Free Republic

Social conservatives are making a last-ditch effort to stop Republicans who support gay marriage, looking to torpedo their campaigns ahead of next month’s elections. But they don't just have 2014 in their sights — they’re already turning one eye to 2016, with the goal of defeating pro-gay marriage Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio). The National Organization for Marriage is making robocalls attacking a trio of socially liberal Republicans, including a pair of openly gay House candidates, California’s Carl DeMaio and Massachusetts’ Richard Tisei, plus Oregon Senate nominee Monica Wehby, who supports same-sex marriage. The organization is also openly discussing ways to...

AKRON, Ohio — Akron school officials announced that Resnik CLC was closed Thursday as a precaution after a student’s mother had contact with Ebola patient Amber Vinson. Details of their contact were not made available. The student was in voluntary quarantine along with his/her mother. The health department did not order the school to close, rather the district made the decision as a precaution. It will remain closed until Oct. 20. BRECKSVILLE, Ohio — The PNC Bank processing center in Brecksville will be closed today as a precaution after learning an employee traveled on one of the same planes as...

A Northeast Ohio area teacher was on board the same plane that carried Amber Vinson, the Dallas nurse who travelled through Cleveland and was hours later diagnosed with Ebola virus. Two Solon schools announced that they will be closed on Thursday as a precaution after learning that a Solon Middle School staff member traveled home from Dallas on Frontier Airlines on Tuesday on a different flight, and an elementary teacher from Cleveland who confirmed contact with an Ebola infected person will be staying home from work until cleared by health officials to return to work. Solon sent the following email...

Northeast Ohio hospitals released the following information Wednesday night after a Dallas nurse traveled through Cleveland before being diagnosed with Ebola. “Today, we learned that Cleveland Clinic and The MetroHealth System had employees – mostly nurses – aboard the Frontier flight from Dallas to Cleveland on October 10, returning from a nursing conference in Texas. That flight included the Dallas nurse who was diagnosed with Ebola when she returned to Dallas on October 13. Both health systems have put all of our employees who were on that flight on paid leave while we will monitor their health daily. We are...

Amber Joy Vinson CLEVELAND, Ohio – Did you spot or make contact with Dallas Ebola patient Amber Joy Vinson during her recent trip to Ohio? Vinson, 29, was diagnosed with Ebola this week after visiting family in Akron. She came to the region last week and returned to Dallas Monday on a Frontier Airlines flight out of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport....

Five suburban Ohio teenage boys were charged Tuesday with dumping a bucket of urine, water and tobacco spit on an autistic 15-year-old boy who thought he was participating in the ice bucket challenge for charity. The Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office filed the charges in juvenile court against the teens, who are between the ages of 14 and 16.

This story is developing. Please check back for further updates.

2nd health care worker with Ebola flew from Cleveland to Dallas on Frontier Airlines the day before presenting symptoms, according to CDC, Frontier - @NBCNews

FULL TITLE: Ohio televangelist ‘forced members to have vasectomies and abortions, told women to treat pregnancies as tumors and allowed children to be sexually abused’ Televangelist Ernest Angley has been accused of running an Ohio church where men are forced to get vasectomies and women abortions, and where children were sexually abused. Self-proclaimed prophet Angley has been described by some of 21 former members as a closeted-homosexual Jim Jones who's turned a blind eye to sexual abuse. But the 93-year-old has defended the allegations, saying he is simply an instrument of God. He told the Akron Beacon Journal: 'I'm not...

Athens County Sheriff's Lt. Steve Sedwick had never seen anything like it. Around 5 a.m. Wednesday, as he was leaving Athens to head toward Albany to patrol, Sedwick spotted four deer carcasses lying in the middle of the highway exit lane. The bizarre site was on the exit for Ohio Rt. 682 off of Rt. 32/50/33, the main highway through Athens. "I caught something in the corner of my eye as I drove by and it looked like there was something laying in the middle of the road," he said Friday. "So I stopped and backed up - I...

House Speaker John Boehner has denounced any potential White House effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, saying that such a move is "dangerous," could result in terrorists being relocated into the United States and that overriding Congress is another example of the Obama administration’s “legacy of lawlessness.” Boehner made the statement Friday, following a Wall Street Journal story stating the White House is “drafting options” that would allow Obama to close the detention facility in Cuba by overriding congressional restrictions on bringing detainees into the U.S. The White House has responded to the story, reportedly based on information...

