Free Republic

A Texas judge opted Monday not to issue an arrest warrant against Gov. Rick Perry, but the Republican still faces the unflattering prospect of being booked, fingerprinted and having his mug shot taken — and has assembled a team of high-powered attorneys to fight the two felony counts of abuse of power against him. "This is nothing more than banana republic politics," Tony Buzbee a Houston-based defense attorney who will head a cadre of four lawyers from Texas and Washington defending Perry, said at a news conference. A grand jury in Austin, a liberal bastion in otherwise largely conservative Texas,...

(snip) “What you’ve seen with our politics, partly because of gerrymandering, partly because of the Balkanization of media so people just watch what reinforces their deepest biases, partly because of big money in politics, is increasingly politicians are rewarded for taking the most extreme, maximalist positions,” Obama told the liberal Times columnist. “Sooner or later, that catches up with you. You end up not being able to move forward on things we need to move forward on. We need to reform our immigration system. That would be good not just for our domestic economy but for our position in the...

On Sunday’s broadcast of ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” fill-in moderator Martha Raddatz asked how journalism has evolved since the time of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s role in the Watergate scandal that resulted in the downfall of then-President Richard Nixon. Sharyl Attkisson, formerly an investigative reporter with CBS News, where she resigned after becoming disenfranchised with the editorial direction of CBS, suggested that had the Watergate scandal happened today, Nixon might have skated if he employed the tactics President Barack Obama’s is using in handling his controversies. “I think we have gone backwards since that time where we...

At the time, it must have all seemed unforgettable: the endless revelations of wrongdoing, the painful congressional investigation and, finally, the soft black-and-white image of Richard Nixon resigning the presidency.But ask today’s students about the events of Watergate 40 years ago and odds are that many have never heard of the scandal, or, at best, are vaguely aware that something happened once that lives on in a suffix attached to the occasional controversy. major reason is that in U.S. classrooms and textbooks, the discussion of Watergate is going the way of the Teapot Dome Scandal and the Petticoat Affair: increasingly...

On July 31, when all eyes were focused on the Ted Cruz-stoked chaos unfolding in the House chamber over the border bill, the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee did something rather remarkable. It voted to declassify its Benghazi report. After two years of investigation, it found no evidence to buttress any of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012, attack that killed Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans. We didn’t get this news from committee chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.). Nope. There was a story in the San Francisco Chronicle on Friday. A press release...

We're gonna go out on a limb here and say this is DEFINITELY one of the strangest assignments the Secret Service has ever gotten! While President Barack Obama was busy hanging out with Katy Perry at the White House this weekend, his oldest daughter Malia was seeing musicians like OutKast, Skrillex, Lorde, and SO many more! That's because the 16-year-old was in Chicago with thousands of other youths at this year's installment...

Blackburn told TheBlaze that 356 bills made it through the House and are languishing in the Senate. Additionally, according to the congresswoman, 98 percent of those bills were passed with bipartisan support. She also pointed out that 200 of the bills were passed in the House with unanimous support from the entire chamber and more than 100 were passed with 75% support of House Democrats. To make her point that the House is working, but the Senate is where the obstruction exists, Blackburn printed all of the bills that the House has passed and stacked them on a desk with...

Mitt Romney loyalists are trying to gin up the narrative that Republicans just can't get enough of Romney.“Democrats don’t want to be associated with Barack Obama right now, but Republicans are dying to be associated with Mitt Romney,” Spencer Zwick, "a longtime Romney confidant who chaired his national finance council," claimed to the Washington Post. The Chamber of Commerce, which has vowed to wage war on the Tea Party and push through amnesty legislation, glowingly praised Romney, alleging he would be in a "commanding position" if he entered the 2016 race. Romney is reportedly set to make trips to West...

As soon as the House GOP leadership fumbled its border bill, Democrats started blaming Ted Cruz. "Blaming" might be too strong a word -- Democrats were practically vibrating with delight at another chance to portray John Boehner as a simpering loser who keeps getting dunked on by a freshman senator from Texas. .@SenTedCruz Just thought I'd go right to the source, will the House be voting tonight? — U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (@repmarkpocan) July 31, 2014 Democrats do this because Cruz is famous, and -- they believe -- primarily associated with the 2013 government shutdown. The press doesn't do much...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) HBO supernatural drama takes aim at conservatives in bloody takedown. HBO's “True Blood” took another stab at conservatives on Sunday's episode when it left a bloody mess of an event held in Ted Cruz's honor. It was exactly what the doctor ordered for an ailing Eric (Alexander Skarsgard), who has been infected with the dangerous virus that's killing vampires. He was all ready to meet the true death until his progeny Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten) informed him that Sarah Newlin, part of the group manufacturing the virus, was still alive and on the run. That was enough for...

