Free Republic

The far left, led by Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), is championing a reform measure dubbed the “BREATHE Act,” which contains a slew of radical proposals, including the call to incentivize states to pass laws that expand voting access, allowing “local and State resident voting for undocumented people.” The proposal, drafted in partnership with the Movement for Black Lives, aims to overhaul the U.S. criminal justice system, providing a range of radical changes — from defunding the police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to establishing a commission tasked with designing reparations for victims of “mass criminalization.”...

July 8 (UPI) -- The United States has set a new one-day record for new COVID-19 cases -- more than 60,000, surpassing the previous mark by several thousand. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University said 60,021 new cases were recorded Tuesday, just days after the previous national record of 54,500. Updated figures by the university on Wednesday morning placed total U.S. cases at 2.99 million and the death toll at about 131,500. More than three dozen states have shown increases over the past week and health officials say hospitalizations and patients in intensive care have also risen significantly. In Florida, health...

Texas has once again broken its single-day record for new coronavirus cases. The state reported 10,028 new cases Tuesday as officials warned that hospitals are reaching capacity. The previous daily record was 8,260 new cases on July 4. There are now more than 200,000 cases across the state, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. The state also set a new record for single-day deaths, with 60.

According to Matthew McConaughey, assault weapons are not “alright, alright, alright.” But banning them is. The 48-year-old actor spoke at the Austin, Texas March for Our Lives, stating that he was there because he’s an American citizen, a proud Texan, a March for Our Lives believer, and, most importantly, because “I’m a father and I’m a husband.” Though he claimed that he wasn’t advocating for gun control, he asked that Second-Amendment supporters “take one for the team.” McConaughey, a famous face at the gun-control rally, announced that he didn’t attend for the sake of subverting the Second Amendment, but that...

A doctor at Stanford University said the spike in hospital patients in Texas has "nothing to do with COVID-19.” Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the former chief of neuroradiology at the university’s medical center, joined Fox News’s The Story on Monday and said the public should not panic about the spike in hospitalizations. When I looked at every single hospital area in Texas today, 15-20% of people in the hospital as inpatients are COVID-positive patients. That means 80-85% have nothing to do with COVID-19. And the same thing goes with some of these...

For just the eighth time in the fair's 134-year history, The State Fair of Texas is canceled for the upcoming season. The fair made the announcement on their website Tuesday morning, citing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

At pro-Palestinian Black Lives Matter rallies in New York and Washington, chants were heard calling for “Death to Israel,” “Death to America” and “From Gaza to Minnesota, globalize the Intifada!” Several hundred protesters attended the July 1 demonstration in Brooklyn dubbed as a “Day of Rage” event, set to coincide with the earliest date Israel could begin its plans to apply Israeli law over parts of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley. Speakers issued inflammatory rallying cries that ran the gamut from anti-Semitic and anti-American to just plain absurd. One pro-North Korea activist called for the end of the...

Senator Ted Cruz blasted anarchists tearing down statues, adding later that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the mob are the exact same extremist base Joe Biden is petrified of upsetting. Cruz (R-TX) was responding to Kimberly Strassel, a Wall Street Journal columnist who reported that Biden, when pressed on the topic of monuments suggested the decision should rest with local governments, but that he “won’t condemn people lawlessly tearing them down.” The Republican congressman replied that Biden’s lack of condemnation is no surprise. “Dems support the riots. The vandals. The anarchists,” he wrote on Twitter. “That’s their base. And they’re terrified...

Mexican military forces killed a total of 16 gunmen from a faction of Los Zetas in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas... The shootout took place on Friday early morning in the Los Fresnos neighborhood when members of the Mexican army were patrolling the streets of Nuevo Laredo. The soldiers encountered a convoy of SUVs filled with cartel gunmen in military-style uniforms, Breitbart Texas initially reported... The deceased gunmen are believed to be members of a paramilitary group known as Hell’s Troops or Tropa del Infierno. The group is part of the Cartel Del Noreste faction of Los Zetas....

If Abraham Lincoln and Christopher Columbus no longer pass woke muster in Boston, then it’s time for the Kennedys to go. And everything with their names plastered on it — the JFK Library and JFK federal building, his statue at the State House, the Kennedy School of Government across the river, the Rose Kennedy Greenway, the Edward M. Kennedy Whatever They Call It, etc. Everything must go! Profiles in Courage? The Kennedys were more like Profiles in Caucasity, as that woke Harvard gal said this week before she too got canceled. Let’s start with President Kennedy. Just for starters, he...

