Free Republic

Thanks in very large part to The Donald, the illegal immigration issue has come raging to the fore in the consciousness of a great many American citizens (and others) in recent times. People are not only thinking about the issue, but they have started talking about it, oftentimes with great passion. And this is so regardless of which side of the dispute the contenders align with. It seems there are two basic, contending schools of thought, both premised in the Fourteenth Amendment, which says: Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction...

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo - A billboard on the side of us 50 just south of the Colorado River, is causing quite a stir in our community. The controversial image depicting Donald trump as a dragon slayer is attached to the side of a private building in full view of the highway where thousands of people pass each day. The billboard is 10 ft high and 20 ft. wide and is attached to a building just south of the US 50 bridge over the Colorado River on route to orchard mesa. The man behind the billboard is Arvid Mosnes. He commissioned...

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday that those who oppose the Iran nuclear agreement, like former Vice President Dick Cheney and presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, are "pro-war" and are some of the same people who got the U.S. into a war with Iraq in 2003. "There's no doubt that we've seen forceful advocacy to kill this deal," Earnest said. "It's the same forceful advocacy we've seen in the run up to the Iraq war in 2003. In fact it's many of the same people making the same arguments." Cheney is scheduled to appear Sept. 8 at...

CLEVELAND — Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday drew parallels between terrorist organizations and the field of Republican candidates for president when it comes to their views on women, telling an Ohio audience her potential GOP rivals were pushing "out-of-date" policies. "Now extreme views about women? We expect that from some of the terrorist groups. We expect that from people who don't want to live in the modern world," Clinton said. "But it's a little hard to take coming from Republicans who want to be the president of the United States, yet they espouse out-of-date and out-of-touch policies," she added at...

A Fairfax County police union is strongly defending an officer charged in the 2013 killing of an unarmed Springfield man, calling his arrest “unbelievable” and blasting the handling of the case by the county’s top prosecutor, police department and its leaders...

TORONTO - The Ontario government has been working on plans for high occupancy toll lanes on three Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area highways since 2013, but has kept most of the details secret. When the NDP filed a Freedom of Information request in early 2014 for detailed information on the work, which includes traffic models, most of the documents were to be blacked out or not released at all, according to a report obtained by the Toronto Sun. Ministry of Transportation staff prepared the note to give senior bureaucrats and the minister’s office a heads-up about the NDP’s “contentious” request....

A federal judge Friday ordered the IRS to turn over the records of any requests from the White House seeking taxpayers’ private information from the tax agency, delivering a victory to a group that for two years has been trying to pry the data loose. It’s not clear that there were any such requests — but Judge Amy Berman Jackson said the IRS cannot just refuse to say so by citing taxpayer confidentiality laws, known as section 6103 of the tax code. “This court questions whether section 6103 should or would shield records that indicate confidential taxpayer information was misused,...

In the years since the recession, the dream of a steady paycheck and a home in a nice neighborhood have become more elusive for many working-class Americans. While some may say that the lack of homeownership reflects changing values, owning a home remains an important tool for wealth building for most families. Yet it is particularly unattainable for low-income and minority households. The homeownership rate for households that fall below median income was less than 50 percent in 2014, for those who made above the median it was nearly 80 percent. And the gap in homeownership between whites, and blacks...

When the 19th Amendment went into effect 95 years ago today (8/26), The Nation was already looking ahead to the deeper implications of women’s suffrage. “What Will They Do With The Vote?” asked a piece by Stella Crossley Daljord. The answer has implications for the state of American politics today, almost a century after the extension of suffrage to women.

Law of Unintended Consequences: New EU Tax Laws Force Thousands of Businesses to Close in Just Six Months { Full title ]. New European Union tax rules introduced in January have already driven thousands of small companies out of business, with thousands more set to follow as awareness of the change in the VAT law grows. Research has shown that incompetence on the part of collecting agencies has further added misery to the situation. After an eight-year consultation which excluded the voices of micro-businesses, the EU introduced new rules on VAT returns at the beginning of this year, which required...

Democratic leaders are increasingly frustrated by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s failure to put to rest questions about her State Department email practices and ease growing doubts among voters about her honesty and trustworthiness. On top of that, many say, her repeated jokes and dismissive remarks on the email controversy suggest that she is not treating it seriously enough. Interviews with more than 75 Democratic governors, lawmakers, candidates and party members have laid bare a widespread bewilderment that Mrs. Clinton has allowed a cloud to settle over her candidacy — by using a private email server in the first place, since it...

