Free Republic

For nearly 50 years, Idaho's prison staffers have been serving Thomas Eugene Creech three meals a day, checking on him during rounds and taking him to medical appointments. This Wednesday, some of Idaho's prison staffers will be asked to kill the convicted serial killer. Barring any last-minute stay, the 73-year-old, one of the nation's longest-serving death row inmates, will be executed by lethal injection for killing a fellow prisoner with a battery-filled sock in 1981. Creech's killing of David Jensen, a young, disabled man who was serving time for car theft, was his last in a broad path of destruction...

If there was ever any doubt that Pope Francis’s Vatican regime is determined to subvert the doctrines of Pope John Paul II, the shameless conduct of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute’s new administration ought to stand as indisputable proof. Followers of Saint John Paul II were apprehensive after the Institute fell into the hands of Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, who was appointed Grand Chancellor by Pope Francis. Paglia is notorious for his elastic interpretations of moral theology along with the homoerotic art that sullies the walls of his former cathedral. In 2017, Pope Francis issued a motu proprio changing the...

The ground is constantly shaking in southern California right now, and this has many concerned that another large earthquake may be coming. I have been keeping my eye on Cal Tech’s recent earthquake map, and as I write this article it says that there have been 10,053 earthquakes in California and Nevada over the past 7 days. I have never seen that number so high, and southern California is being hit by yet another new earthquake every few moments. Most of the earthquakes are happening out in the Ridgecrest area where we witnessed the magnitude 6.4 earthquake that hit on...

The U.S. State Department, echoing reports by human rights groups and some news media, reported that between 800,000 and 2 million Muslims have been forced into "internment camps" in Communist China where they are reeducated "to erase religious and ethnic identities." Many of the Muslims' children are shipped off to orphanages by the authorities. Commenting on the situation, the director of the State Department's Human Rights and Democracy Bureau, Michael Kozak, said last week, "For me, you haven't seen things like this since the 1930s," a reference to the internment camps of Nazi Germany and the gulag prisons of the...

Public employees in California may have their pension benefits slashed due to the rollback of a longstanding rule in the state, Gov. Jerry Brown revealed in a recent budget briefing. The California governor revealed that he has a “hunch” legal proceedings could pave the way for cuts to public employees’ benefits. “There is more flexibility than there is currently assumed by those who discuss the California rule,” Brown said during the briefing.

More than 300 firefighters are working to control the raging wildfires burning through northern California's Wine Country that have left at least one dead. Wind-fueled wildfires broke out late Sunday night into early Monday morning destroying more than 1,500 homes and businesses and forcing 20,000 people to evacuate. Fourteen fast-moving fires continue to burn through eight counties-Napa, Sonoma, Lake, Mendocino, Yuba, Nevada, Calaveras and Butte. The fires have destroyed 57,000 acres total leaving 50,000 people without power. Governor of California Jerry Brown has issued a state of emergency for Napa, Sonoma and Yuba Counties as fires blaze through the Wine...

Illinoisans already pay some of the highest, if not the highest, property taxes in the nation. An analysis of the past 15 years shows that property taxes are growing far faster than residents’ ability to pay for them. Between 2000 and 2015, the total property taxes Illinois local governments collected doubled. Household incomes in Illinois, in contrast, only grew 31 percent over that time period. Because taxes have grown so much faster than income, the burden property taxes impose on Illinoisans has grown significantly. In 2000, property taxes consumed 4.4 percent of household incomes. In 2015, property taxes consumed 6.7...

Muncie man accused of murder: ‘I took out a meth dealer!’ By Vi Nguyen Published: August 10, 2017, 7:32 pm Updated: August 11, 2017, 8:25 am MUNCIE, Ind. (WISH) — A stabbing in Muncie on Thursday ended with a man dead and another arrested for murder. The 19-year-old suspect told police he would refer to himself as a martyr and wanted to purge the wicked. It happened a few minutes after noon Thursday at an apartment near South Franklin and West Seventh streets. Muncie police arrested Jaylin Ammon on a preliminary charge of murder. He was being held in the...

NOVEMBER 15--NFL star Von Miller, the reigning Super Bowl MVP, is seeking to quash the distribution of a sex tape that was recorded several months ago while the Denver Broncos linebacker was vacationing in Mexico, The Smoking Gun has learned. Lawyers for the 27-year-old athlete last week petitioned a Los Angeles judge to issue a restraining order barring Miller’s sex partner from selling or commercially exploiting the tape, which the Los Angeles woman filmed with her phone and reportedly offered to sell to Miller for $2.5 million. While the Los Angeles Superior Court action only lists the name “Doe” as...

