Free Republic

A group of women whose lives were ruined after being coerced into participating in pornography has just gotten some small measure of vindication in a civil suit against the pornographers. According to The Washington Post, a California judge has tentatively ordered a pornography company to pay $13 million to 22 young women after ruling that they were tricked and inappropriately pressured to make the videos which did not, as promised, stay offline. The ruling, given last Thursday, was the latest development in the women’s years-long legal battle against the owners of GirlsDoPorn, a San Diego-based business that made millions producing...

The Trump administration is heading to court this week in two lawsuits charging that the president is violating the Constitution by profiting off of his hotels and other businesses while in office. The cases revolve around the Constitution’s once-obscure emoluments clauses, which critics say President Trump has flouted, giving foreign diplomats an opening to curry favor with him by patronizing his businesses. On Monday, a panel of judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments over whether members of Congress can sue the president for alleged emoluments violations, and on Thursday, the full 4th Circuit Court...

Three teenage boys have admitted threatening two women on a bus after they refused to perform a sex act. Melania Geymonat, 28, and her girlfriend Chris were targeted on the top of a double-decker London night bus after refusing to kiss. The teenagers, aged 15, 16 and 17, appeared in court on Thursday after previously denying charges of harassment by using threatening or abusive words or behaviour. Highbury Corner Youth Court previously heard the two women were surrounded by the boys, hit with coins and subjected to sexual gestures after they refused to perform a sex act. Prosecutor Saira Khan...

How far would you be willing to go to reduce litter on public transportation? In the state of California, law enforcement is willing to handcuff a man for the crime of eating a sandwich. According to KGO-TV in the Bay Area, 31-year-old Steve Foster was handcuffed and detained Monday on an open-air platform at the Pleasant Hill station in Walnut Creek, California. A cop putting a man in handcuffs for eating a sandwich would have been business as usual, sadly — except, in the cell phone age, the whole thing was recorded and ended up inflicting a massive black eye...

"Former Sen. Al Franken is attempting to make a political comeback but was accused of sexual misconduct by a ninth woman on Monday. New York magazine published reflections from 25 women involved in the #MeToo movement, including one anonymous woman who revealed a new allegation against Franken. The magazine identifies her as “a former staffer who served on Democratic campaigns and works at a large progressive organization.”

This week, a menacing crowd assembled outside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s home in an explicit effort to disrupt his convalescence after a fall broke his shoulder. Their activities included round-the-clock shouting of obscenities, demanding that “someone should stab him in the heart,” and chanting “murder Turtle”—a nickname political opponents have given the Senator. In an attempt to document this harassment, a video of the crowd’s behavior was posted on McConnell’s Twitter account. Twitter froze McConnell’s account and demanded that the video be removed. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey explained that “the foul language in the video violates our standards.” McConnell’s...

This week, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex), campaign manager for presidential candidate former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro, tweeted the names and places of employment for 44 San Antonio citizens who donated to President Trump’s campaign. The easily foreseeable consequence that these people would be harassed and threatened by left-wing loons quickly came to pass. Nevertheless, Castro lamely claimed that “it was not my intention to harass anyone. I just wanted everyone to think twice before they give any support to our racist President.” Apprised of the harassment incidents—one woman received an obscenity-laced voice mail labeling her a...

Hysterical Democrats, driven mad by Trump Derangement Syndrome, are generating sympathy (and money) for those whom they attack for supporting Donald Trump.  The threatened boycott of Equinox and SoulCycle because a major stockholder, Stephen Ross, held a fundraiser yesterday for the Trump 2020 campaign, has the best prospects of succeeding because their clientele is heavily skewed to affluent urban millennials.  But so far, the only tangible result is that it (along with a second event also held in The Hamptons) was more successful than anticipated. Brett Samuels reports in The Hill:   Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said President Trump on...

Rabbi Netanel Louie leads the Hebrew Discovery Center, a small Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Los Angeles county that has endured multiple acts of violence in the past few years. Sadly, the hate against this Jewish community doesn’t seem to stop. Recently, in the middle of the night a vandal threw a can of white paint at the synagogue, defacing the front entrance to the building. This isn’t the first time the Hebrew Discovery Center has been the target of hateful acts because of who they are or what they believe. A couple of years earlier, a man walked in while...

ThinkProgress, a progressive news website founded more than a decade ago, is up for sale, its publisher, the Center for American Progress, announced on Monday. "Unfortunately, like so many other news outlets that have relied on advertising to fund its work, ThinkProgress has seen a significant drop in revenue in recent years, along with other financial strains," Navin Nayak, executive director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said in a statement provided to CNN Business. "In addition, events over the last few years have underscored the divergent missions of American Progress and ThinkProgress."

