Free Republic

Cartoon suggests drowned refugee boy would have grown up to be a 'groper'The aunt of drowned Syrian refugee boy Alan Kurdi says a controversial new cartoon from French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is "disgusting." "I hope people respect our family's pain. It's a big loss to us. We're not the same anymore after this tragedy. We're trying to forget a little bit and move on with our life. But to hurt us again, it's not fair," said Tima Kurdi from her home in Port Coquitlam, B.C. The cartoon suggests that Alan Kurdi, had he grown up, would have been like...

Norway has said it will send refugees back across its Arctic border with Russia on bicycles. About 5,500 people, most of them Syrians, cycled through the Arctic Circle Storskog crossing in 2015 to take advantage of a loophole in border rules: while Russia does not allow people to cross on foot and Norway does not let in drivers carrying people without documents, bicycles are permitted at both ends. The Norwegian national police directorate said it was trying to avoid sending the refugees back on bicycles, but it has ordered that two-wheelers ditched after the crossing "be gathered up for use...

To paraphrase Michelle Obama, after seven years of her husband's being in office, I can safely say many of us are, for the first time in our lives, ashamed to be Americans. His disingenuous State of the Union speech last night was one reminder of this; the seizing of two Navy riverine vessels by Iranian Revolutionary Guards yesterday was another. The ten sailors on board those boats are lucky. News agencies have announced that they have just been released. According to CNN, "the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and U.S. officials appear to be at odds over whether the U.S. apologized...

The Washington state legislature has convened for a 60 day session, and the anti gunners are wasting no time introducing bills that supposedly address “gun violence”, in which they sort of admit that their “universal background check” ballot initiative has failed to prevent such “gun violence.” Rep. Jim Moeller’s HB 2354 would ban so-called “assault weapons”, in which nearly every modern firearm is defined as an “assault weapon”. Parts of Section 1 of the bill read:(27) “Assault weapon” means: (a) A semiautomatic rifle that has the capacity to accept a detachable magazine and has one or more of the following:...

For the first time in the 2016 election cycle, the same team of debate moderators will get a second shot to question the Republican presidential candidates. Fox Business Network's Neil Cavuto and Maria Bartiromo will once again take the stage, this time without Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker, to question a smaller group of candidates just a couple weeks before the first primary states begin casting their ballots. While their first go-around was considered a successful first presidential debate for the business network, the moderators took a safer approach to questioning after a raucous and chaotic CNBC debate. In...

A woman, who came forward and told her story of being sexually assaulted in Cologne, Germany, on New Years Eve, was victimized a second time after an Internet video gave out her identity and suggested her account of the attack was anti-Muslim propaganda. The 26-year-old woman named Selina withheld her full name when she gave an interview to German television channel SWR Fernsehen last week. In the interview, she described her moment of terror being surrounded by dozens of men who looked at her like "free meat at the supermarket" and groped her repeatedly. She noted that her attackers spoke...

As Detroit’s public school system spirals toward insolvency and Michigan political leaders talk of bailouts and whether the district should remain under state receivership, one key group remains largely voiceless: parents of the Detroit children whose futures depend on having access to quality schools, regardless of what political entity operates them. Parents’ voices do occasionally break through, however, with priorities that clash with those of the status quo system’s vested interests. Exhibit one is an October poll released by the Michigan Association of Public School Academies, which found that seven in 10 Detroit parents want more school choice. Eliminating the...

Ted Cruz believes he can win some blue states in a general election, specifically Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and New Hampshire - all states the Republican nominee lost to Barack Obama in the 2008 and 2012 elections.Cruz said Mitt Romney and John McCain, the past two Republican nominees for president, lost those states because millions of conservatives didn't vote."We haven't been bringing out the Reagan Democrats. I believe our campaign will do that," Cruz said in an interview with U.S. News & World Report published Thursday. "And I'll point out, what we do know doesn't work is following the Bob...

The State of the Nation: A Dictatorship Without Tears John W. Whitehead "There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution."--Aldous Huxley There's a man who contacts...

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump joins Thomas Roberts to discuss the latest on his campaign, and the comments South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley made about his campaign.

The Obama Administration is frantically working to make the president's gun control "executive orders" permanent. Knowing the next president can effectively "delete" the unconstitutional actions restricting gun rights, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said they're trying to "institutionalize" Obama's orders long after they're gone. "My goal is to position the [Department of Justice] where it will carry on in all of these issues long after myself and my team have moved on," she said. All GOP candidates have vowed to rescind the executive orders should they win in November, but Lynch and her cronies are setting the wheels in motion...