Climate change skeptics have suggested a recent slowdown in the warming of the Earth is evidence that global warming is a farce and that climate models can't be trusted, but new research suggests the slowdown, or "pause," was not a significant disruption of larger trends. The planet has been slowly warming over the last century or more. But in the last 15 years, that rate of warming has slowed. Temperatures are still high by historical standards; but between 1998 and 2013 they were slightly below what climate models had predicted. A small number of scientists and policy makers have pointed...

As it has for decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week released its annual National Health Interview Survey on the health of Americans. But this year, there was a difference: For the first time, the respondents were asked about their sexual orientation. Of 34,557 adults ages 18 and older, the survey reported, 1.6 percent said they were gay or lesbian. Some critics say the numbers are low, but they fall in the range of other surveys. In the new survey, however, only 0.7 percent of respondents described themselves as bisexual; other studies have reported higher numbers.

Today on Slate’s feminist XX blog, there was a headline that read: Even if She Loses in Texas, Wendy Davis Is a Win for America. Seriously? So, a Texas State Senator, who filibustered a bill that would ban abortions twenty-weeks into a pregnancy last summer, is a “win for America?” Jessica Grose, who wrote the article, added: Now, for all the support Davis’ campaign has received from fellow Democrats in Washington and elsewhere—former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm called her “Joan of Arc, standing up there for women all across the country”—she’s still running for governor of a deeply red state....

It’s a confirmation of reports in June that ISIS had taken control of a site where some of Saddam’s WMD arsenal remained. Iraq has informed the United Nations that the Islamic State extremist group has taken control of a vast former chemical weapons facility northwest of Baghdad where 2,500 chemical rockets filled with the deadly nerve agent sarin or their remnants were stored along with other chemical warfare agents. Iraq’s U.N. Ambassador Mohamed Ali Alhakim said in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon circulated Tuesday that “terrorist” groups entered the Muthanna site June 11 and seized weapons and equipment...

Perhaps because there was no longer any plausible deniability about the existence of the story, MSNBC's Chris Matthews tonight devoted a segment to the controversy, bringing on Bernard Center founder Michelle Bernard and Salon's Joan Walsh to discuss the matter. While all three agreed that the controversy would in no way sink Mrs. Clinton's 2016 prospects, Walsh was particularly vociferous in her defense of Clinton, while Matthews and Bernard were critical of the former first lady. At one point, a testy Walsh charged Bernard with twisting the facts of the story.

As we celebrate the Fourth of July, who can argue that our democracy is working the way the Founders intended? And who can deny that most of the blame for dysfunction must fall to the Republican Party? George Washington distrusted all political parties. He warned in his farewell address that, as they alternated power, parties would act in “the spirit of revenge” — rather than, presumably, in the best interests of the nation. The “disorders and miseries” that resulted, Washington feared, would inevitably threaten democracy. Whatever the motivation, Republicans have paralyzed our government in a way that would have shocked...

Believe it or not, it was 10 years ago this month that Barack Obama, then a candidate for the U.S. Senate, introduced himself to America with a speech that shook the Fleet Center in Boston. The main theme of that Democratic convention was the litany of George W. Bush's failures — an unpopular and unending war in Iraq, a faltering image abroad, a stagnating middle class. Obama gave eloquent voice to those frustrations, arguing that all of them could be addressed if only we reunited the electorate. Probably Obama himself would not have guessed then that he would ascend to...

From efforts to install a monument at the Oklahoma Capitol to a controversial “Black Mass” at Harvard University, Satanists are all over the news. But are they, along with Wiccans and pagans, all together in one non-Abrahamic lump? Not at all, say experts on paganism and the major Satanist groups’ websites. “Paganism is an umbrella term for a wide variety of traditions outside the Abrahamic faiths. Wicca is the largest but there are countless others, from Druid to Heathen to people who are creating their own faiths even as we speak,” said Laura Wildman-Hanlon, a Wiccan priestess and editor of...

Monica Lewinsky has spoken out about becoming 'the most humiliated woman in the world' when salacious details of her affair with then-President Bill Clinton emerged. As part of her return to the spotlight, Lewinsky shared details in a new National Geographic documentary, 'The 90s: The Last Great Decade?', which will air starting next Sunday. On Tuesday, the Today show gave a first glimpse at the three-part special, in which Lewinsky, now 40, opens up about the day a 445-page report by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr was published. 'That was one of the worst days of my life,' she said. 'I...

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby is being called narrow by some analysts, but that’s true only in that Hobby Lobby got everything it wanted and nothing more. In her blistering dissent Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg correctly called it “a decision of startling breadth.” The question before the Court was twofold: Do corporations enjoy the same protections for religious liberty as individuals do? And if so, does providing contraceptive coverage in an employee health plan – as required under the Affordable Care Act – violate that liberty? Justice Samuel Alito, writing for all of the Republican-appointed...