Free Republic

As the nation learns more about the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping program, such as recent revelations that the NSA most likely tapped into the communications of Google and Yahoo users, not through cooperation with the companies themselves, but via collusion with the companies’ Internet backbone providers, questions on how the federal government approached its surveillance are increasingly becoming more difficult to answer. One such question — if the Justice Department knowingly lied to the Supreme Court regarding the NSA’s procedures about the notification of targets — presents a potential minefield for the Obama administration. In the 2012 Clapper v. Amnesty...

"........If ACA navigators on occasion have urged poor applicants to fudge on their eligibility, what is the big deal? Are those really lies—given that the system that reduced some Americans to poverty and the status of the uninsured is one big lie to begin with? When “regulations” are enforced about voter IDs, Obamaphones, or eligibility for disability insurance and food stamps, poor people suffer;when they are ignored,the real truth emerges and a higher justice is served...... Again,how could the president be accused of lying when he was helping the uninformed to be released from their “crap” coverage in order to...

Family members of the two masked men shot to death after allegedly robbing a store in Reading spoke out Tuesday. "It's not fair," said Virginia Medina, mother of 24-year-old William Medina, who police said robbed Krick's Korner store alongside 18-year-old Robert De Carr on Monday. The two men were shot and killed by a private citizen while leaving the store, and family members want to see charges pressed. "[William] had no right to lose his life over something that man could have called the police for," said Medina. "He took the law into his own hands and walked away scot-free."...

Republican lawmakers want to know why the Al Qaeda terrorists involved in the Benghazi attacks were excluded from the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program, a program which offers huge cash payments for tips leading to the capture of wanted terrorists. Fox News reported that a ranking Republican lawmaker believes this is "more evidence that the Obama White House wants to minimize the terrorism angle in that attack." In a related post on Thursday, I noted that Thomas Joscelyn of The Long War Journal reported that: The UN, on Oct. 18, added Muhammad Jamal al Kashef - who previously served...

Anthony Harris of Prichard made a series of poor choices on Friday. He decided to steal a purse. Then, he decided to steal the purse of Bridgett Bolen of Hurley, Miss. Bolen quickly confronted the would-be thief with a kick to the groin and a punch to the face, leaving Harris sitting in Mobile Metro Jail with stitches under his left eye.

Vid at link

LANSING, Mich., Oct. 7 (UPI) -- A proposed law in Michigan is aimed at ensuring beer drinkers who pay for a pint get at least 16 ounces. The measure was introduced in the House last week, MLive.com reported. It would ban what barflies refer to as "cheater glasses" with thick bottoms so they look like they hold a pint but actually take a few ounces less. State Rep. Jim Irwin, a Democrat from the college town of Ann Arbor, said the state regulates meat and other foodstuffs to make sure buyers get what they pay for. Irwin introduced a similar...

According to Kate Berry at American Banker, “The nation’s four largest banks are holding $57 billion of seriously delinquent loans that they’ve been slow to move into foreclosure over concerns that the Federal Housing Administration, the government mortgage insurer, will refuse to cover the losses and hit them with damages, according to industry sources.” The FHA insures home loans issued by banks and other mortgage lenders to low-income and first-time home buyers. Those buyers pay the FHA insurance premiums to cover potential losses. In the event that an FHA-backed loan goes into foreclosure, the lender has the right to file...

The last time we checked in on Operation Fast and Furious, the bloody and not-”botched” gunrunning scandal in which the ATF pressed American gun dealers into funneling at least 2,000 weapons to cartels across the Mexican border with no serious efforts to trace them, more of the trafficked weapons were still showing up at crime scenes as recently as this past August. Since President Obama asserted his executive privilege over Congress’s subpoenas for the Fast & Furious documents that the Department of Justice has patently refused to hand over (despite their ongoing insistence in no deliberate wrongdoing) and Congress subsequently...

Being a far right-wing person I have always been very pro law & order and believe that those who violate our laws should pay the consequences. More often than not I have found myself thinking that our criminal justice system is not harsh enough. But, it is the system we have and I would not trade it for any other in the world. One of the cornerstones of our system is supposed to be the impartiality of the justice that is dispensed. Without impartiality, can the punishments meted out still be considered just? Sometimes, no.The impartiality of the justice system...

An Ohio man is standing outside this week wearing a sign around his neck that declares he is an idiot. Richard Dameron, a 58-year-old from Cleveland, stood with his arms crossed outside the local police station in Sky News footage, a yellow sign with block lettering stating his apology. "I apologize to officer Simone & all police officers for being an idiot calling 911 threatening to kill you. I'm sorry and it will never happen again," the sign says. Dameron was convicted of calling 911 and threatening police, and then missing a court appearance, according to WKYC. His unusual sentence...

