Free Republic

These are dirty secrets the progressive Left and social justice warriors would rather you didn’t know. But the cat is now out of the bag. Omar Mateen wasn’t just a homophobe, by the way. He was also a misogynist – a real one, not someone who offends feminists on Twitter – who repeatedly beat his ex-wife while they were married. Of course, as we saw in Cologne six months ago, this sort of behaviour is also the norm in Muslim cultures. Needless to say, the Left is silent on the subject. A lot of people laughed at Donald Trump when...

(NEWSER) – The ship was fashioned after the Titanic, and met an end no less tragic, but the tale of the Cap Arcona—and the thousands of concentration-camp prisoners who lost their lives aboard it—is one you've likely never heard. The "Nazi Titanic" gets its due in a new book of the same name by Robert P. Watson, a historian and professor at Florida's Lynn University. The German luxury liner was built in 1927 and traversed the Atlantic 91 times, reports the Columbus Dispatch in a review of the book. During WWII, it played the role of the Titanic in a...

link only: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027900304

"Sometimes he would go over in the corner and sit and drink by himself, and other times he would get so drunk he was loud and belligerent," said Ty Smith, who also uses the name Aries. He saw Mateen at the club at least a dozen times, he told the Orlando Sentinel. "We didn't really talk to him a lot, but I remember him saying things about his dad at times," Smith said. "He told us he had a wife and child." Orlando Police Chief John Mina said he had no information about those visits.

WE are about to make the biggest ­political decision of our lives. The Sun urges everyone to vote LEAVE. We must set ourselves free from dictatorial Brussels. Throughout our 43-year membership of the European Union it has proved increasingly greedy, wasteful, bullying and breathtakingly incompetent in a crisis. Next Thursday, at the ballot box, we can correct this huge and ­historic mistake. It is our last chance. Because, be in no doubt, our future looks far bleaker if we stay in Outside the EU we can become richer, safer and free at long last to forge our own destiny —...

The ATF confirmed that Mateen obtained his guns at the center a few days before Sunday morning’s atrocity in Orlando, 125 miles to the northwest. The center offers free range time for anyone who has just bought weapons there. The St. Lucie Shooting Center is owned by retired New York City cop Edward Henson Henson, who refused to refer to Mateen by name calling him ‘an evil person’ said he could could have legally purchased the guns anywhere The center offers free range time for anyone who buys weapons there ‘He was really blasting it,’ said a patron practicing next...

Witnesses are reporting gunfire and explosions in the Paris suburb commune of Magnanville. French special police have surrounded a house where a man is holding hostages. The attacker stabbed the home owner, a police officer who was reportedly his neighbor.

A former Republican senator is endorsing Hillary Clinton for president after the mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., citing her support for gun control. Former Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.) called for universal background checks on all gun sales and an assault weapons ban Monday in the wake of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. “I can’t believe I’m endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, but I am,” said Pressler, who spoke with The Hill on Monday after endorsing Clinton in a statement issued over the weekend. “This morning, I woke up and told my wife, ‘Did I really do that?’” he...

PITTSBURGH — U.S. Sen. Bob Casey has unveiled legislation that would ban gun sales to those who commit misdemeanor hate crimes. Casey was joined at a press conference Monday morning in Pittsburgh by Mayor Bill Peduto for the announcement. “We may not be able to extinguish all hate, but we can take action to limit the damage so we don’t have to have these types of press conferences in the future,” Peduto said. The Hate Crimes Prevention Act denies the use of a gun to anyone who has been convicted of a misdemeanor hate crime under federal, state or tribal...

Second, sadly it is religion, including our own, that targets, mostly verbally, and often breeds contempt for gays, lesbians and transgender people. Attacks today on LGBT men and women often plant the seed of contempt, then hatred, which can ultimately lead to violence. *** Even before I knew who perpetrated the mass murders at Pulse, I knew that somewhere in the story there would be a search for religion as motivation. While deranged people do senseless things, all of us observe and judge and act from some kind of religious background. Singling out people for victimization because of their religion,...

