Free Republic

North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard M. Burr apparently is easy to underestimate. The former Wake Forest football defensive back (he played at 6’1’’, 200 pounds as a sophomore in 1975, according to the university’s Athletic Media Relations Department) served five terms in the House and is now in his second term in the Senate. He is the Tar Heel State’s senior senator and, more importantly, chairs the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, a particularly meaningful position given terrorist threats to the United States. But Burr, who lost or dropped a couple of bids to join his party’s Senate leadership, has...

Dean G. Skelos, the leader of the New York State Senate, and his son were arrested on Monday by federal authorities on extortion, fraud and bribe solicitation charges, expanding the corruption investigation that has cast a renewed spotlight on Albany’s intractable corruption problem. The charges against Senator Skelos, 67, and his son, Adam B. Skelos, 32, were detailed in a six-count criminal complaint that quickly became mandatory reading material in the Capitol building. Politicians and their staff members pored over the 43-page complaint — an often titillating document that included references to burner phones, secretly taped conversations and strong-arm tactics...

The State Department has not found any evidence that, while serving as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton took any actions influenced by donations to the Clinton Foundation."We are not aware of any evidence that actions taken by Secretary Clinton were influenced by donation to the Clinton Foundation or speech on honoraria of former President Clinton," State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke said during a Monday press briefing.The State Department's comments come on the eve of the official release of "Clinton Cash," a book about Clinton's tenure as secretary of state that alleges she used her power in office to provide favors...

Americans will defend to the death — and literally had to — Pamela Geller’s right to disseminate images of the Prophet Muhammad. The First Amendment applies even to irresponsible provocateurs. A Geller-organized event in Texas over the weekend included inviting artists to draw images of Muhammad, an act that has provoked deadly attacks by some Islamists. In explaining her rationale, Geller pointed to an Iranian Holocaust cartoon contest that drew nearly 1,000 entries, saying “We need to make a similar show of strength of what is right.” Which extended to a drawing of Muhammad anally impaled on a pencil up...

More than half the public says Hillary Clinton is not trustworthy, one of several problems that could hamper her bid for the presidency, the May IBD/TIPP poll finds.

A Texas traffic cop saved untold lives Sunday night when he took down two heavily armed men bent on storming a building where a 'Draw the Prophet' Muhammad contest was taking place, killing both before they could make their way inside. The police officer, who has not been identified by Garland Police Department officials, "probably saved lives," said police spokesman Joe Harn, who added that "his reaction, and his shooting with a pistol, he did a good job." Harn said the two suspects, believed to have driven some 1,100 miles from Phoenix to invade the contest at a suburban Dallas...

[A]s I argue in Islam and Free Speech, it will not do to blame the messenger for the violence. The shooting last night was not caused by the free-speech event any more than the Charlie Hebdo murders were caused by derogatory caricatures, or the rioting after a Danish newspaper’s publication of anti-Islam cartoons was caused by the newspaper. The violence is caused by Islamic supremacist ideology and its law that incites Muslims to kill those they judge to have disparaged Islam. *snip* The threat to liberty in this instance is sharia blasphemy law. A bloc of Muslim-majority countries, with the...

The meteoric rise in U.S. oil production has ended, easing a global glut and driving a rebound in crude prices from below $50 a barrel, according to crude trader and hedge fund manager Andrew J. Hall. “We have now reached a turning point,” Hall said in a letter Friday to investors in Astenbeck Capital Management LLC, his commodities hedge fund. Growing demand and supply pullbacks “rendered all the doomsday forecasts self-defeating.” Oil production from Texas to North Dakota peaked at almost 10 million barrels a day in February and has been falling since then, Hall wrote. A drastic reduction in...

A Baltimore city employee has been fired after it was discovered that he had watched 39 hours of pornography on the job over a two-week period.The worker was a maintenance supervisor with the Department of Public Works, and brought a DVD of pornography to work, the Baltimore Sun reports. One day that he was being monitored, he watched it for nearly seven hours of his workday, the inspector general tells the Sun.The worker has not been identified. He worked at the facilities division of the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant, on Eastern Avenue, was suspended without pay last September and...

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The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) issued a regulation for Christmas lights on Monday, deeming some holiday decorations a “substantial product hazard.”“The Consumer Product Safety Commission … is issuing a final rule to specify that seasonal and decorative lighting products that do not contain any one of three readily observable characteristics (minimum wire size, sufficient strain relief, or overcurrent protection), as addressed in a voluntary standard, are deemed a substantial product hazard under the Consumer Product Safety Act (“CPSA”),” the final rule said.The ruling applies to a variety of Christmas decorations, including “stars, wreathes, candles without shades, light sculptures, blow-molded...

