Free Republic

Socialist blue New York is seeing its locals fleeing to other states, and with those kind of losses, someone's congressional seat has got to go. Whose seat is on the block?  The Daily Wire has a report: According to pollster Frank Luntz, New York is likely to lose a seat in Congress after the 2020 census and Democrats in the state legislature will have to redraw the state's Congressional districts as a result. Although there are plenty of places to cut, New York Dems are reportedly eyeing Ocasio-Cortez's Bronx district for elimination because she's been out of sync with state-level Democrats who control...

Posted on January 1, 2020 by Msgr. Charles Pope Some Gifts in Strange Packages from 2019 It is hard to describe 2019 in glowing terms for the Church, both in the United States and around the world. I will not recite every gory detail here but this year saw a further unfolding of the drama of sexual abuse, the coverup of sexual abuse, and the deposing of several bishops and other clergy for this reason, and with more likely to follow in the year to come. All this led to further discouragement that ensued among both clergy and the...

Shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve, as America’s party city was celebrating the arrival of 2020, a desperate woman on a suburban Las Vegas street leapt out of the back door of a white Hyundai Sonata with a sunroof, and ran toward a front door, chased by the driver of the car. As she charged up the sidewalk, she must have known the chances of anyone being at home at this time, on this night, were vanishingly small. The woman must have felt utterly abandoned as she banged on that door, screaming for help, but no one came to...

Over Christmas, several Palestinian leaders repeated the claim Jesus was a Palestinian, but one took it a step further, calling him the first Islamic martyr. Tawfiq Tirawi, a senior Palestinian leader and Fatah Central Committee member, made the claim that Islamic tradition would mean Jesus is rewarded in heaven with 72 virgins, the Jerusalem Post reported -- an argument many Christians would consider blasphemous.

Creepy Joe is back. Sounding a bit like Humbert Humbert, the aging pervert from Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 Lolita, Joe Biden told an 11-year-old at a campaign rally this: https://twitter.com/alx/status/1212570955513552897 It's hard to confirm where this tape came from, but it appears authentic, given that the backdrop matches that of another Dec. 30 video. Is he a pervert? Hard to say, but probably not, given that perverts usually get caught early. He's certainly creepy, though, and he's done this many times. He may have not noticed anything weird about what he said, but the rest of us do. He may be...

Finding your loved one a perfect gift can be hard. But a diamond ring, silk dress, or designer bag couldn't come close to Mike Nipper's gift to his wife of 51 years. Mike donated his kidney to his wife, Peggy, after hers began to fail as a result of polycystic kidney disease (PKD). The genetic condition causes cysts to develop in the kidneys, often leading to kidney failure when the organ becomes too enlarged. "It was quite a gift," Peggy told CNN. "I don't think he has to give me another gift for the rest of my life. This was...

The interviews have started, countless others have been scheduled and in Dallas they deliberate again. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has over nine seasons of evidence as to what he has in Jason Garrett as a head coach. But it will take him at least three meetings to decide whether or not to bring him back next season, as the sides get set to gather again on Thursday. All signs continue to point to Jones letting Garrett go with the coach’s contract scheduled to expire on Jan. 14. But as the Cowboys delay hits 2020, other teams — including two of...

Happy New Year, everyone!! Here's hoping 2020 is the best year yet!! President Trump should take the win in the Senate trial without dragging it out, then concentrate on winning the 2020 election with wide coattails, then bide his time as the cases against the various coup plotters wind their way through the justice system. Win the election, hold the senate, take back the house!! And then continue the work of making America great again: Build the wall, enforce the law, deport them all!! End DACA!! End sanctuary cities!! End anchor babies!! Continue cutting regulations, cutting government, cutting spending and...

It is a cliché that if we do not study the past we are condemned to repeat it. Almost equally certain, however, is that if there are lessons to be learned from an historical episode, the political class will draw all the wrong ones — and often deliberately so. Far from viewing the past as a potential source of wisdom and insight, political regimes have a habit of employing history as an ideological weapon, to be distorted and manipulated in the service of present-day ambitions. That's what Winston Churchill meant when he described the history of the Soviet Union as...

