Free Republic

A federal appeals court has ruled that the structure of a U.S. consumer watchdog agency is unconstitutional because it gives too much power to a single agency director. The ruling issued Tuesday said the way the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is organized violates the Constitution’s separation of powers because it limits the president’s ability to remove the director who heads the agency.

This is serious and genuinely alarming. Bruce Schneider is an expert in cyber-security, the Chief Technology Officer of Resilient, an IBM Company, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and a board member of Electronic Frontier Foundation — an organization defending our rights in the digital world. In a blog post, Schneider sounds the alarm that in the past year, the websites of major companies that provide the Internet’s basic services repeatedly have been attacked, each time more sophisticated than the last, which suggests “someone” is practicing how to take down the Internet by learning from the companies’ defensive moves. Below...

A recent "undercover enrollment" investigation conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that pretty much anyone can sign up for Obamacare and receive taxpayer funded incentives without having to worry about pesky little details like proving citizenship, identity or income-based needs. In fact, the study found that every single one of its 15 fictitious Obamacare applications were actually approved for coverage despite intentional application omissions, fictitious identification and citizenship documentation, etc. Moreover, all of the applications were also approved for federal subsidies which totaled $60,000 per year. Per the GAO: Our undercover testing for the 2016 coverage year found...

What is it really like behind the scenes of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign: Hectic, stressful and an unforgiving atmosphere where one simple mistake can end your employment, according to a now-excommunicated campaign operative who spoke to True Pundit. Clinton has nearly a thousand paid moving parts in her massive campaign. Our source was well placed and worked with the candidate on a daily basis, or whenever Clinton would show up for work. Some of the following revelations are somewhat disturbing, especially when weighed against the fact that Clinton is campaigning for the most stressful job on the planet. According to...

I’ve been creeped out by Facebook for a long time now. The following story takes it to another level. From Fusion: While some of these incredibly accurate friend suggestions are amusing, others are alarming, such as this story from Lisa*, a psychiatrist who is an infrequent Facebook user, mostly signing in to RSVP for events. Last summer, she noticed that the social network had started recommending her patients as friends—and she had no idea why. “I haven’t shared my email or phone contacts with Facebook,” she told me over the phone. The next week, things got weirder. Most of her...

More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money - either personally or through companies or groups - to the Clinton Foundation. It's an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president. At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press. Combined, the 85...

ALTHOUGH THE CHARITY founded by former President Bill Clinton has done admirable work over the last 15 years, the Clinton Foundation is also clearly a liability for Hillary Clinton as she seeks the presidency. The once-and-maybe-future first family will have plenty to keep them busy next year if Hillary Clinton defeats Donald Trump in November. The foundation should remove a political — and actual — distraction and stop accepting funding. If Clinton is elected, the foundation should be shut down. Since its founding, the foundation has supported relief in Haiti, global health, and other good causes. It also provided posts...

Apparently this isn’t a joke, nor is it merely another snide attempt to smear Donald Trump and the Trump campaign. Sources indicate a concerted effort is now underway among a group of Establishment Democrats and Republicans to try and convince the American people that Donald Trump is mentally unfit to serve as President of the United States. DEVELOPING… incompetent/#XtmgQcorqGAsTtIq.99

A California Bernie Sanders delegate spoke with reporters today inside the Wells Fargo Convention Center in Philadelphia. The DNC is blocking the California Bernie supporters from entering the auditorium.The party even put reserved signs on their seats! The DNC also put up white noise machines to drown out the Bernie protesters inside the convention center. dns noise machines

All he needs is “an adventurous female” to be a surrogate mother, says a scientist at Harvard Medical School, and he’s off to the races on a plan to resurrect the extinct Neanderthals. He thinks he has enough Neanderthal DNA that he can “reconstruct” the whole DNA strand. Would that mean filling the little gaps with, say, frog DNA? It worked in Jurassic Park. Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School believes he can reconstruct Neanderthal DNA and resurrect the species which became extinct 33,000 years ago. His scheme is reminiscent of Jurassic Park but, while in the film dinosaurs...

Pokémon Go mania has turned a corner — it has reached the point of ridiculousness. The game is making people do nutty, dangerous, and even life-threatening things. The “augmented reality mobile game” is sending players all over the place as they try to catch the crazy creatures. These people might be in a park or on private property — in a church or in your bathroom. The stories are getting more outrageous and outlandish. The upside of the game is that it’s getting people moving. They are actually walking around outside. They are running. They are breathing fresh air (except...