The Central States Pension Fund has no new plan to avoid insolvency, fund director Thomas Nyhan said this week. Without government funding, the fund will run out of money in 10 years, he said. At that time, pension benefits for about 407,000 people could be reduced to "virtually nothing," he told workers and retirees in a letter sent Friday. In a last-ditch effort, the Central States Pension Plan sought government approval to partially reduce the pensions of 115,000 retirees and the future benefits for 155,000 current workers. The proposed cuts were steep, as much as 60% for some, but it...

Full Title: Trump: The Two-Party Political System Is 100% Rigged, "It's A Crooked Deal," "I See It With Bernie Too" In the wake of gaining no delegates from the Colorado state Republican convention, Donald Trump took to Monday morning's Fox & Friends to declare that "the system is rigged." "For example-- South Carolina I won in a massive landslide," the GOP fronrunner said. "Now they're trying to pick off those delegates one by one... What kind of a system is this?" "I win Louisiana by a lot," he continued. "I get thousands of more votes than Cruz, and then I...

It’s been just over four months since Sean Penn met with the world’s most wanted drug lord, and things aren’t going as the actor had planned. “My article has failed,” Penn told CBS’s Charlie Rose in an interview that will air on 60 Minutes this Sunday. The Oscar winner was referring to the 10,000-plus word screed detailing his meeting this October with notorious Mexican cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, and the events leading up to it. Rolling Stone published Penn’s article this past Saturday, following Guzman's capture six months after his Hollywoodesque escape from a maximum security prison this...

Former President George H.W. Bush is in a hospital in Maine with a broken bone in his neck. The 91-year-old former president injured himself Wednesday when he fell. He was in stable condition at Maine Medical Center in Portland. The 41st president was taken there by ambulance from his vacation home in Kennebunkport, reports CBS News correspondent Bill Plante.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday said the nation owes an apology for slavery. “As a nation — I don’t think as a president, but as a nation — we have got to apologize for slavery,” the 2016 Democratic presidential contender told host Joe Madison on Sirius XM’s “The Black Eagle.” “As a nation we have got to apologize for slavery, and of course the president is the leader of the nation,” he added. Sanders said that slavery had caused too much suffering to remain unaddressed. “Obviously nobody in this generation was involved in slavery,” Sanders said.

The number of drug users in Afghanistan is estimated to be as high as 1.6 million, or about 5.3 percent of the population, among the highest rates in the world. Nationwide, 1 in 10 urban households has at least one drug user, according to a recent report from the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. In the city of Herat, it is 1 in 5. From 2005 to 2009, the use of opiates doubled, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, putting Afghanistan on par with Russia and Iran, and the number of heroin users jumped...

... The killing of Sheik Ibrahim Ismael followed the unexplained killing of yet another mosque leader, Aboud Rogo Mohammed, in August 2012. ... Ahmed and family members accuse the government of being behind the killings. The coastal police chief did not respond to repeated calls for comment. A national police spokesman told The Associated Press to call back later but then turned off his phone.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) chastised GOP colleagues as “intransigent” in their refusal to accept the Democrat’s “50% cut” proposal. “Look, we have stated repeatedly that we are willing to scale back spending increases by 50%--to meet our opponents halfway, so to speak, but we can’t get any agreement,” Pelosi complained. Reid mocked House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) for “letting himself be bossed around by a caucus dominated by freshman representatives. Boehner’s been around long enough to know the score. There’s no realistic way we can actually reduce spending. Getting an agreement...

Former Planned Parenthood affiliate Golden Gate Community Health has abruptly shuttered all its Bay Area clinics, including the Marin County site at Fourth and H streets in San Rafael. In September the organization lost the right to use the Planned Parenthood name after experiencing significant financial problems. Documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service reveal it broke even in 2005-06, but ended 2008-09 with a $2.8 million deficit. "If we are able to raise $800,000 by this week's end we can fully reopen all of our sites again on Monday including our San Rafael location, which provides safety net reproductive...

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann attacks blogger from Cityfile for reporting rumors about him and his mother's death. And also a fight between him and Rachel Maddow over who got to interview actor Ben Affleck. With all due sympathy to Olbermann over his mother's recent death, he has unintentionally legitimized Cityfile. If it were me, I would take the high road and settle my grievance with the website in private. But that would by un-Alinsky of Olbermann to do. When it doubt, pick the target, personalize it, polarize it. Finally, for Olbermann to question anyone's journalistic integrity is like Barack Obama or...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. Inspired by a reader who sent a list of once American corporations who's profits are no longer funneled to the hard-working American employee, I investigated the subject. The clip that landed on my desk was from "America is Selling Out," published in The American Conservative, December, 2005. As I digested, emotionally charged from the publication's Web site at www.economyincrisis.org, I agreed with some of the information, discarded the sensational propaganda and extrapolated my take on the issues' raw facts. From what I've experienced and witnessed first-hand, I consider the current state...