Free Republic

Here's a look at what's gone wrong at both chains.. These are tough times for two big US dollar store chains. In the past month, Family Dollar said it will close nearly 1,000 stores and 99 Cents Only said it will go out of business. Both companies said inflation and shoplifting have contributed to their troubles. While inflation has pressured the companies' low-income customer base and shoplifting has squeezed their profits, those factors alone can't explain their difficulties. Years of strategic mistakes and underinvestment have plagued Family Dollar and 99 Cents Only, retail analysts say. Both brands were acquired by...

It is widely accepted that the Ukrainian crisis erupted into a military conflict on February 24, 2022, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the seeds of the hostilities were planted about thirty years earlier by President Clinton and, later, by George W. Bush, both of whom recklessly pushed for NATO’s eastward expansion.

Vladimir Putin has hit out at Western 'scum' who he accuses of seeking to 'instigate pogroms' in Russia after an anti-Semetic mob rampaged through Dagestan. The Kremlin leader was two hours late for a meeting with his leading military and security henchmen in which the dictator blamed foreign interference for the ugly scenes at a regional airport when the mob hunted for Jews arriving by plane. Citing no evidence, he accused Ukraine and Western intelligence services of being behind the hate-filled uprising in Makhachkala, capital of Dagestan region. In a rambling diatribe, a grim-faced Putin told his subordinates that the...

In the early seventies Shiekh Ahmed Yassin started the Organization Mujama Al Islamiya which helped establish the Islamic University in Gaza, hospitals and schools. Just like the United States was funding the Taliban to fight in Afghanistan against the Soviets to bring down the communists so too was Israel selling Arms to Iran to fight their archenemy Iraq during the early eighties.Islamic fundamentalism was not seen as a threat to world peace, instead it was Marxists terrorists around the world who were seen as a threat so Muslim extremists were seen as natural allies against G-dless communists.

I truly pray that I'm completely wrong about all of this. That would be a blessing. It’s been over three years since the launch of Operation Warp Speed and we’re finally entering the fifth stage of the Covid “vaccine” con job. I made my first predictions about the Covid roadmap and the way it was all going to go down in mid-2021 when we were still in stages two and three. It’s all falling into place as I thought it would with one exception. I anticipated stage 5 would start in early- to mid-2024 just before the GOP had locked...

A Twitter profile by the name of Trans Resistance Network wrote on Monday that “anti-trans hate” has “consequences” in relation to the killing of six people at a Christian school in Nashville, TN, by a man described as a “transgender woman” by left-wing news media outlets. The man who killed six people — including three children — in Nashville “felt he had no other effective way to be seen than to lash out by taking the life of others,” according to the Trans Resistance Network’s statement. The statement alleged that right-wing figures promote “anti-trans hate” by “calling for nothing less...

A chess robot broke a 7-year-old boy's finger during a match in Russia last week. Video posted to social media of the incident shows the robot, which is playing three simultaneous matches against various opponents using a large mechanical arm, playing the young victim. The boy, reaches to move one of his pieces and the robot grabs his finger. The robot did not appear to make any severe twisting or other movements after grabbing the finger, however. Several adults rushed in soon after the incident and freed the boy's hand. "The robot broke the child’s finger," Sergey Lazarev, president of...

Remember, under Title IX and Biden rules to stop someone identifying as a woman from participating as a woman is a thought crime. AngelaLMorabito "Sorry you believe women's sports are for women; maybe try being less crazy?" UPenn directed its female swimmers to mental health services when they complained that a transgender athlete is out-competing them. Replying to @AngelaLMorabito so the answer UPenn had was to tell girls to stop crying quote: The university sent a short reply to the parents, telling them that Penn Athletics “is committed to being a welcoming and inclusive environment for all our student-athletes, coaches...

The mother of the 15-year-old boy who dressed in a skirt and raped a female classmate in the girl's bathroom and was then charged with sexually assaulting another girl months later says her son doesn't identify as a female, and it wasn't just some disguise to slip into the girl's bathroom. Speaking exclusively with DailyMail.com, the mother, who asked not to be identified for the sake of her underage son, defended his actions as that of a heterosexual, hormonal teen who, in the case of the rape, had consensual sex with the girl twice before. 'He's a 15-year-old boy that...

President Donald Trump is responsible for contracting the coronavirus, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said late Monday night, adding it was “embarrassing for the nation” that he fell ill. “Anybody who contracts the virus by essentially saying, ‘masks don’t matter, social distancing doesn’t matter,’ I think is responsible for what happens to them,” Biden said of Trump in an NBC town hall in Miami.

