Free Republic

When Corporal Ryan Stickney and 200 of his fellow Marines prepared to return to their families after Operation Desert Storm in 1991, a logistics error forced them to turn to a surprising source for a ride home: Donald J. Trump. Today, Stickney would like to say "thank you." Stickney (left), was a squad leader in a TOW company of a Marine reserve unit based in Miami, FL and spent approximately six months in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War between 1990 and 1991. Upon his unit’s return to the United States, the former Marine says the group spent several weeks...

California State University Fresno recently held a three-day student retreat for black students that aimed to foster inclusion and help incoming African American students adjust to college life and get involved in the campus community. The inaugural “Harambee Student Retreat,” which took place Aug.14 through Aug 17, was free to participating students, who enjoyed housing, meals, workshops and activities meant to help aid in the “successful transition of incoming African American/Black students to Fresno State,” the university’s website states. About 40 new students plus about a dozen returning students took part, and about $16,000 was set aside in the university’s...

A 35-year-old man accused of bludgeoning his foster grandparents to death last year in their Glendale home using an ax and a hammer was held to answer Tuesday to capital murder charges. Investigators found two decomposing bodies under a blanket on a twin-sized bed in that room. They were later identified as William and Verna Scheiern, 77 and 82 years old, respectively. On the floor a few feet away, police found a bloodied hammer. Against a wall in the living room, they found an ax, with dried blood on the head and handle. During an interview with detectives at the...

One march was led by his father. The other by his mother. One went to the cemetery where he is buried, the other to a patch of black asphalt where his body lay for more than four hours. The processions marked the second anniversary of Michael Brown’s death, which is Tuesday, and attracted mothers and other family members of black people whose names were made famous by horrific circumstances. The first, led by Michael Brown Sr., began a little after 8 a.m. in the Canfield Green Apartments complex where a former Ferguson police officer shot the unarmed 18-year-old [THUG] on...

TALLAHASSEE — Florida has more gun manufacturers than any other state except Texas, after a surge of nearly 350 percent in licenses for gun makers fueled by the nation's growing demand for firearms. The increase in gun manufacturing licenses since 2009 has strained the resources of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — the federal law enforcement agency that monitors the nation's gun sales and distribution. As the number of licenses to make firearms grew nationally by nearly 250 percent from 3,040 licenses in 2009 to 10,503 last year, the number of special agents watching manufacturers has increased...

A week ago I felt good about America but no more. Coyotes are running freely in the streets of our big cities, the stock market is teetering on the verge of collapse, the monetary system will soon go belly-up, China and North Korea and Iran have a knife to our throats, our schools are in chaos, politicians corrupt, the media stupefied by political correctness, and everywhere you look you hear foreign accents. We are on the edge of the abyss. At my house, we've begun fortifying the basement walls with sandbags and laying in barrels of fresh water and K-rations....

In the wake of the Orlando massacre, Chicago Sun Times reporter Neil Steinberg set out to buy an “assault rifle,” presumably to prove how easy it is. But the process didn't exactly go as planned. In his column titled "Would-be Terrorists Can Buy Guns, But a Reporter? No," he points out how a journalist in Philadelphia was able to buy an "assault rifle” in less than 10 minutes. He also noted the percentage of gun transactions in America that don’t go through a background check, and so on. But not at the gun shop he visited. After filling out the...

And so it begins. This is rampant in Europe and will be here, too, if Obama continues to import hundreds of thousands of these invaders. Why would they behave differently here? In Muslim countries, rape victims are at fault. The Quran allows Muslim men to use non-Muslim women as sex slaves, “captives of the right hand,” 4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6, 33:50, 70:30). But the even greater irresponsibility is that of the establishment that made people in Idaho think there was no risk in being around these migrants. Idaho: 3 Syrian Muslim Refugees Allegedly Rape Minor Girl; Muslim Women Spit on Citizens...

TAMPA — A pride flag waving outside the Hillsborough County center was meant to be a sign of respect and remembrance for the victims of the shooting at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando. But just a day after it was raised, Commissioner Stacy White said it may be offending Christian employees and questioned whether it should be taken down. In an email sent to the the county human relations director Peggy Rowe on Thursday, White said he received an anonymous complaint from a county employee that the presence of the flag was “nearly unbearable” for her to pass on her...