Virginia Shooting Victim’s Husband: ‘I Blame the Guy Holding the Gun,’ Not the Gun On August 28, Tim Gardner, husband of Virginia shooting victim Vicki Gardner, said he does not blame the gun for his wife’s shooting. Rather, he blames the man who was holding the gun and pulled the trigger. Vicki is the woman Alison Parker was interviewing when Vester Lee Flanagan opened fire. According to Fox News, Tim Gardner said one of Flanagan’s bullets “grazed [Vicki’s] spine” without doing the damage a direct hit would have done. Tim expressed gratitude that it was not a direct hit and...

Donald Trump told Mark Halperin yesterday that his sister, a federal judge, would be a “phenomenal” Supreme Court justice. He also said that “we will have to rule that out now, at least.” If he ever becomes president, let’s hope he rules it out permanently. Maryanne Trump Barry came up in my book The Party of Death for writing one of those heated judicial decisions in favor of giving constitutional protection to partial-birth abortion. She called a New Jersey law against it a “desperate attempt” to undermine Roe v. Wade. It was, she wrote, “based on semantic machinations, irrational line-drawing,...

A federal judge in North Dakota acted late on Thursday to block the Obama administration’s controversial water pollution rule, hours before it was due to take effect. Judge Ralph Erickson of the District Court for the District of North Dakota found that the 13 states suing to block the rule met the conditions necessary for a preliminary injunction, including that they would likely be harmed if courts didn't act and that they are likely to succeed when their underlying lawsuit against the rule is decided. The decision is a major roadblock for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Army...

Trump's teleprompter challenge trips up White House By Susan Crabtree • 8/26/15 3:53 PM White House press secretary Josh Earnest got a little tongue-tied Wednesday after being asked what he thought of Donald Trump's suggestion that teleprompters ought to be outlawed. Veteran CBS White House correspondent Mark Knoller asked him if such a uniform ban would affect the president "adversely." Since the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama has been known for his reliance on tele-prompters to deliver speeches and often rambles without one. "I don't have any … well … that's a tough one to respond to," Earnest admitted amid some...

In case you missed it yesterday, Hillary Clinton essentially said Republicans and terrorists treat women the same way. "Now, extreme views about women, we expect that from some of the terrorist groups, we expect that from people who don't want to live in the modern world, but it's a little hard to take from Republicans who want to be the president of the United States. Yet they espouse out of date, out of touch policies. They are dead wrong for 21st century America. We are going forward, we are not going back," she said.

  Muslim Apartheid housing in Canada is apparently not only legal, but even government subsidized. As one wheelchair bound young man found out. According to a letter that arrived at his mother’s house last week, Austin Lewis, 21, was removed from the waiting list at the Ahmadiyya Abode of Peace building on Finch Ave. W in North York because he is not a member of their faith. “It was mostly confusing, more than anything else,” he said. “Why would a government segregate its own building?” Because they don't want to be accused of Islamophobia? Lewis, who has used a...

Does Hillary Clinton have a serious legal problem because she may have transmitted classified information on her private e-mail server? After talking with a half-dozen knowledgeable lawyers, I think this “scandal” is overstated. Using the server was a self-inflicted wound by Clinton, but it’s not something a prosecutor would take to court. “It’s common” that people end up using unclassified systems to transmit classified information, said Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA general counsel who’s now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where he often represents defendants suspected of misusing classified information. There are always these back channels,” Smith explained. “It’s...

You can rightly complain about the things which go on inside the White House, the State Department, the Justice Department or the EPA and all of the headline grabbing controversies which erupt from them. None of them, however, may be up to nearly as much mischief as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) though it doesn’t seem to catch the attention of the media nearly as much. This week they were at it again and while a bit on the wonky side, a new wrinkle in the rules could spell big trouble for America’s employers and many, many workers....

We should be absolutely clear about what Delaney is arguing here: He is a) agreeing with Jefferson that “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind,” b) contending that “progress” suggests that the individual right to keep and bear arms is now counterproductive, and c) concluding that it is time therefore to make a “change in law and constitution” — in other words, to repeal the Second Amendment. This, it is true, is not a mainstream position on the American Left — at least, it is not one that is argued openly. But...