Free Republic

More than 150,000 doctors, health care organizations and others have flooded the Federal Register with comments condemning a Trump administration plan that would make it harder for immigrants to maintain their legal residency status if they seek federal assistance for food, health care or housing.

At least 700 people were arrested in Paris as 5,000 demonstrators faced off against 8,000 police in another violent demonstration by "yellow vest" protesters.Riots broke out all over France despite the supposed cause of the violence being eliminated earlier in the week by the government of President Emmanuel Macron. The government had been claiming that a fuel tax increase was to blame for the protests, but the government rescinded the increase on Wednesday.Donald Trump believes it was Macron's climate change policies: The Paris Agreement isn’t working out so well for Paris. Protests and riots all over France. People do...

"You will be made to care," wrote Eric Erickson in RedState back in 2013. He was referring to a court case in Colorado of a Christian baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple and was fined for it. Today, we are being threatened, intimidated, and bullied into caring about people who believe they are trapped in the wrong body - that their biological gender is incorrect and that they are actually someone of the opposite gender - or some other gender created out of whole cloth. A Virginia French teacher found out the consequences of...

In nominating William Barr for AG, the president could not have done better In 2007, the Justice Department was in disarray. Though it was largely exaggerated, a controversy over the firing of some United States attorneys, the intrusion of politics into Justice Department hiring decisions, and White House contacts with Main Justice forced the resignation of an overmatched attorney general, Alberto Gonzales. The Justice Department is not just any arm of government. It is a bulwark of the rule of law on which our domestic tranquility and prosperity depend. It is a watchman against terrorists and hostile foreign powers, ensuring...

More than 1,000 persons have been sent to North Carolina's death row since the state assumed responsibility for executing criminals in 1910. The prison system houses male death row inmates at Central Prison and female death row inmates at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women. Both prisons are located in Raleigh. At Central Prison, the men are housed in cellblocks of Unit III. Two correctional officers in a control center watch the inmates at all times. Each cell block is divided into eight pods with 24 single cells - 12 cells on each level. The cells open into a...

Every weekend around this time of year, the living-room TV in Tim Gates’s Pittsburgh home is tuned to the Hallmark Channel. His wife and teenage daughter watch the network’s original Christmas movies all day long. Mr. Gates usually sits down and teases them about the movies, which feature predictable plotlines and tropes. “Next thing I know, I’m sucked in for a half-hour, 45 minutes,” he says.

The Democratic National Committee has a few concerns heading into 2019. For starters, their cash flow is not even in the same stratosphere as the Republicans' haul. The RNC raised $227.2 million in 2018 to the DNC's nearly $120 million. Secondly, their voter data infrastructure appears to be crumbling. A new strategy pushed by DNC leadership would compile all the voter data from Democratic groups into a single, for-profit entity. It is a strategy that is "modeled" after their Republican counterpart, Politico explains. But, the shift is causing a major argument between the national committee and the Democratic state parties,...

It wouldn't be Christmas without some local-government official banning the display of a Nativity scene on public property. In this latest case, the church displaying the crèche had already received permission and had a 1984 Supreme Court ruling that such displays are legal as long as other non-religious or non-sectarian symbols are allowed. But what if no one else cares to put up an alternate display of competing symbols? According to these bureaucrats, the burden falls on the church ...

        THE PARABLE OF THE FENCE Once upon a time there was a little boy who was talented, creative, handsome, and extremely bright...a natural leader. The kind of person everyone would normally have wanted on their team or project. But he was also self-centered and had a very bad temper. When he got angry, he usually said, and often did, some very hurtful things. In fact, he seemed to have little regard for those around him...even friends. So, naturally, he had few. "But," he told himself, "that just shows how stupid most people are!" As he...

Any blizzards that blanket Poland this winter can’t compare to the massive snow job climate campaigners are trying to pull off. Some 30,000 politicians, activists, computer modelers, bureaucrats, lawyers, journalists, renewable energy sellers and a few scientists are in Katowice, Poland December 2-14, for another Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conference. Four issues will dominate the agenda. * Proclaim that humanity and the planet face existential cataclysms, unless fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are slashed to zero by 2050 – to “prevent” average planetary temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F) above what they...

