Free Republic

The knock on the door in the dead of night is the stuff of Darkness at Noon, and of the state of Wisconsin. To the question of whether armed police can storm your house and take away your personal effects and tell you to shut up about it, based simply on your political advocacy, Wisconsin answered for years, “Why, yes, they can — now please, shut up about it.” The so-called John Doe investigations into Governor Scott Walker and conservative groups in Wisconsin have been an ongoing travesty that — now that Walker is entering the presidential stage — should...

India's homophobia has cost the country its representation in the Mr Gay World (MGW) 2015 – the international pageant for gay men that seeks to establish ambassadors for LGBTQ and human rights. Over 36 hours after Thahir Mohammed Sayyed (28), the entrant to MGW from Kochi, went into hiding along with his family, he reached out to dna on a social media platform and said: "I am withdrawing from the contest." I hope the organisers appreciate the difficulties I faced. I cannot take this pressure," he said in a message, refusing to come on the phone. "I have switched off...

A New York Times story on a new book detailing allegations of improprieties at the Clinton Foundation contained this paragraph: But “Clinton Cash” is potentially more unsettling, both because of its focused reporting and because major news organizations including The Times, The Washington Post and Fox News have exclusive agreements with the author to pursue the story lines found in the book. Outrage! screamed the Clinton machine. "The conservative author Peter Schweizer has a major credibility problem, though you wouldn't know it, because this anti-Clinton manifesto is being peddled by some in the media who have essentially reprinted the press...

In results that were stunning for several reasons, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was the runaway winner in a "straw poll" of Republican presidential favorites at Pennsylvania’s largest-ever gathering of conservatives, the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference, on Friday and Saturday.With the "straw ballots" counted and released on Saturday, Walker was an easy winner with 91 votes, followed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz with 58 votes. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum was third with 56 votes.Since the first PLC back in 1989, the group has become the most-attended and most-watched conclave of conservatives in the Keystone State. Fueled by the recent campaigns of...

<p>CNN)Billionaire businessman and powerful Republican donor David Koch wants Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to be the next president but doesn't plan to financially back anyone during the primaries.</p> <p>Koch made the comments Monday at a private gathering hosted by the New York State Republican Party at the Union League Club in Manhattan. They were described to CNN by two attendees who were in the room.</p>

The New York Times, The Washington Post and Fox News have made exclusive agreements with a conservative author for early access to his opposition research on Hillary Clinton, a move that has confounded members of the Clinton campaign and some reporters. "Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich" will debut on May 5. But the Times, the Post and Fox have already made arrangements with author Peter Schweizer to pursue some of the material included in his book, which seeks to draw connections between Clinton Foundation donations and...

Republicans often rail about undocumented immigrants. But Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, an expected GOP presidential candidate, took it a step further Monday by sounding some critical notes about the number of those who immigrate to the U.S. legally. "In terms of legal immigration, how we need to approach that going forward is saying -- the next president and the next Congress need to make decisions about a legal immigration system that’s based on, first and foremost, on protecting American workers and American wages. Because the more I’ve talked to folks, I’ve talked to [Alabama Sen. Jeff] Sessions and others out...

Kermit -- everyone's favorite singing and dancing frog might be real. Or, at least a frog that looks like Jim Henson's popular Muppet. The Costa Rican Amphibian Research Center just announced the discovery of a new glass frog species.

Officials at Mitchell Primary School are apologizing after a book about a transgender child was read to most of the school’s K-3 students. Criticism flooded the district after Fox News host Sean Hannity posted about the lesson on his website, prompted by a Mitchell school mother who was angry she wasn’t given advanced warning that teachers were reading students the book “I am Jazz” by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, the news site reports. The book details the struggles of a child “with a boy’s body and a girl’s brain,” who eventually finds a doctor that tells the family the...

With every day that passes, Operation Decisive Storm proves just how necessary, and hence, justifiable it is. The conspirators inside Yemen have made huge investments over the past few years in funding sectarian infrastructures, organizations, logistics, as well as tribal and interest-based relations woven with ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh’s “family-run militia.” The militia that has fought under his banner defends his interests and the interests of those he chooses to befriend today, only to turn on them tomorrow. These investments have been huge and long term. The investors are now well known and for a time this looked like nothing...

