Free Republic

Former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee has filed to run for President as a libertarian in what appears to be a new long-shot White House bid following his failed campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2016. Chafee filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Sunday to form the Lincoln Chafee for President campaign committee based in Wyoming. A website linked to Chafee's FEC filing states "Lincoln Leads with TRUTH" along with the phrase "Thirty Years, Zero Scandals." Chafee has spent most of his life as a Republican. He was nominated to his late father's Senate seat in 1999 and...

Westerly Apartment Complex Shooting: 2 Dead, 2 In Hospital A building employee died and two others, another employee and a resident, were seriously injured. By Rachel Nunes, Patch Staff Dec 19, 2019 10:59 am ET | Updated Dec 19, 2019 4:01 pm ET The shooting happened at Babcock Village, a retirement home on Cross Street, according to a report. (Courtesy Lorren Kleinkauf) WESTERLY, RI — A shooting at an apartment housing complex in Westerly, R.I. has left two people dead - including the apparent shooter - and two more fighting for their lives at New England hospitals. Police arrived at...

Armed Services Committee member Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) on Monday called for the panel to hold a hearing to investigate U.S. strategy in the 18-year Afghanistan War following a damning report that senior U.S. officials knowingly lied to the public for years about the country's progress in the conflict. “We all read today, the striking reporting by The Washington Post, suggesting that administration officials, potentially including military officials, have misled the American public about the war in Afghanistan. I am writing to request hearings to address these deeply concerning revelations about the Afghan war,” Gillibrand wrote in a letter to...

School-bus drivers Billie McClinsey and Brad Mayer didn’t like being represented by the Teamsters and wanted to put the matter to a vote. That should have been straightforward. Federal law provides that if union opponents collect signatures from 30% of their co-workers, they can ask the National Labor Relations Board to schedule a vote. But the process is frequently made convoluted and oppressive. As a result, Messrs. McClinsey and Mayer are trapped—likely indefinitely—in the union they oppose. The NLRB is soliciting comments on proposals to lift barriers that limit workers’ right to remove a union. Messrs. McClinsey and Mayer work...

In the melting Arctic, communities are racing to maintain their way of life. In the rising Pacific, residents are sounding alarm bells. And in Rhode Island, Kate Schapira and her husband are not having a baby. Fears about climate change are prompting worldwide action, but one knock-on effect in the United States is mounting anxiety about everything from plastics to class-based environmental disparities. Schapira, a 40-year-old senior lecturer in the English department at Brown University, is addressing that unease in a number of ways. The decision not to have children was not just about concern for their future wellbeing amid...

Rhode Island’s poor land use policies are exacerbating the local impact of global warming. Cranes in the sky and pile drivers on green space create jobs and win votes, but they also generate long-term problems, especially when bottom-line driven special interests manipulate what we build and where we build. Political gain and short-term growth aren’t preparing the Ocean State for what will be a challenging future. For the past three years, swaths of Rhode Island open space have been cleared, covered, and crushed to build renewable energy facilities. Renewables help reduce dependence on fossil fuels, but this stampede of renewable-energy...

With few exceptions, states are losing the battle with aging bridges in need of repair or replacement. Even states with low percentages of bridges rated poor are finding it difficult to keep up with bridge and road systems that in many cases are 50 years old or older. Utah, which ranks fourth for the lowest percentage of poor bridges, programs a bridge for repair or replacement in the year after it drops to a poor rating, completing the project within four or five years. The Utah Department of Transportation notes, though, that the number of bridges falling from good to...

For investors around the world looking at Greece, there was but one question Sunday: What is going to happen when the markets open? On Sunday night, the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, said in a televised address that Greece’s banks and stock market would be closed on Monday, as Athens tries to avert a financial collapse. But the question of what happens when the markets do open is particularly acute for the hedge fund investors — including luminaries like David Einhorn and John Paulson — who have collectively poured more than 10 billion euros, or $11 billion, into Greek government bonds,...

The Democrats believe that Trump, who is the president of the executive branch, is not allowed to discuss anything with the US Attorney General without their permission. Senate Democrats are now seeking documents over an alleged request by Trump for US Attorney General Bill Barr to hold a press conference to clear him of any wrongdoing with Ukraine. The Washington Post earlier this week reported that President Trump asked Bill Barr to hold a presser clearing him of wrongdoing and affirm that no laws were broken during his July 25 phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Bill Barr was...

Top Defense Democrats Demand Answers From Pentagon On President Trump's Order To Withhold Ukraine Military AidWASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), Vice Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, and U.S. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper demanding answers regarding the Trump Administration’s improper withholding of military aid to Ukraine and the Defense Department’s role in the process.The Senators are seeking information from Secretary Esper regarding President Trump’s decision to manipulate national security assistance for his own political gain by halting the delivery...

