Free Republic

The Nuclear Option: A Foreign Policy Conducted in a Drug-Addled Haze See, kids, this is why you don’t do drugs. And this is why you will always eventually regret voting for somebody who boasted of all the coke and dope he did while smoldering about his absentee father. President Choom Gang has demilitarized our military. He sends the Department of Health and Human Services to the Mexican border to welcome and take care of tens of thousands of illegal children streaming across. And now he wants to deploy American troops into West Africa to combat the Ebola virus. Boy, is...

Head of Marshals Service in Chicago reassigned AP , Associated Press Sep. 9, 2014 4:02 AM ET CHICAGO (AP) — The U.S. Marshals Service has announced it has replaced the head of its Chicago office for the past four years in a re-organization, appointing an interim chief for its high-profile northern Illinois district. Darryl McPherson, who was named to the top Chicago post by President Barack Obama in 2010, was recently reassigned to the same office's judicial security division, said Drew Wade, an agency spokesman in Washington. Wade, however, declined to discuss why the 17-year Marshals Service veteran was moved...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The IRS says it has lost emails from five more workers who are part of congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax exempt status.

Secret EPA water maps obtained by the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology graphically show the increase reach of the EPA’s regulatory authority over Colorado’s waters under proposed rules supported by Rep. Jared Polis (D-Boulder). The maps were drawn up in October 2013, but were only turned over to the Committee today. There is some dispute as to whether the maps relate to the Agency’s proposed Waters of the US Rules, which would bring intermittent and ephemeral waters under the agency’s control. The maps clearly delineate those waters, and were produced at the insistence of the Committee

This lawless administration plans to bypass the two-thirds requirement for Senate ratification on a climate change treaty by entering into a "politically binding" hybrid agreement to "name and shame" climate scofflaws. Apparently letting the Environmental Protection Agency run amok with regulations fulfilling candidate Obama's pledge to bankrupt the coal industry, and enact a de facto cap-and-trade regime the president couldn't get through Congress, is not enough. The man who said his nomination was the moment the seas began to recede and the planet began to heal now plans to deal the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution yet another...

With the public hearing in Soldotna last night, the public comment period on the proposal to close the Fall 2014 and Spring 2015 Brown Bear hunting season on the Kenai Peninsula comes to an end. In a release yesterday, the Governor’s office said, “Federal land managers have again proposed limiting Alaskans’ access to a state resource, the proposed closure is not justified by either resource protection concerns or federal policy. I strongly urge the Service to reconsider this action and allow state-authorized hunting to continue on the refuge.” ... The decision to temporarily close the Brown Bear season on the...

Extortion: Radical Democrat activist groups stand to collect millions from Attorney General Eric Holder's record $17 billion deal to settle alleged mortgage abuse charges against Bank of America. Buried in the fine print of the deal, which includes $7 billion in soft-dollar consumer relief, are a raft of political payoffs to Obama constituency groups. In effect, the government has ordered the nation's largest bank to create a massive slush fund for Democrat special interests.

<p>Scandal: Talk of crashed and recycled hard drives, like that Benghazi video, was a distraction from the truth, which is that the missing emails detailing IRS perfidy exist on a system intended for government wide catastrophe.</p> <p>It would make sense that such a system would exist in the event that, say, the Islamic State or some other terrorist entity managed a nuclear attack on Washington D.C.</p>

Chris Sourovelis has never had any trouble with the law or been accused of any crime. But that hasn’t stopped the City of Philadelphia from trying to take his home. The Sourouvelis family, along with thousands of others in Philadelphia, is living a Kafkaesque nightmare: Their property is considered guilty; they must prove their innocence and the very prosecutors they’re fighting can profit from their misery. Now the Institute for Justice has filed a major class-action lawsuit to end these abuses of power. Back in March, Chris’s son was caught selling $40 worth of drugs outside of the home. With...

Three men found guilty of murdering innocent mother as she celebrated 24th birthday Sabrina Moss, a nursery schoolteacher, was sheltering from the rain when she gunned down in the street By Alice Philipson 6:49PM BST 18 Aug 2014 Three men have been found guilty of murdering an innocent nursery school as she sheltered from the rain during a night out celebrating her 24th birthday. Sabrina Moss, who had a four-year-old son, was shot in the heart as she became caught up in a bloody drugs turf while standing with a group of about 15 others outside a fast-food restaurant in...

