Free Republic

Was TWA Flight 800 shot out of the sky?As a former pilot, that is a question I get asked about all the time. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but let’s be clear: Yes. I say it was. And I believe the FBI covered it up.

Not long ago, the New York Times uncovered the artifact that Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush had once listed himself as “Hispanic” on a Florida voter-registration form. Bush is married to a Mexican American. He lived for a number of years in South America and speaks Spanish fluently. Maybe he has consciously assumed a Hispanic identity. Or perhaps he did not think there was much of a difference between “white” and “Hispanic.” Or, as he said, he simply checked the wrong box by accident. Vijay Chokal-Ingam, whose family immigrated from India, and who is the brother of sitcom-actress Mindy Kaling,...

Hassan Rouhani: We're talking with 'the major powers,' not with you

Wednesday marks Tax Day in the United States, the day when Americans are obligated to turn in their taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

Here’s one thing you can’t blame on President Obama: the politically correct approach to radical Islam on American campuses was well under way before he took office. “The Achilles’ heel of democratic societies, as the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski once observed, is also their moral foundation—the principle of tolerance, which they extend even to those who want to destroy them,” author and activist David Horowitz writes in The Black Book of the American Left. “The Islamists understand this vulnerability and therefore have exploited it as a central strategy along with the intimidation they conduct through terror.” “By deploying defamatory expressions...

Hillary Clinton’s statements that all her grandparents immigrated to the U.S. are in conflict with public records, a report says. According to Buzzfeed, Clinton spoke in Norwalk, Iowa, on Wednesday about her family’s arrival in the country. “All my grandparents, you know, came over here,” she said. Only her paternal grandfather, Hugh Rodham Sr., immigrated to the United States, according to Buzzfeed. Her paternal grandmother, Hanna Jones Rodham, was born in Pennsylvania, records show.

The early days of American political campaigns are always marked by a certain pantomime absurdity, but one could be forgiven nevertheless for wondering whether Hillary Clinton’s confused, staccato launch has been especially daffy. For an event that has been at least six years in the making, last Sunday’s confirmation was unusually schizophrenic and almost entirely inchoate. In the morning, we were told that Clinton would be demonstrating her tech savvy by announcing with a video and a tweet. Instead, we got an insipid e-mail from an aide. In the evening, we were informed that Clinton would be driving across the...

Customer Mary Fuller was so scared by the unruly teens flashing gang signs and raising a “ruckus” in the parking lot of the BP gas station in Memphis, Tennessee, that she expressed her fears to a complete stranger, who offered to walk the elderly white woman outside to her car. “I said, ‘I don’t know if I ought to walk out of here or not, because they’re still fighting,’” Fuller told WMC-TV. “He said, ‘It’s not a problem. I’ll take care of this.’” The man she confided in was Orrden Williams, who had gone to the gas station to use...

An increasingly shallow and risk-averse America gets the most shallow and risk-averse candidate imaginable. The Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign part deux is less than a week old, and already reporters and opinionators across America are complaining. She announced via a video, the ultimate way to control a message and avoid any engagement with real people or the press. She is undertaking a trip by van; nothing novel, simply a redux from her 2000 Senate campaign in New York. For now, at least, she is passing on talking policy in any real detail. For the foreseeable future, she appears interested...

Rabbi (Maj.) Sarah Schechter, a Cadet Chapel Jewish chaplain, reads from the Torah while the U.S. Air Force Academy Honor Guard escorts the casket containing the remains of Capt. Richard D. Chorlins into the Cadet Chapel April 14, 2015. COLORADO SPRINGS (Tribune News Service) — Six academy pallbearers carried a wooden casket shrouded with an American flag as they marched under a cloudless sky Tuesday morning. They took seven steps, paused and took seven more steps. The ritual was repeated until the processional had halted seven times on its way to the resting place for Capt. Richard David Chorlins in...

Talk radio host and author of “The Liberty Amendments,” Mark Levin said that the GOP field has a group of young conservatives that included, but was not limited to, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio, who were “smarter, wiser, quicker on their feet, more principled than any group of young conservatives seeking the presidency I’ve seen since Reagan” on Wednesday.

