Free Republic

House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that Facebook upheld its ban on former President Donald Trump because he was “pathologically” continuing to “endanger our democracy.” Mitchell said, “I want to ask you about the decision by Facebook this morning. The oversight board acknowledging that Donald Trump created an environment it called a serious risk of violence on January 6 with his posts. They opposed an indefinite suspension of his accounts. The former president issued a statement in response saying that free speech was taken away from the president of the United...

Gov. Jerry Brown has billed his $25 billion plan to build two massive tunnels under the Delta as a way to not just make it easier to move water from north to south, but also increase the reliability of water supplies and bring back salmon and other endangered species. But now the Brown administration is proposing a major and politically risky change: dropping a 50-year guarantee to restore the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta's environment. A centerpiece of the project, the environmental plan included $8 billion to preserve 100,000 acres of wetlands and dozens of other restoration efforts. The dramatic course...

A new government case plan directs Rifqa Bary, the girl who fled from her family in fear for her life after converting to Christianity from Islam, to talk about religion with her Muslim parents. The case plan also works toward getting Rifqa to return home. According to reporter Meredith Heagney of the Columbus Dispatch, who wore a hijab when she visited a Columbus mosque and has consistently filed slanted, anti-Rifqa stories on this case, the goal of this case plan is reunification of the Bary family. Ohio authorities would like to have Rifqa living back with her parents. They think...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday declared that greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide endanger human health and welfare, clearing the way for possible U.S. regulation. The EPA said it found that "greenhouse gases in the atmosphere endanger the public health and welfare of current and future generations" and human activities spur global warming. "These high atmospheric levels are the unambiguous result of human emissions, and are very likely the cause of the observed increase in average temperatures and other climatic changes," the agency said in its finding, released online at epa.gov. Regulation is not automatically...

WASHINGTON - Armed airline pilots may be at risk of discharging their weapons on planes because of cumbersome rules imposed by Congress and the Transportation Security Administration, a group representing the pilots said Tuesday. A 2002 law prohibits pilots from carrying their guns outside the cockpit without a trigger lock, and as a result they must frequently affix or remove trigger locks during flights. That law and the TSA policy that goes with it may be responsible for a March 22 incident in which a pilot accidentally discharged his weapon on U.S. Airways Flight 1536 from Denver to Charlotte, N.C.,...

Criticizing China's test of an anti-satellite weapon, the U.S. State Department said Friday "modern life as we know it" depends on the security of space-based technology. State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said the administration raised concerns about the test with Chinese officials in Washington and in Beijing, making clear its opposition to "any militarization of space." He said tests of the kind China carried out "produce extensive amounts of space debris, have the potential for disturbing or accidentally disrupting communication satellites or other kinds of space vehicles that are out there." A report released Friday by a U.S. congressional...

Everyone wants to protect potential victims of rape and child molestation, and a package of recently enacted laws helps move California in that direction. It provides for: Longer sentences and parole terms for convicted offenders. Scientific risk assessment of all sex offenders prior to release from prison, leading to differential post-release supervision with more attention to the most dangerous individuals, including GPS monitoring of high risk parolees. Prohibiting registered sex offenders from loitering around schools and other places where vulnerable populations congregate. Risk-level information on the Megan's Law Web site. The creation of school-based education programs addressing child personal safety....

Hatred-politics endanger Lieberman race THIS is no exaggeration: The soul of the Democratic Party - and possibly the future of civility in American politics - is on the line in the Aug. 8 Senate primary in Connecticut. Sen. Joe Lieberman, Conn., one of the last "liberal hawks" in the Democratic Party and a leader in efforts to find bipartisan solutions to America's problems, is being targeted for defeat by an emergent new left that's using savage, Internet-based attacks to push moderation out of politics. If former Greenwich Selectman Ned Lamont beats Lieberman in the Democratic primary, it will represent a...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 14, 2005 – Leaving Iraq before the mission there is finished will make America less, not more, secure and will send a dangerous message that will ring around the world, President Bush said today here at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. Speaking the day before Iraq's national elections, Bush disputed critics who claim the United States would be safer and Iraq less violent if the United States withdrew its forces there. "This view presumes that if we were not in Iraq, the terrorists would be leaving us alone," Bush said. In reality, the president said, terrorists have been...

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration said Friday it will allow developers to complete construction and other projects even after belated discoveries that the work could endanger protected species. The new rules from the Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service restore a Clinton-era initiative known as "no surprises." It will let federal agencies give blanket assurances to home builders, timber and mining companies and other developers that they won't have unforeseen requirements to protect rare species once a project has begun. A federal judge had blocked the rules last June, telling the government it needed to hear more ideas from the...

The decision by Congress to keep summoning U.S. military commanders back to Washington to testify about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal is endangering the lives of U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq, the head of the House Armed Services Committee said on Thursday. "Over the last 24 hours, we have had 66 attacks on American forces," House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., told MSNBC's "Scarborough Country." "If you‘re the battlefield commander of Iraq [called back to Washington] you have issues stacking up on your desk with respect to convoy security, surveillance capability, operations, working in this IED problem that we...

Tuesday, July 23, 2002'Environmentalists' Endanger Sequoias You don't have to be a tree hugger to love California's magnificent sequoias. But thanks to environment-destroying "environmentalists," these towering symbols of the West could go up in smoke. A 38,000-acre fire roared through Giant Sequoia National Monument today and came within two miles of the Trail of 100 Giants. This majestic grove features some of God's greatest work, among the largest and most ancient living things on Earth, 1,500 years old. Nuisance lawsuits lodged by "environmentalists" have abetted the growth of the fire. "The courts have blocked the removal of much of...