The House Judiciary Committee hearing scheduled for former White House counsel Don McGahn was "silly" and the committee's chair knew he couldn't challenge in court McGahn's refusal to comply with a subpoena, Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., said on Tuesday. "The whole thing is a political exercise, and Jerry Nadler is not going to take this to court because he knows if he did, he would be completely humiliated," McClintock said while appearing on Fox News' "Outnumbered." "He wants the grievance, not the substance," McClintock added. His comments came as Nadler vowed to "go to court" if needed in order to...

Government accountability is an idea that draws bipartisan support: calls for more transparency and oversight of politicians and bureaucracies go over well with voters. But what about oversight of the people who put them in office? Democracies give power to the people — does anyone hold the people responsible for this power? Not really, and that has long been a problem. Since its beginning in ancient Greece, democracy has faced a crisis of legitimacy when the people have not been held accountable for their exercise of sovereignty, allowing elites to dismiss democracy as mob rule. Today, defending our democracy begins...

Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., said it is time for impeachment inquiries to be opened if former White House Counsel Don McGahn is a no-show to Tuesday's scheduled congressional hearing. Cicilline, a member of the Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee, appeared on MSNBC and offered his reaction that the White House is instructing McGahn to refuse to comply with a subpoena to appear on Capitol Hill and the assurance from the Department of Justice that McGahn has "immunity" which does not legally require him to testify before Congress, something Cicilline believed was "legally incorrect." "Let me be clear; if Don McGahn doesn't...

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) wouldn’t speak about the subpoena itself, but defended the character of Burr in leading the Intelligence Committee. “I support his leadership and think that he has done a good job,” she said, the Washington Post reported. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), another member of the committee, also defended Burr’s leadership, and questioned whether some of his colleagues understood that their work was different from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that concluded earlier this year. “Mueller is a criminal justice investigation. Ours is an intelligence investigation about the Russia threat and about the way our agencies performed,” Rubio...

RUSH: Greetings, my friends. The surreal nature of our lives today — those of us who are engaged and enmeshed in politics. The surreal nature, the Twilight Zone nature of all this just continues. Okay. So we got the Mueller report out. It finds no collusion. There never was any. Don’t get me started on this. I’m not only probably driving you crazy, I’m driving myself crazy talking about this. There was no collusion. There was no investigation. All of this is a trumped up hoax. And Mueller didn’t find any because there wasn’t any to find and he had...

In what can only be described as a gross violation of the code of conduct befitting a member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, new member Brian Sims (D-Philadelphia) openly harassed an elderly pro-life woman praying outside a Planned Parenthood in his district. Not only did Sims, the first openly (and rabidly) gay representative behave like a threatening bully, but he may have committed a crime. According to the Pennsylvania code, criminal harassment is defined thus: A person commits the crime of harassment when, with intent to harass, annoy or alarm another, the person: (1) strikes, shoves, kicks or otherwise subjects...

President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit Monday against Deutsche Bank and Capital One in an attempt to block congressional subpoenas for his business records, claiming House Democrats are simply attempting to harass him. Politico reported that in a joint statement, Reps. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. and Adam Schiff, D-Calif., called the Trump suit “meritless.” They claimed Trump’s suit was a tactic to delay accountability. Waters is the chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee and Schiff is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Schiff said at the time that the subpoenas were part of an investigation "into allegations of potential foreign...

Harvey Weinstein may be facing life in prison if found guilty in his upcoming rape trial in New York this summer, but he won’t have to deal with Ashley Judd’s retaliation case for a while. “The Court GRANTS Defendant’s motion to stay this case pending resolution of his criminal case in New York, with the exception that the stay does not extend to any appeal Plaintiff takes from the Court’s entry of judgment on its order dismissing her sexual harassment claim,” wrote U.S. District Judge Philip Guterrez today in a mixed bag of orders that are technically wins for both...

Amid a departure of top executives at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a new report details allegations of sexual misconduct and racial discrimination against those very individuals at the progressive nonprofit which frequently has targeted conservative groups. A report from the New York Times on Monday detailed several complaints by both current and former employees that indicated a “climate of intolerance” in the workplace -- complaints including sexual harassment and a lack of diversity based on race and gender. **SNIP** On Friday, SPLC President Richard Cohen announced he would be stepping down from the civil rights organization amid the...

A case of a form of schoolyard squabbling arrived at a Court of Appeal in Australia on Monday. The court is tasked with deciding whether flatulence is a form of bullying. According to 56-year-old David Hingst, a former employee at Construction Engineering, it certainly is. Hingst sued the firm for bullying in 2017, accusing supervisor Greg Short (whom Hingst referred to as "Mr. Stinky") of being a serial offender who regularly "thrusted his bum" at him, news.com.au reported quoting The Australian Associated Press. Hingst is seeking damages of AUS$1.8 million ($1.28 million). "I would be sitting with my face to...