Free Republic

Cardinal McCarrick secretly gave nearly $1 million to group led by cleric accused of sexual misconduct In the years before his removal from ministry, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick secretly gave nearly $1 million to a controversial group of Catholic missionaries and supported leniency for its founder after the Vatican punished him for sexual wrongdoing, internal church documents show. From 2004 to 2017, McCarrick sent the Institute of the Incarnate Word dozens of checks — some as large as $50,000 — from a charitable account he controlled at the Archdiocese of Washington, according to ledgers obtained by The Washington Post.

LAS VEGAS — Mike Bloomberg is privately lobbying Democratic Party officials and donors allied with his moderate opponents to flip their allegiance to him — and block Bernie Sanders — in the event of a brokered national convention. The effort, largely executed by Bloomberg’s senior state-level advisers in recent weeks, attempts to prime Bloomberg for a second-ballot contest at the Democratic National Convention in July by poaching supporters of Joe Biden and other moderate Democrats, according to two Democratic strategists familiar with the talks and unaffiliated with Bloomberg. The outreach has involved meetings and telephone calls with supporters of Biden...

Querida Amazonia: Syncretizing Smoke and German-tinted Mirrors The reactions to the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Querida Amazonia—I had almost written Post-Sinusoidal Apostolic Expectoration—have once again exhibited all the features of an ecclesiastical Rorschach inkblot test. In spite of the document’s hailing from the man whom we might as well agree to call Pope Lío (as in ¡Hagan lío!), conservatives of the First Things variety have breathed a collective sigh of relief: “Peter has spoken through Lío!” The pope did not, after all, push through married priests and female deacons, as everyone had feared! The Germans are collectively wringing their hands...

The Marina City Council voted to approve the conditional use permit that allows Joby Aviation to test their prototype air taxis at the airport. The company wants to build a 580-thousand square foot manufacturing facility at the airport that will provide as many as 1,600 jobs to the regionThe Marina City Council voted to approve the conditional use permit that allows Joby Aviation to test their prototype air taxis at the airport. The company wants to build a 580-thousand square foot manufacturing facility at the airport that will provide as many as 1,600 jobs to the region

When Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Bernie Sanders supporter, defended so-called Bernie Bros on Twitter and asked for examples of the Vermont senator’s backers “being bad,” U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise shut him down with just six words. “I can think of an example,” Scalise tweeted back. Scalise, a Louisiana congressman and the House Republican minority whip, was one of several people injured during a 2017 shooting at a practice for the annual congressional baseball game in Alexandria, Va.

The Rev. Al Sharpton had harsh words for mayoral hopeful Mark Green and the Democratic Party yesterday – charging the Democratic nominee did “everything he could to polarize the city.” “I want to know where the whole Democratic leadership was [during the mayoral runoff],” Sharpton, who’d supported Fernando Ferrer against Green in the runoff, said at a rally at his National Action Network headquarters. “Wherever they were, stay there – and keep your mouth shut. Don’t be running your mouth off to us.” Sharpton’s comments came as Green spent a second day taking hits from Ferrer supporters over an attack...

A code red was issued at South Dade Senior High SchoolA man was arrested Thursday after he was seen with an AR-15 near a southwest Miami-Dade school, prompting a campus lockdown, school officials said. Numerous calls to 911 reported sightings of a man riding an ATV with the rifle's barrel protruding from his bookbag while parents dropped off their children at around 7 a.m. at South Dade Senior High School, police said in an arrest report. School officials locked down the campus as police searched for hours. They did not find an intruder or anyone with a gun and reopened...

Late last century, when the internet was much younger, some very talented people helped me with a profoundly cross cultural album that could only ever work if it was done in a spirit of freedom. I tried to write the words to express that myself but in the end I couldn’t. I had to borrow words and revise them for the context from Walt Whitman. Where else could I look when I needed to talk about new frontiers of freedom. God Bless America.

The language of the Fourth Amendment strongly suggests that warrants are required for searches, and the Supreme Court has permitted only narrow exceptions to the warrant requirement.Last week, The New York Times reported on a facial recognition technology company offering law enforcement, federal government agencies, and companies the ability to identify people simply by uploading a photograph. Clearview AI has compiled more than three billion images by scanning Facebook and other platforms. It analyzes uploaded facial images and returns public photos that match the photo subject, along with links to where those photos appeared. Clearview’s service, says the Times, “could...