Michelle Obama focused on praising Hillary Clinton Monday night at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, insisting she was the only presidential candidate who could be trusted with the children of the nation, but she took a side trip down a path that raised old shadows. She said one of her jobs in the White House was to teach her daughters “to ignore those who question their father’s citizenship or faith.” She was referencing the challenges to her husband’s constitutional qualification for office as a “natural born citizen.” Dozens of lawsuits were filed over that issue before and after Obama’s...

A new study of the genomes of Australasians has revealed sections of DNA that do not match any known hominin species. The dramatic findings mean that a mystery species bred with ancient humans in the distant past and that our family tree is much more complex than previously believed. New Scientist reports that the unknown species bred with early human ancestors when they migrated from Africa to Australasia. The surprising finding, published in the journal Nature Genetics , was made by Jaume Bertranpetit at Pompeu Fabra University in Spain and his colleagues, who examined the genomes of living Indigenous Australians,...

The elongated skulls of Paracas in Peru caused a stir in 2014 when a geneticist that carried out preliminary DNA testing reported that they have mitochondrial DNA “with mutations unknown in any human, primate, or animal known so far”. Now a second round of DNA testing has been completed and the results are just as controversial – the skulls tested, which date back as far as 2,000 years, were shown to have European and Middle Eastern Origin. These surprising results change the known history about how the Americas were populated. Paracas is a desert peninsula located within Pisco Province on...

Presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who used a secret unsecured private email server to conduct government business during her entire tenure as secretary of State–and deleted of those 30,000 emails before government investigators could review them, demanded the passwords to every social media account of every family member of her potential vice presidential candidates, according to a report in Politico published Saturday evening. How tough was the vetting? Finalists had to turn over every password for every social media account for every member of their families. They had to turn over every password for every social media account...

I wasn’t going to write about this. I was trained as an attorney and I am skeptical by nature, and so I generally don’t like to write about things that I can’t prove. But in the case of this bizarre winged creature, a couple of factors changed my mind. First of all, we actually have physical evidence which has been scientifically tested. When it comes to things like this, people are always crying out for some real physical evidence, and now we have some. Of course the existence of evidence does not mean that we can necessarily find answers to...

At group calling itself Atlanta is Ready (#ATLisREADY), aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement, recently issued a set of demands to the Mayor of Atlanta, including: We demand a termination to APD’s involvement in the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program, that trains our officers in Apartheid Israel The Mayor rejected the demand, finding that counter-terrorism training benefits the Atlanta Police Department’s ability to protect Americans: You could chalk this incident up to just some isolated ploy by local activists, but that would be a mistake. Rather, there has been a multi-year effort by left-wing and Islamist anti-Israel,...

It was a few years ago that a Greek-American archaeological team made a startling discovery – they found the oldest indications of seafaring and navigation in the world, in an area called Plakia on Crete Island in Greece. It is an incredibly important discovery that is given little attention, despite the fact that it reached the top ten discoveries of 2010. Their research is forcing scholars to rethink the maritime capabilities of early human and pre-human cultures. The team of archaeologists were carrying out excavations in a gorge on the island of Crete when they discovered a Palaeolithic site in...

I don’t know a ton about Boris Johnson. He’s the former Mayor of London, is very pro-Israel and hates the BDS movement, led the Brexit campaign only to withdraw from contention to be Prime Minister, and was just appointed Foreign Minister (okay, “Foreign Secretary”) in Theresa May’s new cabinet. And he has a mop of blonde hair. He obviously has some wit, as in a 2007 column in The Telegraph newspaper in Britain, wherein he described Hillary Clinton in terms we all can appreciate (emphasis added): “She’s got dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like...

If the killings of 5 police officers in Dallas, Texas have shown us anything, it’s that violence breeds more violence, and extremism is a recipe to tear a national conscious apart. Black Lives Matter is seen by some as a modern Civil Rights movement where activists seek justice and reform by protest and activism. Issues such as police brutality, inconsistencies in the justice system, and broader inequality within the nation, are topics BLM has painted as crises for the country. The Black Lives Matter organization undermines any opportunity to seek meaningful reform on the issue of police use-of-force by instead...