Free Republic

When I was growing up in Chicago’s northern suburbs, one of our local heroes was the late, great W. Clement Stone, founder of Combined Insurance. I recall being an awestruck college volunteer with the Young Republicans, manning the registration table at a Republican state convention, when Clem Stone came up to chat with us. His story was the stuff of legend: starting from nothing during the Great Depression, selling insurance door-to-door, and from that humble beginning, he became the multimillionaire founder of one of the great Illinois corporations. From time to time, we hear of others who also got their...

FROM ME: Social Media has been reporting today that Miss Philippines, Samantha Lo, is really a US Citizen and was trying to travel from France to Venezuela with a FAKE Filipino passport. ARTICLE: The 2019 Miss Grand International held its welcome ceremony and press conference with its official candidates at TELEVEN TV Station in Caracas, Venezuela on October 15, 2019. Filipino beauty pageants were worried why Samantha Ashley Lo, 26, of the Philippines was not among the candidates who participated in the event. Neither Miss Grand International nor Binibining Pilipinas Charities, Incorporated has released a statement about Lo’s absence. According...

Netflix continually shows an absolute lack of regard for basic decency when it comes to the content they offer subscribers. Perhaps the single greatest offender among Netflix’s offerings is ‘13 Reasons Why,’ their smash hit teen drama laced with suicide, rape, graphic sex scenes, and more. Everything you want your children to be inundated with all in one convenient television series, right? 13RW goes beyond typical sin-glorifying entertainment, however. Centered largely around the suicide of Hannah Baker, one of its main characters, the show has prompted copycat suicides. According to the American Family Association, a young woman, Anna Bright took...

Going solar isn’t necessarily any protection from California’s new “planned” power outages, and local residents and businesses are enduring a lot more than just a few inconveniences. Bloomberg’s Chris Martin has a story on California’s troubles with one of my favorite headlines ever: “Californians Learning That Solar Panels Don't Work in Blackouts.” Apparently, many of California’s would-be Earth-savers had no idea that just putting solar panels on their roofs doesn’t mean they’ll have power when PG&E switches it off. As Martin explains:

When couples struggling to conceive approach an infertility clinic for help, they’re not just patients seeing a doctor: they’re also healthcare consumers navigating a billion-dollar industry. All too often, they’re also sucked onto a moving sidewalk designed to effortlessly take them from one intervention to another, without stopping to heal their spirits, discern their options, or possibly close their wallets. That’s what happened to me. I should be clear: I feel that most of the doctors we talked to were sincerely trying to help. This was especially the case with the reproductive endocrinologists who worked with nonprofit hospitals. They are...

Since the initial publishing of our article last night about the potential identity of the alleged whistleblower, more information has been uncovered that may help to corroborate the story. In October of 2016, Department of State records show that former Obama NSC for Ukraine, Eric Ciaramella, attended a dinner in honor of the Italian Prime Minister. He was a guest of the Executive Office of VP (EOVP), along with other swamp creatures: This is interesting because we know Italy played a key role in the Spygate drama. U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham were recently in...

You might want to sit down for this one. If you thought the IRS was just a necessary yet uncomfortable part of American life, here’s some more evidence that it’s simply an arm of the United States government that deserves to be excised. The IRS just admitted that it audits the working poor at about the same rate as the wealthiest 1 percent. Here’s why, according to ProPublica: "…the IRS said, auditing poor taxpayers is a lot easier: The agency uses relatively low-level employees to audit returns for low-income taxpayers who claim the earned income tax credit. The audits —...

Porter Ranch, Saddleridge fire. Fire coming from manholes. #CaliforniaFires Video: Matt Dejoy

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) this week released its annual report on sexually transmitted disease (STD) reports for 2018, showing that STDs rose for the fifth consecutive year, reaching an all-time high. In particular, men who have sex with men (MSM) are disproportionately affected by the syphilis and gonorrhea epidemics. Over half of the more serious syphilis cases in 2018 were among MSM, even though they represent a tiny fraction (perhaps 4%) of the U.S. population. Every one of the 2.4 million people diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease (STD) in 2018 is a victim of the...