Chicago's bail reforms may not have had the rosy outcomes indicated by a top county judge's analysis, which independent researchers say is downplaying the new crimes that have resulted from allowing defendants to await trial outside of jail. Those are the results of an analysis by a group of Chicago Tribune reporters in a new investigative piece as well as a just-published data analysis paper by University of Utah professors Paul Cassell and Richard Fowles. In 2017, Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans implemented an order reforming how the Chicago area courts handled pretrial detention. The goal was to reduce...

Another President Trump rally!!!

[Barf Alert] Biden touts Catholic faith as campaign falters .- Presidential candidate Joe Biden highlighted his Catholic faith in a new campaign ad, released on Tuesday, Feb. 18. The former frontrunner for the Democratic nomination has seen a sharp drop in his poll numbers following loses in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.Biden, a baptized Catholic, said in the ad that “faith is what has gotten me through difficult times in my life,” including the deaths of his first wife, eldest daughter in a car accident, and his son Beau’s death from brain cancer. As Biden is speaking, the ad displays black-and-white...

Oh, my, that wasn’t what Mr. Excitement wanted to hear at all: Wednesday night’s televised debate that featured the mega-billionaire being pummeled repeatedly by his Democrat opponents drew a record audience of 33.5 million, according to Nielsen Fast National Data. No doubt when Bloomberg was being safely tucked into his lush bed last night by his man-servant Jeeves, the former New York City Mayor was placating himself over his dismal performance with the thought that, hey, nobody watches these things, anyway. So, no harm, no foul, right? Wrong. Mr. Excitement no doubt figured that he could make up for what...

Washington (CNN) The intelligence community's top election security official delivered a briefing to lawmakers last week warning them that the intelligence community believes Russia is already taking steps to interfere in the 2020 election with the goal of helping President Donald Trump win, three sources familiar with the matter tell CNN. Last week's briefing, led by election security official Shelby Pierson and first reported by The New York Times, addressed the overall picture of Russia's efforts, including hacking, weaponizing social media and attacks on election infrastructure, one of the sources said. The briefers said Russia does favor Trump, but that...

John Krasinski is pushing back on criticism that his selection of specific military and government characters is somehow his way of playing “red state heroes” -- as some have speculated, according to Esquire -- without dipping his toes in anything political. The former “Office” star, who has played a former Navy SEAL-turned-private military contractor working in Benghazi in Michael Bay’s 2016 film “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi,” opened up to the outlet about his decision to act in projects that celebrate the military and said his connection to these types of roles is genuine and not a ploy...

Iran said on February 20 that three more people have tested positive for a new coronavirus in the holy Shi'ite city of Qom, where two people the previous day had died of the illness caused by the virus. The IRNA state news agency reported that all schools and universities, including religious Shi’ite seminaries, were closed in the holy Iranian city, located about 140 kilometers south of the capital, Tehran. Amid fears of the virus spreading, neighboring Iraq banned border crossings by Iranian nationals after already suspending flights to Iran. The country’s Health Ministry said the same day that there were...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Microsoft (MSFT.O) Chief Executive Satya Nadella said the technology giant will invest $1.1 billion in Mexico over the next five years, according to a promotional video released by the Mexican government on Thursday.Nadella said the investment is “focused on expanding access to digital technology for people and organizations across the country.”Microsoft will build a new data center to deliver “client services to help every organization to really get an advantage and drive digital transformation,” added Nadella.The U.S. company will also invest in training labs and skills programs, Nadella said.Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, speaking during...

Evisceration of rich shorty.

A death row inmate who was convicted of killing four people — but who saved the lives of three corrections officers while in prison, according to his lawyer — is scheduled to be executed Thursday night. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee denied Nicholas Sutton’s clemency on Wednesday. “After careful consideration of Nicholas Sutton’s request for clemency and a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and will not be intervening” Lee said in a statement. Sutton, 58, was sentenced to die for fatally stabbing a fellow inmate in 1985, when he was serving...

Trump’s “Deal of the Century,” or, officially, “A Vision to Improve the Lives of Palestinian and Israeli People” (the Plan) was published during the height of the shameful bluffpeachment, so it flew under the radar in America. Apparently, the ostentatious political correctness of the Plan (the opposition of “Israelis” and “Palestinians,” “two-state solution,” etc.) misled most pundits – and the Plan quickly disappeared from front pages everywhere. The Deal of the Century was referred to as another futile effort to achieve an ephemeral peace in the Middle East. However, if one puts aside the politically correct newspeak (I understand that...