Free Republic

Sheesh! Talk about a cheap shot. If former New Mexico governor and Clinton cabinet member Bill Richardson dislikes Jeb Bush, at least criticize him for something plausible. Instead, Richardson took a cheap shot at Jeb Bush on Meet The Press today for supposedly having a poor ability to speak Spanish. Really, Bill? Because the video below of Bush speaking Spanish during an interview with Univision's Jorge Ramos clearly demonstrates a high degree of fluency in that language.

Who Really Discovered America? Did ancient Hebrews reach the shores of the North and South American continents thousands of years before Christopher Columbus? What evidence is there for Hebrew and Israelite occupation of the Western Hemisphere even a thousand years before Christ? Was trans-Atlantic commerce and travel fairly routine in the days of king Solomon of Israel? Read here the intriguing, fascinating saga of the TRUE DISCOVERERS OF AMERICA! William F. Dankenbring A stone in a dry creek bed in New Mexico, discovered by early settlers in the region, is one of the most amazing archaeological discoveries in the Western...

In this case out of New Mexico, a man was found not guilty, but only after the prosecution did everything they could to convict him.  It would have been a straightforward case of defense of self and others if he had refrained from making frivolous threats before the incident.  From daily-times.com: AZTEC — After six hours of deliberation Friday, a jury found David Markham not guilty on all criminal charges, including first-degree murder, in the 2011 fatal shooting of Christopher Lucero. Following a weeklong trial, the jury determined Markham, 60, acted in defense of himself and Leandra Tafoya when...

A New Mexico high school teacher has left her job after a student rewrote the biblical story about Jesus handing out bread and fish to the poor into a narrative about Jesus handing out marijuana to the sick. Katrina Guarascio, a creative writing teacher at Cleveland High School in the Albuquerque suburb of Rio Rancho, had assigned students to take a fairy tale or legend and rewrite it in modern times. …

Albuquerque Police detectives believe they have probable cause to file felony charges against District Attorney Kari Brandenburg for violating the state law prohibiting bribery and intimidation of a witness in connection with burglary cases involving her 26-year-old son, Justin Koch. For the last year, detectives have been investigating Brandenburg for her role in contacting victims in two burglaries and a larceny in which her son was a suspect – cases that involve thousands of dollars in property, including a 9mm Smith & Wesson. In late November, APD forwarded its lengthy case file to the state Attorney General’s Office for review...

Photographs supplied by Valerie Caldwell. Alyssa Caldwell and her father had been hunting all day.   The weather had been nasty; cloudy skies with snow and rain alternating.   They had seen a few elk, much too far away to take a shot.   They left their makeshift blind to see if they could spot another elk before the end of the day.   It was the middle of the afternoon. At 12, Alyssa was already an experienced huntress.   She had started shooting at 5, and had a new rifle, a stainless Howa 1500, as her elk gun.  They...

Transfer of Public Lands Act’ demands Washington relinquish 31.2 million acres by Dec. 31. In three weeks, Utah intends to seize control of 31.2 million acres of its own land now under the control of the federal government. At least, that’s the plan. In an unprecedented challenge to federal dominance of Western state lands, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert in 2012 signed the “Transfer of Public Lands Act,” which demands that Washington relinquish its hold on the land, which represents more than half of the state’s 54.3 million acres, by Dec. 31. ... With the 2012 law, Utah placed itself on...

Fear of being arrested and deported, family separation, and poverty just some of the daily anxieties faced by an estimated 11 million undocumented people living in the U.S. The stress can also take a toll on mental health. New Mexico State University Family & Child Science professor Kourtney Vaillancourt says the psychological impact of living undocumented goes even further...and can adversely affect mental health. "There is those additional stressors of being seperated from family, there is the stressors of kind of living in an ambigious state where you are not exactly sure what is going to happen. You may not...

Letters from the IRS to tea party-related organizations in Oklahoma City and Albuquerque, New Mexico show that IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C., and two satellite offices in California, were directly involved with sending harassing letters to conservative organizations that sought tax-exempt status. The IRS has acknowledged only the involvement of its Exempt Organizations office in Cincinnati, Ohio, which typically makes most decisions about granting or denying tax-exempt status to non-profit organizations. And Wednesday afternoon, CNN cited a congressional source in reporting that the acting IRS Commissioner – whom President Obama fired later in the day – had identified two 'rogue'...

How might you feel if you had performed, with your bosses’ permission and direction, a project that they later blamed on you and publicly denounced as a rogue operation? That’s the situation in which some employees of the Cincinnati’s IRS office find themselves. The IRS and the Obama administration have repeatedly said that low-level, “rogue” employees in Cincinnati were to blame for the agency’s inappropriate targeting of conservative groups, despite an array of evidence to the contrary. As a result, those Cincinnati employees are understandably miffed. Several IRS employees in the Cincinnati field office acknowledge in recent interviews with the...