This week has pissed me off. It’s been a week filled with news I’d rather forget, but really, it’s one we all should remember. It should be a rallying cry, an opportunity for those interested in justice to reform a broken system and expedite a punishment reserved for a deserving few. A college baseball player from Australia was murdered in Duncan, Okla., because three monsters were bored. The sheer convergence of bad parenting required to bring these three together and have none of them, not one, object to the idea of murdering a random stranger for lack of anything to...

Frying those who kill innocents for sport would be a start... The feral animals that beat WWII hero Delbert 'Shorty' Belton to death in Spokane this week -same as the satanic thrill-kill thuglets that wasted Australian Chris Lane earlier in the week- are an irreparable, dangerous nightmare within our society- to be treated as such.  Try 'em as adults from 14+... and don't be shy about putting anybody in The Chair, dammit.  Then charge the parents, too- that should provide some incremental deterrent. But Ross Perot said that once these neighborhoods and families descend into chaos, with little morality or even shame remaining...

[snip] Watergate remains the greatest political scandal in modern American history. It culminated not only in President Nixon’s announcement of his resignation, 39 years ago Thursday, but in the conviction and imprisonment of his three most senior aides. Attorney General John Mitchell, White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman were found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury in the three-month Watergate cover-up trial, which ended on January 1, 1975. [snip] I was a young lawyer working on the White House staff and assisting in Nixon’s defense efforts. It...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted a video on its website to provide the definition of environmental justice, specifically when it comes to communities. “The health of a community suffers when people don’t have access to healthy homes, healthy food, transportation, fresh air and safe neighborhoods,” the narrator stated in the video. She is Dr. LaToria Whitehead, who works in CDC’s Healthy Homes and Lead Poisoning Prevention Branch. “I’m also an environmental justice specialist,” Whitehead said. The video opened with a closed grocery store as a backdrop, with Whitehead informing viewers that the part of Atlanta where the...

I need help/ammo. My kids go to a small Seventh Day Adventist school in Orlando. There's a new humanities teacher and the information that's in the pamphlet about him says the 'big subject' for 8th grade is "social justice". I know what we conservatives consider SJ, and I agree with it but there are varying definitions on line. When I meet with this guy and the head of curriculum I want to be armed with as much accurate information as possible. I'm trying not to be really pissed off that this is going on. I am arming my daughter with...

Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Allegations arise of abuses of power and wrongdoing in a subordinate agency of a Cabinet department, which then conducts an investigation that lays the blame on a few low-level staffers and then insists that any further debate on the issue is nothing more than a “phony scandal.” The State Department did that with Benghazi, Treasury (or at least the White House’s spin on the IG report) with the IRS, and the Department of Justice with Operation Fast and Furious. The DoJ will now take a second spin on the Wheel Of Scapegoats by...

Statement of Frank L. Davis, Jr., Co-Founder, Executive Vice President and National Director of Legislative Affairs, National Retail Sales Tax Alliance Testimony Before the House Committee on Ways and Means Hearing on Fundamental Tax Reform Mr. Chairman, Mr. Rangel and Members of the Committee; my fellow Americans. It is a privilege to be asked to testify this afternoon. My name is Frank Davis. I am a retired Naval Reserve Aviator, having spent 28 1/2 years in active and reserve service to my country. I consider myself still serving, albeit in a somewhat different capacity, but with the same goal in...

Glenn Garvin from the Miami Herald gave some insight that probably did not make it to most of the cable news shows, that air time is reserved for doctored 911 calls, and misleading photos. Mr. Garvin wrote in his column, “There is no war on black men, at least not by white men. Last year, the Scripps-Howard News Service studied half a million homicide reports and found that killings of black victims by white attackers have actually dropped over the past 30 years, from 4,745 during the 1980s to 4,380 during the first decade of the 2000s. There were nearly...

The kidnapper serving life in prison for abducting Elizabeth Smart has reportedly been beaten to a bloody pulp in prison. Boo hoo, right? The source is the National Enquirer, so take this how you will. But I don't see why they'd make up something so odd. Anyway, Brian David Mitchell, who abducted Elizabeth when she was 14 and spent the next nine months raping her, has been serving his time in a high security prison in Tuscon, Arizona. Apparently, he's not popular there. Prisoners are known to look down on child molesters and rapists, and Mitchell is both. Add to...