Free Republic

Being the United States president can be pretty overwhelming. Fortunately for the 44th U.S. President Obama, had basketball to turn to relieve himself of some of the stress. ...Obama played and he played without any reservations. "they didn't adopt any "presidential rules," and he paid for it dearly one time as someone caught him on the mouth and gave him a busted lip. "There ain't no presidential rule?" Stak chimed in. "I got the scars to prove it," Obama bragged. The affable U.S. president said hoops was as much a part of his schedule as meeting diplomats from other countries....

n the back yard of a Brooklyn bar, beneath strung-up lightbulbs and swaths of fabric that swooped like great sails, an ecstatic crowd greeted Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, and his victorious ally, Brad Lander. These Democrats also had a withering verdict on their own party establishment. “To me, centrists can go **** themselves,” said Léa Zimmerman, 34. “They’re ******* useless, they don’t stand for anything, and if they do stand on something, it’s pathetic. I’m done with pathetic, performative people.” On Tuesday the biggest city in the US, and the wealthiest city in the world, rejected the...

WASHINGTON — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decried Apple’s recent $200 price hikes on computers and tablets, which the tech giant blamed on a memory chip crunch — and called for breaking up Big Tech. “We need to break up a lot of these companies that are far, far too big, and we need to be instituting consumer protections for people,” the New York Democrat told Fox News. Most analysts believe the so-called “RAM-ageddon” crisis is a result of the rapid build-out of data centers to power artificial intelligence, which has turbocharged demand for memory chips. Citing memory chip shortages, Apple jacked...

"Someone may well say, 'You have faith, and I have works; show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works.' You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder. But are you willing to recognize, you foolish fellow, that faith without works is useless?" (James 2:18-20). Even demonic faith is better than dead faith! In recent years there has been an alarming rise in the number of professing Christians who believe that there's no necessary relationship between what they believe and what they do. They say...

France saw around 1,000 additional deaths last week at the height of its record-smashing heat wave, the country’s public health agency said Sunday, as the head of the World Health Organization warned that Europe is now the fastest-warming continent and needs to do more to protect its citizens. Temperature records were toppled in several countries on the weekend, wildfires were sparked in Germany and Berlin police used water cannons to cool down the crowds. Meanwhile, the heat wave slowly moved toward eastern parts of the continent. Germany marked a new record for the third day in a row with 41.7...

Explanation: Right now, one of the largest sunspot groups in recent history is crossing the Sun. Active Region 4478 is not only big -- it's violent, showing tangled magnetic fields capable of throwing off huge clouds of particles into the Solar System. Some of these CMEs might impact the Earth. At the extreme, these solar storms could cause some Earth-orbiting satellites to malfunction, the Earth's atmosphere to slightly distort, and electrical power grids to surge. When impacting Earth's upper atmosphere, these particles can produce beautiful auroras. Pictured here, AR 4478 and its dark sunspots were captured in visible light a...

One of the defining images of 2020 featured two homeowners, two firearms and a confrontation that ignited a national firestorm. Six years later, the legal, political and cultural fallout from that moment continues to reverberate through debates over self-defense, private property rights, public protest and prosecutorial power. On June 28, 2020, as racial justice protests swept cities across America following the death of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter demonstrators made their way through Portland Place, a private, gated street in St. Louis, toward the home of then-Mayor Lyda Krewson. As the crowd passed through the neighborhood, the McCloskeys emerged from...

Yesterday I wrote that the burden of proof is always placed differently on the Jew: the rabbi who must clear himself from "supporting genocide[sic]" before renting a house in France, the army whose seized weapons are presumed staged, the citizens of revolutionary France told to prove a loyalty no Catholic was asked to swear. The structure is built so the burden cannot be met. Compliance and defiance, denial and proof, all resolve to the same verdict, because the only admissible evidence is the defendant's Jewishness, entered as a guilty plea before the proceedings began. A day later, Scott Wiener walked...

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on Sunday said ensuring the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE America) Act gets passed in the Senate is an “impossible task.” “You know, I have people telling me I need to implement the SAVE Act immediately in North Carolina, in a state that has voter ID,” Tillis told CNN’s Jake Tapper during an interview on “State of the Union.” He then asked why “do I, over the next four months, have to try to pursue the impossible task of implementing a bill that simply can’t be imlemented in that timeframe?” “Why are we doing more...

Frank Everink hadn’t even heard of Kansas City. But when the Dutch soccer fanatic saw his team would be playing along the border of Missouri and Kansas, he made a detour in his worldwide road trip. Everink got into his camper van and drove south from Toronto, making stops in Detroit, Chicago and Indianapolis. Along the way, he—and other European fans who flocked to Kansas City for the World Cup—beheld the fruits of the American economy from a vantage point few foreign tourists typically see: suburban superstores, hulking plates of food, quiet streets. He marveled at the sprawling houses, a...

