Free Republic

Many images that came out of Ferguson, Mo., last month looked like scenes from Birmingham, Ala., in the 1960s: the gun-wielding police officers, the sign-carrying protesters and the chants demanding equal treatment and human dignity. But that’s where the similarities ended. For all the righteous indignation it inspired, the Ferguson turmoil has become the latest in a series of flash-in-the-pan causes that peter out without inspiring lasting movements for racial justice. As an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi during the ’60s, what I learned was the importance of organizing at the grass-roots and how even...

Legislators are pushing this week to leave Washington for the campaign trail, but they are taking the time to revisit two scandals, in the Department of Veterans Affairs and the IRS, that have occupied much of their attention this year — with spillover impact on federal employees. The House could vote as early as Tuesday on legislation to make it easier for agencies to take disciplinary action against career members of the Senior Executive Service, the layer of employees between political appointees and career middle managers. The bill would double to two years the standard SES probationary period in which...

Like many residents of Northwest Portland, Matthew Hale doesn’t own a car. Instead, he prefers to walk or ride the bus to the city’s innumerable coffee shops and breweries and live-music spots. On weekends, he and his wife have no problem hitching rides to the Pacific Coast or the Cascade mountain range. Everywhere he looks, Hale told me, there are people just like him — bearded, on skateboards, brewing kombucha. “It’s really chill,” he says. Portland has taken hold of the cultural imagination as, to borrow the tag line from “Portlandia,” the place where young people go to retire. And...

USA Today has published a copy of the November 2010 edition of the Senate Handbook, a "compilation of the policies and regulations governing office administration, equipment and services, security and financial management." It has never been released publicly before, which means we now have much more about how Senate offices go about their business, decorate their office spaces, etc. In fact, it's far more than you would ever want to know. But now that the information has been published online, we can at least tell when elected officials are fudging the official rules. We read the manual (so you don't...

On July 24, President Obama traveled to Medina, a small, wealthy enclave outside Seattle, to attend a fundraiser for a Democratic super PAC at the home of former Costco CEO Jim Sinegal, one of the Democratic Party’s most reliable donors. But at the same time Sinegal was raising money to help Democrats retain control of the U.S. Senate, he and two of the wholesaler’s top executives were also shelling out cash to help Republicans win the Washington State Senate. In fact, the three Costco executives — long among the most reliable donors to Democratic candidates and causes — have spent...

As the sun rose over my dusty village on Aug. 3, relatives called with terrifying news: Jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) were coming for us. I’d expected just another day full of household tasks in Tel Uzer, a quiet spot on the western Nineveh plains of Iraq, where I lived with my family. Instead, we scrambled out of town on foot, taking only our clothes and some valuables. After an hour of walking north, we stopped to drink from a well in the heart of the desert. Our plan was to take refuge on Mount...

When Barack Obama and I last sat down in 2006, I refused to shake his hand. Today, I still won’t. His announcement last weekend that he would delay executive action on immigration is his fifth broken promise to Latinos on this all-important issue for our community. He has been blind to the pain of the 1,100 deportations our communities face every day and the anguish our families feel as they are swung back and forth as political pawns. The question for us Latinos — especially the nearly 24 million of us eligible to vote — is, what to do about...

<p>Since the rise of both modern medicine and society, a large subset of the Western World's population has required a scapegoat to explain their everyday ills. Today, it's gluten. A decade ago, it was monosodium glutamate (MSG). One hundred years ago, it was poop.</p>

<p>Newly minted "Meet The Press" moderator Chuck Todd will interview President Obama on Saturday. That interview will air on Sunday's "Meet" -- Todd's inaugural show.</p> <p>1. What, specifically, is your timeline for making a decision on using your executive authority in regards the nation's millions of undocumented immigrants?</p>

In a boost for Republicans and Kansas GOP Sen. Pat Roberts, the Democrat who attempted Wednesday to drop out of the three-way Senate race must remain on the ballot, the state’s top election official ruled Thursday. Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who endorsed Roberts during the primary, argued that Democratic nominee Chad Taylor failed to declare that he would be unable to perform the job if elected, a requirement of Kansas law. Taylor’s withdrawal letter cited that law but didn’t explicitly reference any reason for his decision. “The law is quite clear on this,” said Kobach. “Those words...

On March 20 in the St. Louis County town of Florissant, someone made an illegal U-turn in front of Nicole Bolden. The 32-year-old black single mother hit her brakes but couldn’t avoid a collision. Bolden wasn’t at fault for the accident and wanted to continue on her way. The other motorist insisted on calling the police, as per the law. When the officer showed up, Bolden filled with dread. “He was really nice and polite at first,” Bolden says. “But once he ran my name, he got real mean with me. He told me I was going to jail. I...

