Free Republic

While Obama Inc. targets conservative groups, it isn’t going to annoy the guy who bought its boss his spot in the White House. Soros’ wealth increased tremendously during Obama’s time in office. And much of it came from dodging taxes. You know, the taxes he insists that middle class peons and small business owners need to be socked with. George Soros likes to say the rich should pay more taxes. A substantial part of his wealth, though, comes from delaying them. While building a record as one of the world’s greatest investors, the 84-year-old billionaire used a loophole that allowed...

KALAMAZOO (WWJ) – If you thought you felt an earthquake on Saturday — you did. And It was one of the strongest quakes ever experienced in Michigan. Officials with the United States Geological Survey said an earthquake with a magnitude of 4.2 and a depth of focus of 5.9 km was measured around 12:23 p.m. about nine miles southeast of Kalamazoo, near Galesburg. Multiple residents in several different regions beyond Kalamazoo — from Mount Pleasant and Sterling Heights to Lansing and even as far as Cleveland, Ohio — reported feeling a rumble and the ground shake for between five and...

Chicago has a simple financial choice: Stay in frying pan or get in the fire. That in simple terms is what Moody's Investors Service said in a report today about the difficult options the Emanuel administration faces over the city's woefully underfunded pension funds. The city must cut spending and raise taxes now or the risks of becoming insolvent will grow, forcing even harsher decisions later. The credit rating agency offers a sobering reminder of what's at stake in the eight-page report, which focuses on the pensions problems. ... A CUT ABOVE JUNK. Moody's, typically the most conservative of the...

Moody’s Investors Service on Friday announced it had reduced its rating on Chicago Board of Education debt to one level above junk bond status. Moody’s downgraded the rating to Baa3 from Baa1 on the board’s general obligation debt. That rating applies to a total of $6.3 billion in outstanding debt held by Chicago Public Schools. That lowered rating, according to Moody’s, “reflects CPS’s continued reliance” on its reserves to cover ongoing operating expenditures, “particularly pension contributions, which will steadily increase in the coming years.” ... the lowered CPS rating also takes into account the city’s own credit rating, which also...

DETROIT (Reuters) - A Detroit prosecutor who said on Facebook that people involved in Baltimore rioting should be shot has resigned, after her comments ignited fierce criticism, the prosecutor's office said on Friday. Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Teana Walsh had posted comments about this week's unrest in Baltimore, which was sparked by the death of Freddie Gray after he was fatally injured in police custody, according to a screenshot of her page posted on MyFox Detroit.com. She described "large swarms of people throwing bricks etc at police who are fleeing from their assaults" and then suggested using guns. "Simple. Shoot...

Who in the world is Rick Snyder? I am sure most of you are asking yourselves this very question. Let me start out by making it very, very simple: Rick Snyder is the two-term governor of Michigan. He has the business background of Carly Fiorina, the policy wonkiness of Bobby Jindal, the mild-mannerism of Ben Carson, and the Midwestern appeal of Scott Walker. “I met with Rick Snyder yesterday. He’s running,” former U.S. Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) stated at the Jewish Republican Committee’s meeting in Las Vegas last Saturday. Governor Rick Snyder has not formerly announced his candidacy for president,...

UPPER PENINSULA -- The Michigan Department of Natural Resources is considering changing, or even cancelling deer hunting season this year. DNR officials say that the winters in the Upper Peninsula have been especially harsh and have severely thinned out the deer population. According to Deer Management Specialist Chad Stewart, the most recent deer harvest will be one of the lowest in the last thirty years. To help preserve deer population numbers in the U.P., the DNR has prepared six options that they will present to the Natural Resources Commission at their May 7th meeting. The most severe, and controversial, of...

Contrary to the emotional blackmail some leftists are attempting to peddle, Baltimore is not America’s problem or shame. That failed city is solely and completely a Democrat problem. Like many failed cities, Detroit comes to mind, and every city besieged recently by rioting, Democrats and their union pals have had carte blanche to inflict their ideas and policies on Baltimore since 1967, the last time there was a Republican Mayor.In 2012, after four years of his own failed policies, President Obama won a whopping 87.4% of the Baltimore City vote. Democrats run the city of Baltimore, the unions, the schools,...

The IRS documents released by the government watchdog group on April 9 revealed that the senator, along with Senator Carl Levin, pressured the agency to go after political nonprofits – which turned out to be overwhelmingly conservative non-profits.. A May 1, 2013, email exchange between Lois Lerner and other top IRS staffers revealed that 11 days prior to Lerner’s admission in a ABA meeting that the IRS had “inappropriately” targeted conservative groups, she met with select top staffers from the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in a “marathon” meeting to discuss concerns raised by both Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Sen....

Members of the Supreme Court questioned on Tuesday whether now is the right time to force states to allow same-sex couples to marry, pointing to how quickly public opinion has shifted on the issue of marriage equality. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was a key figure in striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013, suggested that he might be worried about the court moving too quickly to force states to marry same-sex couples. “This definition has been with us for millennia,” Kennedy said of male-female marriages. The justice also said it would be very difficult for the court to...

