Free Republic

Illinois’ financial outlook was changed from ‘stable’ to ‘negative’ by two major ratings firms, raising the risk the state’s credit rating will formally fall to non-investment grade status.. ... the state is actually paying higher interest on its debt today than it was in June 2017, according to Crain’s Chicago Business. When investors demand higher interest it generally reflects a higher risk that borrowers will default. Illinois was the least prepared to weather a recession heading into the coronavirus crisis, with only about 15 minutes of state spending saved in a rainy day fund. Lower credit ratings mean investors will...

Activists from every20seconds.org protested at 4 office Park Drive in Little Rock Arkansas around 8am-11 or so on Good Friday when it was scheduled to be open. The murder the unborn clinic was opened on Tuesday and Thursday of that week and had vehicles from out of state. Governor Asa Hutchinson & his Arkansas Health Department refused to shutdown the abortion clinic in the state like Texas and Louisiana other states have done over a week ago. (Oklahoma and Oregon clinics defied their state orders). A Federal appeals court ruled in favor of Texas shutting down their abortion clinic. After...

A man has been arrested of destroying three Buddha statues on Sunday, 5 April, at Wat Lao Santitham, a Buddhist temple in the city of Fort Smith, Arkansas. Twenty-one-year-old Shawn Michael Israel was caught on police body cameras at the temple with a hammer in his hand. Israel is heard saying that the statues were a “false idol . . . a false monument,” and that he was doing what God told him to do through scripture. (40/29 News) Police officers arriving at the scene reported seeing Israel “beating on a gold Buddha statue, with a hammer, causing severe damage...

Add Arkansas to the list of states where the governor has banned abortions along with, other non-essential medical procedures, to help fight the coronavirus by conserving medical supplies. Governor Asa Hutchinson released a letter via the Arkansas state health department on Friday that all health care facilities postpone all surgeries and procedures that are not medically necessary during the current COVID-19 pandemic. In his statement the Governor said that all ambulatory surgical centers and all abortion facilities are included. On Saturday afternoon, state Senator Trent Garner posted a copy of the letter and thanked Governor Hutchinson for issuing the ban...

Tom Cotton was both the first and the loudest voice in Congress to sound the alarm about the looming pandemic. While others slept, Tom Cotton was warning anyone who would listen that the coronavirus was coming for America. On January 22, one day before the Chinese government began a quarantine of Wuhan to contain the spread of the virus, the Arkansas senator sent a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar encouraging the Trump administration to consider banning travel between China and the United States and warning that the Communist regime could be covering up how dangerous...

The daughter was killed in the same house where her mother was killed. Almost 23 years after an Arkansas mother was murdered by a 16-year-old, the convicted killer allegedly killed her daughter, police said. Deputies from the Crittenden County Sheriff's Office responded to a call on Wednesday at the historical Snowden House in Horseshoe Lake where they saw a possible suspect fleeing the property. Police located "a possible suspect who jumped from an upstairs window and ran to a vehicle that he drove across the yard and got stuck in the yard at the Snowden house, the suspect then jumped...

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) is floating a plan to “get cash into the hands of affected workers and their families” due to national shutdowns of businesses in nearly every industry from the coronavirus outbreak. In a series of posts online and in a Fox News Channel interview, Cotton said American workers who are being forced to stay home from their jobs due to shutdowns in the midst of the coronavirus crisis need immediate relief in the form of cash payments. The monetary policy, known as Universal Basic Income (UBI), has made its way into the national spotlight over the last...

An employee of the biotech company at the center of the COVID-19 outbreak in Massachusetts is being criminally investigated after she defied the president’s travel ban and went to China. Of the 328 confirmed cases of the disease in Massachusetts, 30 percent of them are linked back to Cambridge-based Biogen after several employees at a conference held by the company at the Marriott Long Wharf tested positive for the virus and traveled across the country, further spreading the disease. Belmont native Jie Li is being accused of knowing she was sick and of taking medication to bring down her fever...

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) on Monday called for the United States to take more drastic measures to address the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, including a national “shutdown” that would only exclude “absolutely essential work” and stipends to affected workers to assist them in paying their bills as the pandemic continues to unfold across the globe. “The time has come for extraordinary measures to combat the Chinese coronavirus. What seems extreme today will seem obvious tomorrow,” Cotton, an outspoken skeptic of the House’s relief package, said on Monday.

An Arkansas Department of Health employee faces a felony charge of first-degree battery after North Little Rock police said he ran over a man with his car during a dispute, leaving the man injured. A Department of Health spokeswoman, Danyelle McNeill, said in an email Thursday that Aldo Reyes, 39, has been placed on leave amid a department investigation into his arrest. Reyes was arrested about 8:40 p.m. Saturday after police responded to 5501 MacArthur Drive in North Little Rock, according to an arrest report. At the scene, an officer reported seeing a victim lying in the road with severe...

