Free Republic

VALPARAISO | Prosecutors opted Monday to exercise their right to charge a 16-year-old Valparaiso girl as an adult on accusations of handcuffing, confining for hours and sexually assaulting a 17-year-old boy last week. April Kuchta, of the 300 block of Roseland Terrace, was charged with felony counts of criminal deviate conduct, criminal confinement, intimidation and sexual battery, as well as a misdemeanor battery charge. The seriousness of the first two offenses provide the option for adult charges without the more typical waiver process, said Deputy Prosecutor Tim Haraminac. Kuchta was transferred Monday from juvenile detention to the Porter County Jail....

SAVE Offers Condolences Following the Tragic Death of Reginald Daye, Victim of Duke Lacrosse Accuser WASHINGTON / April 18, 2011 – Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) is offering its condolences to the family and friends of Reginald Daye. “Reggie” Daye, 46, succumbed April 13 after girlfriend Crystal Mangum stabbed him in the chest with a kitchen knife. Mangum is the woman who falsely accused three Duke University lacrosse players of rape in 2006. Daye's nephew said the couple had been arguing over rent money. The argument got so heated that someone called police who made a visit to the...

Ruben Noe holds the distinction of being the first male transsexual in Spain to become pregnant. Born Estefania, the woman began hormone treatments designed to shrink her breasts, stay her cycle, and eventually become a man. But then the maternity urge struck, with predictable results. In Ruben’s words, “They induced the female hormone cycle with pills and prepared my womb so that it would once again be suitable to carry an embryo. Then they inseminated me.” Ruben Noe is not a medical freak. Hospitals across Spain now offer sex-change services as part of their standard package of healthcare services. In...

Former Sarah Palin aide Frank Bailey is finally getting his tell-all book published. Continue Reading While a transcript of the book leaked out to the press in February and took some of the thunder from its release, an imprint of Simon & Schuster announced Monday that it will publish “Blind Allegiance” on May 24. Bailey paints a highly unflattering portrait of Palin in the book, quoting at length from emails from the former Alaska governor showing her intense focus on how the press covered her. Though the book contains many embarrassing anecdotes for Palin, Bailey had struggled to get the...

Last month, 16 Yale students and recent graduates filed a confidential complaint with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights alleging that in violation of Title IX—which bans sex discrimination in schools—Yale maintains a hostile environment for women that denies them equal access to educational opportunities. The Office for Civil Rights has already begun to investigate. If it finds Yale in violation, the university could lose approximately $500 million in federal funding. Is the complaint really plausible?

The US involvement in yet another war in a Muslim country is slowly turning into yet another quagmire. After Iraq and Afghanistan, who would have guessed that this could happen? One of the main platforms of Obama’s campaign was a promise to extricate the US from unpopular wars, and now we suddenly find ourselves in yet another… And who is responsible for this? According to the New York Times, it was a clique of female advisors, including Hillary Clinton, Samantha Powers and Susan Rice. Only the day before, Mrs. Clinton — along with her boss, President Obama — was a...

Tim Pawlenty implied Tuesday that there are some less-than-serious presidential hopefuls eyeing the race, with a quip that seemed to lump Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Donald Trump together with wrestling icon Hulk Hogan. "You're going to have, you know, Mitt Romney who will start out as the front-runner with the most name-ID and money..." Pawlenty told CNN’s Piers Morgan in handicapping the race. "And on the other end of the continuum, you'll have perhaps Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Donald Trump, or I don't know, maybe Hulk Hogan will get in the race too. Who knows? But I think in...

Glenn Beck doesn’t see Sarah Palin running for president and said she has done some damage to her political brand. Continue Reading Beck, a constant Palin cheerleader, said flatly on his radio show Monday, “Sarah Palin, I don’t think, wants to run for president.” The outgoing Fox News personality has hosted Palin on his show several times – once for a full hour – and she has frequently lavished praise on him. Still, even with all that good will, Beck was frank in assessing what Palin has done to hurt her own political stock – even though he credited her...

I've reported over the years on the problems facing our nations' abuse shelters, including funding woes, over-worked staff, loosey-goosey procedures, and even illegal conduct. But nowhere have I seen what I'm going to reveal about the Next Step, a shelter located near Bar Harbor in lobster-addled Maine... On March 15, 2007, the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence unveiled three ambitious bills. One bill would create a new class of crimes for "domestic violence assaults." A second bill would establish a so-called "predominant aggressor" policy that would help police sort out cases of mutual abuse. And the third bill would...

Calls to de-fund and efforts to defend Planned Parenthood have reached a fever pitch in light of the potential shutdown on Capitol Hill, with Democrats pointing to Republicans’ unwillingness to drop Planned Parenthood cuts as the reason for an imminent government shutdown. “Republicans want to shut down our nation’s government because they want to make it harder for women to get the health services they need,” Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on the floor Friday. “This is indefensible and everyone should be outraged — men and women should be outraged.” Both sides have gone to the mat over...