If the reports are true that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends on expressing support for the campaign that Russian President Vladimir Putin is conducting against Poland over the past few months, then it is a bad joke at the expense of the victims of the Holocaust, and its survivors, in whose name world leaders are gathering on Thursday at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem. At the center of Putin’s campaign is the accusation that Poland caused the outbreak of World War II, while minimizing the large role played by the Soviet Union.

Tragic Barnard College freshman Tessa Majors was allegedly in Morningside Park to buy marijuana when she was fatally stabbed by a group of teenage robbers, the head of the NYPD sergeants’ union claimed on Sunday. “What I am understanding is that [Majors] was in the park to buy marijuana,” Sergeants Benevolent Association president Ed Mullins told radio host John Catsimatidis on his AM 970 show, The Cats Roundtable. Police sources confirmed to The Post that they are investigating that angle, based on claims from a college friend of Majors’. A friend of the victim claimed to detectives that the 18-year-old...

Talk about blaming the victim! Sarah Sanders tweeted today about having been kicked out of a restaurant by the owner because she works for President Trump. The Politico story on the incident quotes Sanders’ waiter confirming the incident. But instead of condemning the restaurant, Politico criticizes Sanders: “[T]he tweet qualified as an uncommonly specific attack from an official White House account on a private business.”Get the rest of the story here.

The Freedom Party of Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders will hold a competition of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad, it said on Tuesday. The party said the plan to hold the competition in the party's secure offices in Dutch Parliament had been approved by the Dutch Counter-terrorism Agency NCTV. Cartoons depicting Mohammad have provoked violent responses in the past. In 2015, Islamist gunmen killed 12 people at the Paris offices of the French secularist satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which had printed cartoons of the Prophet. In 2005, the publication in a Danish newspaper of a dozen cartoons depicting the Prophet...

A University of California, Berkeley task force is blaming conservative students for destructive protests on campus, saying that hosting conservative speakers was “likely to incite a violent reaction.” The report was filed on April 10 by a Commission on Free Speech that Chancellor Carol Christ created last October to “analyze events featuring external speakers” on campus in the wake of a series of disruptive protests against planned appearances by speakers such as Ben Shapiro, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Ann Coulter.

There is a girl in Toronto who needs a lot of patience and understanding. This 11-year-old child made a mistake that grew and grew until it became an international story. She told her family, her school and the police that a stranger had followed her and attacked her with scissors, slashing her hijab. Twice. The child's brother reported that he had been witness to it all. The girl described her attacker and the event in some detail. The man was Asian, he was smiling, he was dressed in black, the scissors had a blue handle. After the police went to...

AMERICAN GREATNESS Power, Sex, and Politics Angelo Codevilla Power,” Henry Kissinger observed, “is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Men, but mostly women, have been trading erotic services for access to power since time began. The ruling class’s recent carrying on over a supposed epidemic of powerful grabbers and gropers runs counter to common sense and experience. If Henry, who resembled less a prince than a frog even in his youth found his connections with power and wealth sufficient to satisfy his longings, so can anyone similarly placed. Nor is there any evidence of a sudden increase in morality or restraint having cut...

U.S. airlines have received some well-deserved criticism lately for their routine mistreatment of customers. But maybe it’s time air travelers also look in the mirror to see why so many jetliners have become venues for Mile High cage fights. Those folks might see a reflection of the Ugly American. The whiny American. The entitled American. Just this week, we’ve been treated to a fight night on a plane at Burbank Bob Hope Airport in California that ended with a Southwest Airlines flight attendant buried somewhere in the scrum. At Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida, passengers started duking it out...

The man dragged from a full United Express flight by airport police in Chicago is a Kentucky physician who was convicted more than a decade ago of felony charges involving his prescribing of drugs. But while the passenger's unflattering history quickly became the focus of attention, there's no indication that his past influenced how he was treated or that the airline or police were aware of his background. And it's unlikely that officials would have known anything about him other than basic identifying information such as his name and address, if that. A person with knowledge of the Sunday evening...

America's police will be safer when they admit they have a problem, Pres. Obama declared on Sunday at a bilateral event with the prime minister of Spain in Madrid. Fielding a question on Sunday, July 10, about the violence against police in Dallas, Texas last week, which left five officers dead, Obama said police officers will be safer once they acknowledge their failures: "There are legitimate issues that have been raised, and there’s data and evidence to back up the concerns that are being expressed by these protesters. "And if police organizations and departments acknowledge that there’s a problem and...