Alarmed by the recent murder of a transgender woman, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) has redeclared what he calls "a trans femicide state of emergency. Too many transgender Chicagoans don't feel safe in spaces where they should feel safe and welcome. This declaration renews a state of emergency first declared in 2024. It is shameful that I have to reiterate this, but the killing must stop." Critics question the Mayor's focus on such a small fraction of the city's homicides. In the last decade 14 transgenders have been murdered. During this same period more than 5,000 non-transgenders have been murdered....

@SenRandPaul Anthony Fauci will answer to the American people. 7/29 at 10 AM

Two large Saharan dust clouds are headed west from Africa towards the United States. It’s Saharan dust season in the Atlantic, the time of year when massive clouds of dust from Africa’s Sahara Desert are carried westward by winds, sometimes traveling thousands of miles to the United States. Where is the dust now? Satellite photos from Sunday showed one primary dust plume in the western Caribbean Sea, over Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and across the southern Gulf of America. Unhealthy air quality was observed across Belize and across the Yucatan Peninsula, where dust concentrations are highest. When will the dust hit...

A former DNA analyst with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation changed her plea to guilty in court on Tuesday to four charges, as part of an agreement in which prosecutors dropped 100 other counts she was facing. Yvonne "Missy" Woods reached a plea agreement with prosecutors after she was accused of mishandling or manipulating data in dozens of criminal investigations, casting doubt on many cases in which she was involved. She pleaded guilty to one count each of cybercrime, perjury, attempt to influence a public servant and forgery. The case was tried in the First Judicial District, where CBI lab...

Many public elementary schools across the U.S. offer books containing material steeped in gender ideology and left-wing racial ideology. In 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that Maryland parents have a right to opt their elementary-aged-students out of LGBTQ+ storybook lessons in school on the basis of religious freedom. However, since then, many taxpayer-funded primary schools throughout the country have continued to make books with heavily scrutinized sexual and political themes available to children. Here are five books elementary schools in the U.S. are offering students. 1) “Sex Is a Funny Word” — Boulder Valley School District, 5th grade supplemental healtheducation...

~ FreeRepublic Memorial Wall 2.0 ~In honor of those FReepers who now rest from the labors of life.Their voices may have been silenced, but their words and deeds will never be forgotten. Jeff Head Jeff Head 1956 - 2021Member since 7/26/1998Tributes Homepage Proud American in Canada Julie Kosmond Murray 1962 - 2021Member since 7/12/2001Tributes Homepage terartTerri 19xx - 2021Member since 11/5/2012Tributes Homepage hsmomx3Diane Berry 1959 - 2022Member since 3/1/2001Tributes Homepage] Daffynition Carolyn Moley Lyman 1943 - 2022Member since 3/1/2007Tributes Homepage dainbramagedRichard 19xx - 2022Member since 10/9/2007Tributes Homepage Cboldt Charles “Clyde” Seyboldt 1955 - 2022Member since 1/28/1999Tributes Homepage JoeFromSidney Dr. Joseph...

Five young Arapaho braves snuck off from Fort Robinson 150 years ago this week and fought the 7th Cavalry at Little Bighorn, where General Custer met his demise. They later told their story to actor and adopted member of the Arapaho tribe, Tim McCoy. ============================================================== Left Hand (left) was 22 years old when he snuck away from the agency at Fort Robinson and ended up fighting with the Sioux and Cheyenne in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. (Courtesy) They have been dubbed by historians as the Arapaho Five, warriors who found themselves fighting against the cavalry in the Battle...

CNN head Mark Thompson has no interest in sharing “oversight” of his network and has made his position clear to incoming Paramount bosses ahead of an expected $111 billion merger with CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, according to a new report. With the merger looming and reports indicating Paramount-Skydance CEO David Ellison could hand CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss a major role at CNN, Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin reported in The New York Times that Thompson has made his feelings on the future clear. Thompson has reportedly told Paramount executives that he “would not share oversight of...

Consider what it takes to lie to a free people at scale. A private liar can deceive a neighbor. A campaign can deceive a district. But to deceive an entire nation, and to do it durably, you need something rarer. You need an institution the public has been trained to trust, and you need to borrow its authority. The intelligence community is that institution. When career officers say a thing is so, citizens reasonably assume the judgment rests on secret evidence too sensitive to share. That trust is precisely what makes the apparatus so dangerous when it is turned, because...

A 50% top rate of income tax, a mansion tax, a fresh tax blitz on buy-to-let landlords and tougher taxes on inheritances may only be the start as Labour looks set to take a sharp lurch to the left. Many fear what will happen if net zero zealot Ed Miliband is made chancellor. But whoever Burnham appoints, they will face relentless pressure to do the one thing Labour MPs always want: hike spending and find somebody to tax to pay for it. They will pretend only the rich will pay, but as we've seen, in practice working people and pensioners...