Crony Bidding And Gross Incompetence Reign.. At a time when Coloradans are desperately pleading for improved and new roadways the agency in charge of the same, the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), is mired in the greatest crisis of its long-storied existence . ... In December 2018, Governor Jared Polis appointed 35-year-old Shoshana Lew as his new Executive Director, a history major .. She replaced Governor Hickenlooper's appointment of 56-year-old Michael Lewis, an engineer with extensive public construction management experience. ... Lew's primary qualification .. was her close relationship to Michelle Obama who called the newly elected governor for a...

President Trump is barreling toward a showdown with Congress over his decision to pull back U.S. troops in northern Syria despite widespread opposition. The announcement, which caught leadership and traditional GOP allies flatfooted, sparked a wave of condemnation, with Republicans calling it a “disaster in the making,” a “catastrophic mistake” and a “terrible decision.” Lawmakers are already weighing how to respond to Trump’s decision, setting the stage for a high-profile clash with Trump as soon as Congress returns from a two-week break on Monday. “Congress must and will act to limit the catastrophic impact of this decision,” said Rep. Liz...

A gas shortage threatens the Long Island region,” bleat six Long Island state senators, all Democrats, in a letter pleading for approval of a pipeline proposed to fix the problem — belatedly admitting that the policies they’ve long favored don’t work for their own constituents. This year, Sens. Todd Kaminsky, John Brooks, James Gaughran, Anna Kaplan, Monica Martinez and Kevin Thomas all voted for Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Green New Deal law, whose very purpose is to further crimp energy supplies, and for a $100 million hike in taxes on energy. And, as Senate GOP leader John Flanagan (their fellow Long...

Perhaps Nancy Pelosi should consider opening up an Impeachment Denial Office on Capitol Hill, as her caucus seems determined to threaten it for pretty much anything. Several Democratic presidential candidates demanded the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh over a badly reported smear job at the New York Times, and a few of Pelosi’s colleagues jumped on that bandwagon. By yesterday afternoon, however, the backfire was evident enough for Pelosi to put her foot down: House Democratic leaders and rank-and-file members are dismissing calls to impeach Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, with some arguing the House has limited...

In 2017, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) accused President Trump of showing “a disdain for an independent judiciary that doesn’t always bend to his wishes” after Trump criticized a judge who ruled against his administration. Senate Democrats, by contrast, have launched an unprecedented attempt to actually bend the Supreme Court to their wishes — threatening to restructure the court if the justices do not rule as they see fit. The threat came over the Supreme Court’s decision to hear a challenge to New York City’s restrictions on how gun owners who have residential permits can transport their guns. In...

Federal Judge Orders FBI to Search for Steele Documents We Expose Senator Whitehouse’s Unauthorized Practice of Law When Officers of the Law Abdicate Their Duty to Protect Federal Judge Orders FBI to Search for Steele Documents We are grateful for judges unafraid to tell the Deep State and its powerful agencies to reveal their secrets, especially when bureaucrats are digging in their heels. In the latest example, U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper ordered the FBI to conduct a search within 60 days for records of communications with former British spy and dossier author Christopher Steele post-dating Steele’s service...

Full title: Judicial Watch Files Complaint With Rhode Island Supreme Court Against U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse For Unauthorized Practice of Law Alleges Whitehouse filed a brief with U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of four clients while maintaining inactive status and that the brief was nothing more than an attack on the federal judiciary and an open threat to the U.S. Supreme Court (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a complaint with the Unauthorized Practice of Law Committee of the Rhode Island Supreme Court against U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who is a member of the Rhode...

A handful of Democratic Senators signed onto an amicus curiae brief in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. City of New York, defending New York City's blatant attack on the Second Amendment. For years, those who live in NYC could transport handguns, as long as it was to a few select gun ranges in the area. If you were a gun owner in NYC and wanted to take your firearm outside of city limits to a different gun range, that wasn't allowed.The Senators who signed alongside New York City include Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), Mazi Hirono (HI), Richard Blumenthal (CT),...

Several high-profile Senate Democrats warned the Supreme Court in pointed terms this week that it could face a fundamental restructuring if justices do not take steps to "heal" the court in the near future. The ominous and unusual warning was delivered as part of a brief filed Monday in a case related to a New York City gun law. Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., referenced rulings by the court's conservative majority in claiming it is suffering from some sort of affliction which must be remedied. "The Supreme Court...

Attorney Brad Hall, in the firm's conference room with iPhone photos he has taken. (Greg Sorber/Albuquerque Journal) Editor's note: Albuquerque attorney Brad Hall has represented more than 200 victims of priest sex abuse in New Mexico. As his years-long legal battle nears its conclusion in federal bankruptcy proceedings, Hall talked about the legal and emotional journey that began with an unlikely visit. Brad Hall was thinking about hanging it up after more than two decades as a successful plaintiff's lawyer specializing in civil rights cases. Maybe travel. Visit his kids living in exotic locations. Maybe do some writing. That all...