The PJ Tatler Eric Holder’s Soros-Sponsored Police Sensitivity ‘Training’ Your money went to the radical Institute on Race and Justice. J. Christian Adams August 21, 2014 The vice president’s Boeing 757 delivered Eric Holder to St. Louis yesterday. In Ferguson, Holder announced that he was “a black man” and therefore had the power to heal Ferguson in ways that no other law enforcement official could. Yet his comments were sure to throw gasoline on fire burning hot with racial division. That shouldn’t shock anyone. It’s the community organizing model of running the Justice Department. What is shocking is who is...

Due Process: The Criminal Section of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division that is handling the shooting of Michael Brown was once smacked down by a federal judge for gross prosecutorial misconduct. Demonstrating the same relentless pursuit of truth and justice that occurred after the New Black Panther voter-intimidation case or the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in Fast and Furious, Attorney General Eric Holder and his team of leftist lawyers and ideologues have descended on Ferguson, Mo., to assure, as Gov. Jay Nixon put it, justice is done for Brown and his family. Justice for Ferguson Police...

The Endangered Species Act has wreaked havoc for decades on rural communities, but a newly filed lawsuit could force San Francisco urbanites like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to share their pain. A federal complaint filed this week contends that the Hetch Hetchy Project, which supplies water to San Francisco and the Bay Area, has unfairly enjoyed an exemption from the “severe cutbacks” required in rural California in order to save endangered fish species. Craig Manson, who heads the Center for Environmental Science, Accuracy and Reliability (CESAR) in Fresno, said the lawsuit is aimed at addressing the “double standard” that...

An officer who was working at the Ferguson protests was caught on camera pointing a semi-automatic weapon at a peaceful demonstrator and saying "I will f****ng kill you." Yesterday, it was announced the police officer was suspended indefinitely. The incident just before midnight on Tuesday punctuated the 11th straight night of racially charged demonstrations in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, since Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, was slain by a white police officer. No one was hurt in the gun-pointing confrontation, but the incident underscored what many have criticized as heavy-handed and unprofessional police tactics that have helped stoke...

Attorney General Holder visits Ferguson as grand jury probes Michael Brown shooting; demonstrators detained in NYC WARNING GRAPHIC LANGUAGE IN VIDEO: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder spoke with students near the strife-filled Missouri town, and also talked with police boss state Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson — even as one law officer brought in from out of town was videotaped threatening protesters. In New York, demonstrators took to the streets early Thursday. BY Meg Wagner , Corky Siemaszko NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Thursday, August 21, 2014, 3:50 AM Declaring “change is coming,” the nation’s top law enforcement officer arrived...

A tweet by St. Louis Post-Dispatch crime reporter Christine Byers dropped a bombshell in the ongoing reporting on the shooting of unarmed 18 year old Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer. “Police sources tell me more than a dozen witnesses have corroborated cop’s version of events in shooting Ferguson.”

More than a half-million acres of land across nine Western states is being proposed for designation as critical habitat for the yellow-billed cuckoo. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 546,335 acres of critical habitat is up for listing in 80 separate units in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Utah and Wyoming. The bird is a neotropical migrant that winters in South America and nests along rivers and streams in western North America. ... The Service is seeking information concerning the western yellow-billed cuckoo’s biology and habitat, threats to the species and current efforts to protect...

Between 1989 and 2010, Congress rejected nearly 700 cap-tax-and-trade and similar bills that their proponents claimed would control Earth’s perpetually fickle climate and weather. So even as real world crises erupt, President Obama is using executive fiats and regulations to impose his anti-hydrocarbon agenda, slash America’s fossil fuel use, bankrupt coal and utility companies, make electricity prices skyrocket, and “fundamentally transform” our economic, social, legal and constitutional system. Citing climate concerns, he has refused to permit construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and blocked or delayed Alaskan, western state and offshore oil and gas leasing and drilling. He’s proud that...

Large turnouts are expected at two upcoming public hearings on proposed changes to the Mexican wolf management plan, including expansion of the wolf-management areas in Arizona and New Mexico. The hearings, Aug. 11 in Pinetop, Ariz., and Aug. 13 in Truth or Consequences, N.M., will be the final opportunity for verbal testimony on proposed changes to management of the endangered Mexican gray wolf population in the two states. Public hearings last year in Albuquerque and Pinetop drew a total of around 1,000 people, most of whom were not allotted time to speak. ... The Fish and Wildlife Service proposes to...

Proposed regulations to guide sheep grazing in the Weminuche Wilderness are so weighty and controversial that the level of environmental examination of the issues is being ramped up a notch. The original Environmental Assessment (EA) of the plan – for which an unusual second public comment period was opened – has been suspended to allow preparation of a more comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Kara Chadwick, recently named supervisor of the San Juan National Forest to replace Mark Stiles, broke the news Thursday in a talk to Club 20. She confirmed it later to The Durango Herald. Chadwick cited heightened...