Free Republic

Operation Jade Conditioning First, let’s cover what Joint Military Exercise Jade Helm 15 is not: it is not a covert plan for the military to conquer the Southwest and institute martial law. And no, the hundreds of special operations troops and thousands of other military personnel taking part in Jade Helm 15 are not bad guys who are out to establish tyranny in America. Those are straw man arguments, posited to be rejected. But the elimination of the straw men does not mean that Jade Helm 15 is benign. Reality check, please: does anybody reading this seriously believe that President...

The federal bureaucracy, in the form of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, recently announced a ban on ammunition used in AR-15 rifles, which are among the most common firearms in America, but then suddenly backed off. So breathe a sigh of relief and move on? Not if you like the Second Amendment, according to a National Rifle Association commentator. Colion Noir, a practicing attorney who graduated from the University of Houston, has been described by the Los Angeles Times as someone who doesn’t fit the stereotype of NRA members: “Old, fat, white guys.” “At 29, he’s not...

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” ― Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means If 2014 was the year of militarized police, armored tanks, and stop-and-frisk searches, 2015 may well be the year of technologized police, surveillance blimps and scan-and-frisk searches. Just as we witnessed neighborhood cops being transformed into soldier cops, we’re about to see them shapeshift once again, this time into robocops, complete with robotic exoskeletons, super-vision contact lenses, computer-linked visors, and mind-reading helmets. Similarly, just as military equipment created for the battlefield has been deployed on American soil against American citizens,...

Currently there are 73 federal agencies that have full-time armed officers with arresting authority. According to a 2008 report by the Department of Justice, there were 120,000 full-time law enforcement officers working for federal agencies and 24 different federal agencies employed at least 250 full-time officers. Federal agencies with at least 250 full-time officers included the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Mint, U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Veterans Health Administration. While speaking before the Constitutional Convention in 1787, James Madison said, “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” Despite this...

A man, woman and their 4-year-old boy at an unidentified Inland Border Patrol checkpoint are ordered and pulled from their vehicle, questioned and taken into custody – all for the seeming offense of refusing to say where they were headed. A video of the incident, recorded by the family’s dashboard camera, opens with the man and woman chit-chatting with their son in the back, later identified as 4, and pulling up to a border checkpoint. The man, who’s driving, has his window a third of the way down.

The Los Angeles Police Department began exploring the deterrent approach a few years ago with a new model called predictive policing that deployed officers and patrol cars to areas where data suggested crime was more likely to occur. Criminologists say the use of helicopters is a natural, if highly unusual, expansion of that policing strategy. So far, LAPD officials say, the stats show the strategy is having a positive effect. Months of data show that the number of serious crimes reported in the LAPD's Newton Division in South L.A. fell during weeks when the helicopters conducted more flights.

Call it Common Core for police. But the White House, in cahoots with the Department of Justice, has set in motion a plan that will expand federal control of community police forces, via standards handed from above called the “Task Force on 21st Century Policing.” The plan was released Monday, Infowars reported. And its gist? Like Common Core, the education plan criticized by opponents as little more than a federal mandate that’s tied to funding, the just-released police plan would force local law enforcement agencies to follow federally set standards in return for receiving federal tax dollars. “The U.S. Department...

President Barack Obama today introduced his plan for a progressive takeover of state and local policing. “We have a great opportunity… to really transform how we think about community law enforcement relations,” he said Monday. “We need to seize that opportunity… this is something that I’m going to stay very focused on in the months to come,” Obama said, as he touted a new interim report from his Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Obama also instructed his media allies to help a federalization of policing, and to sideline critics of centralized policing rules. “I expect our friends in the...

The latest example of cellphone video vindicating someone from false charges is a doozy. It comes from Washington Parish, La., and WWL TV. One of the worst days of Douglas Dendinger’s life began with him handing an envelope to a police officer. In order to help out his family and earn a quick $50, Dendinger agreed to act as a process server, giving a brutality lawsuit filed by his nephew to Chad Cassard as the former Bogalusa police officer exited the Washington Parish Courthouse. The handoff went smoothly, but Dendinger said the reaction from Cassard, and a group of officers...

The US Department of Justice and embattled mayor Rahm Emanuel are under mounting pressure to investigate allegations of what one politician called “CIA or Gestapo tactics” at a secretive Chicago police facility exposed by the Guardian.Politicians and civil-rights groups across the US expressed shock upon hearing descriptions of off-the-books interrogation at Homan Square, the Chicago warehouse that multiple lawyers and one shackled-up protester likened to a US counter-terrorist black site in a Guardian investigation published this week. As three more people came forward detailing their stories of being “held hostage” and “strapped” inside Homan Square without access to an attorney...

