Free Republic

Twice in his first two years as New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy tried to raise income taxes on millionaires to funnel more money into the state budget for education, transportation, and public-worker pensions. And twice, his fellow Democrats who lead the state Legislature told him no, saying the Garden State is already over-taxed.

2 Shooters Fire At Civilians, Police From Jersey City Rooftops Yet another stunning active-shooter incident is unfolding Tuesday afternoon in New Jersey City, as two armed suspects fire on police officers using what appear to be sniper rifles as the shooters jump from rooftop to rooftop trying to escape, according to local media reports. Loud gunshots can be heard in videos posted to social media. At the end of the video below, a man can be heard shouting “they took him out”, though more gunshots followed.

<p>The Guardian headline reads: “DOJ Internal watchdog report clears FBI of illegal surveillance of Trump adviser.”</p> <p>If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was.</p>

On paper, the speaker of the House and chairmen of the relevant committees announcing they will impeach the president should feel like a historic moment and a rarely equaled disgrace for the presidency. This day should feel momentous, grim, and solemn. In this presidency, it feels like “Tuesday.” On paper, the impeachment hearings did everything House Democrats wanted them to do. While some of the key testimony was second-hand, the witnesses painted an ugly picture of the administration and president, focused on farfetched tales of a lost server and obsessed with the Bidens and not seeming to give a fig...

Talk about fortuitous timing. As news broke last Tuesday that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) was ending her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, I was heading to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston to interview another African American woman many want to be a part of the 2020 presidential campaign: Stacey Abrams. Abrams, a Democrat, was the first black woman to be nominated by a major party for governor when she ran (and lost) to be the next chief executive of Georgia in 2018. And her experience, Abrams said, mirrors that of Harris. “Wanting someone to...

Moses was a prophet and a leader according to Abrahamic religions, but many scholars view him as a legendary figure rather than a real historic person. They do concede that a Moses-like figure could have existed in history, so is it possible to track this person down through historic records? It is the view of this writer that this is very possible and that in fact the Moses figure can be traced as that of the primary confidant of none other than Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut. The trail begins with Th Exodus.

US small-business sentiment rose 2.3 points to 104.7, the biggest jump since May 2018, according to the November optimism survey from the National Federation of Independent Business. It shows a reversal from "previous months of clatter" about a looming recession, the report noted. Positive earnings and expectations that business conditions will get better drove the results, according to the survey. "Owners are aggressively moving forward with their business plans, proving that when they're given relief from the government, they put their money where their mouth is, and they invest, hire, and increase wages," said William Dunkelberg, the chief economist...

Reporter Alex Bozarjian said she was in "disbelief" when a man, who was running in the Savannah race she was covering on Saturday, moved behind her and appeared to slap her on the butt. "He took my power, and I'm trying to take that back," Bozarjian said Tuesday on "CBS This Morning," adding, "I think what it really comes down to is that he helped himself to a part of my body." Bozarjian filed a police report Monday, and the man, Tommy Callaway, was banned from future Savannah Sports Council races. Callaway's lawyer said: "While we regret the situation, Mr....

The Justice Department’s in-house watchdog released a ( 476-page report) Monday that criticizes some of the FBI’s actions in beginning an investigation of the Trump campaign’s connection with Russian election meddling, but does not concludes that political bias drove the agency’s probe. Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report does answer many questions and verifies some suspicions about the initial FBI investigation, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane. [snip] Here are six key takeaways from Horowitz’s report.

China is developing a new high-tech system of mass surveillance and coercion aimed suppressing political dissent among its 1.4 billion people, while forcing American and Western businesses to conform to the government’s communist policies if they want to operate there. The massive system has been tested in several major Chinese cities and uses millions of surveillance cameras linked to supercomputers containing massive databases. Face and voice recognition technology then identifies and monitors people with the goal of controlling behaviors that range from dissident political activity to jaywalking, ostensibly as part of a financial credit monitoring system similar to those used...

The United States has a total area of 3,796,742 square miles. That makes it the third or fourth-largest country in the world by land area, depending if you count overseas territories. So what's the point? Despite its size, the U.S. is facing a dilemma of sorts. According to a new report from The Brookings Institution, regional divergence in the U.S. innovation sector "has reached extreme levels." The innovation sector, composed of 13 of the nation’s highest-tech, highest R&D industries, is vital to the U.S. economy. The innovation sector accounts for 3% of U.S. jobs, but generates 6% of the country’s...

