Free Republic

He is the man with the mustache who takes a rebellious drag on a cigarette in the Herman Cain Internet ad gone viral. "We've run a campaign like nobody's ever seen," he says before taking a puff. "But then America's never seen a candidate like Herman Cain." Meet Mark Block, Cain's unorthodox campaign manager. Perhaps no one is more responsible for the Georgia businessman's meteoric rise in the presidential polls than Block, a Republican strategist and tea party leader who's left a trail of questionable campaign work behind him. Block has been accused of voter suppression and was banned from...

The SEC alleges that Citigroup Global Markets structured and marketed a CDO called Class V Funding III and exercised significant influence over the selection of $500 million of the assets included in the CDO portfolio. Citigroup then took a proprietary short position against those mortgage-related assets from which it would profit if the assets declined in value. Citigroup did not disclose to investors its role in the asset selection process or that it took a short position against the assets it helped select. Citigroup has agreed to settle the SEC’s charges by paying a total of $285 million, which will...

JOPLIN, Mo. (AP) — By all accounts, Mark Lindquist is a hero, an underpaid social worker who nearly gave his life trying to save three developmentally disabled adults from the Joplin tornado. Both houses of the Missouri legislature honored Lindquist, the Senate resolution calling him "a true hero and inspiration to others." But heroism doesn't pay the bills. The tornado's 200 mph winds tossed Lindquist nearly a block, broke every rib, obliterated his shoulder, knocked out most of his teeth and put him in a coma for about two months. Lindquist, 51, ran up medical expenses that exceed $2.5 million,...

“it’s very clear that private sector jobs have been doing fine. It’s the public sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about.”

A schoolgirl was brutally gang raped after rigid school rules meant she was kept late and missed her bus home, it has been reported. The 13-year-old's parents are suing Mount Hope Middle School in West Virginia, claiming the horrendous sexual assault would not have happened were it not for the actions of staff at the school. The girl was allegedly set upon by a group of athletes at the school while waiting outside for a ride home. She had missed her bus after being made to collect uniforms for the cheerleading squad by Linda Nevi, the coach. When the girl,...

ATLANTA -- Police in Atlanta are hunting several suspects who posed as FBI agents Saturday to rob and shoot a man, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. The unidentified victim was leaving his Atlanta apartment with a woman at around 10:30am local time when he was approached by several men in the building's parking lot, police said.

The Solyndra scandal cost at least a half-billion public dollars. It is plaguing President Barack Obama. And it's being billed as a Washington story. But back in Obama's political hometown, those of us familiar with the Chicago Way can see something else in Solyndra — something that the Washington crowd calls "optics." In fact, it's not just a Washington saga — it has all the elements of a Chicago City Hall story, except with more zeros. So forget optics. What about smell? It smells bad, and it's going to smell worse. Or, did you really believe it when the White...

The FBI on Thursday said it had stopped a training session that called the Prophet Muhammad a “cult leader,” said mainstream Muslims were likely to support violent extremism and described the Islamic principal of charity as a “funding mechanism for combat.” The content of the training session set off a wave of concern among Muslims across the nation who had been trying to help authorities battle homegrown terrorism. An FBI spokesman confirmed on Thursday that the agency did host one training session six months ago that described Muslims as more likely to be violent as they increased in devotion to...

Various Chiefs of Police and other law enforcement representatives have gone on a public tour with the Governor proclaiming how important the “Duty to Retreat” is to New Hampshire’s self defense law as it applies to honest citizens under RSA 627:4. Given that they feel that way, we propose adding it to the self defense requirements for law enforcement found under RSA 627:5. (Note that this applies only to a law enforcement officer's self defense, not to making an arrest.) We have taken the exact language that they support and just modified it to fit law enforcement. Here is how...