Despite filing papers with the Kansas secretary of State withdrawing from the Senate race late Wednesday, Democrat Chad Taylor may be stuck on the ballot this fall. Two election law statutes have raised questions about whether Taylor gave sufficient cause to remove himself from the ballot, and, if so, whether Democrats must ultimately choose a candidate to replace him. Kansas Republican Party Executive Director Clay Barker told The Hill that Taylor is now back on the secretary of State’s list of general election candidates, while a legal team analyzes the statutes. One statute declares that, except under specific circumstances, “no...

Andrew H. Madoff, who reported to authorities that his father and longtime Wall Street colleague, Bernard L. Madoff, had masterminded perhaps the largest Ponzi scheme in history, a multi-billion-dollar crime that Andrew described as a “father-son betrayal of biblical proportions,” died Sept. 3 at a hospital in New York City. He was 48. His lawyer, Martin Flumenbaum, told the Associated Press that the cause was mantle cell lymphoma. Mr. Madoff was diagnosed in 2003 with lymphoma and suffered a relapse a decade later. Mr. Madoff was the only surviving child of “Bernie” Madoff, a once-revered financier who is now serving...

SAN SALVADOR — When 5-year-old Georgina first saw her older brother and cousin descend from the bus that brought them back from Mexico, she let out a joyful scream. But her aunt sobbed and her mother couldn’t bear to look. For them, the return of Ismael and Abraham – after just eight days en route to the United States – marked a quick and painful defeat for their family. They had mortgaged their home to pay $8,000 for a coyote to smuggle the cousins to the US. The teens left El Salvador after gangs had repeatedly threatened them with forced...

An Alabama group is working to get an official state license plate featuring the Gadsden flag, the yellow Revolutionary War-era flag with a rattlesnake and the words “Don’t Tread On Me” that has become popular with Tea Party groups. The Foundation for Moral Law, a Montgomery-based religious liberty group that has taken on cases dealing with abortion, marriage, and public prayer, is working to get 1,000 pre-orders, the threshold that must be reached before the Alabama Revenue Department will manufacture plates, according to the Associated Press. Arizona, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia now offer license plates featuring the...

The specter of Michael Brown is inescapable inside his high school. Hundreds of students, most of them African American, walk the same halls and sit in the same lunchroom as Brown did — before his hard-won graduation and, days later, his death in the middle of Canfield Drive not far away. The American flag at the entrance of Normandy High School flies at half-staff. Students write and draw in their journals and read essays about police brutality, Brown’s fatal shooting by a white police officer on Aug. 9 considered the most vivid case study at hand. Teachers rush from class...

It was quite a spectacle. In November 2013, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wildlife Refuge in Commerce City had an enormous, spiky display of tons and tons of elephant tusks and ornately carved ivory icons and knickknacks. Some were aged and discolored; others gleamed exquisitely, fit for long-ago king. Then, the feds smashed the whole pile — six tons in total — into bits. From the tusks to the trinkets, the ivory had been seized over the past two decades by U.S. customs and other authorities and piled up here in Colorado. The pulverizing of the stockpile was to draw attention...

<p>Last Thursday, the rapper Nelly went on the air of his hometown hip-hop radio station, St. Louis's Hot 104.1, to announce a college scholarship fund for local teens in honor of Michael Brown, the unarmed black 18-year-old killed by a policeman earlier this month. Nelly also took the opportunity to mock the looters who have flourished since Brown's death, saying, "We don’t even know how to loot. We get out of the car without a mask, look at the camera, and then put the mask on.” Then he set his sights on black people more broadly. “Every other race I know play chess," he said. "Black people play checkers.”</p>

ST. LOUIS • City police are investigating a police shooting this afternoon in St. Louis. Police were called to Riverview Boulevard and McLaran Avenue in St. Louis city about 12:30 p.m. Police shot a suspect who brandished a knife at officers, according to authorities.

Hidden at the end of a hallway on the first floor of the Capitol, just past the “senators only” sign, is a white-tablecloth eatery with high, arched windows, a thick red carpet flecked with beige flowers, and an ornate chandelier. Here in the Senate Dining Room, only senators, high-level staff members and other approved guests are eligible to sit in the polished wood and blue leather chairs and talk business over the restaurant’s signature bean soup, while uniformed servers bustle about refreshing iced teas. A generation ago, Senators Mike Mansfield, Democrat of Montana and the majority leader, and George Aiken,...