On May 31, 2002, 18-year-old Brenden Flynn was involved in an auto accident and suffered a traumatic brain injury. He was med-flighted to a hospital in Syracuse, New York. Shortly thereafter, he was transferred to Park Ridge Hospital near Rochester, where doctors notified his mother, MaryJo Flynn, that Brenden had a zero chance of recovery or having any meaningful “quality of life.” They suggested ending his life. If Brenden were to survive, his doctors said, he would be in a nursing home for the rest of his life. Brenden’s mother, not wanting to make the decision to end her son’s...

I grew up among refugees. My parents had fled from Communist Hungary after the 1956 Revolution was crushed by the Soviet Union. We had many Hungarian friends, but also knew people from Albania, East Germany, and Poland. All had their stories, the one more dreadful than the other. I remember one story among many, when we visited a couple, let’s call them “Joe” and “Cathy”. When we were leaving, thinking they were out of earshot, I blurted out: “Why does Uncle Joe have funny hands?” My mother hushed me quickly and the whole thing was forgotten. But some years later,...

I love this time of year. Just got done with a brisk walk on this crisp, cool, cloudy autumn day in Southern Connecticut. All the leaves turning colors and gently falling to the ground. If you are like me, you try to catch them as they fall around you. Swirling in the wind, the leaves are more tricky to catch than you might think. But what to do when you do catch one? I just put it in my pocket for a while and then eventually I pull it out and let it fall to the ground further away then...

When the New York Mets finished off the Atlanta Braves to win the National League pennant in 1969, utility player Rod Gaspar declared that the Mets would win the World Series in four straight. Shortly thereafter, when the Baltimore Orioles finished off the Minnesota Twins to advance to the World Series, Frank Robinson declared, “bring on Ron [sic] Gaspar.” Robinson’s confidence seemed justified. The Orioles had won 109 regular season games; the Mets 100. The O’s had outscored their opponents by 262 runs; the Mets by 91. Baltimore was the overwhelming favorite to beat the Mets, and rightly so. I...

Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force.. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it. In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical...

Maria Ana Carrola Flores, the UC San Diego student who got hit by a car at 1:30 a.m. during an anti-Trump protest, actually sued her college because it “failed to warn students of the danger of walking onto the freeway� You may remember this video, which I have posted before. It shows an anti-Trump protest near UC San Diego that took place at 1:30 a.m. a few days after Trump was elected President. One of the protestors, a UC San Diego student named Maria Ana Carrola Flores, gets hit by a car:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GtM-debHD8 Maria Ana Carrola Flores chose to stand in the middle...

For a profile in courage, consider a very significant move by the Trump administration this week in defense of Muslims. Just days before taking up new trade talks with China, the administration announced a dramatic stand in defense of up to 2 million Chinese Muslims in concentration camps and against companies that are using their technology to spy on the Chinese in their daily lives. Not that I expect the media to give the president and his administration points for defending the religious liberty of people around the world, but when you consider that the NBA couldn't find the character...

Minneapolis mayor is having all porta-pottys removed from outside Trump rally venue! Talk about petty! https://twitter.com/Real_Patriot911/status/1182350996900630528?s=20

On Wednesday night I attended the New York Film Festival and witnessed a cinematic masterpiece, the film that last month won the top prize as the Best Film of the Venice International Film Festival. It’s called “Joker” — and all we Americans have heard about this movie is that we should fear it and stay away from it. We’ve been told it’s violent and sick and morally corrupt — an incitement and celebration of murder. We’ve been told that police will be at every screening this weekend in case of “trouble.” Our country is in deep despair, our constitution is...

Greta Thunberg is an environmental hypocrite Greta Thunberg wants the whole world to think that she cares about the environment because she traveled across the Atlantic ocean by boat instead of by airplane.However, in the real world, multiple yacht crew members flew on an airplane from Europe to New York in order to bring the yacht back to Europe.Furthermore, the yacht itself was made from propane and petroleum – the very same things that Thunberg was protesting against.Of course, this whole environmental movement is far more about virtue signaling than it is about actually protecting the environment, which is why pretty...

The only way that rich people could pay Bernie Sanders’s proposed annual 8% wealth tax would be by selling enough stock to get the money to pay the tax. This would drive down stock prices, and would hurt every single middle class person who has a pension, a 401K, or an IRA. Billionaires don’t just have billions of dollars in cash just sitting around, waiting to pay Bernie Sanders’s proposed annual 8% wealth tax.For example, the richest person in the world is Jeff Bezos, the guy who created amazon. 99.9% of his wealth is in the form of stock in the...