Free Republic

... As 'Domestic Extremists' In FOIA'ed Emails An activist is a terrorist, at least according to Senior Police Officer Justin Berry of the Austin Police Dept. While the terms aren't mutually exclusive, a person can be one without being the other. In Berry's mind, they're both, and he feeds off the FBI's paranoia to reach his conclusion.

KANSAS CITY Mo. (Reuters) - A Kansas City man was charged on Wednesday with trying to fire-bomb the local office of Missouri U.S. Democratic Representative Emanuel Cleaver using two bottles filled with charcoal lighter fluid, prosecutors said.

After forgiving millions of dollars in medical debt, Occupy Wall Street is tackling a new beast: student loans. Marking the third anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the group's Strike Debt initiative announced Wednesday it has abolished $3.8 million worth of private student loan debt since January. It said it has been buying the debts for pennies on the dollar from debt collectors, and then simply forgiving that money rather than trying to collect it. In total, the group spent a little more than $100,000 to purchase the $3.8 million in debt. While the group is unable to purchase...

The movement descends into litigation. “We can either go and beat him up or we can go to court.” WASHINGTON — Activists who organized the dormant Occupy Wall Street movement are suing another activist for control of the main Twitter account, and one of the plaintiffs says there was no other option but to turn to litigation to solve the dispute. The conflict centers around @OccupyWallStNYC, one of the main Twitter feeds that distributed information during the movement’s heyday in 2011. The OWS Media Group filed a lawsuit against organizer Justin Wedes on Wednesday, which is also the third anniversary...

Do you remember Occupy Wall Street and its many imitators across North America? It was three years ago next week that the movement went public and eventually set up tent cities across the continent. People camped out in parks, they held marches and meetings and demanded change. They demanded the one percenters pay their fair share. It was supposedly a grassroots reaction to the bailout of big business, the fat cats that run the banks. But of course we know those bailouts happened in 2007 and 2008 and Occupy, some might say the left's answer to the Tea Party, didn't...

Think of every area where the GOP has strayed from its conservative roots. The bailouts. TARP. Out-of-control government spying. Job-killing corporate cronyism. There is one man in Congress consistently saying “no” to making government bigger and less accountable. His name is Justin Amash, and the establishment has taken notice. Big business wants to ensure voters elect Republicans who will keep the perks flowing -- from taxpayers’ bank accounts and right to their pockets. They’ve even created a feel-good way to describe such a Republican: Pro-business. And that’s exactly the kind of guy they’ve found in Amash’s primary challenger. Amash goes...

A Washington Post story headlined “Not Their Grandfather’s Protest” sought to depict the Ferguson riots, triggered by the fatal shooting of a black youth by a white police officer, as a new generation of the Civil Rights movement. Not so. As much as we mourn the tragic death of Michael Brown, we can’t help noticing that the mob in Ferguson was destructive, hateful, and only too eager to liquidate small businesses that provided a livelihood for people whose only sin was doing business in Ferguson, Mo. Watching the Ferguson riots on TV, I spotted a sign that said, “Begin the...

Israel is considering launching another heavy ground offensive into Gaza, Communications Minister Gilad Erdan (Likud) indicated Saturday, in the wake of renewed rocket fire and an exodus of Negev residents from their homes. "Has the decision been made? No," Erdan stated to Channel 2 News. "But we are closer to it than we ever have been." A ground offensive would be the most extensive so far since the 2005 Disengagement, Erdan said. No matter what, he stressed, Israel would take action. "We are committed to this operation, and making sure it does not revert to how life was before," Erdan...

EMERGENCY PR: NATIONAL DAY OF RAGE DATE: THURSDAY, AUGUST 21 2014 7PM ET, 6PM CT, 5PM MT, 4PM PT IF YOUR CITY IS NOT LISTED, MAKE A FACEBOOK EVENT FOR IT NOW. WE ARE ANONYMOUS. JUSTICE AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has issued a bulletin drawing attention to the hactivist group Anonymous’ plans for nationwide protests against the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.The group has called for a “National Day of Rage” on Thursday to span 38 major U.S. cities.The Threat Management Division of the Federal Protective Service issued the bulletin.“Currently there is no indication that protests are expected to become violent. However, recent protests in Ferguson have resulted in violence, property damage and subsequent arrests,” the bulletin reads.Brown was shot by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9. Wilson...