Hunter Biden is using the coronavirus outbreak to try to get out of a deposition in his child support case, Page Six has learned. Biden, 50, claims it’s “unsafe” for him to travel to Arkansas court — and that appearing as scheduled Wednesday could put his pregnant wife and soon-to-be born baby at risk for the flu-like illness. “Travel restrictions have been implemented both domestically and internationally, particularly on airlines, due to the coronavirus,” his attorney, Brett Langdon, wrote in court documents filed Tuesday. “Setting aside personal endangerment, [Biden] reasonably believes that such travel unnecessarily exposes his wife and unborn...

Hunter Biden's lawyers alerted the Arkansas judge presiding over the child support lawsuit against him that he will be unable to attend his scheduled court deposition this week, citing travel restrictions caused by the coronavirus and the approaching due date of his pregnant wife.Biden was ordered last Thursday to appear at the court on Wednesday, March 11, for a deposition in the ongoing child support case, but his lawyers told the court in a Wednesday filing that Biden would be unable to attend."Defendant requests continuance of the hearing as he is unavailable to attend due to his wife's due date in 2...

The mother of Hunter Biden's child is seeking to have him held in contempt of court for failing to provide mandatory documentation. Lunden Alexis Roberts, 28, filed a paternity suit against Biden alleging he is the father of her infant child last May, and a subsequent DNA test proved “with scientific certainty” that he is the father. In court on Friday, Roberts's lawyers filed a renewed motion for contempt and for order to show cause because Biden has not supplied her with a copy of his 2017 and 2018 personal tax returns, along with a long list of other items

Hillary Clinton said she gave a false apology for her use of an unauthorized email server during her time as secretary of state. "We'll just say what you did was a mistake. It was dumb. It's over. And that will end it," Clinton said in the Hulu documentary released Friday, Hillary, about her life. "I didn't not believe that. I wasn't convinced of that. But I understood the frustration of my campaign." "So against my better judgment, I said, 'OK, fine,'" she said about giving a series of interviews which led to an apology on ABC News.

Maurice ‘Isaiah’ Torres died of septic shock in an Arkansas hospital after his father violated him with a stick for eating a piece of cake. Mauricio Alejandro Torres was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 2016, but it was overturned due to a technicality. State law dictates that capital murder offences that carry the death penalty must be tried in the same state as where they are being prosecuted. And while Isaiah died in his home state of Arkansas, the assault that killed him happened in Missouri. The disturbing details of his short life and protracted death...

LPublic Document Case heading, cropped and scaled by Dean Weingarten Many Second Amendment supporters have heard of the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934. It went into effect on 26 June, 1934.  It was the first national gun law to have a substantially limiting effect. It was the first federal statute challenged in the Supreme Court on the basis of the Second Amendment, in United States v. Miller. The story of that challenge may be read, in short form, on an AmmoLand News article from 2013.Far fewer people are familiar with the National Firearms Act of 1938. The NFA of...

As Democratic lawmakers in Virginia chip away at commonwealth residents' firearms rights, one bill in a Southern state seeks to undo the damage and form a pro-Second Amendment bulwark across the south. Mississippi House Bill 753, sponsored by seven Republicans in the state Legislature, was introduced Monday. The bill aims to establish an interstate compact to circumvent certain federal gun laws by establishing a regional power dedicated to the defense of the Second Amendment. Part of the legislation's intended purpose is to exempt certain firearms, accessories and ammunition from overreaching federal regulation. The bill doesn't stop there, promising to "declare...

Two officers were shot and a suspect was killed in a shooting Monday morning at a Walmart in Forrest City, Arkansas, reports CBS affiliate WREG. Law enforcement tells the station two police officers were called to the store in Forrest City, about 85 miles east of Little Rock, after the suspect began making threats. The suspect reportedly said he was going to blow up the Walmart. The officers approached the suspect, and that's when shots were fired, the station reports. The suspect died and the two officers were both reportedly struck by gunfire. One was airlifted to a medical center...

Hunter Biden has agreed to pay monthly child support retroactive to November 2018, ending a standoff that began after the judge in his Arkansas paternity case ordered him to appear in person for a hearing to explain why he shouldn't be held in contempt. The court redacted the amount of child support that Biden agreed to pay, pursuant to his agreement with plaintiff Lunden Alexis Roberts. However, Independence County Circuit Court Judge Holly Meyer noted that she "lacks sufficient information" to determine the appropriate amount of child support "based off the defendant's income," and that modifications to the child support...

The former Secretary of State was driven in a black GMC Yukon XL to the venue in a five vehicle convoy - but bizarrely left at around 2.30pm, before the film was screened at 3pm. . . . Clinton appeared to steady herself as she came down a set of stairs by what appeared to be a loading dock behind the venue. She was surrounded by aides and her security detail and held on to the railing.