Free Republic

It's almost always the colonels who lead the coups. Why? Because they're usually young, hungry and oh-so-close to holding the reins of power, if only those pesky generals weren't in the way. The US isn't big on military putsches, but in the past month the Republican Party has witnessed a political equivalent, as three Republican "colonels" - first-term senators with little establishment authority but lots of ambition - made their moves for the White House. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio may be junior players in congressional chambers but Republican politics, and US electioneering in general, have changed in...

Illegals being processed at the McAllen Border Patrol Station in Texas last year. President Obama’s White House Task Force on Creating Welcoming Communities unveiled its recommendations Friday for a national strategy to “integrate” millions of immigrants and refugees into cities and towns across the U.S. The chair of the task force, Obama’s domestic policy adviser Cecilia Muñoz, said her focus is on making sure Obama’s historic immigration policies get “institutionalized” so they will live on long after she and her boss are gone from the White House. Obama created the task force Nov. 21 when he announced his plan...

Tim McGraw is facing a backlash from country music fans who say that his decision to headline a concert for a gun control charity could end his career. The Louisiana-raised singer is scheduled to raise money with a Hartford, Connecticut show on July 17 for the Sandy Hook Promise group, which organized in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in late 2012. However, anti-gun control commenters have said that McGraw, 47, risks losing his career the same way female country trio the Dixie Chicks never bounced back from criticizing President George W Bush. The conservator pro-gun blog Bearing...

The first two Republicans to declare their presidential ambitions—Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky—will most likely battle each other for a limited pool of funds donated by true-red conservatives. Marco Rubio, the third Republican to declare his candidacy, has a much better shot at corralling serious corporate money. Politically, Rubio has been migrating from the limited-government, Tea Party edge of the GOP toward the mainstream, aligning himself with business interests seeking modest reforms rather than the radical downsizing of government. “Rubio has positioned himself as an establishment candidate with appeal to grass-roots conservatives,” says Ford...

The Z-Ro Retinal Obfuscation weapon mounted to a handgun. Last summer’s riots in Ferguson, Missouri, prompted much talk by President Obama and certain members of Congress about the need to demilitarize local police forces. Nearly a year later, the opposite is happening. New and more powerful weapons are flowing into local police departments daily, and still others are new to the marketplace. One weapon about to make its debut is the “Z-Ro Retinal Obfuscation” gun. When fired, the gun allows an officer to temporarily blind his targeted subject for up to 15 minutes. The new “compliance weapon” made a...

DENVER, April 17 (UPI) -- A Denver teacher's assignment asking third grade students to write down things "I wish my teacher knew" went viral when she shared some of the responses.

Apple Watch. Seems like Apple has a hit on its corporate hands. Or a preorder hit. The company sold a million Apple Watches in the first 24 hours—just in the U.S.—according to one piece of analysis. That would make it the most successful new product category launch in Apple's history—so what do you do if you've been talking smack about it for months? If you're Roger Kay, you stuff a straw man full of nonsensical numbers that will allow you to declare the device a failure no matter what. It's a neat trick so long as no one applies a...

The U.S. Department of Justice administers two statistical programs to measure the magnitude, nature, and impact of crime in the nation: the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) -- FBIThe federal crime statistics in a table below are a rebuttal to the race-grievance industry, Obama-Holder demagogues, and MSM employees lies that crime is almost entirely white police, white neighborhood watch, and whites in general violence against Black Americans. The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) have long made it publicly known -- if only the lies weren't so...

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A Bloomberg report on Friday cast new doubts on Comcast's long-gestating bid to buy Time Warner Cable. The news wire, citing anonymous sources, reported that "staff attorneys at the Justice Department's antitrust division are nearing a recommendation to block" the bid. The attorneys "could submit their review as soon as next week," Bloomberg said. Then the department's leadership will decide whether to act on the recommendation. The Justice Department declined to comment, and so did the other government agency that is reviewing the proposed merger, the Federal Communications Commission.

Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who is running for president, plans to meet with the head of a national Latino organization who accused the lawmaker of distancing himself from his ethnic community. Cruz is scheduled to meet on April 29 with Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and hold a question-and-answer session in Washington D.C. before an audience of business leaders and journalists. “The Hispanic Chamber is an important constituency,” said Rick Tyler, the national spokesman for the Cruz campaign. “We’re going to have a conversation, the host and the senator. They will...

