Free Republic

Vicki Behenna told her son to believe what she believed — that the justice system is fair, that he should let it run its course. It is a belief born out of experience. She helped convict a bank president for misapplying funds, a pair of convenience store owners for food stamp fraud and even a former Oklahoma deputy treasurer for a kickback scheme involving state investment trades. She was part of the team that tried the crime of the century in Oklahoma. She helped prosecute Timothy McVeigh. She has seen the system work time and again. Then, it failed her...

MCALESTER, Okla. (AP) - A Krebs man who was in the country illegally has pleaded guilty to raping and impregnating an 11-year-old girl. The man entered his plea Monday and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. On Wednesday, Pittsburg County District Attorney Farley Ward told the McAlester News-Capital that DNA test results show the defendant had gotten the child pregnant. The Associated Press isn't naming the man because doing so could identify the victim. The man was first arrested in 2011 for assault and transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. He was deported later that year, but Oklahoma...

DEL CITY — A 14-year-old girl was arrested in the death of her infant son, police said. The boy, Jaidyn Respicio, who was 7 months old, was taken by ambulance to a hospital from a home in the 4700 block of SE 18 on Sunday morning, police Maj. Jody Suit said. When paramedics took Jaidyn to the hospital about 6:50 a.m., his limbs had turned blue and he could not lift his head, according to the search warrant filed Monday. Jaidyn was pronounced dead about 7:55 a.m. The boy’s mother, Jennifer Respicio, 14, was arrested on a homicide complaint and...

Jihad has blown up The Liberal Utopia. The visionary liberal land of political and social perfection. President Obama is not happy — and he isn’t alone. You know the place. • The Liberal Utopia is a land where gun background checks prevent mass murder. • The Liberal Utopia is a land where Islamic fundamentalists have changed their perception of America because the President travels to Muslim nations to give lovely speeches, believes that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere is a wonderful sign of an Arab Spring, and refuses to use the word “terrorist” whether his administration is investigating...

“In this age of instant reporting and tweets and blogs, there's a temptation to latch on to any bit of information, sometimes to jump to conclusions,” said President Obama, in the late evening of April 19, after Dzokhar Tsarnaev was captured alive in Watertown, Mass. “But when a tragedy like this happens, with public safety at risk and the stakes so high, it's important that we do this right. That's why we have investigations. That's why we relentlessly gather the facts. That's why we have courts. And that's why we take care not to rush to judgment -- not about...

m from Boston. Over the years, I lived in two apartments within a stone's throw of Monday's bombings. Over the years, I stood and cheered marathon runners countless times. I know every square inch of the area in all the pictures, which is hardly unusual. It's the center of Boston. My nephew was around the corner when the explosions went off. This week's terror hit home for me. And what to do? That is always the question. Do you stop going to sporting events? Cultural events? Outdoor rallies? I was raped around the corner from where the bombs hit. I...

Armed militants have attacked a prison in the Iraqi city of Tikrit, killing at least 12 guards and freeing about 90 inmates, officials have told the BBC. They say a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb at the gates of Tasfirat prison and clashes between militants and security guards followed. Some of the escaped inmates were reportedly al-Qaeda members. The prison was later retaken from the gunmen by security forces, reports say. A curfew is now in place in the area.

Have you noticed that in the past few years, and especially in the past few weeks since the murder of the Ambassador and his guards and colleague in Benghazi (a city that Erwin Rommel loved and whose inhabitants he praised), whenever the New York Times refers to Mohammed, they always call him, without quotation marks, The Prophet Mohammed, as if everyone with any sense understands that OF COURSE Mohammed is The One True Prophet and that it's just understood that Mohammed is The Prophet.

Today I went out into the field here in Chicago looking to talk to some of the striking teachers but no one in a red-shirt was anywhere to be found (or, if they were wearing one, they had nothing to do with the teachers’ union strike). A journalist friend of mine asked me to nose around and see if I could uncover anything about slain Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was rumored to be gay. A former “roommate” of Stevens by the name of Austin Tichenor lives and works in Chicago and while making calls to friends of mine in the...

A former University of Nebraska women’s basketball star faked an attack in which she allegedly carved anti-gay slurs into her skin because she felt it would spark change, police said Tuesday.

An 87-year-old World War II veteran walking from a corner store after purchasing lottery tickets was attacked Monday afternoon by three youths who beat and robbed him, knocking out his hearing aid and breaking his dentures, according to his family and police.

Today, the Obama Administration told Americans “not to read too much into” monthly jobs reports. As it turns out, they’ve been encouraging Americans to do that for years. But after 41 straight months of unemployment over 8%, you don’t have to read between the lines to see the truth. President Obama’s policies have failed to get America working again. June 2012: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is informative to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/07/06/employment-situation-june) May 2012: “Therefore, it is...

After pretending to consider various women and minorities for the Supreme Court these past few weeks, President Bush decided to disappoint all the groups he had just ginned up and nominate a white male. So all we know about him for sure is that he can't dance and he probably doesn't know who Jay-Z is. Other than that, he is a blank slate. Tabula rasa. Big zippo. Nada. Oh, yeah ... We also know he's argued cases before the Supreme Court. Big deal; so has Larry Flynt's attorney. But unfortunately, other than that that, we don't know much about John...

I have noticed a tendency of some commentators (such as Larry Tribe) to discount the gross inaccuracy of President Obama’s remarks on Monday concerning judicial review, by pointing to the substantially revised views he expressed on Tuesday. On the NewsHour, my colleague and friend Mike Seidman went so far as to insist that the President’s statement on Monday was entirely correct. To the contrary, I take the President’s Tuesday statement, along with his felt need to make it, as an implicit admission that his Monday statement was wrong and in need of prompt correction. I am therefore pleased to see...

'I am confident," announced the president of the United States, "that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress." And so it was on Monday that Barack Obama, anticipating a loss before the Supreme Court, added the third branch of government to the list of villains he will run against in his re-election campaign. Many are saying the president should know Marbury v. Madison. He does. It doesn't matter. If something gets in his way, Barack Obama hammers it—whether...

The winner for Earth Hour every year since 2003 - North Korea. Odds favor them to be the winner again this year.

People send me stuff. Today I learned via Twitter from baseball great Jose Canseco that Al Gore is dead. And here I thought it was just Futurama that thought this:

MARCH 27--With Twitter and Facebook continuing to explode with posts purporting to contain the address of George Zimmerman, property records and interviews reveal that the home is actually the longtime residence of a married Florida couple, both in their 70s, who have no connection to the man who killed Trayvon Martin and are now living in fear due to erroneous reports about their connection to the shooter. The mass dissemination of the address on Edgewater Circle in Sanford--the Florida city where Martin was shot to death last month--took flight last Friday when director Spike Lee retweeted a tweet containing Zimmerman’s...

Anyone who spends time looking at crime statistics will discover the basics of race and crime before too long, but you better be careful not to talk about them in polite society. They are protected by a taboo even stronger than the Victorian taboo against public discussions of sex, but with good reason. The facts are painful. No one can take joy in publicizing them. Murder is the crime which has the greatest “clearance rate,” i.e., it is the crime most frequently resolved and prosecuted. We know a lot about the victims and perpetrators of the crime of murder. Murder...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Gas prices are once again dominating the national debate. But despite rhetoric, high gas prices aren't hurting as much as they used to.