TITLE:Documents: IRS letters harassing conservative groups came from Washington, DC headquarters and from California offices, despite Inspector General's focus on Cincinnati employees Tax agency has admitted targeting tea party groups and other conservative organizations for special, politically motivated scrutiny IRS inspector general focused on wrongdoing in Cincinnati, Ohio office and ignored abusive letters coming from other cities MailOnline found letters from IRS's Washington, D.C. headquarters, and from IRS offices in two southern California cities The American Center on Law and Justice is threatening to sue the IRS if 27 tea party groups aren't granted tax-exempt statuses by Friday Letters from...

An abortionist who travels to a clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico has called killing a pre-born child in the womb a “good parenting act” in an effort to explain why she performs abortions weeks after most states restrict the procedure. Abortionist Susan Robinson tells GritTV’s Laura Flanders that she lives in California but travels to Albuquerque, New Mexico where she is one of only a few abortion doctors willing to kill babies in the later stages of pregnancy. In the interview, which focuses on her role in the abortion documentary film After Tiller, Flanders asks abortionist Robinson what types of...

A Las Cruces, NM abortion facility opened its doors last month without applying for a business license, submitting proper paperwork only after they asked for increased police presence to deter protesters and city officials cried foul. In an email exchange obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the Thomas More Society, Project Director Mary Frank of the Whole Woman’s Health abortion clinic requested more frequent patrols from local police upon their opening October 13. “Good morning gentlemen,” begins the note from Mary Frank, “we will be holding our first clinic on Thursday 10/16 and Sat. 10/18.” “We...

Federal officials within weeks plan to start construction on a new "virtual fence" along the U.S.-Mexico border. Plans are expected to be formally announced tomorrow. Supporters say the system could almost completely cover the nearly 2,000-mile frontier within five years. The first permanent towers with sensors, cameras and communications gear to detect drug smugglers and illegal immigrants will be built along 53 miles of Arizona. Customs official Mark Borkowski says more towers will follow on the remaining 320 miles of Arizona's southern border. Borkowski says virtual fencing then will go up in New Mexico, followed by California and most of...

Today I was visited by a young man who claimed his brother was killed in Afghanistan. He claimed his brother was a Rifleman and gave the 0311 MOS. I don't recall the unit he claimed his brother was with.Something about his story just raised a red flag.The claim was he was raising money to send care packages to troops. I thanked him, told him I was sorry about his brother, but that I wanted to check the website first.The site on his "receipts" stated the charity's site was www.thepatriotproject.com (which I found didn't exist), but the man said it was...

Alyssa Caldwell and her father, Joshua, were heading to what they hoped would be a great spot for Alyssa to take a nice bull elk on the edge of a meadow in New Mexico's Unit 52, just south of the Colorado border. After hunting a makeshift aspen blind over a waterhole, dad and daughter decided to stalk to a meadow and see if any elk had come to feed lower on the mountain. However, after about 200 yards, Joshua realized he had forgotten the shooting sticks in the blind. "I decided to head back up to grab them and told...

On immigration, the GOP primary will have little room for nuance. President Obama on Thursday announced his much-anticipated executive action on immigration, and in doing so he lobbed a grenade squarely into the 2016 Republican primary race. Obama's order will reshape how the feds prioritize deportations of undocumented workers, shielding an estimated five million of them from being kicked out of the country. "We shall not oppress a stranger for we know the heart of a stranger — we were strangers once, too," Obama said, quoting scripture. By moving ahead solo before the new Congress is sworn in, Obama ensured...

Sen. Ted Cruz is lobbying hard to prevent government regulation of the Internet, but one measure the Texas Republican supports is expected to create a sizeable budget hole for his state. Cruz, a likely presidential candidate in 2016, spent ample time last week promoting a permanent extension to an expiring ban on federal, state, and local taxation of Internet access that is currently being considered in Congress. The measure, which passed the House earlier this year, is popular in both parties and considered a lame-duck "must pass," as the ban is set to lift on Dec. 11. But a lesser-known...

Thursday on Newmax TV's "America's Forum," Artesia, NM Mayor Phillip Burch said since the cases from his town's detention center have been handed over from Virginia judges to judges in Colorado they are now simply housing, feeding, providing clothing and schooling to illegal immigrants until 95 percent are being handed bus or plane tickets to locations within the Untied States of their choosing. The mayor said when he was visited by Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson he was told there would be "a rapid detention process," but now the mayor is happy the detention center in his town is being...

When it came time for the US Senate to vote on the Keystone XL Pipeline, Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-LA) “clout” did not have much of an impact on fellow Democrat senators. In fact, 35 of the senators who voted against the project were given campaign cash by Landrieu since the 2008 election cycle. Take a look here at the list of senators who don’t seem to acknowledge Landrieu’s “clout.” Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) $10,000 Sen. Richard Blumenthal (R-CT) $5,000 Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) $10,000 Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) $7,000 Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) $10,000 Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) $3,500 Sen....