Free Republic

Former president Donald Trump, fighting criminal charges in New York and multiple other ongoing investigations by federal and local prosecutors, is pitching Republican elected officials to get behind him as the inevitable nominee — and many of them are buying it. Trump is finally seeing the response he was hoping for when he announced his candidacy almost six months ago, in a moment of political weakness, as many Republicans were openly blaming him for the party’s disappointing showing in the midterms. Now, Trump is reasserting his primacy in the GOP, capitalizing on his early polling lead and using his indictment...

Ubaldo was 26 and working as a cashier in a Los Angeles gas station when he learned that his status as an illegal immigrant was about to change. He had turned on a Spanish radio station as an announcer was shouting the news: Ronald Reagan was expected to sign a new amnesty bill into law. It was 1986. “I felt like I just won a million dollars or more,” he said. Ubaldo is just one of the six immigrants Yahoo News has interviewed for our series on Americans who gained green cards under Reagan’s 1986 law that legalized 2.7 million...

Education activists are rallying around a homeless woman who may face jail time for enrolling her son in kindergarten under a friend's address. Supporters say the woman's story is yet another dismaying example of inequality in the U.S. education system. Tanya McDowell, a homeless single mother from Bridgeport, is charged with first-degree larceny and conspiracy to commit first-degree larceny for signing up her 5-year-old son to attend nearby Norwalk schools under the address of a friend. (Her son went to the school for four months. Her friend has been evicted from public housing for letting McDowell use her address.) McDowell...

Senator Elizabeth Warren made a surprise appearance at the National Congress of American Indians Wednesday morning, forcefully responding to President Trump’s derisively calling her "Pocahontas" and addressing her claims of Native American heritage more directly - and far more expansively - than she ever has before. [Snip] She did not apologize for her claims that her mother’s family had Cherokee blood — instead, reaffirming: "My mother's family was part Native American. And my daddy's parents were bitterly opposed to their relationship. So, in 1932, when Mother was 19 and Daddy had just turned 20, they eloped." "The story they lived...

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has clarified his recent remarks on immigration policy, saying he does not hire illegal immigrants to do repairs on his home. The onetime secretary of state for George W. Bush waded into one of the most contentious culture-war issues of 2010 during an appearance Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press"  -- the latest in a series of dissensions from conservative orthodoxy that have prompted some of his former GOP colleagues to question his party allegiance. "I don't hire illegal immigrants," Powell said in a statement Monday.

In an emotional speech this afternoon, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the proposed mosque and community center two blocks away from Ground Zero. A panel today voted to remove a final hurdle for the proposed mosque, which several prominent national Republicans, including Sarah Palin and Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, oppose because they say it's too close to the site of the September 11 attacks. A poll from last month indicates most New Yorkers also oppose the project. "Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a...

A group of more than 100 scientists and experts say in a new report that California faces the risk of a massive "superstorm" that could flood a quarter of the state's homes and cause $300 billion to $400 billion in damage. Researchers point out that the potential scale of destruction in this storm scenario is four or five times the amount of damage that could be wrought by a major earthquake. It sounds like the plot of an apocalyptic action movie, but scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey warned federal and state emergency officials that California's geological history shows such...

States could dodge a key part of the health care reform law because of a little-noticed mistake in the lengthy bill, according to a white paper by conservative health care experts Michael Cannon and Jonathan Adler. A missing word in the law's definition of a health insurance exchange could prevent the federal government from doling out crucial subsidies to aid middle class and lower-income people in buying insurance in states that refuse to set up their own exchanges. (Only 14 states are close to setting up exchanges so far. The federal government will set up back-up exchanges in states that...

How would the nation's school system be different if teachers were paid like engineers? Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proposed last month that a significant boost in teacher salaries could transform public schools for the better by luring the country's brightest college graduates into the profession. But it's possible that teachers would rather have more job security than a higher salary. When Michelle Rhee controlled Washington D.C.'s schools, she offered up to $130,000 salaries to teachers if they would give up their union's tenure and seniority rules and agree to be paid based on their students' test scores. She could...