(CNSNews.com) – Power plants generating 72 gigawatts (GW) of electricity in 37 states have either closed or are scheduled to shut their doors to comply with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations, according to the Institute for Energy Research (IER). The loss of generating capacity is “over seven times the amount originally predicted by EPA modeling,” IER’s updated report, released October 7, noted. “Originally, EPA calculated that only 9.5 GW of electrical generating capacity would close as a result of its MATS (Mercury and Air Toxics Standard) and CSAPR (Cross State Air Pollution Rule) rules,” the report stated. “Before President Obama’s...

You cannot make this stuff up! Democratic Rep. Marcia Fudge (Ohio), at a town meeting hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus, lectured the black audience for what she called complaining. She spoke in a “you should be ashamed of yourself” tone that would make one feel guilty for complaining. How can they be so ungrateful for all the good things that the Democrats are doing for the black community? I hope you will spend this much time with your local elected officials. I guarantee you most people in this room have not done that. With your school board, with your...

An Ohio Democrat argued that “the real issue” with the Ebola crisis is “a disinvestment in the pubic health infrastructure in the United States.”“This is a very difficult task and I find it very ironic that the very political party and politicians who are criticizing every single step, every single move that’s being made as I said by some of the best public health officials in the world are the same people that voted to cut, you know, over $500 million from the Centers for Disease Control budget over the last four or five years, over $440 million from the...

Landlords installing a new screen door on their rental property were shot in a drive-by shooting Wednesday night.  They were making the repairs to a home they owned on Coates Avenue, near East 114th Street, when a man drove by and fired shots out of a car.  Twalann Coates, 31, and Gerald Reed, 25, were shot in the leg and buttocks, respectively.  The couple drove themselves to Marymount Hospital, where Reed was transferred to MetroHealth for further treatment. Both were treated and released.  Police say neighbors heard several shots around 8:15 p.m., and saw the couple limping to their car....

CLEVELAND — An Ohio woman has sued a Chicago-area sperm bank after she became pregnant with sperm donated by a black man instead of a white man as she and her partner had intended. The woman is seeking damages and wants to ensure the sperm bank doesn’t make a similar mistake again. Within days of their wedding in New York, Jennifer Cramblett and Amanda Zinkon had become pregnant with the donor sperm. In April 2012, five months into her pregnancy, Cramblett, 36, called Midwest Sperm Bank LLC outside Chicago to reserve sperm from the same donor in the hope that...

This will certainly go down as one of the last minute, whistle beating acts of the Supreme Court. Very nearly on the eve of the recently extended – and highly contentious – early voting period in Ohio, the Supreme Court has delivered a 5-4 decision overturning a lower court’s ruling and forcing the state to file a new petition if they want the case heard. SCOTUSblog has the details. With just sixteen hours before polling stations were to open in Ohio, the Supreme Court on Monday afternoon blocked voters from beginning tomorrow to cast their ballots in this year’s general...

The Supreme Court’s conservatives cleared the way Monday for Ohio to restrict early voting in the state, on the eve of the day it was to start. The court granted the state’s request to stay decisions of lower courts that threw out the state’s new plan, passed by the Republican-led legislature. But the court’s four liberal justices said they would have stayed out of the case and left those decisions in place. Ohio argued that the new plan--reducing from 35 to 28 the number of days voters could cast an early ballot--could not be seen as violating the rights of

A divided Supreme Court has put off the start of early voting in Ohio, which had been set to begin Tuesday. The justices' order by a 5-4 vote Monday granted a request from state officials, who have been trying to trim the number of days for early voting and restrict weekend and evening hours. The moves prompted a lawsuit from black churches and civil rights groups that the new rules would make it difficult for residents to vote and disproportionately affect low-income and black voters Early voting in the swing state now will start on Oct. 7, under a state...

Does anybody get the feeling the Dems are increasingly  desperate to find new talent that doesn't implode?  Weak bench if you ask me... and telling There's plenty of similarities between the way they promoted a poorly-vetted Wendy Davis in Texas -and now gubernatorial candidate (and political goober) Ed FitzGerald in Ohio-  only to collapse in a utterly failed effort. The Buckeye state Dems blame a firm they hired to vet him, so typical of leftists to point the finger when they screw something up. Both of these Democratic Party 'rising stars' imploded spectacularly, all but guaranteeing the Republicans will not only retain...