Encouraging polls are hard to come by lately but he’s had a couple. Trafalgar gave him a good one a few days ago when they found him a point up in Wisconsin, matching his margin from 2016. That was an outlier, as the previous three surveys of the state had Biden ahead by eight, eight, and 11 points. But if anyone’s entitled to a benefit of the doubt on a Rust Belt poll it’s Trafalgar, which detected Trump’s impending upsets there four years ago when no other pollster did. So maybe Wisconsin’s tighter at the moment than the conventional...

Gov. Abbott issues statewide mask requirement for Texas https://www.kltv.com/2020/07/02/gov-abbott-issues-statewide-mask-requirement/

Customs and Border Protection plans to deploy up to 200 autonomous surveillance towers as it expands its work with the portable, off-the-grid systems into a program of record. The towers, supplied by contractor Anduril, are designed as unmanned sentinels along the Southern border with Mexico that operate autonomously in remote areas where grid power is not available. The agency has been testing the technology for a couple of years. CBP tested four of the towers in the San Diego region in early 2018, and has bought 56 additional towers since, it said in its statement. Ultimately, CBP wants to procure...

Los Angeles Democrat seeks “new path of support and collaboration” with Communist Cuban regime. “Congresswoman Karen Bass, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, is undergoing vetting as a candidate to be Joe Biden’s running mate,” Bo Erickson of CBS News reported on June 24. In March, the five-term Los Angeles Democrat endorsed Biden for president, but even some Democrats were troubled by one of Bass’s previous endorsements. “The passing of the Comandante en Jefe is a great loss to the people of Cuba,” said Bass in a statement after Fidel Castro passed away on November 25, 2016.  “I hope together,...

The U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command has confirmed a junior soldier tied to the disappearance of Fort Hood solider Vanessa Guillen shot and killed himself as police moved in to make an arrest overnight. A civilian, who is the estranged wife of a former soldier, is also in custody, according to the Army. The attorney and family of Guillen said early Wednesday that a third suspect was also in custody, although officials have not confirmed this detail. Authorities have also not released any of the suspects' names. At Wednesday morning's emotional press conference in Washington, D.C., the Guillen family said,...

A suspect in the disappearance of a 20-year-old Fort Hood soldier killed himself as law enforcement approached Tuesday night and a second person, a civilian, is now in the custody of the Texas Rangers and awaiting charges as the investigation into human remains found on the post continues, officials with the base say. The unnamed soldier, officials said, was wanted in connection with the disappearance of Pfc. Vanessa Guillen, who was last seen April 22 in a parking lot outside her Regimental Engineer Squadron Headquarters. Her car keys, barracks room key, ID card and wallet were found in the room...

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) on Tuesday lambasted Anthony Fauci over his assessment of the recent surge in coronavirus cases in the U.S., claiming that his state did not need advice from the nation's top infectious disease expert. "Fauci said that he’s concerned about states like Texas that skipped over certain things. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about," Patrick said on Fox News after Fauci testified before a Senate committee about the U.S. response to the coronavirus outbreak. "We haven’t skipped over anything." "The only thing I’m skipping over is listening to him," Patrick added. "He has been...

Hundreds of officials who worked for former Republican President George W. Bush are set to endorse Democratic White House hopeful Joe Biden, people involved in the effort said, the latest Republican-led group coming out to oppose the re-election of Donald Trump. The officials, who include Cabinet secretaries and other senior people in the Bush administration, have formed a political action committee - 43 Alumni for Biden - to support the former vice president in his Nov. 3 race, three organizers of the group told Reuters. Bush was the country's 43rd president.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem confirmed that her state will move forward with plans for a large Independence Day celebration at Mount Rushmore on July 3 .. free masks will be given out to those who desire to wear them, there will be no social distancing. Thousands are expected at the festivities that will be attended by none other than President Donald Trump. The event will feature fighter jets soaring over the 79-year-old monument, along with the first fireworks display at the site since 2009. Noem, a Republican, made clear that they would not impose coronavirus restrictions on the crowd....

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a Senate hearing Tuesday that people should stop going to bars “right now” — just as states like Texas and Florida, both of which have seen a dramatic uptick in the number of cases, were recently forced to close their bars a second time to stem the spread of the virus. “Congregation at a bar, inside, is bad news,” Fauci said. “We really got to stop that right now.”