Free Republic

Queen guitarist Brian May said he was shocked into silence by the media's behavior during Oscars season, and said that “vitriol and dishonesty” had left him saddened, even after Bohemian Rhapsody’s success at the awards ceremony last month. The biggest-grossing music biopic of all time won four Academy Awards after Queen and Adam Lambert had opened the show last month – but afterward, May found himself unable to explain how he had felt in the preceding months.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co is considering closing two major plants in Russia as part of its global plan to restructure operations in unprofitable regions, three industry sources told Reuters. Faced with fourth-quarter losses in every part of the world outside North America, Ford is making cuts in Europe, closing down vehicle lines in South America and laying off thousands of workers in China. In Russia, where Ford's plants have a total production capacity of 360,000 vehicles a year, Ford could close its site in the northern Leningrad region and one of its plants in the central region of...

The mother of soak-the-rich congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that she was forced to flee the Big Apple and move to Florida because the property taxes were so high. “I was paying $10,000 a year in real estate taxes up north. I’m paying $600 a year in Florida. It’s stress-free down here,” Blanca Ocasio-Cortez told the Daily Mail from her home in Eustis, a town of less than 20,000 in central Florida north of Orlando. The mother-of-two — who calls herself BOC — said she picked Eustis because a relative already lived there and right before Christmas 2016 she paid $87,000...

...The now unsealed records expose efforts by Weissmann, and the Enron Task Force he led, to intimidate witnesses and to interfere in the attorney-client relationship of a cooperating witness. Several affidavits unsealed last week catalogued veiled threats made to witnesses the Enron defendants sought to interview. However, because many of the attorneys would speak only off the record to Enron’s attorneys, the courts refused to consider the affidavits sufficient to prove prosecutorial misconduct.

New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has not ruled out the possibility that Amazon could reopen a negotiating process to enter New York City, despite her previous statements slamming the tech giant's plan for a second headquarters in the Big Apple. Saikat Chakrabarti, the freshman congresswoman's chief of staff, blamed Amazon for backing out when the going got tough after a range of community groups, labor organizations and activists pushed back on its plan to build a complex for 25,000 workers on the Queens waterfront. "What [Ocasio-Cortez] was vocal about was the process by which it happened," Chakrabarti told Bloomberg...

Next time someone labels your opposition to mass immigration "racist" or "xenophobic," tell them you are equally opposed to New Yorkers immigrating to Florida and Californians immigrating to Arizona. And for the same reason: They bring with them the very values that caused them to flee. The only difference is Latin Americans are largely unaware of what they are doing; New Yorkers, Californians and other leftists who move to conservative states know exactly what they're doing: voting for the government policies from which they fled.

If Donald Trump did not have creeps, deadbeats and dirt bags as buddies, he would have been friendless in New York. It seems that everyone around him before he became president is either in prison or is soon going there, including Michael Cohen, his desperate former lawyer and personal fixer. Maybe with Cohen behind bars, Trump can concentrate on being president. This guy is so bad that he should have long ago been named chairman of Trump's New York Creep Committee (NYCC).

Research commissioned by The Atlantic Magazine shows that older white liberals may just be the most politically intolerant group in the country. The article by Amanda Ripley, Rekha Tenjarla and Angela Y. He, published Monday and titled “The Geography of Partisan Prejudice,” utilized polling and analytics firm PredictWise to “create a ranking of counties in the U.S. based on partisan prejudice.” While its findings showed “significant variations in Americans’ political ill will from place to place, regardless of party,” it also found that groups the authors expected to display partisan animosity, such as immigrants, paled in comparison to “the most...

It looks like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the golden girl of the Democratic Party, might be in some serious trouble, according to a new report from The Daily Caller. According to the report, Ocasio-Cortez and her chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti appear to have been in control of Justice Democrats PAC from December 2017 through her primary campaign victory in June 2018. Justice Democrats PAC donated heavily to her campaign, and that support was crucial for her victory. If the Federal Election Commission (FEC) finds that the New York Democrat’s campaign operated in affiliation with the PAC, which had raised more than...

