Free Republic

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (AP) -- The family of the man who killed four Marines and a sailor in Chattanooga said in a statement that their son suffered from depression and was not the person they knew. "There are no words to describe our shock, horror, and grief," said the statement, provided Saturday to the Associated Press by a lawyer representing the family of Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez. "The person who committed this horrible crime was not the son we knew and loved. For many years, our son suffered from depression. It grieves us beyond belief to know that his pain found its...

Obama is Not in Mourning for Our Dead Marines and Sailor Submitted by Donald R. May on July 19, 2015 - 1:55am Barack Hussein Obama does not seem to be in mourning for the four Marines and one Sailor killed in Chattanooga by the Islamic Terrorist. Many flags across our nation are flying at half-staff, but not by order of President Obama. He did not order flags at the White House and other federal buildings to be flown at half-staff. Obama did make the effort to light the White House in rainbow colors to celebrate the recent Supreme Court ruling...

Donald Trump appears to have gotten under the skin of not only Democrats, but also fellow Republicans and the news media. Has that subjected Trump, a Republican presidential candidate, to unfair and/or inaccurate reporting? An article in the Washington Post today is headlined, “Trump slams McCain for being ‘captured’ in Vietnam.” The article’s lead sentence states, “Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump slammed Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a decorated Vietnam War veteran, on Saturday by saying McCain was not a war hero because he was captured by the North Vietnamese [emphasis added].” Is this report accurate? In fact, Trump’s actual quote...

As it turns out, I was on vacation and out of reach of cable news for the entire week, including during the horrific shooting in Chattanooga. (This no doubt came as a relief to some of our readers, though rumors of my early acceptance to the Mars Relocation Program were exaggerated.) I was still picking up details and some of the mainstream media coverage of the tragedy via social media, though, and I rather wish I hadn’t even had access to that. Upon arriving home and switching on CNN I was treated to Jane Harman talking to Wolf Blitzer and...

Here lays the supreme problem for the National Socialist Left in attempting to exploit every tragedy for crass political gain against their enemies. They often get hoisted on their own petard when their rank hypocrisy is shown in stark relief for all the world to see. Now that we know that the Chattanooga shooter was motivated by radical Islam, will the National Socialist Left have the balls to oppose a REAL enemy instead of one THEY KNOW won’t retaliate against their rank oppressive tendencies? Or will they ‘Cair’? It’s a sure bet that whenever a shooting takes place in a...

In the wake of the latest mass shooting, carried out by Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, an engineer like so many Islamic terrorists, we are seeing the usual scramble to avoid stating the obvious. On CNN, Tom Fuentes ludicrously cautioned that Muhammad is not an Islamic name: SNIPAnother Islamic extremist commits a terrorist act–what a coincidence! Speaking of coincidences, the Washington Post chose this morning to plug the Southern Poverty Law Center’s long-discredited tabulation of “hate groups,” the vast majority of which no one has ever heard of.

Abdulazeez shot his victims in a ‘gun-free zone,’ which is a useful illustration of the absurdity of gun-control laws: we constrain conscientious Americans but offer free rein to killers. [..] Surely, we are in for a new round of emotional pleas for more gun-control laws. And, helpfully, in this week’s Newsweek cover story by Kurt Eichenwald we already have a compendium of muddled and misleading anti-Second Amendment talking points that dominate the Left these days. The confusion begins with headline, which is based on an absurd premise, and bleeds into the lead: Let’s start with an undeniable truth: In the...

A report from a prominent economist finds that the number of permits to carry concealed handguns has skyrocketed by 178 percent in the last eight years, even as the murder rate has dropped. The figures, cited in a study by the Philadelphia-based Crime Prevention Research Center, is evidence that legally-possessed handguns deter crime, rather than contribute to it, according to the center's president, John Lott, an author and Fox News contributor who has held teaching and research positions at Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, Yale and the University of Chicago. He said the huge increase in the number of permits issued...

According to AP, the shooting started “around 10:30 or 10:45 a.m.” The Islamic State tweet warning of the attack or crowing about the attack was posted at 10:34AM. “Gunshots were fired at a military recruiting center and a Navy Reserve center in different parts of Chattanooga, Tennessee.” And the Islamic State has called on Muslims to murder American military personnel here in the U.S. (Tweet image thanks to Pamela Geller.) “Chattanooga shooting: 4 killed,” by Jason Hanna and Greg Botelho, CNN, July 16, 2015: Four people were killed in shootings in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Thursday morning, Mayor Andy Berke said....

