Free Republic

Last Sunday marked 50 years since the Symbionese Liberation (SLA) Army kidnapped Patricia Hearst, granddaughter of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. Patty took on the nom de guerre Tania and joined her SLA captors in armed robberies. Arrested in 1975, Hearst drew 35 years but served less than two before President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence.In 2001, President Bill Clinton granted Hearst a full presidential pardon. She married police officer Bernard Shaw and now showcases her French bulldogs at the Westminster Kennel Club. Nice story, but reports come up short on the SLA and other domestic terrorists, whose influence is...

The Israeli Army in the Gaza Strip slaying thousands of Muslim Brotherhood brothers (Hamas) came upon evidence of UNRWA employees participating in the satanic events of October 7, which should not surprise because UNRWA has been a major player in the antisemitic fantasy of a “Palestinian people” whose homeland was allegedly stolen from them by the Jews, the lie that justifies the very existence of UNRWA in support of the “victims of Zionism.”UNRWA’s brief for 75 years has been supporting millions of “Palestinian refugees” when, truth be told, there is nothing Palestinian about these people. And neither are they refugees.The...

One striking anecdote emerges from Special Counsel Robert Hur’s voluminous 300 plus page report on Biden’s misappropriation of classified documents.In interviews with Biden, the Special Counsel found that the memory of the President of the United States had “significant limitations” and that he didn’t know “when his term ended”, “when his term began” and “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”If there are any two things that a man ought to remember, it’s when his son died and when he ascended to the vice presidency and when he became a private citizen again.Now a man...

Vladimir Putin once again appeared to be unable to control a twitchy leg during his lengthy interview with US right-wing journalist Tucker Carlson earlier this week. The Russian president spent half an hour of the sit-down chat on an almost uninterrupted ramble covering 1,200 years of Eastern European history. But some viewers were distracted by his apparent need to physically push down his knee to prevent his leg from moving around. It’s been an odd habit of Putin’s for a while – stretching back at least as far as September 2022, when the appendage started twitching during a speech in...

The South Carolina Senate passed H. 3594 on February 1, 2024. The bill was passed in the South Carolina House in February of 2023 with a vote of 90 to 30. The Senate added a couple of changes in an amendment to the bill put forward by the president of the Senate, Shane A. Massie. Massie had previously been one of a few Republican South Carolina senators blocking the bill from passage. H. 3594, as amended, goes back to the House for a vote of concurrence with the amendment. The bill passed the Senate on a roll call vote, with...

What if Chinese hackers successfully disrupted the entire SNAP network? FBI Director Christopher Wray recently warned America about a possible Chinese cyberattack on our electric grid, transportation centers, and energy facilities that would almost destroy our economy. The impact of such an attack is hardly hypothetical -- countless schools, hospitals and private firms have been hit with such attacks and millions in ransom has been paid to hackers. SNIP In 2020, 27% of SNAP recipients were Black. Like all government programs, it occasionally stumbles. For example, recipients in Georgia recently had their payments delayed due to administrative glitches. Severe weather...

Fights within the Idaho GOP boiled over Thursday as lawmakers ousted a senior member of Republican leadership. Rep. Megan Blanksma, R-Hammett, was removed from her position as majority leader, the most senior position in the House after Speaker Mike Moyle. The vote against Blanksma came a day after she was the lone House leader to vote against budgets passed by a panel of lawmakers — an apparent statement made over a new controversial process for setting state agencies’ budgets. snip Rather than pass individualized budgets, the co-chairs of the committee, Rep. Wendy Horman, R-Idaho Falls, and Sen. Scott Grow, R-Eagle,...

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Volodymyr Zelensky has finally succeeded in firing General Valery Zaluzhny. This time, according to reporting coming from Kiev, Zaluzhny has accepted the order and has thanked Ukrainians for their sacrifice. Zelensky will now fire most of the top brass in the army aligned with Zaluzhny. Choosing Syrsky is somewhat of a risk, because Syrsky and Zaluzhny are friends. On the other hand, Syrsky is not known for achieving victories. He is an older (58 years), plodding general who now commands the ground troops. It is the ground troops who are losing along the line of contact. No one can say...

RENO, Nevada — Donald Trump long ago bent the Republican Party to his will. But seldom has the sheer sweep of the former president’s dominance been laid bare more clearly than this week. In one 72-hour span, Trump led the charge to crush a painstakingly negotiated border-security deal in Congress, pushed the Republican National Committee chair to the exits and, in Nevada, embarrassed his last remaining rival in the presidential primary.But The heaviness of Trump’s hand was felt across the country — as was the conspiratorial, “Stop the Steal” tenor of the party lining up behind him. On Thursday —...

Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, has said that a constitutional ban on insurrectionists taking office was created for state appointments, not the presidency, yet this has not been raised by Trump's lawyer in his ballot ban challenge. During oral arguments on Colorado's ban on Trump's inclusion on the state ballot, she told the former president's lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell, that she was surprised that the historical record was not a major pillar of his arguments for keeping Trump on the Colorado ballot. Brown Jackson, a Biden appointee, said that the historic record shows that the ban on insurrectionists under Section...

The American-made Patriot missile system is likely responsible for the Russian Il-76 plane crash, American officials anonymously told The New York Times. The plane was also likely carrying at least some Ukrainian prisoners, officials reported. Russia's Il-76 military transport plane crashed in the country's Belgorod region on Jan. 24, allegedly killing everyone on board. The cause of the crash is unclear, with Russia claiming that Ukraine's military shot the plane down as it carried 65 Ukrainian POWs. Kyiv has demanded an international probe into the incident. Ukraine's military intelligence agency did not confirm whether prisoners were on the plane nor...

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It's something that features on many people's bucket lists. But if you've always dreamed of climbing Mount Everest, new regulations may make you reconsider. People who climb the world's highest mountain will now have to bring their own poo back to base camp.

"Your Honor, my client was clearly too drunk to have made it anywhere near I-25 from that maze of one-way streets in downtown Denver, and cannot be held accountable for how he or his car might have been found trying to enter the highway from the off-ramp." —The World's Best Defense Attorney back in my younger days Advertisement Some legal defense moves are so unscrupulous that it would take a high-caliber lawyer to think of them and a true scoundrel to implement them. I'm looking at you, Johnnie Cochran, in your $4,000 suits, with a combination of awe and horror....

Former President Donald Trump said 'all I want' is for the general election to be held Tuesday after an easy caucus win in Nevada, a good day at the Supreme Court and a bad day for President Joe Biden. Trump appeared onstage at the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino and gloated over his resounding double win in Nevada - with Thursday's caucuses called for the ex-president with under 1 percent of the vote reporting, and Tuesday's primary result - when Trump wasn't on the ballot - embarrassing rival Nikki Haley. He also hinted that he believed the Supreme Court would...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (TND) — Two major California Democrats are siding with Republicans on a new initiative to raise penalties for theft, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.The campaign reportedly takes aim at Proposition 47, a controversial law that in 2014 reduced punishments for drug possession throughout the state and reclassified theft of items worth $950 or less from a felony to a misdemeanor. In 2022, a bill that sought to lower this threshold to $450 failed in the California State Legislature, but some of the law’s fiercest supporters now appear to have changed their tune. Democratic San Francisco Mayor London Breed...

ALAMEDA COUNTY, Calif. (KRON) — Two days after announcing a 900 percent increase in California Highway Patrol officers in Oakland and the East Bay, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced plans Thursday to deploy state attorneys to the area to boost criminal prosecutions.Deputy attorneys general from the California Department of Justice and attorneys from the California National Guard will be deployed in Oakland and Alameda County as part of a new partnership between the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office and California law enforcement agencies, a statement from the governor’s office said. The aim of the partnership will be to increase prosecutions...

On this date in 1929, a Catholic militant who had gunned down the president of Mexico was shot for his trouble. In the midst of the dirty Cristero War pitting Catholics against a secular, development-minded state, adroit former president Alvaro Obregon had just won election to a new term. On July 17, 1928, as the president-elect banqueted in Mexico City, starving artist and father of three Jose de Leon Toral (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish) gained admittance as an itinerant caricaturist … then shot dead his putative subject square in the face. En route to his inevitable Calvary, which he...

On this date in 1943, young Yugoslav partisan Lepa Svetozara Radic went to a German gallows. A Bosnian Serb — her village today lies in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Republika Srpska, steps inside the river that forms its border with Croatia — Lepa Radic was just 15 when Europe’s Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941. Her family’s established left-wing affiliations brought them swift arrest by the fascist Ustashe, but Lepa and her sister escaped in December and joined Tito‘s Communist partisans. In early 1943, Nazi Germany mounted a huge offensive against the partisans. On a strategic plane, the offensive failed:...