Free Republic

As blacks from Baltimore and other parts of the country riot in response to Freddie Gray’s April 19 death following his arrest on the 12th, The Atlantic reports that blacks increasingly “experience the police not as benevolent defenders of the peace but as an arbitrary menace.”

Baltimore has the fifth highest big city murder rate in the country. The four cities ahead of it are Detroit, New Orleans, Newark and St. Louis. All these cities have something in common. Not racism, but race. The killers and the dead are black.

The Polish Catholic Church has called for a fitting tribute to hundreds of its priests who died during World War II at the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau. “Dachau was the main camp for priests from all over Europe, and over half came from Poland,” said Mgr Józef Kloch, spokesman for the Polish bishops’ conference. “We want to highlight this as we remember the camp’s liberation by the US Army, paying tribute to those who died, as well as to their spiritual achievements in such appalling conditions,” he explained. Mgr Kloch spoke as plans were underway for the observance of...

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., urged his fellow Republicans Saturday to become the "party of civil rights" by embracing limits on the courts and law enforcement. It was both good policy and good politics, he argued, and would fill a vacancy created by Democrats turning away from these issues. Paul, a 2016 presidential hopeful, made the case for this during a speech to the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, a major gathering of socially-conservative voters in the key early primary state. He began by noting that the GOP had lost Iowa in the last two presidential elections and said it needs...

Last week it emerged that Tidal, following its March 30 launch, has fallen out of the iPhone top 700 apps. But positioning in the app charts is driven by downloads, and according to our source, Apple “deliberately took a long time to approve Tidal iOS app updates. Tidal had a new app on Android on April 15, but still hasn’t received approval for Apple’s iOS app store.” Robert Kondrk, vice president of iTunes Content, has also declared war on artists who sign up with Tidal. A source told us, “Robert told execs at Universal Music Group that Rihanna and other...

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - "We're going bust." "No, you're not." "You're strangling us." "No we're not." "You owe us for World War Two." "We gave already." The game of chicken between Greece and its international creditors is turning into a vicious blame game as Athens lurches closer to bankruptcy with no cash-for-reform agreement in sight. Europe's political leaders and central bankers and Greek politicians agree on only one thing: if Greece goes down, they don't want their fingerprints on the murder weapon. If Athens runs out of cash and defaults in the coming weeks, as seems increasingly possible, no one wants...

Is Jonathan Gruber — the MIT economist who seemingly dropped out of public view after he was caught on camera bragging about how he and other Obamacare architects misled the American public — now advising the Department of Labor? No evidence indicates that he is, but the authors of DOL’s sweeping new seven-part group of regulations that would sharply curtail choices of assets and investment strategies in 401(k)s, IRAs, and other savings plans appear to share Gruber’s mindset on the “stupidity of the American voter” (a revelation that Rich Lowry aptly described as “an unvarnished look into the progressive mind,...

Sen. Ted Cruz has been gunning to abolish the Internal Revenue Service since coming to Washington two years ago. To critics, it sounds like bluster. The fiery rhetoric garners hearty applause from conservative audiences, particularly since revelations in 2013 that the IRS targeted Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny. But some federal agency is going to have to collect taxes, so Cruz's vow to shutter the IRS smacks of a politically motivated campaign promise rather than serious policy — at least to some. In an interview with the Washington Examiner on Friday, the 2016 presidential candidate began to put some...

"In a Hillary Clinton campaign—not to mention a Hillary Clinton administration—her husband is a tremendous asset, someone who could help make the difference in a close election, or give valuable advice to a first-term president.....But there’s a cost to flying with Bill Clinton; you also have to carry his baggage........It was his fame,reputation,and powers of persuasion that drove the effort,which has raised and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on charitable activities around the world....but while Clinton and his foundation have done tremendous good, they have also had a questionable relationship with donors and contributors.........(NYT) published its first take on...

Christians and followers of other religions in China suffered the worst abuses in a decade last year as part of a state-sponsored crackdown on dissent, according to a Christian human rights group.The organization China Aid said the persecution of religious practitioners and human rights advocates in China increased by more than 150 percent last year.According to its annual report released on Tuesday, 17,884 individuals were persecuted for their religious beliefs. Authorities detained nearly 3,000 dissidents and sentenced 1,274 people, compared to just 12 in 2013.President Xi Jinping of China, widely viewed as the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) most authoritarian leader...

