Free Republic

A GOP-controlled Senate panel on Wednesday blocked President Barack Obama's request for $50 million to pay for legal help for unaccompanied immigrant children coming to the United States after fleeing violence in Central America. The lawmaker responsible for the move was Republican Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, chief author of a spending bill funding the Justice Department's budget. The spending measure, however, has a long way to go before becoming law. Without lawyers, children are much more likely to be sent back to their home countries. Under federal law, immigrant children have two options to seek legal status, including requesting...

Hundreds of migrants brought to Italy after being rescued at sea camped on streets near Rome's Tiburtina train station and gathered in Milan's main terminal on Thursday, making a brief stop on their journey to northern Europe. At Tiburtina, migrants from Syria, Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia were among those resting in the shade under olive and fig trees. Children played in the supermarket nearby, and dozens napped on cardboard under an overpass. Italy is struggling to handle the summertime surge in migrants, with thousands rescued at sea each week and more than 50,000 so far this year. Almost 2,000 have...

Next time there is a knock at the front door, it just might be the head of the Environmental Protection Agency waiting to deliver a message. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy dealt a warning Wednesday to Americans who do not place environmental stewardship above everything else. "If you are selling to somebody a product, and you can assure them that that product was produced in the most environmentally responsible way, I will guarantee you that they will value that product more highly," McCarthy said at the 2015 GreenGov symposium at George Washington University in Washington. "I can guarantee you because if...

Wednesday in Iowa, former Johns Hopkins pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson, a Republican presidential candidate, said he was “thinking seriously” about creating a program with a “covert division” of monitors to spy on government workers in hopes of improving government efficiency. Carson said, “The other thing that I’m thinking very seriously about doing is adding a covert division of people who look like the people in this room, who monitor what government people do. And we make it possible to fire government people!” Carson added, “I think just knowing that person that just came through that door might be one of...

At the Treasury Department, the memo came down from the deputy executive secretary, Wally Adeyemo, in December of 2009. Going forward, the memo stated, “sensitive information” requested under the Freedom of Information Act was to be reviewed not only by career FOIA officials but also by a committee of political appointees... before release. And it didn’t just happen at Treasury, but at the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security, too. Current and former FOIA attorneys at these agencies say documents requested by the media have come in for special scrutiny, called “sensitive review,” often holding up release for weeks...

Justice Department’s national security chief cites six-month transition period in the USA Freedom Act as a reason to turn the bulk surveillance spigot back on.The (Obama administration) has asked a secret surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months. The legal request, filed nearly four hours after Barack Obama vowed to sign a new law banning precisely the bulk collection he asks the secret court to approve, also suggests that the administration may...

Dozens of activists are calling on a Dallas-based video broadcast station to fire a black talk show host for blaming a group of mostly black teenagers for starting a fracas at a private swimming pool in McKinney, Tex. on Friday. Benet Embry, has been accused by some for being a traitor to his race after he posted to his Facebook account to push back against what he called a false media narrative that has been crafted in the wake of the incident. The Daily Caller confirmed with the CEO of Deep Ellum, Jedi Jantzen, that the station has received at...

The United States Department of Justice is using federal grand jury subpoenas to identify anonymous commenters engaged in typical internet bluster and hyperbole in connection with the Silk Road prosecution. DOJ is targeting Reason.com, a leading libertarian website whose clever writing is eclipsed only by the blowhard stupidity of its commenting peanut gallery. Why are the government using its vast power to identify these obnoxious asshats, and not the other tens of thousands who plague the internet? Because these twerps mouthed off about a judge. Last week, a source provided me with a federal grand jury subpoena. The subpoena1, issued...

link only: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/kalief-browder-1993-2015

resident Obama bluntly challenged the Supreme Court over a pending ruling on the validity of ObamaCare subsidies, complaining Monday that the court should never have taken up the case -- and warning that a ruling against subsidies would be a "twisted interpretation" of the law. The president and his administration's legal team for months have fought the Affordable Care Act court challenge, which is over whether people who enrolled through the federal HealthCare.gov are entitled to subsidies. But the president's comments on Monday, during a press conference on the sidelines of the G-7 summit in Germany, were perhaps his toughest...

