Free Republic

A bill introduced Friday by California Assembly Member Mike Gipson (D) would force insurance companies to provide lawmakers with an annual report highlighting homeowners with guns in their residence. The bill, AB 3067, says: “This bill would require an insurer, by January 1, 2026, to include questions on an application for homeowners’ or renters’ insurance seeking specified information regarding the presence and storage of any firearms kept in the household, accessory structures, or vehicles kept on the property subject to any applicable insurance policy.” It continues: “The bill would require an insurer to annually report this information to the Department...

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) scrutinized language in the special counsel’s report, released Thursday, on President Biden’s retention of classified documents — including comments about the president’s age and memory. “I smell a rat,” Pritzker, one of the top surrogates in Biden’s reelection campaign, said during a press conference Friday. “It was extremely unfair for a [former President] Trump appointee, originally to the Department of Justice, to offer his own opinions about the mental acuity or age of the president of the United States,” he added. His defense of Biden comes after DOJ special counsel Robert Hur, who was tasked...

An ultra-rare gigantic rat so big that it puts New York City's subway-dwelling rodents to shame has been caught on camera for the first time. Uromys vika, a giant rat known for being "one of the world's rarest rodents" according to the University of Melbourne, is found in just one isolated spot throughout the world – the island of Vangunu in the Solomon Islands. The species was only first identified by a single animal discovered in 2017, but recently, university researchers said that after placing out glass oil lamps filled with sesame oil, they captured 95 images of four different...

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis says he can beat Trump 😂…. Nikki Haley says, no, DeSantis is a diminishing meatball now; only her neocon curriculum vitae is strong enough to go against Godzilla Trump. Team DeSantis scoffs… Team Haley sneers…. Can you imagine being a billionaire stupid enough to subject themselves to this nonsense?The R.A.T coalition (Republicans Against Trump) is so desperate, they held a strategy session with DeSantis and Haley to decide which one of them would carry the banner of most approved & purchased candidate. And the candidates each thought this was a good thing. 😂🤣😂 I just do...

Former Vice President Mike Pence didn't parse words when reacting to former President Donald Trump's indictment by Special Counsel Jack Smith on Tuesday. In a statement released following Trump's indictment on charges related to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol and efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, Pence accused Trump of putting himself over the Constitution, and said a Trump candidacy would serve as a distraction from President Biden's "disastrous" record. "Today's indictment serves as an important reminder: anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States," Pence said. "I...

Spiritual adviser and bestselling self-help author Marianne Williamson is making a second straight run for the White House and taking aim at President Joe Biden. Williamson, who called for reparations and a Department of Peace as part of her long-shot campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, declared she plans to launch her candidacy for president in 2024 in an exclusive interview with Medill News Service on Thursday. "I wouldn’t be running for president if I didn’t believe I could contribute to harnessing the collective sensibility that I feel is our greatest hope at this time," Williamson said. With many...

A Lesson in Markets and Bureaucracies: The Very Instructive History of Rat FarmsIn effect, authorities created two rat farms, both unintended: the sewers, and the private-sector rat-farms.The history of Rat Farms offers a valuable lesson in how markets and bureaucracies work. The story of how the colonial authorities in Hanoi came to establish two kinds of rat farms is highly instructive. The first rat farm was unintentional. French colonial authorities decided to modernize the French Quarter of Hanoi (where Westerners lived) by constructing a modern sewer system, the overall goal being to establish "a little Paris in the East." Their...

Devoted Donald Trump ally Kash Patel is pushing his children’s book about “King Donald” by featuring an autograph — and a handwritten QAnon salutation. This is the same book, “The Plot Against the King” (a fractured fairy tale about Trump), that the former president has said he wants in “every school in America” — presumably without Patel’s QAnon greeting. “Kash is signing books today, and he’s got a special message in 10 books for some lucky patriots,” Patel’s “Plot” Truth Social account gushed Saturday. (He also “retruthed” the message on his personal account.) The “special message,” enthusiastically underlined several times,...

A new paper explores how gene-editing technology could be used to bring a species back, but even its authors have concerns about what that could mean. If Tom Gilbert could bring any extinct animal back to life, he said, it wouldn't be dinosaurs or woolly mammoths or any other megafauna that once roamed the planet. His is a humbler choice: the Christmas Island rat, a species that was wiped out from its island home in the Indian Ocean more than a century ago. Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, admitted that his pick may not be...