Jim Quinn is back! - and in better form than ever!! The Quinn in the Morning Show airs from 6:00am to 9:00 am, Monday thru Friday. To listen online, go to www.warroom.com and sign up (for a small fee). Or, for those of you in the upstate NY listening area, Quinn is on WYSL 1040 AM in Rochester, NY. If you sign up online, be sure to choose the "auto-renew" option in order to have full access to archived shows and podcasts.

Here comes Kasichmania? CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Gov. John Kasich is about to launch a national political committee that would allow him to raise money and his profile as he considers a run for president in 2016, sources close to the Republican said Thursday. (SNIP) But I don't think he'll get that far. If he runs, plenty of people in the base are going to react the way Mofo Politics reacted when he put forth a plan to expand Medicaid in Ohio under Obamacare: Kasich justifies his “very conservative” decision to expand Medicaid and implement Obamacare... (SNIP) ... There’s a, kind...

The world is witnessing the horrific genocide of Christians, reminiscent of the genocide of Armenian Christians that began this month one hundred years ago. The Vatican has estimated that “more than 100,000 Christians are violently killed because of some relation to their faith every year.” Three Christians a minute are being murdered. As many as 100-150 million Christians are being persecuted.Statistics alone do not tell the whole story of the toll of human suffering the Islamic genocide of Christians is exacting. The horrific killings include, for example, four Iraqi Christian children, who were beheaded for refusing to say that they...

A Las Vegas man told the Las Vegas Sun he concocted a story about Harry Reid getting beaten up by his brother to test right-wing media gullibility, which he claimed worked like a charm. Larry Pfeifer said he made up a story about Reid’s eye injury, which the senator incurred during an admittedly-bizarre exercise accident, after reading an unsubstantiated rumor in a conservative blog of Reid being beaten up by the mafia. Using a pseudonym, Pfeifer contacted the blogger John Hinderaker and spun a tale of a drunken fight between the Reid brothers, seemingly corroborated by Larry Reid’s DUI arrest...

...President George W. Bush offered rare, and broad-ranging, remarks Saturday night about current national security threats and the 2016 presidential campaign to a large audience of Jewish donors, suggesting that sanctions on Iran should not be lifted... ...He said he was skeptical about lifting sanctions against Iran at a time when its government seemed to be caving in, attendees said, and regretted the leverage the United States would lose as a result of lifting the sanctions. He questioned whether the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, under whom the current framework for a deal has been discussed, represents a new policy or...

....... If a chill in the air seems familiar, it's because New Jersey has more or less been locked in the same pattern for the last year and a half or more. "What we've basically seen for nearly the last two years is that the ridge in the west and a trough in the east," said David Robinson, the state climatologist at Rutgers University. "And that's producing the record heat in the west and keeping things predominantly cold here." While the pattern has relaxed at times, such as during the last few weeks, it has more or less been in...

Quite a bit, we learn ...

A top Democratic money man recruited by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign has put fundraising activities on hold, saying he can’t do it with a clear conscience because the former secretary of state has too many unanswered questions swirling around her. New York businessman Jon Cooper, who Team Clinton enlisted for its elite corps of early fundraisers known as “HillStarters,” said that he decided not to tap his donor network for Mrs. Clinton because she hasn’t provided enough answers about foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation while she ran the State Department, her exclusive use of private email for official...

Can Islam be reformed? It’s a tricky question because, according to a great many Muslim leaders and Western leaders, it doesn’t need reforming. As they keep insisting, the beheadings, slave trafficking, and general violence committed in the name of Islam have nothing to do with Islam. Despite the many attempts to prop it up, some cracks are now appearing in that narrative. In a New Year’s Day speech to Islamic scholars and clerics, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi blamed the “corpus of [Islamic] texts and ideas that we have sacralized” for “antagonizing the entire world,” and he called for a...

Same-sex Marriage leads to the repression of religion, loss of freedom of speech, a weakening of the marital-family leading to increased 'redistribution of wealth'. Haven't we seen this before in another form - an atheistic, socialist State?