Free Republic

When the modern Tea Party movement coalesced in the early days of the Obama presidency, its allusion to the political grievances of the protesters in Boston Harbor a couple of hundred years earlier seemed plausible enough: Its members felt that their taxes were too high and their interests not adequately represented by the remote authorities in Washington. But the election of 2016 presents a challenge to that historical lineage. The home states to the Tea Party are actually doing great on the taxation and representation front. It’s the progressive blue states that should be protesting. Start with the Electoral College....

You’re just a vicious racist, a Manhattan judge said in sentencing a psychotic gunman to 240 years in prison for holding 15 white patrons of an East Village wine bar hostage 10 years ago. Steven Johnson — an AIDS-infected, unemployed Brooklyn barber — had burst into Bar Veloce on Second Avenue just before closing time on a June night in 2002, dousing everyone with kerosene and shouting, “White people are going to burn tonight!” One decade, one mistrial and one overturned verdict later, Johnson was up to his old tricks again at his sentencing yesterday — ranting about the economic...

New York (AP) -- A judge sentenced a man to 240 years in prison Wednesday for taking hostages in a bar and telling patrons that "white people are going to burn tonight." State Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley told Steven Johnson, 39, who is black, that he had forfeited his "right to live in society." Johnson, 39, was convicted March 1 of attempted murder, assault and other charges, including some designated as hate crimes. Johnson invaded Bar Veloce, in Manhattan's East Village neighborhood, while nine men and six women were inside it June 16, 2002. He was carrying three pistols,...

NEW YORKERS are spoiling for a fight. When Buddhist actor Richard Gere urged a concert crowd in Madison Square Garden last October to meet terrorism with "love, compassion and understanding," the audience booed and jeered. This month, Rabbi Yakove Lloyd announced that – in response to terrorist threats – Jews would begin patrolling Brooklyn neighborhoods with shotguns. Call it the "Spirit of 9-11." A silent mobilization is sweeping the city. New Yorkers, young and old, are coming to grips with the fact that it is better to die fighting than to simply die. Unfortunately, city officials don’t agree. The gap...