Free Republic

BALTIMORE – After 10 people were shot — seven of them in one incident — overnight in Baltimore following the city’s most violent month in decades, police announced Sunday that 10 federal agents will embed with the city’s homicide unit for the next two months. The special agents detailed to the city from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the U.S. Marshals Service and the U.S. Secret Service represent a “flipping of the script of sorts,” Interim Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said. “That’s a bit unusual because local police departments —...

This week, the Republican-led House passed a bill, the “PASSPORT REVOCATION ACT,” to give President Barack Obama the power to revoke or deny passports to individuals who his administration SUSPECTS may be affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations. While the bill sounds sensible, in that preventing possible radicals from fleeing into the arms of the Islamic State group makes sense, it gives Obama the right to deprive Americans of their constitutional rights without a jury trial. The bill allows the government to effectively ROB you of your passport if it THINKS you are guilty, regardless of whether you are actually guilty....

When Obama spoke to BBC last week he stressed his frustration over not being able to secure more gun control and suggested that the guns outweigh terrorism as a threat to Americans’ safety. Obama’s exact words: “If you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it’s less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it’s in the tens of thousands.” In the lead up to this statement, Obama mentioned “mass killings” with guns but did not mention mass killings or attempted mass killings in which those holding the...

Now that the Wisconsin Supreme Court has forcefully terminated the John Doe investigations in Wisconsin, the targets of those probes can now speak openly of their experiences at the hands of politically motivated prosecutors. Some of those experiences began leaking out a few months ago, courtesy of David French and his mainly unnamed victims of the Government Accountability Board’s jeremiad against Scott Walker supporters. The court decision offers a few more description of the nighttime and dawn raids on homes and the prosecutors’ abuse of the rights of those targets, but now with the case at an end, the victims...

This was a video from a Facebook user who started recording a conversation between him and his friend and a Pinellas county (Florida) environmentalist saying bbq smoke out of your yard is illegal!

For years, the cities have been robbing the suburbs but they now have a scheme that will quickly end in a takeover of the suburbs by a leftist federal government. HUD announced enforcement of its new 377-page rule called the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule which will allow them to move people from poor crime-ridden areas into “wealthy” suburbs. It was announced by leftist Julian Castro Monday. The rule has force behind it. Federal monies will be withheld and lawsuits accusing residents of racism will be filed. Any town that takes federal funds will be transformed. It is not only...

An Arizona cop barged into a woman’s home while she was in the shower and handcuffed her as she stood naked and sopping wet, according to a lawsuit. Officer Doug Rose lectured an unclothed, sobbing Esmeralda Rossi in front of her daughter and told her he was in charge, even though she was in her own home. Even as an investigation determined that Rose illegally entered the home, the policeman managed to retire and start collecting his pension. -snip- “Don’t take the attitude with cops, because we don’t play,” Rose said. “When a cop shows up, you’re not the one...

Despite the best efforts of some to sound the alarm, the nation is being locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.All the while, the nation’s citizens seem content to buy into a carefully constructed, benevolent vision of life in America that bears little resemblance to the gritty reality that plagues those unfortunate enough to not belong to the rarefied elite.For those whose minds have been short-circuited into believing the candy-coated propaganda peddled by the politicians, here is an A-to-Z, back-to-the-basics primer of what life in the United...

The Third Amendment was created to protect your home from being quartered by soldiers without your consent. It has very rarely been a matter of debate or litigation, until now. Federal district court Judge Andrew Gordon recently ruled that the police are exempt from the 3rd Amendment with a case out of Henderson, Nevada after a family had their home broken into and seized by local law enforcement who stated they needed the home to gain a “tactical advantage” against suspected criminals in a neighboring house. Police actually forced their way into this family’s home, pepperballed the father and his...

Oregon launches program to tax drivers per mile Never autoplay videos David Hastings is a rare American. This long-time hybrid car owner from Oregon wants to pay higher taxes for roads and bridges and says the current 30 cents per gallon state gas tax barely affects him. "I've been free-loading on the highways for 20 years driving electric cars or hybrid cars, getting at least 40 miles to the gallon. So I haven't been paying my share," Hastings said. Now, Hastings will pay more thanks to OReGO -- the first pay-by-the-mile program in the U.S. Oregon’s Department of Transportation has...

