Free Republic

Hillary Clinton bristled during Saturday's Democratic debate when she was asked about her role as First Lady, which put her in charge of the Clinton administration's White House floral and dining arrangements. But perhaps this Christmas season Clinton could actually return some of the items that she and her husband walked off with during their departure in 2001. As the White House's keyboards were losing their "W" buttons, so too was the First Lady making off with an historic haul in the form of gifts and presents from friends. Some actual White House artifacts ended up being part of the...

Ranchers in the West are engaged in 21st-century range wars, but their adversaries are not the rustlers and cattle barons of lore. Federal land management agencies, overzealous officers, and self-righteous judges are the foes western ranchers fear the most. On October 7, father and son ranchers from Oregon, Dwight, 73, and Steven Hammond, 46, were labeled as terrorists and sentenced to five years in federal prison under anti-terrorism laws. In 2001, a fire set by the Hammonds to eliminate overgrown sagebrush on their own property inadvertently spread to adjacent BLM land. The two were convicted of arson when the Bureau...

Deputies estimate that they've seized between 7,000 and 10,000 stolen guns from a house and warehouse near Pageland. Deputies have arrested Brent Nicholson in connection to the stolen goods. Chesterfield County Sheriff Jay Brooks says the seized guns, ammunition, and hundreds of other items were all found on a single property off of Highway 9 outside of Pageland city limits. Brooks says the guns alone filled one tractor trailer and ammunition filled another. Nicholson was arrested and charged with trafficking opium and heroin, earlier in the week in Union County. Deputies reportedly went to serve him with a subpoena Friday...

A central part of Hillary Clinton’s testimony to the legislative committee investigating the Benghazi attack is directly contradicted by the Pentagon expert who led the U.S. military’s efforts to supplement diplomatic security in Libya. Repeating an assertion she has previously made, Clinton stated unequivocally at Thursday’s hearing that there were no recommendations from anyone within the government to close the U.S. special mission in Benghazi despite security threats. Clinton stated “there was never a recommendation from any intelligence official in our government, from any official in the State Department or from any other person with knowledge of our presence in...

In an explosive report we learn that ever since 2012, the United States has been spying on Israel in order to prevent the Jewish State from attacking suspected Iranian nuclear sites, according to Friday’s Wall Street Journal. The White House had sent an additional aircraft carrier to the region after learning that Israeli aircraft had flown into Iranian airspace in what U.S. officials feared was a test run for an attack on Iran’s Fordow plant. The carriers had attack aircraft on board prepared to respond to any Israeli attack on Iran. If that wasn’t enough to strain the conceit that...

As conservatives scratch their collective heads on how to win over young people, a millennial whose online audience is center-left explains why Bernie Sanders is appealing to youth. Devin Foley, the thoughtful President of Intellectual Takeout and Better Ed, explains Sanders is growing in popularity among young people because he gives voice to those who can’t find jobs, who see unfair disparities and who suffer from massive debt. Besides that, Foley says conservatives refuse to reach out to youth in ways that resonate or make sense of the fallen world to them, a world that once promised going to college...

Yale Divinity School invited Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson to be a "guest lecturer" for two days on "transformational leadership." McKesson made it clear just how transformational his leadership was when he defended looting as a legitimate political tactic. On Friday, McKesson will be one of the BLM activists meeting with Hillary Clinton. Perhaps Mrs. Clinton could broach the subject with Mr. McKesson and get his views on whether killing white cops is justified.

Walmart's theft problem is getting worse. Walmart US president Greg Foran said Tuesday that theft, which the company calls shrinkage, was one of three major factors behind the retailer's drop in profit in the most recent quarter. Walmart's profit fell to $3.48 billion, or $1.08 a share, in the quarter ending July 31, from $4.09 billion, or $1.26 a share, a year earlier, the company reported Tuesday. "Inventory shrinkage was meaningfully higher than planned for the quarter," Foran said in an earnings call. Walmart probably loses about 1% of its US revenue — or roughly $3 billion every year —...