As many as 80,000 residents in western Ukraine lost power for six hours on Dec. 23. Cybersecurity firms SANS ICS and iSight Partners have attributed the blackout to Russian hacking group Sandworm and its malicious software, BlackEnergy 3. Cyberattacks on power grids and other critical infrastructure are not new, but this most recent attack seems to be the first use of cyber as a weapon with kinetic effects during an ongoing conflict, highlighting the growing importance of cybersecurity. While an analysis of the cyberattack is ongoing, BlackEnergy has a history of targeting information control systems. For the Prikarpattiaoblenergo electric company...

If you missed the president's final State of the Union message Tuesday night, don't worry. It might have been billed as historic, but you didn't miss much. There were no surprises. No shocks. No awe. Nothing historic or memorable. It was the usual Obama setup -- "We have to find a way to come together, end the government gridlock and make America better and stronger" -- followed by the implication that Washington isn't working the way it should because Republicans in Congress are mean, stubborn or stupid. In seven years Obama hasn't changed the country, not for the better anyway....

The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week, but remained below levels associated with a healthy labor market. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 7,000 to a seasonally adjusted 284,000 for the week ended Jan. 9, the Labor Department said on Thursday. The prior week's claims were unrevised.Still, it was the 45th consecutive week that claims remained below the 300,000 mark, which is associated with strong labor market conditions. That is the longest such stretch since the early 1970s. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims slipping to 275,000 in the latest week. The increase...

After a week of spending "big" on television advertising, Donald J. Trump appears to be slowing his pace. For his second week of advertising, Mr. Trump is spending roughly a third of what he did in his first week, with about $750,000 in reservations in Iowa and New Hampshire, according to multiple media buyers. At the beginning of the month, Mr. Trump pledged to spend at least $2 million a week on advertising, and he did so for the first week. But when it came time to renew or reserve new advertising, Mr. Trump is taking a more frugal approach,...

Townhall's Steve Chapman advocates marijuana legalization to combat El Chapo of the Sinaloa Cartel and other narcotraficatismos.If we truly want to hurt the major drug traffickers, there is a simple way: legalize the use, sale and production of marijuana. - El Chapo Got Caught. So What? Legalization in Netherlands has really solved their problems--right. Legalziation there merely puts organized crime in a different court of play. Netherlands has pulled back from some its legalization policies in the wake of the failures.Marijuana is the least problematic, so lets count some of the ways... Is It Worth Losing Your Manhood?Does smoking pot...

For the past decade there have been allegations of links between Donald Trump and the mafia including both New York and Philadelphia crime families. These possible mob links have been the focus of past news paper reports along with government records. According to some including NY investigative journalist Wayne Barrett the connections between Trump and the mafia are rather extensive. In his book "Trump: The Deals and the Downfall by Barrett, Wayne 1st edition (1992) Hardcover," he claims that Trump went out his way not to avoid but increase ties with organized crime influence in the New York and New...

When you’re at the top the attacks come at you from everywhere. In this case it was a NY Times article that, as Levin suggested last night, was fed to them by some Republican operative working for another campaign. But just like the Trump-ed up birther story, it’s another non-story.Ted Cruz explains below:Ted Cruz explains Goldman Sachs loan (Video)It’s no surprise that Ted Cruz is actually human and makes errors like the rest of us. As he said, the loan against his assets has been disclosed in a variety of other ways so it’s not something he’s been trying to...

Following President Obama's January 5 executive gun control announcement, the White House emailed "talking points" to celebrities which they, in turn, tweeted out in support of the new controls. According to Fox News, the email said, "Below you have: short and long-term action steps, more info on POTUS's actions, highlights from YOUR Tweets thus far (thank you!), and draft Tweets for you to build from if helpful." It also encouraged them to use the hashtag #StopGunViolence and "make sure everyone knows you have the President's back."

When Donald Trump takes the stage at the Republican debate in Charleston, South Carolina, on Thursday night, he’ll have an unlikely home field advantage. The New York real estate mogul has posted a consistently commanding lead in presidential preference polls in the state, which holds its primary election just two weeks after Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s made more than a dozen trips there, drawing crowds in the thousands, while the gatherings of his competitors pull in hundreds at best. In fact, across the South – in states like Mississippi, Florida, Texas, Georgia and North Carolina – Mr Trump has...