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — A white former North Charleston police officer was indicted on a murder charge Monday in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man who was running away from the officer after a traffic stop. The shooting April 4 was captured on video by a bystander and showed officer Michael Slager firing eight times as 50-year-old Walter Scott ran away. The shooting rekindled an ongoing national debate about the treatment of black suspects at the hands of white officers

Obama To Circumvent Congress With ‘Gag Order’ On Firearm Coverage by AWR Hawkins 7 Jun 2015 On June 1 Breitbart News reported on Obama’s Spring 2015 “Unified Agenda.” The gun control measures contained therein which were to be passed by executive fiat. Since that time Representatives like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY-4th) have placed riders on a DOJ appropriations bill to stop portions of the executive gun control push in its tracks. Now the NRA-ILA is revealing that the Obama administration is working behind the scenes to stifle reporting on firearms. From the NRA-ILA: Even as news reports have been highlighting...

A gruesome suicide, a likely murder, a tragic plane crash, wrongful imprisonment, and gripping courtroom scenes draw readers into this compelling story, giving them a frightening perspective on justice and who should be accountable when evidence is withheld. Licensed to Lie is the true story of the strong-arm, illegal, and unethical tactics used by headline-grabbing federal prosecutors in their narcissistic pursuit of power.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) has introduced the Firearm Risk Protection Act—a bill she says will “make gun violence prohibitively expensive.” The gist of Maloney’s legislation is to require that every gun owner purchase liability insurance covering any injuries or fatalities resulting from the use of their weapons. “My bill would boost the cost of owning a gun by thousands of dollars a year,” the Congresswoman boasted. “This should price firearms out of reach for most people. No longer would owning a gun be a one-time purchase. There’d be continuing annual fees to be paid. The number of persons owning guns...

BATTLE MOUNTAIN, Nev. (AP) — Federal land managers say they won't immediately enforce drought-related grazing restrictions in northern Nevada so as to avoid confrontation with ranchers openly defying the order. Conservationists say it's another example of the government caving in to scofflaw ranchers like Cliven Bundy, who continues to graze his cattle illegally in southern Nevada after the Bureau of Land Management backed down from an armed standoff last year. Ranchers Dan and Eddyann Filippini have been notified they are violating the closure ordered in 2013 in an area covering more than 150 square miles near Battle Mountain about 200...

Arguing that "the threat of global climate change is the greatest crisis we have ever faced," Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Conn) has called for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to employ the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act against those who dispute the threat. "Can we really afford to engage in debate when the world is literally melting right before our eyes?" Whitehouse wanted to know. "Those who try to insert feigned skepticism as a barrier to action are worse than jihadi terrorists. They are shills for the corrupt industries that profiteer off Americans' selfish addictions to comfort and mobility....

The courts in New York have allowed an undocumented immigrant to practice law for the first time. Cesar Vargas, a leading voice in the immigrant rights movement, received the OK to practice his profession in a decision handed down Wednesday by a New York appeals court. "We find that the undocumented status of an individual applicant does not, alone, suggest that the applicant is not possessed of the qualities that enable attorneys to vigorously defend their client's interests within the bounds of the law," the ruling says, "nor does it suggest that the applicant cannot protect, as an officer of...

Most of the illegal immigrant criminals Homeland Security officials released from custody last year were discretionary, meaning the department could have kept them in detention but chose instead to let them onto the streets as their deportation cases moved through the system, according to new numbers from Congress. Some of those released were the worst of the worst — more than 3,700 “Threat Level 1” criminals, who are deemed the top priority for deportation, were still released out into the community even as they waited for their immigration cases to be heard. Homeland Security officials have implied their hands are...

BALTIMORE - Baltimore Police arrested and charged a Honduran man with attempting to sexually assault a child in a home where he was a renter, according to a department spokesman. Jose Ricardo Garcia, 34, was charged with various sexual offenses for the May 28 incident. Police said the 5-year-old boy’s aunt caught Garcia in the act at their home in the 3400 block of East Baltimore St. “Please don’t call the police. I have six children back home,” Garcia said after he was caught, according to the boy’s aunt. Garcia then left the home and went to a nearby bar,...

The state Senate on Tuesday approved a hotly debated measure that would allow many immigrants in the country illegally to sign up for special healthcare programs that would offer the same benefits as Medi-Cal. “We are talking about our friends. We are talking about our neighbors and our families who are denied basic healthcare in the richest state of this union,” Lara told his colleagues.