Maybe this was more of a Rorschach test than first thought. When a reporter asks a tough question of a president, many of the people who get upset at the “tone” and who cheer for the reporter switch sides when the party affiliation of the President changes. So far, though, only Bill Maher has managed to toss race in as an issue with Major Garrett’s sharp exchange with Barack Obama yesterday: #MajorGarrett is a huge asshole. If U wanna "strike a nerve" with POTUS, why not just scream the N word? That shld get his attention.— Bill Maher (@billmaher) July...

During Wednesday’s national press conference about his Iran deal, President Obama played the media like a fiddle. It was a situation where the media was so compliant the questioners were hand-picked by the White House beforehand, the president filibustered throughout, and Obama ended the event by asking himself the questions he wanted to answer. Only Major Garrett of CBS News asked a truly tough question, a question that was obviously framed in a way to cut through the president’s rigorously-rehearsed talking points. For daring to question the Lightbringer in the same way the media questioned President George W. Bush for...

WASHINGTON - Marilyn Mosby, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney, catapulted to national fame when she decided in early May to prosecute six police officers for the death of Freddie Gray. In her remarks, Mosby used her family of Boston police officers as a shield against critics who said she could not fairly prosecute the case. --- snip --- Sources told me to look into Mosby’s family’s personnel records at the Boston Police Department. Two months ago, I put in Public Records Law request for personnel records for Mosby's mother and two uncles. --- snip --- In 2003, Linda Thompson was...

The New York Times' refusal to put Ted Cruz's memoir on its bestseller list is once again being called into question — this time by Amazon, the largest Internet retailer in the country. On Sunday, an Amazon spokesperson told the On Media blog that the company's sales data showed no evidence of unusual bulk purchase activity for the Texas senator's memoir, casting further doubt on the Times' claim that the book — "A Time For Truth" — had been omitted from its list because sales had been driven by "strategic bulk purchases." "As of yesterday, 'A Time for Truth' was...

Martin Crutsinger has been a business and economics writer at the Associated Press for over three decades. Certain people in high places apparently hold him in high regard. In early 2014, on his 30th anniversary with the wire service, he is said to have received congratulatory letters from soon-to-be Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, soon-to-be-former chair Ben Bernanke and Obama administration Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, which he clearly enjoyed as those in attendance munched on a very delicious-looking cake. We can't know whether the congrats from those heavy hitters merely marked a career milestone, or if they included an element...

A coalition of Mexican mayors has asked the United States to stop deporting illegal immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes in the U.S. to Mexican border cities, saying the deportations are contributing to Mexican border violence. The request was made at a recent San Diego conference in which the mayors of four Mexican border cities and one U.S. mayor, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, gathered to discuss cross-border issues. Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes blamed U.S. deportation policy for contributing to his city's violence, saying that of the 80,000 people deported to Juarez in the past three years,...

In her 1985 speech after receiving the Best Actress Oscar for her role in "Places in the Heart," actress Sally Field famously gushed, "You like me; you really, really like me." The latest in a long history of surveys examining the public's level of trust in the news media might paraphrase Field's line this way: "You hate us; you really, really hate us, but we don't care." The 2015 State of the First Amendment Survey, a project of the Newseum Institute's First Amendment Center, has "discovered" what most of us could have told them. According to the survey, "Only 24...

Nearly three quarters of Americans believe the news media reports with an intentional bias, according to a new survey. The 2015 State of the First Amendment Survey, conducted by the First Amendment Center and USA Today, was released Friday. It shows that only 24 percent of American adults agree with the statement that "overall, the news media tries to report the news without bias," while 70 percent disagree. When the question was asked last year, 41 percent agreed, a 17-point difference. [Snip] Other findings in the survey: • 38 percent agree that business owners should be required to provide services...

In his address to the nation after the Charleston attack, Obama claimed: “we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.” Senator Harry Reid made a similar statement on June 23rd: “The United States is the only advanced country where this type of mass violence occurs. Let’s do something. We can expand, for example, background checks. … We should support not giving guns to people who are mentally ill and felons.” This claim is...

After the Charleston massacre, President Obama made this comment: “the unique mayhem that gun violence afflicts upon this nation.” The three worst public mass shootings and nine of the worst 13 public mass shootings occurred outside the US. Of these cases, nine occurred in developed or “advanced” countries. The worst public mass shooting are as follows: 1) Utoya, Norway, July 22, 2011: Anders Behring Breivik used a gun to kill 67 people and wound 110 others. Still others were killed by bombs that Breivik detonated. 2) Sousse, Tunisia, June 26, 2015: Seifeddine Rezgui, a college student, used a gun to...