Laws have become too vague and the concept of intent has disappeared. When we think about the pace of change in technology, it's usually to marvel at how computing power has become cheaper and faster or how many new digital ways we have to communicate. Unfortunately, this pace of change is increasingly clashing with some of the slower-moving parts of our culture. Technology moves so quickly we can barely keep up, and our legal system moves so slowly it can't keep up with itself. By design, the law is built up over time by court decisions, statutes and regulations. Sometimes...

The city council in Jacksonville, Florida, has taken up a proposal that, if approved, would make it illegal for residents to park their cars in any manner that prevents law enforcement from seeing their rear license plates from the street. For those who live in single-family homes with off-street parking, such a law would make backing into the driveway to park an illegal act. Florida is among a handful of states that don’t require car owners to display license plates at the front of their cars. The proposed local bill would also require people who use car covers to figure...

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents who detained conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe at the airport specifically asked him about the work he’s done investigating the “federal government.”O’Keefe was detained by U.S. customs agents Monday after arriving at the airport in Nassau, Bahamas en route to Miami. Agents told O’Keefe that he was being detained for crossing back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border while dressed as Osama bin Laden in a video that was published by The Daily Caller. Agents marked his passport with an “X” and explained that he would be detained every time he enters U.S. territory henceforth....

“Free worlders” is prison slang for those who are not incarcerated behind prison walls. Supposedly, those fortunate souls live in the “free world.” However, appearances can be deceiving. “As I got closer to retiring from the Federal Bureau of Prisons,” writes former prison employee Marlon Brock, “it began to dawn on me that the security practices we used in the prison system were being implemented outside those walls.” In fact, if Brock is right, then we “free worlders” do live in a prison—albeit, one without visible walls. In federal prisons, cameras are everywhere in order to maintain “security” and keep...

The United States Department of Justice is using federal grand jury subpoenas to identify anonymous commenters engaged in typical internet bluster and hyperbole in connection with the Silk Road prosecution. DOJ is targeting Reason.com, a leading libertarian website whose clever writing is eclipsed only by the blowhard stupidity of its commenting peanut gallery. Why are the government using its vast power to identify these obnoxious asshats, and not the other tens of thousands who plague the internet? Because these twerps mouthed off about a judge. Last week, a source provided me with a federal grand jury subpoena. The subpoena1, issued...

link only: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/kalief-browder-1993-2015

WASHINGTON — In a remarkable reversal of national security policy formed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Senate voted on Tuesday to curtail the federal government’s sweeping surveillance of American phone records, sending the legislation to President Obama’s desk for his signature. The passage of the measure, achieved after a vigorous debate on the Senate floor, will lead to the reinstatement of government surveillance efforts that were blacked out on Monday after Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, blocked their extension. The vote was a rebuke to Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, as...

The McLennan County Re-Education Camp Neither the United States Department of Justice, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, the Governor of Texas, the President of the United States nor any of the score of smurfs and fools currently running for President has so far dared to come to the defense of the scores of men and at least two women who remain unjustly imprisoned under cruel and unusual circumstances in the McLennan County Jail. The Southern Nevada Confederation of Clubs has stated that the jail is desperately overcrowded, that some prisoners are not being fed and that others cannot...

The FBI is operating a small air force to spy on Americans Associated Press Jack Gillum, Eileen Sullivan and Eric Tucker, Associated Press Jun. 2, 2015, WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI is operating a small air force with scores of low-flying planes across the country carrying video and, at times, cellphone surveillance technology — all hidden behind fictitious companies that are fronts for the government, The Associated Press has learned. The planes' surveillance equipment is generally used without a judge's approval, and the FBI said the flights are used for specific, ongoing investigations. In a recent 30-day period, the agency...

The Department of Justice is concentrating on “far-right” groups in a new study of social media usage aimed at combatting violent extremism. The Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) awarded Michigan State University $585,719 for the study, which was praised by Eric Holder, the former attorney general, earlier this year. “There is currently limited knowledge of the role of technology and computer mediated communications (CMCs), such as Facebook and Twitter, in the dissemination of messages that promote extremist agendas and radicalize individuals to violence,” according to the NIJ grant. “The proposed study will address this gap through a series...