Free Republic

Joe Biden is illegally blocking parents from removing sexually explicit books from school libraries. In conjunction with that, he is also forcing a DEI Library code of conduct on schools that prevent the removal of pornographic and age-inappropriate sexual material. The administration is usurping parents’ rights to decide what is not age appropriate in a library. Biden and his ‘advisers’ are bullying parents into keeping sexually explicit material in school libraries. In other words, the State will decide when children must be exposed to it, not the parents. THE TAKEOVER The assault began with an investigation of Forsyth County Public...

Fellow FReepers!Sidney Powell can spell just fine!You are probably getting the idea by now, but it seems that ALL documents submitted to court are put through a OCR process.OCR refers to 'Optical Character Recognition'. This is the conversion of different types of documents - scanned paper documents, digital images, PDFs and so forth - into clear textThe result is a searchable file. This is to ensure that the text in those documents is searchable to (e.g.) research attorneys, court officials and other legal professionals.Moreover: the data can *then* be moved to a common database and cross-referenced with other data. Anyone...

Orwell’s famous dystopia 1984 is often cited as a parable about the banality of administrative evil. The ever-vigilant bureaucrats of Oceania position themselves not only on the Left side of history, but also at its end. To err from their ideology is treason. The citizens of Oceania live in a state of self-imposed hypnosis where they have to pretend that even the simplest of words signify their exact opposites. The government agency that specializes in espionage and torture is thus called The Ministry of Love. The Ministry views every sexual act as a potential crime unless proven otherwise via affirmative...

On Friday night, Democratic Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez illuminated her relative lack of knowledge regarding world history once again by invoking the Holocaust in her defense of Rep. Ilhan Omar from what she says is an "explicit attack" from President Donald J. Trump. The commander-in-chief shared a video yesterday evening reminding Rep. Omar and her allies about the tragedy that occurred on 9/11 resulting in nearly 3,000 dead Americans. Rep. Omar has previously diminished the terror attack by Al-Qaeda as "some people" doing "something," which was included in the video.  Conservative commentators and pundits across Twitter reminded Rep. Ocasio-Cortez her...

On Friday the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services finally announced that it found California violated the federal conscience protection laws. This is the first time since the launch of the new Conscience and Religious Freedom Division one year ago that OCR has found a violation under these laws. Several pregnancy resource clinics in California complained that the state of California had fined them for refusing to refer others to, and advertise, abortion clinics. In 2015, California adopted the Reproductive Freedom, Accountability, Comprehensive Care, and Transparency Act, which required pregnancy resource centers to essentially...

The Obama administration was notable for its disregard of the rule of law in its avid pursuit of politically desirable outcomes. Law professor David Bernstein’s book on that subject, Lawless examined many such instances (see my review here) including the demand by Department of Education officials that colleges and universities scrap due process for accused male students in pursuit of high numbers of punishments for sexual assault. Now some of the schools that eagerly complied with the Department’s abuse of Title IX (the 1972 law that was written to keep schools that received federal funds from discriminating against women applicants)...

Gail Heriot is a law professor at the University of San Diego, member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and potentially, the next leader of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Last month the due process advocacy group Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) started circulating a letter supporting Heriot for the job, which oversees Title IX compliance on college campuses, and it drew more than 240 signatures from mostly academics in various fields. The signed letter was shared with some members of Congress and Donald Trump’s transition team before the inauguration, but was published last...

Creating the Department of Education in 1979 was certainly one of the worst blunders the nation made in that whole blunder-filled decade. Having neither a constitutional warrant nor any rationale except to reward the teachers’ unions for backing Jimmy Carter, the Department barely made it through Congress. (Even the New York Times thought it a bad idea, as Richard Vedder notes in this Pope Center article in which he explores the damage this agency has done.) Since then, we have wasted billions on the Department but educational results are worse than ever. And now it’s evident that the bureaucrats have...

We are still, for the most part, a nation of laws, except on college campuses. At the Heritage Foundation recently, Samantha Harris, director of policy research at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), said that “students have complained about the lack of due process” at colleges. “In the last five years, thanks to unprecedented intrusion by the federal government…due process has gotten a lot worse,” she said. Too often, accused students are left “without a hearing or [cannot] confront their accuser” in court, Harris averred. By her estimate, “more than 60 students have filed lawsuits” of unfair treatment...

OK. I've answerd my share of Tech questions over the years. Now, I'm faced with a project and looking for words of experience from others. Any recommendations (either positive, or to avoid) for OCR software for Linux. I run Ubuntu 10.04LTS on my desktop and laptop. I have 100+ pages, some typewritten, some from wordprocessing where the electronic versions are no longer available, which I need to convert to something that can be published on the web (probably on a WordPress site). Other than typing from the source pages, what are good options for OCR software for Linux. Are there...

The federal government is poised to adopt or at least preside over something politically correct college administrators have yet to achieve—national speech codes. A recent dear colleague letter from the U. S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (OCR) set the tone. The letter orders college presidents to ignore normal due process when sexual harassment is at issue. Moreover, the letter, from the current Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at DOE, Russlynn Ali pretty much orders schools to conduct “in conjunction with student leaders, a school or campus ‘climate check’ to assess the effectiveness of efforts to ensure that...

(CNSNews.com) – Two top House Democrats told CNSNews.com on Friday that a section in the $787-billion economic stimulus bill that requires the creation of “electronic health records for each person in the United States by 2014” does not mean that the medical records of every American must be included in the new national infrastructure. In the bill, which passed both chambers of Congress on Friday and which President Obama is scheduled to sign Tuesday, $3 billion is allocated for a “National Coordinator for Health Information Technology” to create and meet the objectives of a strategic plan to build a national...

THE BRIEFING ROOM • THE BLOG THE BLOG TUESDAY, AUGUST 4TH, 2009 AT 6:55 AM Facts Are Stubborn Things Posted by Macon Phillips Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, "facts are stubborn things." Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to "uncover" the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions. In this video, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office, addresses one example that makes it look like the President intends to...

The Orange County Register will lay off about 110 employees by the end of the week, Register Publisher Terry Horne announced today. The workers, who are being notified today and Thursday, will receive the company’s standard severance package of two weeks’ pay for every year of service, Horne said, according to an article on the newspaper's site. Here is an excerpt from that article. * Horne said the layoffs were part of an on-going effort to tailor the newspaper’s business model to a media environment that has been hard hit by a loss of employment, auto and real estate advertising;...

The Orange County Register is moving most of its business news into the main section of the newspaper at the end of January as part of a series of initiatives announced by the company this month. The changes, which will begin Jan. 30, are being made in response to the challenges facing newspapers in this digital age – declining circulation, a loss of advertising, high newsprint costs and an increasing demand for instantaneous access to news. "Shifting our business coverage into News is driven by a need to be more efficient in the type of news we publish in our...

Memo from Orange County Register editor Ken Brusic Folks, Most of you heard during town halls last week that revenue problems continue to plague our company and our industry. We learned, for example, that revenue was 14 percent behind last year and profit was 38 percent behind. And last year’s financial results were behind the year before. You also heard that one necessary solution was to cut expenses, including the elimination of positions, people and other non-payroll costs. None of this is easy. But the truth is, as we see revenue continue to fall, especially in print, our company needs...