Free Republic

A strange paradox is emerging in America: Overall violent-crime rates are down, but active shooter events — in which a person is trying to kill multiple people in a populated area — appear to be on the rise, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics. Meanwhile, a just-released study finds that although the United States has just about 5 percent of the world's population, the country has 31 percent of the world's mass shooters. The reasons for these numbers are complex, researchers say, but the data suggest that the availability of guns, and perhaps the American obsession with fame, may...

(CNN)Josh Duggar, the eldest of the Duggar children, is going into rehab, the family said in a statement Wednesday. "Yesterday Josh checked himself into a long-term treatment center," the family said in a posting on duggarfamily.com. "For him it will be a long journey toward wholeness and recovery. We pray that in this he comes to complete repentance and sincere change. "In the meantime, we will be offering our love, care and devoted support to Anna and our grandchildren as she also receives counsel and help for her own heart and future," the statement continued.

Members of the book group, sporting matching gray T-shirts and broad grins, boarded the Napa Valley Wine Train in high spirits Saturday. “The train is leaving the station! Choo choo!” member Lisa Johnson posted on her Facebook page, captioning a picture of five glasses of burgundy liquid clinking together. But not long into the trip train staff began asking them to quiet down. Before the journey was half over, they were escorted off the train, where police officers were waiting for them, according to the Associated Press. “We didn’t do anything wrong and we still feel this is about race....

"Al Sharpton is leaving MSNBC's weekday dayside lineup, and moving to Sunday mornings," Politico's Alex Weprin reported shortly after 7:30 Eastern this evening at CapitalNewYork.com. The activist-cum-TV host's last Politics Nation program is slated for September 4. After a month's hiatus -- side note: wouldn't it be hilarious to see Al try to read that word off his Teleprompter? -- he'll start his Sunday morning show on October 4: "I want to congratulate Al and his team. For four years they have done a terrific job bringing his voice and a big spotlight to issues of justice, civil rights and...

Following yesterday’s incident in which longtime Univision news anchor and Fusion TV host Jorge Ramos was ejected from a Donald Trump news conference, singer Ricky Martin has penned an op-ed defending Ramos and calling for an end to the attacks against Latinos. The piece was published on Univision and translated to English via Billboard. Martin begins by calling out Trump’s gratuitous harassments against the Latin community. From the beginning his intention was transparent: basically tell barbarities and lies to remain relevant in the public opinion, for votes or simply to stay on the media’s radar. Yesterday’s episode against journalist Jorge...

There are few uglier phrases in the modern conservative lexicon than "anchor baby," not least because of the literal imagery the term brings to mind of a human infant, wrapped in chains and flung overboard to secure a vessel in place. But even as a figure of speech, it's a despicable concept. It refers to the notion that undocumented immigrants exploit the quintessentially American policy of birthright citizenship, which confers the status of citizen to anyone born on U.S. territory, by sneaking across the border to give birth to their children. Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush recently stumbled into the...

We thought the feud was over. We thought wrong. “Fox News host Megyn Kelly is no stranger to Trump’s bullish tactics,” notes the Fusion press release touting Ramos’s guest hit tonight. Indeed. She’s tweaking Trump here, obviously, by giving his immigration nemesis a platform to call Trump a child-deporting fascist and grieve over how his right to grandstand on Trump’s dime was brutally suppressed for five minutes or whatever. Here’s your open thread to gripe, grumble, and groan about the great Fox News/amnesty/anti-Trump alliance. Easy prediction, though: Kelly will go out of her way to challenge Ramos on whether he...

GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP — The reverend and congregation of a church that unveiled a “Black Lives Matter” banner on Pomona Road say they are fearful after a receiving a hostile response to the sign on social media. Rev. Cynthia Cain said comments on the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the South Jersey Shore’s Facebook page could be described as threats. Many of the comments on the page also state: “All Lives Matter.” “When we say ‘Black Lives Matter,’ they mistranslate it to ‘ONLY Black Lives Matter.’ Why? Are they afraid that people might start empathizing with people of color?” Cain asked. Police...

Ann Coulter is going to be on the Megyn File....so I tuned in. The murdered girl's father and boy friend made a joint appearance....they really seemed to be almost comfortable. Now look, we all mourn differently...yet the two seemed so at ease on the subject. Maybe the shock of what happened has them in a daze. But at the end of the interview, the father vowed to "shame" people into accepting gun control....but he DID speak about guns being kept out of the hands of mentally ill people. I thought the law already did that. Now Megyn has a former...

Here's a historical fact that Donald Trump, and many voters attracted to him, may not know: The last American president who was a trade protectionist was Republican Herbert Hoover. Does Trump aspire to be a 21st century Hoover with a modernized platform of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff that helped send the U.S. and world economy into a decade-long depression and a collapse of the banking system?