Many high school-educated, twentysomething mothers struggle to make ends meet and lack sufficient funds to provide for their children. This isn’t the situation for 20-year-old Bristol Palin, a Candies Foundation representative and advocate for teenage pregnancy prevention. The Associated Press reported Tuesday that the Dancing With the Stars finalist cashed in $262,000 in 2009 for her role in raising awareness about ending teen pregnancy. Palin and former boyfriend Levi Johnston are the parents of a 2-year-old boy named Tripp, to whom Palin gave birth when she was 18. Last year, Palin told the AP that most girls would probably think...

The last several months have seen a steady flow of embarrassing revelations from the U.S. Department of Justice. The very notion of justice is being transmogrified into a post-modern construct, dragging the Department into a cesspool of identity politics and indulging in an improbable parody of “equal justice under law.” Here’s a run-down of the DoJ capers: 1. Mr. Holder believes white Americans are “cowards.” At a February 18, 2009 Black History Month event – just days after the new Attorney General was sworn into office -- Holder labeled America “essentially a nation of cowards” because we “do not talk...

The vacuum created by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s (R) absence from the 2012 campaign trail presents a major opportunity for the woman she once hinted might share a presidential ticket with her: Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.). With strategists and conservative activists increasingly convinced that Palin won’t make a run for the White House next year, she is losing some clout among her contingent of grassroots devotees who are eager to hit the 2012 campaign trail and rally behind an alternative to President Obama. Bachmann, who is mulling a 2012 run, is the most obvious choice to supplant Palin in...

There are often times that we shake our heads at injustices in the world. Sometimes it seems to be all we can do. And with so many problems in modern life, and their often systemic, intractable nature, it can be difficult to choose what battles to fight and when. Because of this we have increasingly become a nation of head shakers, concerned about an array of injustices but often not knowing where to turn or what to do to solve them. With that in mind we have an opportunity, right here and now, to face down and fight against a...

Bill O’Reilly said Monday night that Sarah Palin only has herself to blame for dropping approval ratings. The Fox News host who has butted heads recently with Palin said the former governor has avoided direct engagement with the media, hurting her image. “Her favorability among Republicans and independents has dropped four [percentage] points in a month,” O’Reilly said during a segment of his television show. “The reason I think it’s dropping is because she is not engaging directly.” O’Reilly then pointed directly to a recent interview he had conducted with Palin in which she accused him of interrupting her after...

We should all be concerned about the ongoing epidemic of intimate partner violence. But the March 9 edition of the cheeky Village Voice casts a spotlight on the sordid under-belly to the abuse issue — the problem of scammers who finagle besieged public benefit programs by making a false accusation of partner violence. The cover story, Ten Worst Tenants by Elizabeth Dwoskin, calls out the hoarders and fraudsters who exasperate, deceive, and torment other tenants and honest-dealing landlords. And fourth on her list are the Domestic-Violence Fakers. Dwoskin first introduces us to Latonya Malone, 26, who earns $35,000 working as...

Sarah Palin’s standing with the American public has undergone a stunning reversal of fortune, according to two recently released polls. Just two and a half years ago, Sarah Palin’s star was ascending to the political heavens. A solid 53% of Americans held a favorable opinion of Mrs. Palin, while only 28% had a negative view. But according to a March 3 Bloomberg News poll, only 28% of Americans now hold a positive view of the former Alaska governor, while a stunning 60% see her in an unfavorable light. And a March 16 Washington Post-ABC poll found Palin’s negative ratings fell...

American women out-vote, out-spend, and out-live their male counterparts. They enjoy an unrivaled array of lifestyle options. But the fact remains, females have become a decidedly unhappy lot. As a National Bureau of Economic Research report explains, "As women have gained more freedom, more education, and more power, they have become less happy." How do we come to terms with this modern-day malady that has no name? The Flipside of Feminism, authored by Suzanne Venker and conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, incisively diagnoses the problem, prescribes the common-sense cure, and above all, instills hope. Think of it as a long-awaited reality...

In ringing prose, President Barack Obama underscored his March 9, 2009, memorandum on scientific integrity with this promise: “Under my administration, the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over….To undermine scientific integrity is to undermine our democracy.” As luck would have it, Attorney General Eric Holder issued a statement a few months later designed to spotlight the issue of domestic violence. In Holder’s own words, “Disturbingly, intimate partner homicide is the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 15 to 45.” Turns out this statement is not one-sided or misleading. It’s flat-out wrong. Go to...

Yesterday NBC Nightly News called for an interview. They were producing a segment on the White House’s newly released report on Women in America — “a statistical portrait” of “how women are fairing in the United States today.” Despite a lengthy interview with Savannah Guthrie, I later learned that NBC cut me from the segment. It’s television, I get it, and things change. My ego is less bruised, however, than my respect for network news. The segment that ensued was terrible. The show included a rundown of the report, clips from an interview with White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett,...