Free Republic

Personal Exemption A personal exemption is the amount that you can deduct from your income for every taxpayer and most dependents claimed on your return. Current law: $4,050 per person, which means a married couple with two dependents would receive a personal exemption of $16,200. New law: The personal exemption is eliminated. The exemption returns after 2025.

A small, southwestern mosque was targeted last weekend by spelling-challenged vandals. Neighbors woke up Monday morning to find that someone with a can of red spray paint paid an unwelcome visit to the Golden Mosque in the City of Clovis, New Mexico. That spray paint reads: “Happy Birthday Jesus Christ! From a real Christain [sic]” On the front of the mosque, near the door, was the word “Trump” scrawled twice in blue. The vandal(s) misspelled “Christian” again on the mosque’s marquee. One such neighbor, Toni Pop, spoke with local KRQE News 13 about the incident. She said, “I pass by...

What's with Drudge and his headline and link to a fake Marist Poll of "most annoying phrases." Marist's article on the poll writes about "Fake news" but doesn't go so far as the make that their headline and then Drudge takes that extra step and make his headline about "Fake news."

Americans' top concerns on the most important problem list in 2017 focused more on how government operates than on any particular domestic or international policy issue. Only about one in five mention any aspect of the economy as the top problem, and there is no one specific policy issue that pops up as a dominant concern. Rather, Americans appear to be most worried about the way in which their government operates and about the people who occupy positions of leadership in the U.S. -- including the 20% who mention the government per se, and another 7% who mention the need...

While most people think that mobile phones could cause cancer, this isn’t the only health hazard that has been reported. We all are probably so addicted to our phones that we are unknowingly destroying our health. Here are some health risks of mobile phones you should be aware of: Health hazards of mobile phones #1. Cancer As reported by the World Health Organisation (WHO), mobile phones emit radiofrequency (RF) fields a 1000 times greater than what is emitted from base stations. It’s obvious that this increased emission is likely to have some adverse effect on health of users. Although there...

SAN DIEGO—Anthony Rodriguez recalled sitting in a remedial math class at Grossmont College, bored out of his mind. The professor was teaching basic math skills that the 18-year-old had already learned in high school. Rodriguez was forced into remedial math by the community college’s placement test, which assesses a student’s ability to succeed in for-credit, higher-education classes. Rodriguez’s placement-test scores dictated at least a year of these low-level math courses. They cost the same as regular classes but don’t count toward a bachelor’s degree. Each week, Rodriguez watched as fewer and fewer classmates showed up. Eventually, he dropped out too....

People have caught on; it was bound to happen. Back in August 2017 Asst. Attorney General Rod Rosenstein created a special joint task-force within the FBI and DOJ to track down intelligence leakers. The investigative unit was requested by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats. No-one was really paying much attention to it, until recently people started realizing the false media stories were too structured. The stories were fake, but the leaks were real. Someone was seeding congress with carefully constructed false information and then watching to see where that false information surfaced. This is...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump frequently casts his first year in office as a string of successes and campaign promises fulfilled. But less than a quarter of Americans think Trump has made good on the pledges he made to voters while running for president, according to a new poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

WILKES-BARRE -- For the past few months, the Federal Communications Commission asked for comments from the public on whether it should end net neutrality. Thousands of comments came from people in northeastern and central Pennsylvania. But it appears many, if not most of these comments, are fake. We called 12 people whose names were listed as making comments with the FCC and none of them said they even contacted the agency. That includes a woman from Wilkes-Barre who admits she doesn't even know what the FCC does. The Christmas spirit runs through the home of Darlene Mapes in Wilkes-Barre, but...

It’s hard to be optimistic about climate action, not in a week when federal scientists reported that “the Arctic shows no sign of returning” to the “reliably frozen region of recent past decades.” Not in a month when California’s wildfires show every sign of burning straight through Christmas. And not in a moment when the federal government keeps scrubbing basic climate information from its websites. But something big is starting to shift. After years of effort from activists, there are signs that the world’s financial community is finally rousing itself in the fight against global warming. A foretaste came last...

