Free Republic

OAKLAND - There are few sights more poignant than empty classrooms that should be full, playground basketball courts with no games, a "School Crossing" sign where there is no longer a school. Just breeze-block walls and nearly 100 years of history. Parker Elementary School, in the words of the Oakland Unified School District, was "unsustainable," no longer a place that drew enough children from a viable surrounding neighborhood to fill its now-dim classrooms and a dark gymnasium that had doubled as the school cafeteria. So it was shuttered last spring.

The far right is rising in the ranchland of Northern California, using special elections and veiled intimidation to spread political influence across a historically conservative region of this deeply liberal state. The movement is rooted here in Shasta County and includes the support of a roughly decade-old militia. The gains it has achieved have come at the expense of moderate Republicans, who for generations fit the small-government, light-regulation ethic that guided political life here.

Season 11 episode 6 "On the Inside":

PASCO, WA A Pasco union leader’s controversial comments linking “reopen everything” movements with white privilege have set off calls for people to leave the union. Pasco Association of Educators President Scott Wilson’s two-minute statement at the Jan. 12 school board meeting linked “free to breathe” and “free to reopen everything” rodeos and rallies with a “culture of white supremacy and white privilege.” The comments from the white middle school teacher have raised the ire of dozens of people upset about the comparison, and led to a letter circulating on Facebook calling for members to opt out of the teachers union.

Veteran actor Scott Wilson, best known to TV audiences as Hershel Greene on The Walking Dead, died Saturday. He was 76. TMZ reports that Wilson died due to complications from leukemia. News of Wilson’s passing comes just hours after it was announced that he will appear in Walking Dead‘s upcoming ninth season, reprising his role as Hershel. It’s believed that his episode was shot earlier this summer. Wilson joined AMC’s zombie smash in Season 2 and was written out in the middle of Season 4. Additional TV credits include recurring roles on The OA, Damien, Bosch and CSI. Walking Dead‘s...

**SNIP** Valerie Plame, the ex-CIA operative outed by the W. Bush administration, also chimed in. “Astonishing: White House mistakenly identifies CIA chief in Afghanistan,” she tweeted in a sardonic message on Monday. The name of the CIA’s chief of station in Kabul, the agency’s top spy in Afghanistan, was listed among the 15 officials briefing Obama upon his arrival at Bagram Air Base. The White House only caught the error when Washington Post reporter Scott Wilson alerted the press office, after Obama’s schedule was included in an email that was circulated to as many as 6,000 members of the media.

When George W. Bush was president, a week didn't go by when the press wasn't dismissing his intelligence and proclaiming his administration's incompetence. Over the weekend, President Barack Obama made a surprise visit to the troops in Afghanistan. Someone on his staff demonstrated truly jaw-dropping incompetence by accidentally releasing to 6,000 journalists the name of the CIA station chief in Afghanistan as part of Obama's welcoming delegation. That is a death sentence, not just for the agent but for all those around him. Try to imagine the media firestorm this would have created had the transgression occurred during the W...

The polo magnate who adopted his girlfriend in an alleged attempt to protect his fortune from a lawsuit must now battle with his teenaged children who want the adoption thrown out. John Goodman adopted his 42-year-old girlfriend in the fall, giving her a share of the more than $300 million trust he established for his two biological children -- a move that critics said was a ploy to save millions for himself if he loses an upcoming wrongful death lawsuit stemming from a car accident that killed Scott Wilson in February 2010. The guardian of Goodman's children opened another legal...

NETZARIM, Gaza Strip -- The harvest is underway inside a row of greenhouses here on the grounds of a razed Israeli settlement. But most of the tomatoes and sweet peppers, usually shipped to European markets, will rot in a nearby ravine. "We keep getting it, but we don't know what to do with it," said Abdul Fatah al-Eilah, the greenhouse manager, as workers stacked boxes of vegetables in a storage shed while tractors towing flatbeds full of produce lined up to enter. The main trade passage between the Gaza Strip and Israel has been closed for much of the year,...