Free Republic

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said Wednesday the odds are "50-50" that he will enter the 2016 presidential race. "I'm certainly not ruling it out," King said during an appearance on CNN's "Wolf." "Right now I'm sort of 50-50." King said he intended to make his decision by the end of June.

Meet Ahmed Mohammed. .....He might be the most expensive hot dog vendor in New York, especially if he thinks you're a tourist. NBC 4 New York cameras recently captured him trying to charge a man named David $15 for a hot dog and a pretzel near the World Trade Center. Customer after customer recounted how the vendor tried to charge them $20 to $30 for a hot dog.

Submit to the Lord and you will find, Breakthrough of a new kind, For in submission Heaven becomes clear, And you will see into things others fear, For The Father's Heart is Pure Above All, And only The Holy may access and call, For The Eyes of The Cherubim guard what is pure, So only the Holy are able to endure . . . Isaiah 6:5-8 5 Then said I, Woe is me! For I am undone and ruined, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for...

A man who ran for Congress last year in East Tennessee has pleaded guilty to plotting an attack on a small Muslim enclave in New York. Federal agents began investigating Robert Doggart of Signal Mountain following a Facebook posting in which he claimed a community outside of Hancock, New York, was planning a terrorist attack and "must be utterly destroyed," according to the plea agreement entered last month.

The New York Times has an article worth reading discussing EPA’s efforts to influence comments submitted to them by the public regarding the agency’s and Army Corps of Engineers’ proposal to redefine “Waters of the United States (WOTUS).” Notably, Gina McCarthy, administrator of EPA, went before a Senate committee earlier this year touting the fact that almost 90 percent of all comments submitted expressed support for the rule as proposed. It turns out that many of these comments were submitted as a result of an unprecedented outreach initiative, which is being led by a former Obama campaign staffer. Thunderclap (a...

Latin Post presents "Turnout," a series featuring leading Latino politicians, government leaders and advocacy groups discussing and debating the most important issues facing the Latino voting bloc. Listen to the Unedited "Turnout" Interview with People for the American Way's Coordinator for Political Campaigns Carlos Sanchez:(AUDIO-AND-VIDEO-AT-LINK)More than two-thirds of the U.S. Latino electorate live in six states -- Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas -- but one progressive advocacy organization has been working on having anti-Latino and anti-immigrant representatives accountable and heard for Latinos across the country, especially for the presidential election season. With people entering their names for...

A New York City arts center has canceled a planned event intended to protest censorship after one of the scheduled plays, “‘Mohammed’ Gets A Boner,” was deemed too offensive to Muslims.

A new Rasmussen poll has found that First Lady Michelle Obama would be the strongest challenger to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton if she chose to run in 2016. According to Rasmussen: In a hypothetical matchup with Hillary Clinton, the putative Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, Obama earns 44% support from black voters to Clinton’s 36%. Among Likely Democratic Voters, it’s Clinton 56%, Obama 22%. That appears to be a better showing against Clinton than Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the only other announced Democratic presidential candidate, makes at this point. Among all voters, Clinton earns 37% support to Obama’s 17%....

All 20 Republican lawmakers who voted against an amendment that prevents illegals from enlisting in the U.S. military refused to answer questions from Breitbart News regarding the expedited citizenship most illegals would have been eligible for once they joined the armed forces. They also each refused to answer whether they agree with House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) calling their Republican colleagues who voted for the amendment “xenophobic” and “un-American.” That means that for now, the 20 Republicans who defected and joined Democrats in opposing the amendment are allowing Pelosi’s comments to remain unchallenged. ... There is a core...

Wary Of Police-Community Relations, City Council Says Idea Deserves Consideration.(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Police Commissioner Bill Bratton is behind a controversial proposal to grant amnesty to more than 1 million people with open warrants for low-level offenses. But some experts worry it could cause crime to skyrocket. First he called for reduced penalties for smoking marijuana. Now, Bratton wants to explore granting amnesty to 1.2 million city residents with open warrants for low-level offenses, people who run the risk of being arrested for failing to resolve tickets for drinking in public, disorderly conduct and the like, CBS2’s Marcia Kramer reported Monday. There is one...

