIA spokesman Ryan Whaylen said "these projects have been completed and CIA will employ these research results and engage external experts as it continues...

U.S. News & World Report's Susan Milligan wildly spun for Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton on the May 20 edition of Hardball when she insisted that the fact that her supporters in a recent focus-group survey by Bloomberg TV cannot name a single accomplishment of hers as Secretary of State is, well, "unfair." Indeed, Milligan insisted, the job of Secretary of State is essentially to make sure nothing major goes wrong on his or her watch. Clearly Susan has never heard of the fiasco that is post-Qadhafi Libya or the ongoing civil war in Syria or the abject failure of...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans' favorable ratings of President Barack Obama now stand at 53%, up four points from March. This comes after a year in which these ratings were mostly below 50% and marks the president's highest score since September 2013. A president's favorable ratings are distinct from approval of his performance; job approval ratings generally tend to be lower. For the Obama presidency, Gallup trends show the two measures have changed largely in tandem. As Obama's approval rating has rebounded nine percentage points from a low of 37% last fall, his favorable rating has increased 11 points from 42%....

Before Hillary Clinton stepped down as secretary of state in early 2013, National Archives officials were warned that her official records might wind up outside the control of the State Department and pledged to take steps to address the issue, newly released records reveal. “We need to discuss what we know, and how we should delicately go about learning more about, regarding the transition plans for Secretary Clinton’s departure from State,” Paul Wester, chief records officer for the U.S. Government wrote to National Archives colleagues in a Dec. 11, 2012, email message obtained by POLITICO. Wester said an individual —...

One of nine bikers killed at a shootout outside a Texas restaurant was a Vietnam veteran and Purple Heart recipient whose family members dispute police claims he was in a criminal group. An Associated Press review of Texas court records and a database maintained by the state department of public safety turned up no criminal history in Texas for Jesus Delgado Rodriguez, 65, of New Braunfels. And his son Vincent Ramirez told the San Antonio Express-News that he was not violent.

An atheist activist is planning to file lawsuits claiming the phrase “In God We Trust” on American money is “offensive” and “unlawful.” “It violates the first ten words of the Bill of Rights (‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion’) and it violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA),” said Michael Newdow, who is also a lawyer and doctor. “Unfortunately, because Constitutional principles can be twisted and perverted, the challenges to this practice under the Establishment Clause have, so far, failed.” Newdow wrote a guest post on the Friendly Atheist blog last week, arguing that the Religious...

Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley has sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson demanding to know why an illegal alien who was working as a camp counselor, charged with child molestation and with distributing nearly 1000 images of child pornography, may have avoided deportation under President Obama's deferred action program (DACA).

ALBANY—A nonprofit group tied to hedge funder Robert Mercer is planning to expand next month, Capital has learned. Reclaim New York, a 501(c)(3) with connections to several prominent Republicans, was established in 2013 and has developed a sizable presence on social media websites like Twitter. Last month, it was featured prominently in a Newsday editorial. According to its website, the group is a "non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to advancing a statewide, grassroots conversation about the future of New York, its economy and its people." Reclaim New York will likely be more visible in the near future. It is in the...

Ferguson city leaders project a $2.5 million budget shortfall during the current fiscal year and a similar shortage in fiscal 2016, largely due to the unrest and fallout after the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, the town's mayor said Thursday. Mayor James Knowles III said several businesses damaged or destroyed in the riots have not returned, so sales tax revenue is about $400,000 less than budgeted. The city voluntarily agreed to reduce the amount of money collected through the municipal court. Beyond that, police were issuing few tickets in the months after the shooting because they were too...

A pack of Democratic congressional leaders lined up on Capital Hill on Thursday to condemn the Obama administration for “jailing” migrant mothers and children in family detention centers across the country. Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Lucille Roybal-Allard of California and Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois led a group of nearly a dozen Democrats, who warned the Obama administration that it was fighting a losing battle after a California court concluded in a draft ruling that the president’s policies violated a decades-old agreement on migration. It’s time, they said, to stop the “violent” and “unconscionable” practice that is also an embarrassment to...