Free Republic

The administration quietly redistributes illegal aliens through military bases.A source tipped me off last week to a curious occurrence: It seems that two planeloads of illegal aliens were recently shipped to Massachusetts. The first reportedly landed at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford. According to my tipster, approximately 160 illegal immigrants arrived on that flight and stayed nearly a week before being transferred to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) site and then released. The second flight reportedly was diverted from Hanscom to Boston’s Logan Airport this past weekend. I am told that both Massachusetts and New Hampshire officials were...

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Less than two years after voters gave President Barack Obama a strong mandate for a second term, the White House is struggling against perceptions that it is losing its grip. At home, the bungled rollout of the Obamacare website and the shocking revelations about an entrenched culture of incompetence and fraud in the VA have undercut faith in the President’s managerial competency. Abroad, a surging Russia, an aggressive China, a war torn Middle East and a resurgent terror network are putting his foreign policy credentials to the test. With the GOP hoping to...

This is a year of important anniversaries for Ronald Reagan and his legacy. It is the tenth anniversary of his passing; it has been 25 years since he left the White House and 50 years since his groundbreaking speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater in 1964. It is also 30 years since his monumental reelection of 1984, ratifying the Reagan Revolution. The election of 1980 would have been meaningless, a detour in history, without 1984 legitimizing it. The Reagan Library, Eureka College, and the Reagan Ranch have taken various steps to commemorate these important anniversaries. And the effort to name...

In the wake of a mass murder in Isla Vista, Calif., critics of America’s gun laws have been predictably quick to trot out the classics, advocating the passage of new restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms and blaming the National Rifle Association for opposing what are invariably termed “common sense” reforms. On Sunday, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut took to Face the Nation to claim that if Congress had passed his preferred measures last year, it would have “finally” put a “stop the madness” and brought an “end the insanity that has killed too many young people.”...

It's a Good Thing That Obama Reads the Paper Because Otherwise He'd Have No Idea What His Administration is Doing It's a Good Thing That Obama Reads the Paper Because Otherwise He'd Have No Idea What His Administration is Doing Nick Gillespie|May. 19, 2014 5:59 pm So it turns out that President Obama—that whip-smart guy who is so super-curious about everything (unlike that quitter-snowbilly former Gov. Sarah Palin amirite?)—apparently had no idea that his administration was letting veterans croak while on waiting lists for care at Veterans Affairs (V.A.) facilities. At the very least, his people knew about the waiting-list...

MRI images from a neurotypical control (left) and an adult with complete agenesis of the corpus callosum (right). The corpus callosum is indicated in red, fading as the fibers enter the hemispheres in order to suggest that they continue on. The anterior commissure is indicated by light aqua. The image illustrates the dramatic lack of inter hemispheric connections in callosal agenesis. Credit: Lynn Paul/Caltech (Medical Xpress)—Building on their prior work, a team of neuroscientists at Caltech now report that rare patients who are missing connections between the left and right sides of their brain—a condition known as agenesis of...

At the risk of damning Mrs Obama with faint praise, I have to acknowledge that the First Lady's is not quite the lamest Hashtag of Western Impotence pose. That honor belongs to the gentleman at right - the Rt Hon David Cameron, PC, MP. Michelle Obama is merely the wife of the head of government; Mr Cameron is an actual head of government. So who exactly is he calling on to do all this "bringing back" he's so in favor of? Activist celebrities pull these stunts to put pressure on government. Who are all these government celebrities meant to be...

In recent years, the Democratic hold on key constituencies has weakened considerably.Demography is destiny, we are often told, and rightly — up to a point. The American electorate is made up of multiple identifiable segments, defined in various ways: by race and ethnicity, by age cohort, by region and religiosity (or lack thereof), by economic status and interest. Over time, some segments become larger and some smaller. Some prove to be politically crucial, given the political alignments of the time. Others become irrelevant as they lose cohesion and identity. From the results of the 2008 presidential election, many pundits prophesied...

The scientific community is not immune to politics, bias, and self-interest.The headline looks like a hoax — saturated fat does not cause heart disease — but it’s real. This news is more than just another example of changing health guidelines. It’s a cautionary tale about trusting the scientific consensus. For more than 50 years, the best scientific minds in America assured us that saturated fat was the enemy. Animal fat, we were instructed, was the chief culprit in causing obesity, Type II diabetes, and heart disease. Throughout my adult life, I have conscientiously followed the guidelines dispensed by the health...

The U.S. Supreme Court has not heard a single Second Amendment case since issuing its landmark gun rights rulings in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010). Unfortunately for gun rights advocates, that silence went unbroken today. In a major announcement this morning, the Supreme Court refused to hear Drake v. Jerejian, a case challenging the constitutionality of New Jersey's arbitrary rules governing the right to carry handguns in public for purposes of self-defense.The lawyer behind the case is Alan Gura, the civil rights litigator who previously argued and won both Heller and McDonald before the...