A Republican businessman running for governor says taxes are too high in Illinois. If he wins, Gary Rabine would take over a state agency that has unsuccessfully tried to collect more than $10,000 in delinquent taxes from one of his dissolved companies. Tax records show the Illinois Department of Employment Security filed a tax lien for $10,262 against Rabine Utility Pavements, LLC, in 2017. Rabine dissolved that company in 2019, according to records filed with the Illinois Secretary of State, but the bill remains unpaid. The tax lien has no mailing address listed on it, which raised questions about whether...

Cambodia's landmine-sniffing rat Magawa, who found more than 100 landmines and explosives during a five-year career, has died at the age of 8, leaving a lasting legacy of saved lives in the Southeast Asian nation. Magawa, who died over the weekend, was the most successful "HeroRAT" deployed by international charity APOPO, which uses African giant pouched rats to detect landmines and tuberculosis. "Magawa was in good health and spent most of last week playing with his usual enthusiasm, but towards the weekend he started to slow down, napping more and showing less interest in food in his last days," the...

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen said on Sunday that former President Donald Trump will lose if he runs for reelection to the White House in 2024. During an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Cohen, who has become a fiery critic of the former president, referred to Trump's efforts to win political donations in claiming that he was talking about running again “to keep the grift growing and to keep the grift going.”

Former Vice President Mike Pence was heckled with calls of “traitor” at a conservative conference Friday as he continues to draw criticism from members of the Republican base for his role in Congress’s certification of President Biden's Electoral College victory. “It is great to be back with so many patriots dedicated to faith and freedom and the road to the majority,” Pence said to applause at the Faith & Freedom Coalition summit before the heckling began. “I’m a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order,” Pence continued, as the hecklers in the audience began to grow louder, yelling...

Thursday on FNC’s “The Ingraham Angle,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) weighed in on Biden chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci’s approach to determining the origins of COVID-19 and the reluctance to blame the Chinese government for the introduction of the virus. The South Carolina Republican lawmaker suggested the efforts to frame the so-called lab-leak theory as a conspiracy theory were to deflect attention from a “relationship” some within the U.S. government had with the Wuhan lab.

After five years of sniffing out land mines and unexploded ordnance in Cambodia, Magawa is retiring. The African giant pouched rat has been the most successful rodent trained and overseen by a Belgian nonprofit, APOPO, to find land mines and alert his human handlers so the explosives can be safely removed. Last year, Magawa won a British charity's top civilian award for animal bravery - an honor so far exclusively reserved for dogs. "Although still in good health, he has reached a retirement age and is clearly starting to slow down," APOPO said. "It is time."

Waters has her say about Republican tactics in Congress in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece she wrote, titled “I’m Not New to This.” Congresswoman Maxine Waters has penned an editorial in which she maintains that critics are targeting her in a “blatant distortion of the truth.” Waters attended a peaceful rally Saturday in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota to show her support in the fight against police brutality. When asked what protesters should do if there wasn’t a conviction, she responded: “We got to stay on the street. And we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational.”...

Despite Parler being the only social media company to be de-platformed after the Capitol riots, the company said it warned the FBI dozens of times about potential violence on Jan. 6. Pushing back on criticism that it turned a blind eye to user content ahead of the riot, Parler said in a letter to the Committee on Oversight and Reform chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney, it “took the extraordinary initiative to develop formal lines of communication with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) to facilitate proactive cooperation and referrals of violent threats and incitement to law enforcement,” after it experienced considerable...

“Late Show,” White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci stated that people who have been vaccinated against the coronavirus can transmit the virus, but there’s recent data that says the amount of virus that people who have been vaccinated have is “extremely low. And I think a couple of months from now, I might modify that statement and say it would be extremely unusual that you would transmit it. But right now, just to be careful, wear a mask.” Host Stephen Colbert asked, “If you’ve been vaccinated, can you give the virus to others, and should you still wear...

Is insulting someone by calling them a “pig,” “sloth,” or “chicken” actually insulting animals? Well, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) seems to think so! In a recent tweet, they shared an infographic with alternative words to common animal-based insults such as snake (try “jerk” instead), rat (“snitch”), or pig (“repulsive”). They ask that people use these alternatives because “using animals as insults perpetrates speciesism.”

Ann and I extend our congratulations to President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. We know both of them as people of good will and admirable character. We pray that God may bless them in the days and years ahead.