This prophetic 1940s Catholic magazine can help end the crisis in the Church March 4, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) —  One of the worst lies about the Catholic Church as it existed before Vatican II is that it was rigid, legalistic, and imbued with clericalism. Anyone who’s read pre-conciliar papal writings on Catholic Action (see here, here, and here) knows that such charges are entirely bogus. Catholics living in the late 19th and early 20th century were anything but unthinking, rosary-counting dullards. (Even if they were, at least they prayed and didn’t dissent from Church doctrine – something that can’t be...

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The Democratic Socialists of America — a key backer of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s stunning victory last year — endorsed public defender Tiffany Caban for Queens District Attorney Sunday. DSA wasted no time likening Caban’s insurgent campaign to AOC’s upset of former Congressman Joe Crowley in last June’s Democratic primary. “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise victory opened the doors for a new, Democratic Socialist vision of electoral politics. It shows people are no longer content with out-of-touch politicians that ignore the working class,” said Sasha Weinstein, of NYC-DSA’s Queens Electoral Organizing Committee. “A Cabán victory will show that Queens is ready to...

The last remaining fortune cookie factory in San Francisco is on the verge of closure, thanks to sky-high rents and new technology, but its owner says he will never give up the family business, writes Lucy Sherriff. Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, in the city's Chinatown, is the last factory of its kind in the area, after competitors were forced to close when overheads became too expensive. The family-run factory opened its doors on Ross Alley in 1962, and uses the same recipe to this day, as well as retaining the traditional machinery used to make Chinese fortune cookies. "Even...

The economy grew at by 2.9 percent in 2018, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Thursday morning in its quarterly report on gross domestic product, tied for the strongest growth in 13 years. The figure fell just shy of President Trump’s stated goal of yearly 3 percent growth. Still, Thursday's report showed GDP growing at a 2.6 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2018, better than analysts expected for the quarter that included the beginning of the partial government shutdown. Most economists expect growth to slow in the quarters ahead. Federal Reserve officials, for instance, see GDP growth...

40 DAYS FOR LIFE: MAR. 6 – APR. 14 The word you are looking for is “monster” March 5, 2019 40 Days for Life starts in 377 cities this week, and sadly it begins in uncharted waters in the United States of America.Not because of what is being said by fringe abortion advocates yelling in the street, but because of what is being supported by elected governors and senators.These governors and senators are kind, tolerant and well-dressed. They are smooth talkers and they want you, as an American, to know that even though they are highly sophisticated, they are tender...

“I haven’t decided anything yet,” Cuban told the Daily News. “We’ll see what happens. It all comes down to how things play out. It’s not something I feel like I have to do. ... But it’s something that if circumstances were right I would do.” Cuban criticized the Democratic party for what he sees as a group that’s more focused on appealing to its base than independents and Republicans. “If you look at the Democrats right now, there’s like a democratic gravity that pulls all the candidates to the same point,” Cuban said. “And it’s very difficult to show leadership...

Nancy Pelosi and a growing number of Democrats are piling on the pressure for President Donald Trump to make his taxes public, yet the Democratic House speaker refuses to release her own and continues to dodge questions about her personal finances. Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) last month vowed that the Dems will do everything in their power to pursue President Trump's taxes.

"So after careful reflection, it looks like I was entirely wrong in my thinking about this movie, and now I've seen the light. The following is an explanation of my mistakes, and a heartfelt apology to Marvel and Brie Larson."

Ty Cobb, the White House attorney who served as President Donald Trump's lead counsel during the early stages of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe, called the former FBI director and federal prosecutor an "American hero" in an interview published Tuesday. Speaking on ABC News' "The Investigation" podcast, Cobb also disagreed with the president's assessment that the Russian investigation is a “witch hunt.” "I think Bob Mueller's an American hero,” Cobb, who joined the White House in the summer of 2017 and left in May 2018, said. "I think Bob Mueller's a guy that, you know even though he came from...

The last time Rep. Ilhan Omar made comments viewed as anti-Semitic, House Democratic leaders pressured her to apologize. This time, they’ve drafted a resolution condemning anti-Semitism that fails to mention her by name. For Sarah Stern, founder and president of the Endowment for Middle East Peace, that’s not enough. She and other Jewish leaders are standing by their call for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to remove the first-term Minnesota Democrat from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “I appreciate this, and it’s wonderful that there is a condemnation of anti-Semitism in general,” Ms. Stern said. “But a person specifically who has...