Kimberly Guilfoyle is livid over the latest Planned Parenthood video that features StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer and she tells Dyer what she thinks of her in this awesome mini-rant: (video at link)BOOM! I love her passion and I can easily say she speaks for me and probably most of you.

On Tuesday, Media Research Center founder and president Brent Bozell, along with more than two dozen pro-life leaders, sent letters to the network news chiefs at ABC, CBS, and NBC, protesting their lack of coverage of shocking Planned Parenthood sting videos. ABC News, in particularly, was particularly egregious, as it "has not even aired one second of video footage (with audio) of the Center for Medical Progress's investigative videos," Bozell noted. "This is outrageous and inexcusable," adding: Your network’s censorship of this taxpayer-funded house of horrors is eerily reminiscent of its censorship of abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s murder trial. Both cases...

Meanwhile, Hillary and Josh Earnest are already using it to push gun control. We haven’t been all over this story all day because we didn’t figure you needed one more conservative news site presuming to give you up-to-the-minute updates. But we’re shaken like everyone else by the murders of Adam Ward and Alison Parker on live television this morning in Virginia. And we’re now learning more about the motives and the twisted mind of Vester Flanagan, who died this afternoon of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Flanagan had worked for a year as a reporter at WDBJ - the very same...

Prompting media nonsense that he "compared Muslims to Nazis." I’m glad I don’t work for ESPN, because I don’t know how anyone can understand the rules there. If you’re an on-air personality there, are you allowed to use your personal social media accounts to express opinions about non-sports matters? Yes? No? Or, as appears to be the case, are you permitted to do so as long as someone doesn’t arbitrarily decide after the fact that what you said was “controversial” and thus unacceptable? HTML5 video is not supported! That appears to be the trap Curt Schilling stuck his foot in...

Trump is “the best of the lot,” Duke says of GOP frontrunner GOP frontrunner Donald Trump can count on at least one die-hard fan: former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Self described “racial realist,” Duke, praised Trump during a recent rant during his online radio show, calling the business mogul a “good salesman.” Duke, who ran unsuccessfully for president as a Democrat in 1988 and later served in the Louisiana House of Representatives, also said he liked Trump because of “the fact that he’s come out on the immigration issue,” adding, “he’s an entrepreneur and he has a...

Warped TV reporter Vester Lee Flanagan exasperated bosses with his 'stiff and nervous' delivery, his inability to use a teleprompter - and by wearing a President Obama badge during an election report, Daily Mail Online can reveal. Management at WDBJ dubbed the failed newsman the 'human tape recorder' because he frequently parroted what interviewees had told him rather than doing his own journalism. Flanagan, 41, clashed repeatedly with photojournalists, belittling them in public and intimidating them with his violent temper, according to internal reports. He was also censured for wearing an Obama sticker while recording a segment at a polling...

So now Megyn Kelly is a RINO squish intent on doing the liberal media’s dirty work. (SNIP) That Trump has been trashing her for so long, and the best her coworkers and boss can do is tweet a few cowardly lines asking him to pwease, pwease stop, Mr. Trump, pwease, suggests that Fox’s audience has sided with Trump on this one and has lost a certain amount of faith in Megyn Kelly. What Trump’s campaign has done, then, is give other candidates an excuse to blow off questions from Megyn Kelly. Considere this exchange between Kelly and Ted Cruz last...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump may be ready to finally call it quits on the Megyn Kelly trash talking. Trump said in a radio interview with Laura Ingraham on Wednesday that he watched Kelly's Fox News show the previous evening and that he liked it "very much." "Actually I watched her show last night, she was very nice and I appreciated it," Trump said of the Fox anchor he has criticized since the network's GOP presidential debate in early August. Asked if he was done with the fight, Trump said that he is and that he had spoken with Fox...

Nothing like a racially charged killing to bring out the worst in George Zimmerman. The Florida man, cleared of charges in the 2012 slaying of black teen Trayvon Martin, used a pair of homophobic slurs and ripped President Obama after a black gunman killed a Virginia television reporter and her cameraman — both white. He also managed to misspell the first name of the killer, Vester Lee Flanagan, and the word “condemning.” “Pansy Fester lee Flanagan, too much of a daisy to deal w/racism,” tweeted Zimmerman on Wednesday. “Murders 2 whites. Hate crime, 100%. Racist Obama says nothing condeming.” Hours...

Even though the gunman is still on the loose, The New York Post’s Bart Hubbuch wasted no time in exploiting the murders of reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward for political purposes. Hubbuch blamed the shootings on the NRA and then, quite bizarrely championed New York’s strict gun control claws. The reason this is bizarre is because Bedford County, where the murders took place, is much safer than New York City, where crime is on the rise.