News broke on Thursday morning that the Pantsuit Princess has accepted a post as the new Chancellor at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland: Emerald Robinson ✝️ ✔ @EmeraldRobinson Hillary Clinton is going to be the head of a university in Northern Ireland? That's an interesting choice. Discuss.https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-50970400 … Hillary Clinton Hillary Clinton is new chancellor of NI university The former US presidential candidate takes up five-year role with Queen's University, Belfast. bbc.com 241 9:29 AM - Jan 2, 2020 Twitter Ads info and privacy 315 people are talking about this The post is largely ceremonial, according to the BBC,...

One little girl in Brunswick, Ohio, asked for something different this Christmas -- a life-sized replica of President Donald Trump. And boy, did Santa come through. When 5-year-old Kailey woke up Christmas morning, she was treated to a full-sized cardboard cutout of the president and first lady Melania Trump. "She asked for a giant Trump and Santa delivered," Kailey's mom, Jillian Cayton, posted to Facebook.

Russia's Aeroflot has been named as the world's most on-time mainline airline in 2019 in a new report. It has beaten Japan's All Nippon Airways (ANA), which comes second, and highest-ranked U.S airline Delta Air Lines is third overall. Virgin Atlantic is the UK's most on-schedule carrier. Meanwhile, Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport is named as the world's most punctual airport.

Pope Francis apologized Wednesday after a now-viral video showed him slapping the hand of a woman who grabbed him in St. Peter’s Square on New Year’s Eve. A video that spread across social media on Tuesday showed Pope Francis greeting worshippers as he made his way to the nativity scene in Vatican City. At one point in the video, a woman grabbed the pope’s hand and yanked him over to her. Visibly irate, the pope slapped the woman’s hand to loosen her grip.

In a tweet responding to a Christian Post editorial, Moore, the 62-year-old founder of Living Proof Ministries, identified 2016 as the year the movement “passed away.” The Christian Post editorial was responding to Christianity Today’s support for President Donald Trump’s impeachment and removal from office; The Christian Post piece blasted “Christian elitism” and the spirit of the Christianity Today editorial. The idea that evangelical Christian voters choosing Trump over Hillary Clinton somehow killed evangelicalism is patently absurd, as if they would have been better off voting for a person and a party that had absolute contempt for them and their...

A federal judge has temporarily blocked a new California labor law from impacting more than 70,000 independent truckers. The law, passed late last year, makes it harder for companies to classify workers as independent contractors instead of employees, who are entitled to minimum wage and benefits such as workers compensation. U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego on Tuesday granted a temporary restraining order sought by the California Trucking Association while he considers imposing a permanent injunction. He said the association is likely to eventually prevail on its argument that the state law violates federal law. He also ruled...

The sanctions imposed by President Donald Trump on Iran have more than erased the benefits given by President Barack Obama under the nuclear deal, according to numbers presented by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Under the Iran deal, Iran gained renewed access to up to $150 billion in assets that had been previously frozen. The Obama administration also infamously gave Iran nearly $2 billion in cash for the release of American prisoners who were effectively hostages. The money is believed to have been used, in part, to fund Iranian terror operations.Rouhani, quoted by Bloomberg News, said Tuesday that U.S. sanctions have...

Former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro said he’s dropping out of the 2020 race. “It’s with profound gratitude to all of our supporters that I suspend my campaign for president today. I’m so proud of everything we’ve accomplished together. I’m going to keep fighting for an America where everyone counts—I hope you’ll join me in that fight,” Castro said in a statement on Jan. 2. Castro, 45, was the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the later years of the Obama administration. He joined the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs in 2017 after...

Professor Stephen Bainbridge is getting a lot of well deserved attention and praise for staring for staring down the academic diversity mafia and throwing its own rhetoric back in its face. Required to submit to what amounts to a loyalty oath to "diversity" in order to qualify for a merit raise at UCLA Law School, he spoke truth to power and discussed his devotion to intellectual diversity — documenting it with footnotes. I take the liberty of reprinting it in its entirety below, taken from his blog, ProfessorBainbridge.com:

During a rally yesterday, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden spoke to a crowd in Derry, N.H., a town that many miners call home. He acknowledged the economic setbacks and job insecurity that coal miners face these days, and gave them some advice: learn to code. According to Dave Weigel of the Washington Post, Biden said, “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well... Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!” According to Weigel, the comment was met with silence from...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was campaigning for Bernie Sanders at a jampacked beach-side rally last week when she took a moment to look beyond 2020. “I know, and we all know, that this isn’t just about Bernie Sanders,” she said. “This is about a movement that has been decades in the making.”