What accounts for hatred of the West by people who voluntarily spent years here? One of the stranger things about East–West relations these days is the schizophrenic attraction to, and hatred of, Western culture that characterizes many foreign leaders and celebrities. Did these mixed-up folk idealistically flock to the West, and then end up bitterly disappointed that their experience did not match their dreams, in the infamous manner of Sayyid Qutb (“The America That I Have Seen”)? The Egyptian intellectual Qutb leveraged his subsidized residence in Colorado into an unhinged and racist screed against Western popular culture; among his targets...

A battle is brewing in the Republican Party over whether illegal immigrants granted deferred deportation by President Obama should be eligible to serve in the military. Anti-immigration hard-liners and vulnerable Republicans who represent districts with large Hispanic populations are battling over provisions in the annual Defense authorization bill, which is set to come to the House floor next week. The fight underscores the GOP’s difficulty in wrestling with Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which allows qualified illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to obtain temporary work permits. GOP presidential candidates are split over the...

The religious right remains the largest voting bloc in the Republican Party, and that gives Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, the potential to play a big role in the presidential nominating contest. But Mr. Huckabee, who was set to announce his presidential bid Tuesday morning, will have a harder time winning Iowa than he did in 2008, when religious conservatives had serious reservations about the two main candidates, John McCain and Mitt Romney. This year’s conservative favorites do not have Mr. Romney’s vulnerabilities among evangelicals, like Mormonism or past support for abortion rights. Some candidates might be outright good...

A woman whose address was listed in public court records as that of a police officer charged in the Freddie Gray case has been harassed by phone calls from bail bondsmen and visits from journalists to her home, her lawyer said Monday. Alicia White is afraid to walk her dog and has deactivated her social media accounts, her attorney, Jeremy Eldridge, said in a phone interview on Monday. Eldridge said his client has the same name, but isn't Sgt. Alicia White, who was charged Friday with involuntary manslaughter and other offenses in Gray's death. The Associated Press was among the...

Opponents of giving the Obama administration broad authority to negotiate a trans-Pacific trade deal, including Republican senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, are pushing a new argument: It could trigger a flood of immigrants into the country. Sessions’ argument – essentially, that the administration could use the authority to expand immigration – was dismissed as an “urban legend” by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, whose panel oversees trade. But with extremely close votes expected in both the House and possibly the Senate on whether to grant President Barack Obama increased powers in trade talks, leading Republicans and members...

Hill Republicans have all but surrendered the fight against President Barack ObamaÂ’s executive actions on immigration. A handful of GOP firebrands are still agitating to use CongressÂ’ power of the purse to reverse ObamaÂ’s move to shield millions of immigrants here illegally from deportations. But top Republicans say theyÂ’re not about to go there again: They tried that earlier this year with the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill but were forced to capitulate on the eve of a department shutdown, having won no concessions on immigration. Better to let the issue play out in the courts, the GOP reasoning...

....As Letterman counts down the days until his final show on May 20, he was joined by President Obama, who is also heading towards retirement when he leaves office on Jan. 20, 2017. The two alternated between sincere appreciation and goofy jokes in Obama’s eighth and final appearance on “The Late Show” (and third since becoming president). Letterman asked what Obama would do once he leaves the White House.

Hours after the Senate allowed a controversial anti-discrimination law to officially take effect in the nation’s capital, a group of pro-life organizations released a joint statement pledging to continue operating in accordance with their beliefs—thereby putting themselves at risk of violating the law.“Despite the enactment of this unjust law, we will continue to hire employees who share our commitment to the dignity of every member of the human family,” reads the statement released by Alliance Defending Freedom, the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Americans United for Life and Americans United for Life Action, March for Life, Concerned Women...

Explanation: What's that under the surface of Mercury? The robotic MESSENGER spacecraft that had been orbiting planet Mercury for the past four years had been transmitting its data back to Earth with radio waves of very precise energy. The planet's gravity, however, slightly changed this energy when measured on Earth, which enabled the reconstruction of a gravity map of unprecedented precision. Here gravitational anomalies are shown in false-color, superposed on an image of the planet's cratered surface. Red hues indicate areas of slightly higher gravity, which in turn indicates areas that must have unusually dense matter under the surface. The...