Free Republic

One singer's rocky performance of the national anthem had her asking for a do-over in the middle of the song. Singer Loomis performed “The Star Spangled Banner” at the Free & Equal Elections Foundation presidential debate featuring third-party candidates on Oct. 24. Loomis' performance kicked off the live taping. She successfully belted out the first few lines of the song but appeared rattled once she got to a higher note and her voice cracked out of pitch. After struggling to sing, "And the rockets’ red glare," Loomis said into the mic, “I f---ed it up. I f---ed it up. Can...

A Cleveland police union president criticized for having his organization endorse Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and incendiary comments about NFL player protests has been ousted. The Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association is the city’s largest police union. President Steve Loomis lost Tuesday by 38 votes to former president Jeff Follmer. Most of the union’s 1,243 members voted. The head of an association representing 200 black officers tells Cleveland.com some of its members questioned Loomis’ provocative statements and his decision to endorse Trump. Black Shield Association President Lynn Hampton says black officers were dismayed to see Loomis taking stances that created negative...

National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney explains how the secretive agency runs its pervasive domestic spying apparatus in a new piece by Laura Poitras in The New York Times. Binney—one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history—worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution." In a short video called "The Program," Binney explains how the agency took part of one of the programs he built and started using it to spy on virtually every U.S....

What do you do when you are an assistant professor at a public university and you’ve been caught red-handed retweeting a tweet advocating murder? If you’re University of Rhode Island professor Erik Loomis, you delete your entire Twitter account ... We’re glad he won’t be advocating violence on Twitter any longer. Hopefully, he will use the freed-up time to seek help from a mental health professional. * * * Update: What exactly is Loomis hiding? Before he deleted his Twitter account, we managed to make note of a few of his angrier tweets

t's always exciting in New Orleans when it involves the New Orleans Saints, or so it seems. The Saints plan to seek “all legal recourse" regarding ESPN's Monday report that GM Mickey Loomis used an electronic devise to eavesdrop on opposing coaches from 2002 to 2004. Meanwhile, the Louisiana State Police are in the NFL New Orleans SaintsLoomisgate probe game along with the FBI.

With the Saints still reeling from the bounty program punishments and with general manager Mickey Loomis already suspended for eight games in 2012, an ESPN Outside the Lines report claims Loomis had an electronic device in his Superdome suite that allowed him to listen to the conversations of visiting coaches for nearly three seasons. According to the report, Loomis had rewired that device so he could eavesdrop for most of the 2002 season, the year he was hired, and all of the 2003 and 2004 seasons. The U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of Louisiana was told about these...

Mustafa Ali, 36, was charged with two counts of murder, robbery and other related offenses in the shooting deaths of two Loomis armored car guards and theft of cash at a bank ATM.

ST. PETERSBURG - Many, many bags are delivered to the county solid waste compound, but most contain trash and they're dumped deliberately. This one ended up in the middle of the road, well short of the dump, and apparently by accident. Inside was $65,000 in cash. "I pick it up and it is loaded with money," said Debbie Cole, a scale-house supervisor who spotted the bag during a break. "I go, 'Oh my gosh.'" "I've never seen that much money before," she said. "When I realized how much money it was, I started shaking." The bag apparently fell off an...