Channel 9 has obtained surveillance video that shows more than a dozen people stealing weapons from a gun show at the Central Florida Fairgrounds in Orange County over the Fourth of July weekend.

I had no intention of commenting on the recent shooting at a Charleston, South Carolina church.........Alas, the Huffington Post, in the person of veteran propagandist Terry Krepel, forced my hand. In an article published Monday, “Did Right-Wing Media Influence Dylann Roof,” Krepel cites me first and foremost among Roof’s influences. For the record, he also cites WND and the American Thinker.

The AFL-CIO, along with some public sector unions, announced a campaign finance freeze in March. Unions hoped the threat of withholding contributions would scare Democratic lawmakers out of supporting President Barack Obama’s Trade Promotion Authority, or “fast track,” to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership — a trade agreement labor groups say would hurt manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

ABC and NBC sustained their refusal on Friday morning to cover a new report from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that found oil and natural gas fracking does not cause harm to the country’s drinking water. After all three networks omitted any mention of the study on their Thursday evening newscasts, ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today continued that pattern while CBS This Morning broke through and provided a new brief on the topic.

Propaganda is about telling a good story. So when the media wants to tell a story of how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, they ignore inconvenient facts, such as the value of the various federal, state, and local transfer payments as well as the value of charitable contributions from private groups such as soup kitchens. That would interfere with the story that is needed to justify higher taxes and higher spending.

Rap star Jay Z has quietly sent thousands of dollars to help bail out protesters from Baltimore’s jail system, a writer who worked with him on his 2010 memoir said. Dream Hampton, who helped Jay Z author “Decoded,” revealed the rapper’s cash infusions via Twitter. The messages were shortly after deleted – but not before the hip-hop magazine Complex picked them up and reported them, Agence France-Presse said. Among the tweets: “When we needed money for bail for Baltimore protesters, I … hit Jay up, as I had for Ferguson [and he] wired tens of thousands [of dollars].”

Texas is larger than most countries in the United Nations, some not much bigger than the postage stamps they print for collectors, but each with a vote that can cancel ours out. Texas is about to a vote against the U.N.’s sovereignty-destroying Agenda 21, so named because it claims to be setting a “sustainable growth” agenda for the 21st century. Agenda 21 is in fact a global power grab similar to climate-change treaties like the Kyoto Protocol. It uses the imaginary threat of unsustainable growth which allegedly threatens to plunder the planet’s finite resources, like climate change allegedly threatens planetary...

American taxpayers will pony up around $3.024 billion this year towards the United Nations’ regular and peacekeeping budgets, more than what 185 other countries combined are paying, an expert on the international body told U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday.

Journalists help promote Hollywood celebrities while condemning average Americans for causing climate change. The same media go out of their way to ignore or excuse the hypocrisy of celebrity “environmentalists” who fly their private jets around the world, rent mega-yachts and live in massive mansions. Avatar Director James Cameron warned of a future “world that’s in shambles” because of climate change, and said he believes “in ecoterrorism” yet, he owns an impressive private collection of motorcycles, cars, dirt bikes, a yacht, a helicopter, a Humvee fire truck and a $32-million submarine. ABC and CBS even praised Cameron for his submarine...

Gee, I wonder why? After all, many of them haven’t yet been identified. Ken Vogel explains that the publicity surrounding the influence-peddling schemes at chez Clinton has potential donors looking elsewhere, but … does that apply to those who still want to buy influence? Hmmm. Actually, the fact that so little goes to charity — and that the rate (6.4% in 2013) has become so public — is what has them rethinking their commitments:

More than five years after President Obama and other leaders agreed on a 2020 goal of raising $100 billion each year from public and private sources to help developing countries deal with climate change, the United Nations wants to see action. Ahead of Earth Day on Wednesday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is pointing to a meeting next month in New York where he says he will be looking for clear indications from governments and investors as to how the ambitious goal will be reached.

Despite questions of the Rev’s financial irregularities and allegations of shakedowns, they support him. Several big corporations sponsored the annual convention last week for National Action Network, Al Sharpton’s in-the-red nonprofit, according to a list obtained by National Review.