Sarah Palin is taking to her Facebook page to slam Jim Hoffa, the Teamsters president, for his call to "take these son-of-a-bitches out" in reference to the Tea Party

Verizon Communications Inc. reported a dozen cases of sabotaged cable lines and warned of delays in repairs and customer service on the second day of a strike involving about 45,000 employees. The telecommunications company said there have been 12 acts of sabotage to telephone lines and to Internet and television services in Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York since the strike began. Fiber-optic lines were intentionally cut in Tewksbury and several other municipalities on the East Coast, the company said.

Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers' activities for one year--in case police want to review them in the future--under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today.... A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.

My buddy was just in a focus group with Steve Wynn, where Steve told the group he is running as a independent, announcing Monday.

DOZENS OF West Philly boys - ranging in age from 11 to 19 - stormed a Sears store in Upper Darby on Thursday as part of a "flash mob" and made off with thousands of dollars' worth of merchandise, police said. Upper Darby police released this surveillance image that they said was recorded during the invasion of the store by dozens of youths. Upper Darby Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood said he believed that the group organized the mass theft through social networking, although the exact networking site was not yet clear. He said that the kids traveled together on public...

When the feds busted a syndicate of Russian-speaking nightclub owners and their so-called Bar Girls, it seemed like just another titillating tale from South Beach. But the April bust showed that the FBI is taking the Eastern European mob a lot more seriously these days than the Italian Mafia. La Cosa Nostra is no longer the bureau’s Public Enemy No. 1 when it comes to organized crime in South Florida. “Eurasian organized crime is our No. 1 priority,” said FBI supervisory special agent Rick Brodsky of the Miami office. In April, six reputed members of an Eastern European network —...

Las Vegas copyright enforcement company Righthaven LLC is now suing individual message-board posters, not just website operators... ..An attorney for Righthaven on Wednesday said those notices (DCMA) don't apply to individual website users who violate copyrights by posting material online without authorization.

Volunteers download attack tool, organizers recruit hacker botnets, say researchers Computerworld - The retaliatory attacks by pro-WikiLeaks activists are growing in strength as hackers add botnets and thousands of people download an open-source attack tool, security researchers said today. In recent days, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have been launched against several sites, including those belonging to Amazon, MasterCard, PayPal and the Swiss payment transaction firm PostFinance, after each terminated WikiLeaks accounts or pulled the plug on services. As of Thursday, WikiLeaks had posted the full text of more than 1,200 leaked U.S. State Department cables from its trove of over...

A just-released biography of King Carl Gustaf – The Unwilling Monarach – claims that he "frequently visited Mafia-run nightclubs to partake in wild orgies when he was a younger man" as reported by Gavin Reilly for The Journal. Good thing no U.S. politicians ever subjected themselves to black mail by attending Mafia-linked sex clubs, right? Although, in 1975 the NYDA and NYPD initiated an investigation dubbed Operation Together which, among other things, was looking into mob control over gay bars, several murders of gay club owners, drug trafficking at gay bars, and underage boy sex rings, and just as law...

The entire police force in a small Mexican town abruptly resigned Tuesday after its new headquarters was viciously attacked by suspected drug cartel gunmen. All 14 police officers in Los Ramones, a rural town in northern Mexico, fled the force in terror after gunmen fired more than 1,000 bullets and flung six grenades at their headquarters on Monday night. No one was injured in the attack. Mayor Santos Salinas Garza told local media that the officers resigned because of the incident. The gunmen’s 20-minute shooting spree destroyed six police vehicles and left the white and orange police station pocked with...

We can only estimate the thousands of deaths of US citizens by illegal aliens on our own soil. The media fails to report them, the government ignores them. The murder of David Hartley, on Falcon Lake in Texas and the subsequent beheading by those same cartels of the lead investigator in retaliation have thrown some attention on the threat to us all by the failed state of Mexico. The Arizona Daily Star gives us some facts. Forty-eight Americans were murdered in Mexico during the first six months of 2010 The tally doesn't include two Texans reported killed Sept. 30 in...