Free Republic

In April 2012, a Kansas SWAT team raided the home of Robert and Addie Harte, their 7-year-old daughter and their 13-year-old son. The couple, both former CIA analysts, awoke to pounding at the door. When Robert Harte answered, SWAT agents flooded the home. He was told to lie on the floor. When Addie Harte came out to see what was going on, she saw her husband on his stomach as SWAT cop stood over him with a gun.

Given that there are so many legitimate incidents to choose from, why have so many high-profile cases ultimately fallen apart? If you were to ask an average person today to name a prominent story about rape on college campuses, odds are pretty good that among the top four or five replies would be the Duke lacrosse case, the Rolling Stone cover story about Jackie and the University of Virginia, Columbia University "mattress girl" Emma Sulkowicz and one of the stories from "The Hunting Ground." Yet in all of these stories, either the accusations were later shown to be a complete...

Habersham County, Georgia is nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, just south of stunning Tallulah Gorge.  The biggest city in the county is Cornelia, with 4,160 residents.  The entire population of Habersham County would fill slightly more than half the seats in the Georgia Dome. Yet Habersham County Sheriff’s Department has a SWAT team, complete with flash-bang grenades, one of which exploded in a 19-month-old’s crib on May 28, 2014.  A drug raid gone wrong.  In fact, gone so wrong that there wasn’t even a hint of a drug dealer at the home, just a sleeping family. [WSB-TV]...

<p>Resume Falsification of Radley Balko Exposed. Exaggerations A Common Tactic of the Left, Obama Acolytes.</p> <p>Liberal (and ersatz libertarian) blogger and wanna-be pundit Radley Balko claims on his bio on his blog that he is a bi-weekly columnist for Forbes.com. But an investigation by the RLCIL demonstrates that Mr. Balko has taken extreme liberties — perhaps even license — with the term “bi-weekly.”</p>

Restaurants in New York City with 15 or more outlets nationwide now must conspicuously post the nutritional content of each item on their menus. Similar legislation is coming to San Francisco and Seattle, and is under consideration in about a dozen other cities and state legislatures. At first blush, this seems like a good idea. Why not force restaurants to let their consumers know the nutritional value of what they're about to eat? If we're to believe what the public health world says about our bulging waistlines, perhaps a little more information would be a good thing. The American Prospect's...

In 1985 a prominent liberal legal figure argued that Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right to an abortion, was a “heavy-handed judicial intervention” that “was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.” The writer was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court—and also now a strong supporter of Roe. Ginsburg isn’t the only backer of abortion rights to have taken issue with the 1973 decision. In 1995, for example, the University of Chicago’s Cass Sunstein, a superstar among liberal law professors, wrote in the Harvard...

Last month, Brian Kelly of Carlisle, Pa., was riding with a friend when the car he was in was pulled over by a local police officer. Kelly, an amateur videographer, had his video camera with him and decided to record the traffic stop. The officer who pulled over the vehicle saw the camera and demanded Kelly hand it over. Kelly obliged. Soon after, six more police officers pulled up. They arrested Kelly on charges of violating an outdated Pennsylvania wiretapping law that forbids audio recordings of any second party without their permission. In this case, that party was the police...

Earlier this month, the U.S. Justice Dept. asked seven U.S. attorneys across the country to step down from their positions. Critics of the Bush administration, including California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, have since questioned the move, noting that it seems to have been politically motivated. The Bush administration counters that these U.S. attorneys were fired because their priorities were out of line with administration policy. Specifically, the DOJ told the New York Times that the prosecutors were being replaced "based on a review of their performance in carrying out Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's violent crime priorities." According to the DOJ, one...

Last month, President Bush declared Nov. 30 "National Methamphetamine Awareness Day."The official statement from the White House implored, "I call upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate programs and activities."There's no question that meth is a particularly nasty, vicious drug, both in how it's manufactured and in what it does to the people who use it. I think some skeptics have raised legitimate questions about the accuracy of some of the more hysterical media proclaiming we're in the midst of an "epidemic," but there's no question that the drug is widely available, and that...

A favorite standby of pundits and columnists is to predict what developments will transpire over the next 12 months. I've decided to take the reductio ad absurdum approach, and predict what might happen in 2006 should the most disturbing trends of the last few years with respect to liberty and personal freedom continue unabated.

<p>A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury.” -- Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (1742-1813), Scottish jurist and historian, professor of Universal History at Edinburgh University.</p>