On May 18, 1891, a lovely spring day, at 3 o’clock, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky arrived in Philadelphia without fanfare. There was to be a concert of his music that evening, the last he would conduct in the United States. The dervish tour had begun on April 26 in New York City, where he had been invited by Walter Damrosch, director of the New York Symphony for the grand opening of what was then called “Music Hall” (later to be formally designated as Carnegie Hall). That invitation was supported by no less a luminary than Andrew Carnegie himself. In New York,...

The groom and groom strolled down the aisle to the mellow strains of “Mr. Sandman.” Wearing her black robe with her signature white lace collar, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg presided over the marriage on Sunday afternoon of Michael Kahn, the longtime artistic director of the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, and Charles Mitchem, who works at an architecture firm in New York. The gilded setting was elegant: Anderson House in the Embassy Row neighborhood, the headquarters in Washington of the Society of the Cincinnati, a club for the descendants of the French and American soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary...

Paul Krugman: Thanks to Jeb Bush, we may finally have the frank discussion of the Iraq invasion we should have had a decade ago. But many influential people — not just Mr. Bush — would prefer that we not have that discussion. There’s a palpable sense right now of the political and media elite trying to draw a line under the subject. Yes, the narrative goes, we now know that invading Iraq was a terrible mistake, and it’s about time that everyone admits it. Now let’s move on. Well, let’s not — because that’s a false narrative, and everyone who...

New York City police chief Bill Bratton is worried about ISIS. So worried, in fact, that he's going to assign 450 New York Police Department cops to fight terrororism that may come from the Islamic State. “We need to be very concerned about terrorism … The significantly increased threat from ISIS using social media to recruit people not only to go to Syria to fight, but encouraging people … to attack police, to attack government officials, to basically brainwash them under their screwed-up ideology. That threat has expanded significantly in the now 16 months I’ve been police commissioner,” Bratton said...

A video first posted on Facebook on Friday of NYPD officers driving away from an arrest after an angry confrontation with bystanders is starting to get some attention. Video here from the Free Thought Project. In the video, police officers from the 30th precinct in Harlem are seen questioning a reported 14-year-old girl over a false alarm on a police call box. It looks like the officers were about to leave the scene after questioning the girl without taking any action, but an argument between the girl, bystanders and the cops ensued and at the 6:15 mark, the driver of the unmarked police...

WHEN our family moved from the West Village to the Upper East Side in 2004, seeking proximity to Central Park, my in-laws and a good public school, I thought it unlikely that the neighborhood would hold any big surprises. For many years I had immersed myself — through interviews, reviews of the anthropological literature and participant-observation — in the lives of women from the Amazon basin to sororities at a Big Ten school. I thought I knew from foreign. Then I met the women I came to call the Glam SAHMs, for glamorous stay-at-home-moms, of my new habitat. My culture...

Saudi Arabia will join the nuclear club by buying “off the shelf” atomic weapons from Pakistan, US officials told a London newspaper.

City Comptroller Scott Stringer laid out the grim facts last week on how the most progressive law in decades means disaster for New York City. The bottom line of Stringer’s report: Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare, Uncle Sam will cut more than $800 million in payments to the city’s Health and Hospitals Corp, by Fiscal Year 2019. The president’s signature law slashes federal payments that long helped out hospitals serving lots of patients who lack insurance. The idea was that the law would boost coverage so dramatically the aid would be unnecessary. Except that illegal immigrants don’t...

Make sure your smoke alarms work: The FDNY may be about to get a lot less reliable. As The Post’s Michael Gartland reportedThursday, the department is tweaking its fitness exam for recruits in ways that will make it easier to pass. This raises fears that new firefighters might be less fit — and less qualified for the grueling task of fighting a New York City-size blaze. Trainees, for example, won’t be asked to complete as many exercises meant to simulate pulling down a ceiling. And a reordering of the tasks on the test — supposedly to better represent actual firefighting conditions...

A rapper was shot multiple times and killed and his passenger was critically wounded as he drove a Porsche down a Queens boulevard early Sunday, a police source said. Lionel Pickens, who goes by the stage name Chinx, was shot several times in the body and his 27-year-old passenger was hit twice in the back about 4 a.m. as they traveled on Queens Blvd. at 84th Dr. in Briarwood, cops said.