SACRAMENTO -- David A.R. Barnitz surveys the lawn on the north side of the State Capitol--the handful of tents, the small circle of activists seated in the shade. This is not "the nirvana I was hoping for," he admits. Still, as roughly 50 people gathered Thursday in the sweltering 97-degree heat for the start of the four-day Occupy National Gathering, he was encouraged by the "unity" and "sense of purpose" among those present. "It's Occupy in its evolutionary stages," he says hopefully. In the fall of 2011, thousands gathered in lower Manhattan for Occupy Wall Street, and thousands more staged...

After the so-called death of the Occupy movement, political activism is making a comeback in Sacramento. In June and July, law enforcement arrested 47 protesters over 12 days at the state Capitol. Those hauled away were members of the newly formed 99Rise movement. They peacefully remained in the building under the rotunda after curfew, in solidarity with their goal of getting big money out of politics. That hasn’t happened yet, of course, but the protesters made headlines by lobbying a few bills—and actually getting two passed. Some of these activists marched nearly 500 miles from Los Angeles to Sacramento, and...

The celebrating began before the coroner could collect the bodies of Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo, the Las Vegas patrol officers ambushed and executed while eating at a pizzeria last month. “The good news is, there are two less police in the world,” read an entry on the Facebook page for CopBlock.org. The post was visible for less than a day, but it attracted at least 6,300 likes and comments by the time the page’s administrators removed it. Jerad Miller — who along with his wife, Amanda, gunned down the Vegas police officers before dying during a shootout with police...

After supposed RINO Thad Cochran relied in part on African-American voters to defeat Tea Party favorite Chris McDaniel and win the Mississippi GOP’s nomination to the Senate, FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe was very upset. Kibbe was so angry, in fact, that he was moved to petulantly declare, “If the only way the K Street wing of the GOP establishment can win is by courting Democrats to vote in GOP primaries then we’ve already won.” This Black Knight-like declaration of victory following conspicuous defeat was widely mocked as yet another example of the Tea Party’s preference to curate reality.

Representatives of the international coalition No Patents on Seeds! from France, Germany and Spain have filed an opposition against a European patent held by Monsanto on conventionally bred tomatoes (EP1812575). The patent claims tomatoes with a natural resistance to a fungal disease called botrytis. The original tomatoes used for this patent came from the international gene bank in Gatersleben, Germany. It was already known that these plants had the desired resistance and they were simply crossed with other tomato plants. Monsanto then produced a cleverly worded patent in order to create the impression that genetic engineering had been used to...

Social media makes it easier and cheaper to build movements quickly – but bypassing the business of creating decision-making infrastructure means they can disappear just as fast.Where have all the chanters gone; the gospel-minded Christians and the denouncers of ‘banksters’ and tyrants; the homeless and the indebted and unemployed who filled our urban squares in 2011-12, crying out such slogans as "We are the 99 percent" and "The people want the end of the regime"? Where are the leaderless revolutionaries who turned cities around the world upside down? The simple answer is: they were dispersed. When the sometimes public parks...

Every. Damn. Time. Tucked away in their backstory of anti-social behavior, an inconvenient nugget of truth about the couple responsible for killing three people, including two police officers, in Las Vegas:

Big Business does some things that are utterly necessary in modern society. They build airplanes and cars. They run airlines, phone companies, credit card companies and banks. But there is not a person among us, including employees of big businesses, that has not withered with frustration from confronting these businesses with a problem and then receiving little or no results. Even though big businesses get the most attention, the vast majority of people in the U.S. work for small businesses. Small businesses by nature are more reactive and responsive to their customers. They are closer to the customer and more...

As the fallout from Rep. Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) stunning primary loss continues to settle, one of the many entrenched interests feeling suddenly insecure about their position in the American hierarchy is big business. For some, like the aviation giant Boeing, Cantor was a reliable friend. With his loss, that company’s prospects, along with its share price, have crumpled. “Mr. Cantor’s loss is much more than just symbolism,” the Times reported on Saturday. “He has been one of Wall Street’s most reliable benefactors in Congress. And Mr. Brat used that fact to deride the majority leader as someone who has rigged...

The world was a beautiful place as Bill de Blasio folded himself into the front passenger seat of a black SUV. The late-afternoon sun was shining on Park Slope, and a grand political breakthrough was within reach. Sure, it had been a complicated few weeks as Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Working Families Party, bitter codependents, tried to agree on a deal that would give Cuomo the WFP’s ballot line this fall in exchange for the governor’s publicly pledging to get behind a progressive policy agenda. Now, though, thanks in part to de Blasio’s mediation, a compromise was falling into...