Link only: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-13/christie-pans-democratic-proposal-to-double-new-jersey-gas-tax

Reliable intelligence sources in the West have indicated that warnings had been received that the Russian Government could in the near future release the text of email messages intercepted from U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server from the time she was U.S. Secretary of State. The release would, the messaging indicated, prove that Secretary Clinton had, in fact, laid open U.S. secrets to foreign interception by putting highly-classified Government reports onto a private server in violation of U.S. law, and that, as suspected, the server had been targeted and hacked by foreign intelligence services. The reports indicated that...

After leaving my 15 year career at DHS, I can no longer be silent about the dangerous state of America’s counter-terror strategy, our leaders’ willingness to compromise the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness—and, consequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack.

If you’re a regular reader, you have likely intuited that my top choices for president were Sen. Rand Paul and Sen. Ted Cruz. But I refuse to join the “Never Trump” crowd and feel drawn to explain why—so that you too may decide. Trump has many issues, which I’ve shared in previous columns. But most are in the open. And, he has notable positives. Hillary, on the other hand, kept her emails on a private server in an obscure Colorado bathroom and conveniently deleted some 30,000 emails—claiming they were “personal.” To date, the most notable third party candidate—Libertarian Gary Johnson—is...

Rebel forces in southern Sudan began using child soldiers long before seceding from Sudan in 2011. The United States, on the other hand, passed a law in 2008 that banned providing military assistance to nations that use child soldiers. The law was called the Child Soldiers Prevention Act, or CSPA, but after South Sudan’s independence, the White House issued annual waivers that kept aid flowing to the world’s newest nation despite its use of child soldiers. President Obama stated in 2012 that the waiver that year was in “the national interest of the United States.” The president’s move was criticized...

President Obama spoke to reporters Monday about the terrorist attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando and said Omar Mateen had a “Glock which had a lot of clips in it.” Obama also said Mateen had an “assault rifle.” According to CNN, the President explained that Mateen acquired his guns via a background check. And he explained that the background check did not stop Manteen “because he did not have a criminal record that in some ways would prohibit him from purchasing” his weapons.

But while critics have subjected her record to close examination, they haven’t given the June 2 speech itself the attention it deserves beyond quoting the zingers hurled Trump’s way. Yet everything about her flawed methodology is right there in that one 35-minute talk – the misguided logic, the ill-considered assumptions, the one-sided worldview that consistently leads her into trouble. Essentially, the speech is an ode to international friendship without recognizing how some of those “entangling alliances” have helped tie U.S. foreign policy into knots. As Clinton put it: “America’s network of allies is part of what makes us exceptional. And...

In Part 1 we established the rather obvious point that in today’s world of flexible just-in-time production, hours-based labor scheduling and gig-based employment patterns, there is really no such standardized labor unit as a “job”. Accordingly, the headcount-centered metrics of the BLS, such as the U-3 unemployment rate and the nonfarm payroll numbers, are a relic of a half-century ago world of mines, factories, warehouses and retail shops where a 40+ hour workweek on a year round basis was the standard practice. In that context, a simple paint-by-the-numbers exercise demonstrates the foolishness of the Fed’s obsession with hitting a quantitative...

MINNEAPOLIS – A federal appeals court on Monday threw out $1.8 million in damages awarded to former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, who said he was defamed by the late author Chris Kyle in the bestselling book "American Sniper." The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also sent a portion of the case -- Ventura's defamation claim -- back to the district court for a new trial, saying Ventura's attorneys made improper remarks and the trial court "clearly abused its discretion in denying a new trial."

Missing in all the media frenzy over the horrific murder of 49 patrons at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, early Sunday morning was any mention of this, from Florida’s concealed weapons statute, Title XLVI, Chapter 790, Section (12)(a): A license issued under this section does not authorize any person to openly carry a handgun or carry a concealed weapon or firearm into any portion of an establishment licensed to dispense alcoholic beverages for consumption on the premises. In other words, politicians who voted to guarantee that those patrons would have little opportunity to defend themselves against Omar Mateen’s attack...