BLACK JUDGE GIVES BLACK HOME INVADER PROBATION, ATTACKS WHITE FAMILY FOR RACISM by AWR HAWKINS A black judge, offended by a white family’s concern that their toddler was frightened of black men after a violent home invasion and robbery, publicly shamed them and let off the convicted man with mere probation. When Gregory Wallace was sentenced for alleged armed home invasion near Buechel, Kentucky, Judge Olu Stevens “slammed” the homeowners, Jordan and Tommy Gray, for not correcting their daughter’s fear of black men. Wallace, who was convicted of robbery, had been found guilty of participating in the March 2013 armed...

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and five of their likely rivals for the Republican presidential nomination including Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will be speaking at an economic summit hosted at Walt Disney World in June by Gov. Rick Scott and his campaign fund Let's Get To Work. Brecht Heuchan of Let's Get To Work said Rubio, Bush, Walker, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry all have accepted invitations to speak at the June 2 summit at Disney's Yacht and Beach...

An audit released today casts a deep shadow of doubt over Vermont's ability to create a fully functioning health exchange. The report details the Green Mountain State's ongoing struggles with billing and website development for Vermont Health Connect. Vermont has spent millions creating and patching the system. According to Auditor Doug Hoffer, long-term sustainability hinges on two upgrade releases scheduled for the end of May and fall respectively. The audit indicates both are at high risk of failure. The governor has pledged to scrap the exchange and begin planning to transition to the federal exchange if either deadline is missed.

Has nobody looked at the latest financials from Angie's List (NASDAQ:ANGI)? They issued financials and a quarterly report this week that appear to be an utter catastrophe, yet the stock rose 25% from $9 to about $11.50 in response. Angie's List runs a website with reviews of dentists and plumbers. The reviews are "crowd sourced" which means they come from actual customers who contribute to the site. Yelp.com, Wikipedia.com and YouTube are other sites that are crowd sourced. Angie's list is different from most sites of this type because they charge an annual fee. Despite continuing losses, Angie's List management...

Veterans, Dependents Account for Disproportionate Share of ‘Mental Defective’ Category on Gun Ban List Apr 15, 2015 WASHINGTON – Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is requesting an explanation for why nearly all of the names on the Justice Department’s gun ban list in the “mental defective” category belong to veterans or their dependents. “It’s disturbing to think that the men and women who dedicated themselves to defending our freedom and values face undue threats to their fundamental Second Amendment rights from the very agency established to serve them. A veteran or dependent shouldn’t lose...

The Greatness of Little Things: A Reflection on a Quote From St. Augustine By: Msgr. Charles PopeI have found that one of my favorite quotes from St. Augustine  is not all that well known. Here it is in Latin, followed by my own translation: Quod minimum, minimum est, Sed in minimo fidelem esse,magnum est.What is a little thing,  is (just) a little thing.But to be faithful in a little thingis a great thing. (from St. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana, IV,35)I first saw this quote on the frontispiece of a book by Adrian Fortescue. Fortescue applied it to the intricate details of celebrating...

Statewide caps on government employee health insurance have saved Michigan public school districts a total of $1.3 billion since the 2010-11 school year, according to an analysis done by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The caps were implemented by a 2011 law. Districts spent $1.91 billion on employee health insurance in 2010-11, the year before Gov. Rick Snyder signed the new law. It imposed either a “hard cap” on how much schools could spend on health insurance, or required employees to pay at least 20 percent of the premiums. The cost to school districts has dropped each year since,...

DES MOINES—With a fork and a frown, Steve Scheffler chops his scrambled eggs into a flattened yellow mash. "Some people don't think I'm conservative enough," he scoffs. "That's laughable." Scheffler, 67, is an icon of Iowa evangelical conservatism: lead organizer for preacher Pat Robertson's 1988 Iowa caucus campaign, former head of Iowa's Christian Coalition, president of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, a man who believes in gay-conversion therapy, and who once warned that same-sex marriage would make Des Moines "the homosexual capital of the Midwest." While the years have not softened Scheffler's conservatism, Iowa's GOP has moved so far to...

LOS ANGELES, April 15, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Women who use the birth control pill may be shrinking their brains and increasing their chances of developing Crohn's disease, two new studies have found.Neuroscientists from the University of California, Los Angeles found that the two main regions of the brain controlling emotion and decision-making are thinner in women who take the pill.A study published April 2 in the journal Human Brain Mapping reports that the pill’s chemicals block the body’s natural hormones, altering the brain’s structure and function.The study concluded that oral contraceptive use “was associated with significantly lower cortical thickness measurements...