The New York-based civil rights activist also wants to plan a two-day march in May from Baltimore to Washington, expressing frustration in the lack of answers into Gray's death. Gray, who died April 19 after suffering a spinal cord injury while in police custody, was buried Monday. "I have been asked by many in the Baltimore area since Day 1 to get involved in the justice for Freddie Gray movement," Sharpton said in a statement.

The Supreme Court on Monday gave new life to a lawsuit challenging ObamaCare’s contraception mandate, striking down a previous ruling in favor of the federal government. An appeals court in Cincinnati will now reconsider the legal challenge from the Catholic groups in Michigan and Tennessee that had sought exemptions from an ObamaCare provision that requires employers to cover birth control for all workers. The justices asked the lower court to reconsider the case in light of last year's landmark ruling on the contraception mandate. That ruling, which was issued last June, decided that the arts-and-crafts retailer, Hobby Lobby, could...

LANSING, MI — Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder "is running" for president, according to a former U.S. Senator, whose comments at a Republican confab were quickly contradicted by a spokesman for the governor, who said he has not made any decisions of that kind. "I met with Rick Snyder yesterday," former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman told reporters on Saturday morning at the Republican Jewish Coalition's spring meeting, according to the Guardian and other publications. "He's running. He's running." Snyder was in Las Vegas this weekend to attend the RJC meeting as part of what his advisors are calling an economic tour....

The two Michigan women lost in the wilderness for almost 2 weeks survived on Girl Scout cookies and cheese puffs, police say. Leslie Roy, 52, and her sister Lee Marie Wright, 56, were on vacation in a remote part of Michigan when they became stranded by heavy snow on April 11. According to police, the two women rationed food and gas as they tried to stay warm in their SUV. "They survived on eight boxes of girl scout cookies, a bag of cheese puffs," Detective Sgt. Jeff Marker of the Michigan State Police told ABC News.

Do we own our own businesses, or do we work at them on a sharecropper basis, keeping only those revenues allowed to us by the actual owners, who are the moonbat social engineers running the government? Maybe Brian Klawiter was attempting to answer this question when he defied authorities by declaring that open demonstrations of homosexual behavior are not welcome in his Grandville, Michigan auto shop.So far Big Government has not felt the need to grind Klawiter under its heel. As survivors of 1930s Germany can attest, freelance thugs will eagerly do the government’s dirty work in the early stages...

A woman of Arab and Jewish descent who was strip-searched at a Detroit-area airport has reached a settlement in a lawsuit filed on her behalf, the American Civil Liberties Union said Tuesday The federal government will give Shoshana Hebshi $40,000 as compensation for being humiliated on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks after armed agents forced her from a plane at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, made her undress during a search and held her for hours. American Civil Liberties Union said Tuesday.

An Ann Arbor Catholic priest announced that he will continue to hold concealed pistol license (CPL) classes at Christ the King parish and urged his parishioners to arm themselves, according to a letter he sent following the announcement of the lessons. The Rev. Ed Fride conducts mass in April 2005 at Christ the King Catholic Church in Ann Arbor.Lon Horwedel | Ann Arbor News file photo  The Rev. Edward Fride, who sent the letter, called upon his parishioners to not allow themselves to "assume that they live in Mayberry [the fictional North Carolina home of Andy Griffith], trusting that because...

People close to Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder have formed a fund allowing him to travel the country to more aggressively tell of the state’s rebound under his watch, raising the prospect of a potential Republican presidential bid. A spokesman for the governor told The Associated Press on Friday that a 501(c)(4) group, Making Government Accountable, was established within the past month. “Once we get into May, the governor will travel more out of the state and promote Michigan, particularly the remarkable economic comeback,” Jarrod Agen said. An aide close to the governor said Snyder is considering a presidential run and...

An outraged mom live tweeted her son's sex education class after becoming outraged by its abstinence only stance. Author Alice Dreger took to Twitter to express her horror at what she heard at East Lansing High School, in Michigan, when she sat in on a lesson earlier this week. Ms Dreger, a respected professor, began furiously tweeting out the contents of the lesson - which was filled with horror stories about what happened to people who have pre-marital sex. MORE AT THE LINK ABOVE... SOME OF HER TWEETS: @alicedreger: Uh oh. They stuck me in the corner with my computer...

Officials worry a monument featuring a gun may be an inappropriate centerpiece in the village park. MILFORD, Mich. -- A veterans group wants to complete the Veterans Memorial in Milford's Central Park with a fallen soldier monument, but the village council isn't sure the piece — which features a pair of boots and a helmet atop an M-16 rifle — is an appropriate focal point for the park.Bear Hall, founder and chairman of the local Friends of American Veterans (FAV), approached the council earlier this month hoping for approval of the plan.The group wants to place a fallen soldier memorial...