When allied forces landed on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, they did so alongside a fleet of bizarre tanks with very special roles – brought into life by an eccentric British commander. On 19 August 1942, Allied armies put their plan for an invasion of Occupied Europe to the ultimate test – by landing troops on the beaches and trying to capture a French port.

TAMPA — Packed with robots and trucks and guns and drones, the Tampa Convention Center's exhibition hall this week has been transformed into a showroom for the latest in war gadgets. It's all part of the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference, a major annual confab that brings military commanders together with defense contractors to figure out what commandos need in a dangerous and ever-changing world. The anchor, of course, is U.S. Special Operations Command, which has an annual budget of several billion dollars to spend on commando-specific goods and services. This year, about 350 companies set up shop at the...

DADE CITY — There's an arms race taking place in law enforcement as weapons manufacturers battle each other for the lucrative right to arm officers. The Pasco County Sheriff's Office is the latest beneficiary of that duel. Last year the agency said goodbye to its old .40-caliber Glock 23 handguns and recently finished equipping its deputies with .40-caliber SIG Sauer P320s. That's because sheriff's officials said SIG Sauer offered to replace their entire arsenal at no cost, sealing the deal. That's a victory for the New Hampshire gun manufacturer over its Austrian rival Glock. Both are among the world's top...

Mail arrives in my inbox all the time, telling me that by going to Mexico I have sold out, fled, abandoned the United States. I’m a coward and a traitor, just like Lord Haw Haw, and Kim Philby, and probably hate America more than Barack Obama does. It is is irrational. They think that just because I went to Mexico, I left the US. They don’t understand. I didn’t leave the United States. It left me. It was a bait-and-switch operation. I signed on to one country, and they slipped another in under me. I want my money back. In...

In the summer of 1925, a woman put her 2-week old son in a shoebox and dropped him off with a neighbor because she couldn’t take care of him. James Gleason has been born prematurely, said his daughter, Barbara Korchak. “He wasn’t expected to live,” Korchak said. But he did, and in summer 1943, he turned 18 during a bloody World War II battle on the island of New Georgia, where he was saving lives as a Navy combat corpsman assigned to a secret unit called the Marine Raiders. Gleason earned the nickname “Doc” during his time with the Raiders....

The reviews are in. Five days after the cable TV/Internet switchover to Frontier Communications from Verizon FiOS in the Tampa Bay market, I'm giving Frontier's performance a "C-" with a strong recommendation to improve. Quickly. I know. Folks and businesses that have no Internet or TV services give Frontier an "F" while those who can't even tell there was any switchover in companies here ask "what's the problem?" while privately expressing thanks for dodging a bullet. For Frontier, spending more than $10 billion to buy Verizon's FiOS businesses in Tampa Bay, and urban parts of Texas and California is a...

Al Sharpton's 1992 Off The Pigs Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZ0RwtvZmk

Air Force Gen. Lori Robinson will be nominated as the next head of U.S. Northern Command, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced Friday. If approved, she would be the first female head of a combatant command. The U.S. military divides the world into geographic regions that are each overseen by a four-star general or admiral directing military operations across the branches of service. None of those combatant commanders has ever been a woman. Northern Command, or Northcom, is charged with defending the U.S. homeland. The current commander of NorthCom, Admiral Bill Gortney, is also the commander of the well-known North American...

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has revealed that 124 illegal immigrant criminals released from jail by the Obama administration since 2010 have been subsequently charged with murder. A Center for Immigration Studies report on the data from ICE to the Senate Judiciary Committee added that the committee is not releasing the names of the murder suspects. "The criminal aliens released by ICE in these years — who had already been convicted of thousands of crimes — are responsible for a significant crime spree in American communities, including 124 new homicides. Inexplicably, ICE is choosing to release some criminal aliens multiple...

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump will hold a town hall meeting in Tampa today on the eve of the Florida primary. Trump will speak at 2 p.m. at the Tampa Convention Center. Admission are free, but spectators need to register at the Eventbrite website. Security has been beefed up in the wake of protests at recent Trump rallies that have become violent. Trump called off a rally in Chicago on Friday due to concerns about possible confrontations with protesters and supporters, and on Saturday a man was arrested after jumping a fence and attempting to rush the stage while Trump...

Kasich Pledges to Submit Comprehensive Immigration Reform Plan to Congress in First 100 Days VIDEO AT LINK