Republicans are hesitant to switch from our winner-take-all state laws allocating electors to the electoral college to using the National Popular Vote. The National Popular Vote Plan would award all of a state’s electors to the candidate who wins the most popular votes in all fifty states. There is a fear that such a move will benefit Democrats, since Democrats won the popular vote even though they lost the elections in 2000 and 2016. But the truth is, Republicans are likely going to lose their ability to win the necessary swing state of Florida in the future, and they can...

CNN has quietly walked back more of their “bombshell” reporting on the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, and this time it’s a story relating to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ security clearance forms. In May, CNN reported that Sessions had failed to disclose meetings he had with the Russian ambassador when he was a senator. Justice Department officials told CNN that Sessions had not listed those meetings on a security clearance form, even though the form says to list “any contact” with the “foreign government” or its “representatives” in the past seven years. CNN framed the non-disclosures as more evidence of collusion between...

Rachel Dolezal is back (but not black) and now this time she’s trying to commercialize her status as an alleged black woman by selling calendars urging people to “get woke.” Dolezal, a white woman claiming to be black, is now selling a 2018 calendar of herself on her personal website. Dolezal’s calendar, which has already sold out, features various pictures of her striking poses with a collection of inspirational quotes Dolezal came up with. “2018 Calendar featuring photos of Rachel Dolezal by four portrait photographers & her own inspirational quotes. With dozens of important birthdays and Black History facts throughout...

Who were your ancestors? What is your ethnic background composed of? Sites like Ancestry.com and 23andme have always been some go to sources in answering all of your toughest questions. But how accurate are they? In a recent interview with Cracked, one of the major ancestry testing companies, (which specific company is unknown) spilled the beans on what really happens when you purchase an ancestry kit. While I can’t say I’m surprised, you may be shocked to learn that these ancestry sites aren’t always as accurate as they claim to be. Beyond this, they’ve also admitted to tampering with the...

Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.

Maxim Eristavi is a nonresident research fellow with the Atlantic Council and co-founder of Hromadske International, an independent news outlet, based in Kiev. Ukraine’s complex political intrigues can be hard to figure out. But this week we’ve arrived at a rare moment of clarity. The most important domestic issue in our country is corruption. And for the first time in our modern history, we have the people and the institutions in place to fight it. But at the very moment when anti-corruption officials have really started to tackle the problem, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is moving to undermine them. His...

Sub-Headline: With Twitter as his Excalibur, the president takes on his doubters, powered by long spells of cable news and a dozen Diet Cokes. But if Mr. Trump has yet to bend the presidency to his will, he is at least wrestling it to a draw.

Suzanne Michelle can scarcely hold it in any longer when it comes to Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. At her Friday Bible study social, the Alabama Democrat is so troubled by Moore's alleged sexual misconduct involving teen girls that she's taken to applying Jesus's teachings to today's politics. Michelle, 34, wants to know how anyone, including right-leaning Christians she sometimes socializes with, can square the "biblical truths" by which they all abide with what she sees as a "single-issue voting population." "From people who are friends of mine, who have different political ideologies, they hold matters of the soul in...

A growing body of research concludes that rising global temperatures increase the risk of heat stress and stroke, decrease productivity and economic output, widen global wealth disparities, and can trigger greater violence. Now a new study by researchers at Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury suggests that even short periods of extreme heat can carry long-term consequences for children and their financial future. Specifically, heat waves during an individualÂ’s early childhood, including the period before birth, can affect his or her earnings three decades later, according to the paper, published on Monday in...

A supervisory special agent who is now under scrutiny after being removed from Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office for alleged bias against President Trump also oversaw the bureau’s interviews of embattled former National Security advisor Michael Flynn, this reporter has learned. Flynn recently pled guilty to one-count of lying to the FBI last week. FBI agent Peter Strzok was one of two FBI agents who interviewed Flynn, which took place on Jan. 24, at the White House, said several sources. The other FBI special agent, who interviewed Flynn, is described by sources as a field supervisor in the “Russian Squad,...