Amherst, MA– University of Massachusetts Amherst student, Thomas Donovan, who is majoring in legal studies and had planned to become a Massachusetts State Trooper, has filed a lawsuit alleging his civil rights were violated after he was pepper sprayed, assaulted, and arrested for filming police brutality. The officer also repeatedly stomped on his cellphone in an attempt to destroy the evidence and cover up the crime- but the video survived.

It seemed like a typical congressional meeting for the Republic of Texas. Senators and the president gathered in the center of a Bryan, Texas, meeting hall, surrounded by public onlookers, to debate issues of the national currency, develop international relations and celebrate the birthday of one of their oldest members. But this wasn't 1836, and this would be no ordinary legislative conference. Minutes into the meeting a man among the onlookers stood and moved to open the hall door, letting in an armed and armored force of the Bryan Police Department, the Brazos County Sheriff's Office, the Kerr County Sheriff's...

A video posted to YouTube this week shows what appeared to be an elderly man being tasered by police with his hands up. The video, reportedly taken near Key West, Fla., shows two officers and an unidentified man during a traffic stop. The apparently older man slowly leaves his car with his hands raised and is tasered by one of the officers. Little is known about the incident in the video, which was originally taken down. An edited version of the video was uploaded Monday by a blog run by Info Wars.

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site. The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

Just minutes after being declared mentally incompetent, a shackled Dasyl Jeanette Rios was tugged by her feet down a courthouse hallway. “All I wanted to do was sob for a few minutes. Cry. I wanted to cry for a few minutes because my life is in your hands,” Dasyl Jeanette Rios said, wailing, as she was pulled by a Broward Sheriff’s deputy with her feet shackled through a Florida courthouse on Monday. The 28-year-old woman had just been declared mentally incompetent before she was dragged like a suitcase through the hallways by Christopher Johnson. The disturbing incident was captured on...

Ft. Lauderdale, FL– A video uploaded to YouTube on Sunday shows Fort Lauderdale police officer Victor Ramirez harassing and assaulting an elderly gentleman at the Broward Bus Terminal in downtown Fort Lauderdale. The man is not being aggressive or threatening in any way when he is shoved to the ground and slapped by the officer. The man was reportedly trying to use the bus terminal’s restroom. “The guy didn’t raise his hand to the officer at all,” a witness told Local 10 News. “The officer just knocked him down with his hands. The guy was defenseless.”

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog The “most transparent administration in history” says it won’t let the public see its 332 page net neutrality plan until after the FCC votes on its implementation The Obama administration has just said that it won’t let the public see its 332 page proposal for net neutrality until after the FCC votes on its implementation.Which reminds me of this Nancy Pelosi gem regarding Obamacare:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoE1R-xH5ToRepublican FCC Commissioner Ajit Paisaid has seen the proposal. Paisaid said Obama’s net neutrality plan was 332 pages long, and that:“It gives the FCC the power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how...

President George W. Bush was fond of saying that "9/11 changed everything." He used that one-liner often as a purported moral basis to justify the radical restructuring of federal law and the federal assault on personal liberties over which he presided. He cast aside his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution; he rejected his oath to enforce all federal laws faithfully; and he moved the government decidedly in the direction of secret laws, secret procedures and secret courts. During his presidency, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. This legislation permits federal agents to write their own search warrants when...

Rand Paul does a lot of interviews -- a lot. This, from time to time, has gotten him in trouble. Rarely, though, has it gone as poorly as this. Speaking Monday afternoon with CNBC, Paul: 1) Reiterated his contention that vaccines should be voluntary. 2) Said this: "I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines." (Michele Bachmann said something similar during the 2012 presidential campaign. It didn't go over well.) 3) Actually shushed the anchor when he thought she wasn't allowing him to answer her questions.

California's measles outbreak has climbed to 91 confirmed cases, prompting a vicious attack from USA Today contributor Alex Berezow against "anti-vaxxers." He blames them for the epidemic that CDC officials say was introduced at the Disneyland theme park by a person infected with measles overseas. Berezow's knee-jerk reaction is to declare, "Parents who do not vaccinate their children should go to jail." He erroneously maintains that measles could not spread in a fully vaccinated society and discredits as "ludicrous" concerns regarding the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. Claiming there is a "mountain of data" proving otherwise, his one and only...