Kevin Hart is out as the host of the 2019 Oscars just a few days after he was in. That’s how it goes, these days. The internet giveth and the internet taketh away. Hart - an accomplished, veteran comedian - was forced to step down after refusing to apologize for “homophobic” tweets from some seven years ago. The celebrity class is largely silent. Everyone knows they’re on record saying something that their own outrage mobs would find untenable. No one wants to get caught in the tempest of their own making. But Hart’s displacement isn’t just about being forced to...

Dodd-Frank overregulation caused increased concentration in banking, squeezing out smaller banks in favor of bigger banks that could more easily absorb increasing regulatory costs. That naturally restricted credit to smaller businesses that were more regularly served by smaller, more regional banks, more likely to have developed relations with small local businesses. But in typical abundance of centralized bureaucrat overcaution, Dodd Frank over regulation also clamped down more harshly on small business lending as inherently more risky. More risky it is. But small business is also the lifeblood of the economy, as small business has long generated most new jobs in...

Thousands of brides are being burned alive in India despite the practice being illegal, a Christian ministry has warned. India Partners, a Christian organization that works alonside indigenous Christian grassroots agencies in India, told Mission Network News on Thursday that there are still as many as 8,000 bride burning cases a year in the Hindu-majority country. A representative with India Partners, identified only as John, said the low view of women is spread through parts of India's society. “This is true both of men and women. It’s not just of men itself. Most women see the other woman as in...

Wrong: One of the Left’s favorite political tactics is to label every right-leaning conservative group as bigots, racists, homophobes or, in the age of POTUS Donald Trump, domestic terrorists. That’s what the office of Clark County Sheriff Chuck E. Atkins in southwestern Washington, attempted to do last month when it issued a report claiming that federal officials claim that the group Proud Boys is an “extremist group with ties to white nationalism,” the Washington Post reported. “The FBI categorizes the Proud Boys as an extremist group with ties to White Nationalism,” noted the report, which was obtained (leaked to?) and...

We now have the first acknowledgment from their side that the Clintons vastly overestimated their personal popularity and the public’s interest in hearing them talk about themselves. The Clintons and their stadium tour promoter are officially responding to the public’s refusal to show up in sufficient numbers for them to avoid embarrassment (and financial loss) at the level of ticket prices that seemed realistic when the tour was announced only two months ago. The UK Daily Mail noticed this offer on Groupon:

Sadly, as both the first Assistant Secretary for Congressional and Public Affairs and then in a reorganization as being in charge of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs for the Veterans Administration, I did experience many scammers and real criminal types that actually did not go to prison but walked away without being charged after running truly horrific veteran charity scams. The lesson I learned in trying to bring many veteran charity scams to justice was, sadly, that a legal strategy adopted by defendants often worked. Two FBI Special Agents who were investigating a $ 6 million scam out of the $...

Charles Harrison, an industrial designer who rethought hundreds of ordinary items, including a plastic trash bin on wheels, a see-through measuring cup and the 3-D View-Master, which were then snapped up by the nation’s burgeoning postwar middle class, died on Nov. 29 in Santa Clarita, Calif. He was 87.

The Justice Department says that President Donald Trump directed illegal payments to buy the silence of two women whose claims of extramarital affairs threatened his presidential campaign, the first time prosecutors have connected Trump to a federal crime. In a court filing, prosecutors said former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen arranged the secret payments at the height of the 2016 campaign “in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump. Cohen has previously said Trump was involved in the hush-money scheme, but court documents filed ahead of Cohen’s sentencing made clear prosecutors believe Cohen’s claim. The filing stopped short...

People who oppose immigration often argue that migrants bring disease with them, and that they then become a burden to health systems in their new countries because they’re so sick...

Everywhere you turn, you are bombarded with concerns about climate change. Whether the weather is sunny, windy, hot, cold, dry, wet, blizzard-y, hurricane-y, or somewhere in between, “climate change” is the default reason for the season. And climate change, we are told, is all our fault. Humans – especially the wasteful humans living in Western nations – are solely to blame for anything and everything weather-related. Never mind geologic history depicting changes through time. It’s always our fault. In 2017, the World Economic Forum took its annual Global Shapers Survey of 31,000 18-to-35-year-olds from 186 countries on key issue, and...