Free Republic

Academia is hell. In the latest higher-education fad, students want "trigger warnings," according to The New York Times. It appears that some students are so fragile that they want university staff to protect them from big bad ideas. Students around the country say they want "explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans." An Oberlin College draft -- now "under revision" -- for trigger warnings suggested faculty "be aware of racism,...

Clearly immigration was why we lost in 2012. It had nothing to do with a milquetoast Republican candidate who had been on both sides of so many issues that a good portion of Republican voters just stayed home. No, forget the moderate candidate. It was the Hispanic vote that killed us! Also, I’ve got some unicorns in my back yard I’ll be glad to sell you on the cheap.

Well, it is official. Eric Cantor and John Boehner — particularly Eric Cantor — have decided they don’t need or want conservatives and, more troubling, do not have any intention of trying to win at the polls by forcing Democrat hands on Obamacare. Our leadership is behaving badly. Last week and on Monday I mentioned Rep. Steve King’s effort to repeal Obamacare and start over. He’s filed a discharge petition. If he gets 218 signatures, Nancy Pelosi must hold a vote

SNIP To lead the Republican majority staff, Gowdy selected Philip Kiko, a key aide to Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., when the latter served as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and more recently a registered lobbyist for the Smith-Free Group, a K Street lobbying firm with a diverse roster of clients. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, swiftly welcomed Gowdy’s choice, calling Kiko “a man of unquestioned integrity with a record of distinguished service” in and out of Congress... SNIP However, emails obtained by Fox News show that some conservatives are unhappy with Kiko’s appointment, chiefly because of his recent lobbying...

House Speaker John Boehner’s staff says he has not made a commitment to the White House to move an overhaul of the immigration laws this year, pushing back against comments made this week by a senior advisor in the Obama administration made this week. Valerie Jarrett told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that she thinks there’s a window “this summer, between now and August, to get something done. “We have a commitment from Speaker Boehner, who’s very frustrated with his caucus,” Jarrett told the newspaper. Michael Steel, a spokesman for the Ohio Republican, said Boehner has not made a commitment to...

Surprise action outside Denver's Brown Palace Hotel this morning, as a press release from a coalition of groups including Together Colorado and the Colorado Immigration Reform Coalition (CIRC) explains: Outside a fundraiser headlined by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) for Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO) today, local leaders staged a rally to protest the fact that these three House Republicans are key obstacles standing in the way of immigration reform that would keep Colorado immigrant families together. It has been 322 days since the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration bill, but Speaker Boehner and House...

A black teenager is facing charges as an adult for what authorities are describing as the revenge arson of the home of a white woman and her two children. And his arrest, and that of a juvenile, may be just the tip of the iceberg, authorities say. Already, Thaddeus Shields, 18, is facing a court hearing this week on the count, and a 17-year-old whose name was not released is facing juvenile court. Authorities, meanwhile, say their investigation continues and more perpetrators may be arrested and charged in the attack in Middletown, Ohio. The alleged black-on-white crime earlier this week...

President Barack Obama's top adviser and confidant told a group of global elites on Thursday in Las Vegas, Nevada that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has made a commitment to the White House to try to pass amnesty legislation this year. After hailing the Senate's amnesty bill that the Congressional Budget Office determined would lower the wages of American workers, Valerie Jarrett, Obama's senior advisor, told attendees at the yearly invitation-only SkyBridge Alternatives Conference that Boehner would help the White House make a push get immigration reform enacted in the next three months. “I think we have a window this...

Sal Russo, co-founder of the Tea Party Express, announced his support for amnesty on Wednesday, reversing his organization’s statement from a year ago that it would not take a position on immigration reform. If you take a look at Russo’s background, this isn’t exactly the revelation that some in the media are making it out to be. What’s interesting, though, is the dichotomy between Russo’s position and the principles of the organization he helped to create. The Tea Party Express bills itself as anti-establishment, but Russo’s immigration proposal is nearly identical to the principles pushed by GOP House Leaders --...

A video showing a teen catching a three-foot carp with his hands on a flooded street in northern Ohio is going viral Wednesday. Cleveland TV station WKYC reports that 16-year-old Jake Sawyer caught a grass carp estimated to be 3 feet long and weighing 40 pounds. "The neighbors they pointed out, they saw, like bubbles and stuff moving around over here,” Sawyer told WKYC. “Then eventually we saw the fish actually surface and we saw how big it was.” Luke Sawyer shot the video while his brother grabbed the carp, also known as a white amur, with his bare hands...