Scientists are scrambling to make sense of a sharp increase in reported infections with the deadly Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) virus. In April alone, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have reported over 200 new cases—more than all MERS-affected countries combined in the preceding 2 years. That has sparked fresh fears that the virus may be about to go on a global rampage. The World Health Organization expressed alarm at the new numbers, and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) published an updated risk assessment on 25 April warning European countries to expect more imported...

Graphene trilayers can be stacked in two different configurations, which can occur naturally in the same flake. They are separated by a sharp boundary. (Image: Pablo San-Jose ICMM-CSI) A team of researchers has discovered how to change the crystal structure of graphene, a finding that could lead to smaller and faster microprocessors.A University of Arizona-led team of physicists has discovered how to change the crystal structure of graphene, more commonly known as pencil lead, with an electric field, an important step toward the possible use of graphene in microprocessors that would be smaller and faster than current, silicon-based technology.Graphene consists...

Scientists led by Dr David Fairlie from the University of Queensland, Australia, have found abnormal amounts of an inflammatory protein called PAR2 in the fat tissues of overweight and obese rats and humans. PAR2 is also increased on the surfaces of human immune cells by common fatty acids in the diet. When obese rats on a diet high in sugar and fat were given a new oral drug that binds to PAR2, the inflammation-causing properties of this protein were blocked, as were other effects of the high-fat and high-sugar diet, including obesity itself.Zucker Rat, a pet rat that has developed...

Eatontown, NJ - -(Ammoland.com)- On April 28, 2014, a three-judge Appellate Division panel unanimously agreed that Jersey City Police wrongfully required resident Michael McGovern to complete questions on four added municipal forms and to provide other information beyond the scope of the firearm licensing statute, and that the Law Division erred in denying McGovern his permits based upon his refusal to provide such additional information. (See attached Decision below)When McGovern applied for his firearm purchase permits, he provided all State-mandated forms and answered all questions required under the law. The State-mandated materials consist of only a State Police Application Form...

According to new research published this week in the journal Nature, an acyldepsipeptide antibiotic called ADEP in combination with the bactericidal antibiotic drug rifampicin eliminates the methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus.This scanning electron micrograph shows the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Image credit: NIAID. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a bacterium that is resistant to many antibiotics. It is responsible for several chronic infections such as osteomyelitis, endocarditis, or infections of implanted medical devices. These infections are often incurable, even when appropriate antibiotics are used.Senior author of the study, Prof Kim Lewis of Northeastern University, suspected that a different adaptive function of bacteria...

You never get something for nothing, especially not in health care. Every test, every incision, every little pill brings benefits and risks. Nowhere is that balance tilting more ominously in the wrong direction than in the once halcyon realm of infectious diseases, that big success story of the 20th century. We have had antibiotics since the mid-1940s — just about as long as we have had the atomic bomb, as Dr. Martin J. Blaser points out — and our big mistake was failing long ago to appreciate the parallels between the two. Antibiotics have cowed many of our old bacterial...

The Burning Shore: How Hitler’s U-Boats Brought World War II to America
By Ed Offley(Basic Books, 312 pages, $27.99)When World War II got underway my father was not beyond draft age, but he was near the top of the range. In early 1942 Dad was married with one child and another on the way (my very own personal self). He was also working at a defense job at the local shipyard where liberty ships were being built. So he spent his war in Tampa dodging hot rivets rather than bullets.But Dad was still in uniform. He signed on for port security...

Religious freedom, life, education, reining in Big Government — are these the proper focus of the NRA?In Indianapolis this weekend, tens of thousands of members of the National Rifle Association came, saw, and — well, in truth, they had already conquered. Last year, in Houston, Texas, the outfit was still running its victory lap after the defeat of the Schumer-Toomey-Manchin gun-control bill, celebrating not only the defeat of that proposal but also President Obama’s failure to to reinstate a federal ban on cosmetically interesting weapons and to establish a national limit on the size of magazines. This time, there was...

Hell has officially frozen over in Pennsylvania. The first political ad warmly embracing ObamaCare, by a candidate not named Obama, hit state airwaves last week. It likely will be the last pro-ObamaCare ad ever made. Allyson Schwartz boldly went where no Democrat has gone before, trying to gain ground in a primary race that is slipping swiftly from her hands. The suburban Philadelphia congresswoman, seeking the Democrat nomination for governor, not only extolled ObamaCare's virtues in her ad; she called out her rivals on social media, in press releases and on MSNBC for not being equally pro-ObamaCare. “I'm proud of...

Using an innovative screening method, a team of scientists from Australia and the United States has discovered a peptide in the venom of the Peruvian green velvet tarantula (Thrixopelma pruriens) that blunts activity in pain-transmitting neurons.Tarantula. Image credit: Michael Gäbler / CC BY 3.0. The novel method, named toxineering, has the potential to search millions of different spider toxins for safe pain-killing drugs and therapies.Dr Michael Nitabach from Yale School of Medicine and his colleagues screened toxins from a variety of tarantula species to find one that blocked TRPA1, an ion channel on the surface of pain-sensing neurons that is...