Foreign Students Walk Off Hershey’s Factory Job In Protest By Liz GoodwinAugust 18, 2011 Hundreds of foreign students on a State Department cultural exchange visa program walked off their factory jobs in protest on Wednesday. The J-1 visa program brings foreign students to the country to work for two months and learn English, and was designed in part to fill seasonal tourism jobs at resorts and seaside towns. The 400 students employed at a Pennsylvania factory that makes Hershey's candies told The New York Times that even though they make $8.35 an hour, their rent and program fees are deducted...

A sobering new report from the State Department finds that more than 12 million people worldwide are victims of "trafficking in persons" — trapped in forced labor, bonded labor or forced prostitution. But just 4,166 people were convicted of trafficking last year, the report says. Even so, awareness of the reach of modern slavery has made such crimes easier to report and police, the study says. Ambassador-at-Large Luis CdeBaca, who heads the State Department's anti-slavery efforts, noted that 116 countries have adopted anti-trafficking laws since the United Nations enacted a law against modern slavery 10 years ago. Last year marked...

The scandal-plagued, tiny New Mexico border town of Columbus is dissolving its police department and asking the county sheriff to protect its citizens. An employee at Columbus City Hall confirmed to The Lookout that the police force has been dissolved. The Luna County Sheriff's Office will now take over patrolling the town. The town has been upended since federal authorities arrested Police Chief Angelo Vega, Mayor Eddie Espinoza, Village Trustee Blas Gutierrez and nine other residents for conspiring to smuggle hundreds of guns to drug cartels over the border in March. All of the accused have pleaded not guilty, and...

Marking the end of seven years of construction work, India's richest man is planning a housewarming party for his 27-story palatial new home in Mumbai, replete with no fewer than three helipads and an air-traffic control station on its roof. The 570-foot-tall glass tower, called Antilia, "features a swimming pool, a health club, a salon and a mini-theatre," reports the Times of India. "The first six levels comprise the garage where more than 160 cars can be parked. Atop the parking lot is Antilia's lobby, which has nine elevators." The house also has a garden that can accommodate trees, according...

Well, that was fast. Just two days after President Barack Obama won a second term, boosted by more than 70 percent of the Latino vote, some Republicans are striking a new tone on illegal immigration. Conservative Fox News and radio host Sean Hannity said Thursday that his views on immigration have "evolved."

Liz Goodwin. The Ticket. 56 minutes ago... Mitt Romney told the Denver Post on Monday that is he is elected president he will not cancel President Barack Obama's deferred action program for young illegal immigrants before instituting another immigration plan. ...

More than a year after the Sandy Hook school shooting, President Obama’s directive to amp up prosecutions of federal gun laws hasn’t made much difference in how many people are charged with gun crimes. U.S. attorneys that prosecute such cases charged 11,674 people with breaking federal gun laws in the fiscal year that ended in September, compared to 11,728 people the year before. “The federal gun charge numbers are not an accurate reflection of the Department's efforts to investigate and prosecute gun violence,” said Allison Price, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, in a statement. “The fact that we may...

North Carolinians voted to change the state constitution Tuesday to say that the only valid "domestic legal partnership" in the state is marriage between a man and a woman, according to the AP's projection. The amendment passed 61 to 39 percent with most counties reporting, making North Carolina the 29th state with a gay marriage ban in its constitution. The state already outlawed gay marriage, but the constitutional amendment makes it more difficult for politicians to ever change the law. The amendment also means that a handful of North Carolina municipalities that extended benefits to the domestic partners of their...

A federal jury says Chicago law enforcement must pay $330,000 to a family after officers shot their dog during a home raid that turned up no illegal activity. Thomas Russell, then 18, opened the door to his home in February 2009 to find police officers with their guns drawn. He asked if he could lock up his 9-year-old black labrador, named Lady, before letting the officers inside. The Chicago Tribune describes what happened next: Police refused the request and came into the house, the lawsuit said. When Lady came loping around the corner with her tail wagging, Officer Richard Antonsen...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s bid to pass a stripped down repeal of Obamacare on a party-line vote failed dramatically in the early hours of Friday when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., joined two other Republican holdouts and all the Democrats to vote against the measure.

Maria Hernandez is one of six people Yahoo News has interviewed for our series on Americans who gained green cards under Ronald Reagan’s 1986 law that legalized 2.7 million illegal immigrants.