Last May, Kelly was asleep in the passenger seat when his friend was pulled over for drunken driving on Interstate 71 between Cincinnati and Columbus, according to The Columbus Dispatch. When Ohio State Trooper Bryan Cook woke Kelly, he was startled and began flailing his arms, according to the lawsuit. Fayette County Deputy Clinton Sines then drew his Taser, opened the passenger door and shouted for Cook to get out of the truck and show his hands as he grabbed the back of Kelly's sweatshirt and tried to pull him out, the lawsuit says. The lawsuit says Sines was apparently...

House Speaker John Boehner would not say Thursday if the House GOP’s campaign arm should stop including the Benghazi attacks in fundraising appeals. Asked three times whether the National Republican Congressional Committee should be fundraising based on what they call Democratic obstruction of the Benghazi investigation, Boehner answered only: “Our focus is on getting the answers to those families who lost their loved ones. Period.” An NRCC email sent Wednesday morning included a link to “become a Benghazi watchdog” – which led to a page where supporters can donate cash. A separate website called “BenghaziWatchdogs.com” still contains a link encouraging...

Rep. Trey Gowdy, the tea party Republican tapped to lead the new committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attacks, made a telling slip Wednesday morning in describing his mission. Asked by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough about the possibility that his panel’s work would continue into the 2016 election campaign, Gowdy replied that “if an administration is slow-walking document production, I can’t end a trial simply because the defense won’t cooperate.” A trial? And the Obama administration is the defense? So much for that “serious investigation” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) promised; his new chairman intends to play prosecutor, proving the administration’s guilt...

..... As veterans from all aspects of Special Operations, we have no doubt that there’s a lot more to what happened in Benghazi than President Obama and his Administration are letting on. From the very beginning, he has attempted to mislead and outright lied to the American people about why the attack on September 11th, 2012 happened, how it happened, and what our government did or did not do to save the lives of our patriots abroad,” former Navy SEAL Captain Larry Bailey wrote in a statement to Breitbart News. The representatives from the retired military community want “a full...

<p>The mainstream, media is still trying to figure out how they are going to push back against the recently-announced House Select Committee that will investigate Benghazi.</p> <p>With polls showing that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe Obama engaged in a cover-up and want the investigations to continue, our media -- that from the beginning have fought to protect Obama, Hillary, and to ensure the truth is never known -- are in a tough spot.</p>

House Speaker John Boehner explained to reporters Wednesday morning that he considers the select committee's investigation into the terrorist attacks in Benghazi a very serious matter. “This is all about getting to the truth. This is not going to be a sideshow. This is not going to be a circus. This is a serious investigation,” Boehner said. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has demanded that, for the sake of fairness, the committee be evenly split between Republicans and Democrats.

The truth can be dangerous. Some extremists will go to great lengths to keep the truth from coming out, even if that means threatening harm to United States Congressman Trey Gowdy. Remember, it is Trey Gowdy who will be leading the House Select Committee into what really happened in Benghazi. Liberals fear that Gowdy, a highly successful prosecutor, will uncover the truth. That is exactly why threats of harm have been made against Congressman Gowdy. Liberals want the truth to remain hidden so they can protect Obama and Hillary Clinton from facing the consequences of their actions. POLITICO reports: The...

Partisan political advantage, gained at the real or potential life-threatening expense of American personnel undertaking high-risk assignments, was the deep moral issue driving prosecutors in the 2005 Valerie Plame name exposure scandal. An even more disturbing and exploitative example of high-level Washington political operatives exposing low-level American field personnel to greater physical risk is the moral issue at the core of the on-going Benghazi scandal. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said national security concerns drove his pursuit of Bush Administration officials involved in exposing Plame's status as a covert CIA agent. For Fitzgerald, Plame's precise operational status at the time her...

Brief press conference from last year when Trey Gowdy indicted the media for their failure in covering the Benghazi attack. Worth a watch. BTW, out of curiosity ... how many of us are motivated to post our complaints about the media here on FR or complain in conversations with others about the feckless media, yet never write letters* or emails or make phone calls to the media to call them out for abrogation of journalistic duty? Can we help stir up some sense of responsibility to inform the public if we constantly nudge them? *Personally, I think a letter is...

Just when you thought the Democrats’ callousness couldn’t get any worse, a Mississippi congressional candidate reaches a new low. Trish Causey, running for the Democrat nomination in MS-4, thought making a “National Masturbation Month” joke about murdered diplomats and Navy Seals was a good campaign move.