Top Republicans are leaning toward calling for a vote to acquit Trump 'immediately' after House Democrats and the White House have delivered their arguments to head off partisan disagreements that might lengthen the trial....The president is not in danger of being removed from office by the Senate, a move that requires 67 votes. Republicans might forgo calling witnesses altogether, saying 'minds are made up on Trump’s guilt or innocence' and that testimony at trial on the Senate floor would draw out the proceedings unnecessarily.

Given the unsupported claims President Donald Trump has made for two years about the FBI’s Russia investigation - calling it a witch hunt cooked up by his political opponents - the conclusion by the Justice Department watchdog that the probe was justified was big news. But the other major findings of the inspector general's report - that there were serious problems with the way the FBI obtained a secret national security warrant to spy on a Trump campaign aide - were also noteworthy, if somewhat overshadowed by the bigger headlines. The report found an FBI process so badly managed, so...

One police officer has been shot in the head amid an ongoing active shooter situation at a bodega in Jersey City Tuesday, according to the preliminary investigation, a senior law enforcement official tells News 4. The situation is fluid and information is developing rapidly; one law enforcement source described the attack as an "ambush," and said at least one individual was holed up in a bodega with a long gun, sources say. Heavily armed local and state officers in SWAT trucks swarmed the scene, ducking behind doorways and store entrances -- some even crawling along sidewalks, closely pressed to the...

Last week deadbeat dad Hunter Biden blew off a court hearing in Arkansas over his child support payments to his baby mama Lunden Roberts, and his lawyer abruptly quit. Now Hunter is refusing to pay Lunden Roberts’ $11,000 legal bill so she is turning the screws on Biden and demanding to know how much Burisma Holdings paid him.

The number of African migrants heading to the U.S. through Mexico has more than doubled this year — from roughly 2,700 in 2018 to 5,800 today, according to data from the federal government. That figure has been steadily rising since 2007 — the year the Mexican government began including migrants from African countries who have contact with immigration officials in their annual migration reports — when the number was 460. And that dramatic increase has been mostly left out of U.S. immigration conversations, activists say. “Even within the immigration movement, you see a lack of visibility of Black narratives with...

Conservation experts have been able to restore a stunning shield that is 2,200 years old. The artifact belonged to a Celtic warrior who was buried in a chariot burial in the north of England. The warrior shield has been hailed as one of the most important and remarkable ancient finds this millennium. ... The workers had come across an Iron Age warrior’s chariot burial. The remains of the warrior were found in the chariot and two skeletons of horses were also unearthed. Paula Ware, an archaeologist with MAP, stated that “these horses were placed with their hooves on the ground...

A self-driving truck has completed the first cross-country commercial freight run. Plus.ai, announced its truck traveled 2,800 miles autonomously from California to Pennsylvania hauling a fully-loaded refrigerated trailer of perishable cargo. The vehicle is fitted with advanced autonomous driving system that utilizes multimodal sensor fusion, deep learning visual algorithms and simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) technologies. The truck drove in autonomous mode across interstate 17 and interstate 70, while traveling through different terrains and weather conditions. Although a safety driver and engineer were on-board, this journey, according to Plus.ai, validates ‘the system’s ability to safely handle a wide range of...

Ok, if you’re still sitting around worrying that Attorney General William Barr has gone all wobbly – even after yesterday’s pointed statements by he and U.S. Attorney John Durham in response to the IG Report – then I think I may have found your cure. Earlier today, MSNBC aired an interview involving one of their hack reporters and Attorney General Barr, and boy, is it epic. Mr. Barr is making no bones about his continued consistent views on what he bluntly still refers to as the “spying” on the Trump Campaign by the Obama FBI, and is not backing off...

In a bid for Latino votes, Democratic presidential candidate South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg proposed that "we end the artificial immigration crisis by returning the land stolen from Mexico by US aggression during the mid 1800s. It's unconscionable that the Trump Administration is persecuting Mexicans who are only trying to recover their own stolen property." "If California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas were to be ceded back to Mexico there would be no incentive for Latinos to try to illegally enter the United States," Buttigieg claimed. "And all of the buildings Americans erected on the stolen lands could be...