Following are excerpts from an interview with Egyptian Islamist researcher Ali Abd Al-Aal, which aired on Mayadeen TV on October 12, 2012. Watch it – it’s an eyeopener. TV host Yahya Abu Zakariya: It has become customary for the sheiks preaching in mosques to talk, in their sermons and lectures, about “the infiltrating infidel West,” “the European-Crusader West,” “the abode of infidels and the abode of Islam.” I have presented claims that the Muslims in Andalusia engaged in fornication, homosexuality, and debauchery. Today, if you go to the West and tour the European continent, where there are 50 million Muslims…...

"Death to the Fascist Insect" Proclaimed the Revolutionary Cohorts of the Symbionese Liberation Army as they Bravely Murdered the Humble Christian Woman, Myrna Lee Opsahl This Day Forty Years Ago.  A photographic exhibition once featured the resolute face of a late 1930s murder suspect as he was marched into a paddy wagon. I ve often searched for that image as an example of dedicated unrepentance. No more. We have the face of Emily Harris and her colleagues in domestic terrorism, waiting in court. We can see arrogant unrepentance, and yet hidden fear in the faces of Myrna's murderers.  Dr. Trygve Opsahl received news of...

The Russian president stunned Barack Obama when he proposed Steven Seagal as an intermediary between Washington and Moscow. Max Seddon and Rosie Gray tell the extraordinary story of the faded action star’s dalliances with the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin knew his relationship with the United States was nearing breaking point when he met Barack Obama in Lough Erne, a picturesque lakeside golf resort in Northern Ireland, on the sidelines of the G-8 summit in June 2013. The Russian and U.S. presidents had never gotten along. Putin spent their first meeting on the porch of his residence in Novo-Ogarevo, outside Moscow, in...

Commentary By Portrait of Patrick Tyrrell Patrick Tyrrell There was good news this month: private-sector job openings rose slightly in February, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Openings rose to 3.8 percent of all private-sector jobs and the job openings—the highest rate since January 2001. Other data for the month showed the unemployment rate for workers age 25-54 (often called prime age workers) ticked downward to 4.6 percent from 4.8 percent.

California’s health insurance exchange, established under the Affordable Care Act, has been held out as a national model for Obamacare. In some ways—not all of them good—it is. Whether it’s falling far short of 2015 enrollment goals or sending out 100,000 inaccurate tax forms, Covered California is struggling with its share of challenges. Now, several senior-level officials integral to the launch of Covered California—who enthusiastically support the Affordable Care Act—are speaking about what they view as gross incompetence and mismanagement involving some of the $1 billion federal tax dollars poured into the state effort. ‘Somebody Must Have Been Smoking Something’...

In June 2003, the nonprofit Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) Observatory Corporation was founded by a collaboration of organizations: the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy, the University of California, and the California Institute of Technology.

Washington - Top Obama administration officials have failed for several days to persuade Saudi Arabia’s government to limit the scope of its airstrikes on cities and towns in Yemen, a campaign that authorities said killed nearly 50 people Monday in Sana, the capital. The U.S. effort to restrain the Saudi attacks came as the Pentagon moved the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt and a guided-missile destroyer into waters off Yemen. In all, nine U.S. warships are patrolling near strategic shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden and the southern Arabian Sea. Officials said the growing armada is meant, in part, to...

TrainMeArizona Plan Spreads to Kansas! The lamestream media told you: A lot of misinformation: "news" reporting on the bill was typically horrendous. Ms. Stoneking reports: "Some reported we had passed open carry -- Kansas has always been an open carry state (statehood was in 1861). Some said now felons could carry guns -- uh duh, no. Some were talking how now we could drive around in our cars with a concealed gun with no permit -- uh, we already could do that as long as it wasn't concealed on our person. Basically just the fear mongering, Kansas will turn into...

The son of Democratic mega-donor George Soros is gearing up to play a more active role in the 2016 election with the launch of new political action committee focused on representing the views of Jewish Americans — beyond foreign policy. Alex Soros, 29, who has steadily increased his political and philanthropic giving in recent years, has helped establish Bend the Arc PAC, the first ever national Jewish political action committee in America focused entirely on domestic issues. Bend the Arc, a non-profit, has an advocacy arm chaired by the younger Soros but has not previously had a political action committee....

The IDF is poised to establish one or two new mixed-gender battalions, which will be permanently based along Israel's borders on routine patrol and observation missions, according to Army Radio. However, the Head of the IDF Fortitude Forum, Col. (res.) Raz Sagi, told Arutz Sheva there is a lot of bluffing and leftist meddling behind the changes announced. The idea of creating specialized units for the “softer” combat routine of patrolling and observation along peaceful borders, so as to let the fighting combat battalions spend more time training, is not a bad one, he opined. “But it also means that...