Ken Borskey, 69, started driving for the ride-sharing company to raise funds for his family before he dies. Roland Gainer, 22, is raising funds to support the Michigan man after riding as a passenger in his car.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - It always begins out of sight, usually under the cover of darkness. This is the nature of South Africa's dirty little secret. Ugly, xenophobic violence that kills in ways that are hard to imagine. Just as mobs sharpening their machetes in front of a cordon of police officers ready to open fire became a defining image of the government-sponsored violence in the days of apartheid, so too has it become a defining image of the new South Africa. During apartheid, black supporters of the Inkhata Freedom Front attacked African National Congress supporters in violence that we...

I had thought, hoped, that I had finished writing about Benghazi, but alas, that is not meant to be. Daily, new evidence is emerging that validates my earlier theory about what truly occurred there, a theory that I have long hoped was in error as the implications of it are so sordid that it has cost me all of the faith that I once had in the human race. In light of the now emerging evidence I must once again address the issue as there is much that must be understood by all with the courage and intestinal fortitude to...

There were few positive signs for the White House Friday as President Barack Obama’s latest executive actions on immigration were debated in front of a federal appeals court. During more than two hours of oral arguments before the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans, Obama’s own statements about his immigration moves were used by a Republican-appointed judge to put a Justice Department lawyer on the defensive.

Why are the Democrats running for president so old? Blame the Clintons. There are five Democrats who have either declared or are thinking about running for president. Three — Joe Biden, Bernard Sanders, and Jim Webb — will be over 70 years old on Inauguration Day 2017. Frontrunner Hillary Clinton will be nine months short of 70. Only Martin O'Malley, who will turn 54 a couple of days before the 2017 swearing-in, has not reached retirement age already. In 2008, Democrats had a 47 year-old candidate who mesmerized the party and ran away with the votes of Americans aged 18...

If you’ve recently finished running the gantlet known as income tax preparation, you might be particularly cheered by Sen. Ted Cruz’s suggestion to abolish the Internal Revenue Service. After all, few of us — except perhaps a few tax preparers for whom the practice provides a livelihood — enjoy navigating the increasingly arcane bureaucracy that governs our tax code. Every year, it seems, there are new rules, new deductions, new forms to fill out and new uncertainty about how all of it will affect one’s bank account. So when Cruz and fellow presidential campaigner Sen. Rand Paul began talking about...

Counterterrorism police have alleged two of the five men they arrested in an operation in Melbourne were planning an Islamic State-inspired terrorist attack on an Anzac Day ceremony. The two men, an 18-year-old Hallam man and an 18-year-old Hampton Park man, were arrested this morning during a major joint counterterrorism team operation. Another man was arrested for weapons offences and two other men were in custody assisting police with their enquiries, after seven search warrants were executed as part of Operation Rising. The Australian Federal Police said they believed the two 18-year-olds were plotting an attack to take place on...

LATEST: PREMIER Daniel Andrews says security will be stepped up across Victoria after police allege they’d foiled Anzac Day terror attack in Melbourne by ISIS-inspired teens. Police allege they have foiled the terrorism attack against serving police officers involving “associates’’ of the dead Melbourne terrorist Numan Haider. The Australian Federal Police counter-terrorism chief Neil Gaughan confirmed details of the terror plot today following raids across Melbourne. Two teenagers were arrested in relation to allegations they were “planning a terrorist attack in Australia’’. “It is alleged both men were undertaking preparations for a terrorist attack at an Anzac Day event in...

Most of our heroin now comes not from Asia, but from Latin America, particularly Mexico, where poppies grow well in the mountains along the Pacific Coast. Mexican traffickers have focused on a rudimentary, less-processed form of heroin that can be smoked or injected. It is called black tar, which accurately describes its appearance. Cheaper to produce and ship than the stuff of decades past from Asia, heroin has fallen in price, and so more people have become addicted. The most important traffickers in this story hail from Xalisco, a county of 49,000 people near the Pacific Coast. They have devised...