Free Republic

Democrat lawmakers and climate change scientists warn that Trump’s disastrous environmental policies will culminate in the destruction of the Sun on August 21, 2017. Since taking office, Donald Trump has been rolling back Obama-era policies that curbed climate change on the pretense of liberating business owners from unnecessary job-killing regulations. However we now know that President Obama’s environmental regulations were the only thing keeping the world from being plunged into total darkness.

I see a little silhouetto of a man Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango What’s a 10 letter word that rhymes with ‘vamoose’ and means essentially the same thing? Scaramooch. That’s right, Little Tony Scaramucci is gone in less time than it takes to perform Bohemian Rhapsody with a ukulele. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy Because I'm easy come, easy go, little high, little low Any way...

What do we take away, then, from the earthquake on the Senate floor last week, with wisps of smoke still rising from the ruins of Republican efforts to do something -- anything -- likely to rationalize the health care mess? We take away, or should, the lesson that government can't do everything, and when it tries to, you get something approximating Obamacare: too big and complex to succeed, unless you redefine success to mean: "We're getting there, OK?" Well, no. It's not OK at all. At the center of national attention, currently, are the Republicans' busted plays. Repeal and replace?...

Somebody must have thought they were hiding something by smashing those computer hard-drives the FBI recovered from the home of Imran Awan, Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s former information technology (IT) aide. But odds are excellent they were wrong. Federal law enforcement authorities may have already recovered and read whatever was on those hard drives. “It depends on what happens, but even if it is hit with a hammer, it probably doesn’t damage the platters that actually hold the data, which remains recoverable,” said Tom Hakim, engineering supervisor for werecoverdata.com, a New York-based lab that specializes in difficult digital...

Author J.K. Rowling issued an apology Monday after falsely accusing President Donald Trump of refusing to shake hands with a disabled boy by sharing an edited video clip on her social media account over the weekend. The boy’s mother lashed out at Rowling, saying that the Harry Potter scribe wrongly said Trump ignored and refused to shake her disabled son’s hand during a recent meet-and-greet. “If someone can please get a message to JK Rowling: Trump didn’t snub my son & Monty wasn’t even trying to shake his hand,” Ms. Kelly Weer wrote in a post on Facebook, slamming Rowling’s...

The murder total in Chicago passed 400 with more than a week left in July, and the month ended with the city on pace to exceed the number of killings in 2016. The city opened 2017 slightly behind the rate of killings in 2016, a year the city finished with 781 homicides, the first time in nearly 20 years that the city had logged more than 700 murders. As of 11 p.m. Monday, the citywide homicide total was 409, with 74 killed in July. In 2016, the city did not reach 400 killings until Aug. 1. The murders were not...

The New York contingent of plotters gathered in the Times building so they could use the company’s considerable communications resources to monitor the coup. In Washington, the plotters were spread out – the State Department, the FBI headquarters (the new Director was under arrest and his Obama holdout deputies were overseeing the arrest of key Republicans, conservative Supreme Court justices, and other appointed officials). The Pentagon was paralyzed – the plotters had enlisted enough officers to prevent an effective counter response. And, of course, the NSA had ensured that all comms out of the besieged White House were down.Elsewhere, the...

Somewhere, in an alternate universe from hell, Anthony Scaramucci and Megyn Kelly are getting married in a ceremony presided over by Maxine Waters. Reince Priebus is the best man, Katie Couric is the maid of honor, and Freddie Mercury is belting out “Bohemian Rhapsody”. I’m glad I don’t live in that universe. This one is cray cray enough. I hadn’t heard this until this morning, but in addition to a) being hired to do a job for which he had no visible qualifications, b) alienating everyone in the West Wing of the White House during his first 24 hours on...

Quick: What was the No. 1 source of electricity production in the U.S. during the first half of 2017? If you answered renewable energy, you were wrong by a mile. If you answered natural gas, you were wrong by a tiny amount. According to the Energy Information Administration, which tracks energy use in production on a monthly basis, the single largest source of electric power for the first half of 2017 was coal. That's an amazing finding, because liberals, especially environmental groups, keep telling us that coal is a dead industry. They ridiculed Donald Trump and called him a liar...

Australian scientists at the Bureau of Meteorology ordered a review of temperature recording instruments after the government agency was caught tampering with temperature logs in several locations. Agency officials admit that the problem with instruments recording low temperatures likely happened in several locations throughout Australia, but they refuse to admit to manipulating temperature readings. The BOM located missing logs in Goulburn and the Snow Mountains, both of which are in New South Wales. Meteorologist Lance Pidgeon watched the 13 degrees Fahrenheit Goulburn recording from July 2 disappear from the bureau’s website. The temperature readings fluctuated briefly and then disappeared from...

Word For The Day, Tuesday August 1, 2017 In order that we might all raise the level of discourse and expand our language abilities, here is the daily post of "Word for the Day". anoesis [an-oh-ee-sis] -na state of mind consisting of pure sensation or emotion without cognitive content.[First recorded in 1900-05; a-6+ noesis]

As the end of summer draws near, it occurs to me that I have spent most of it working on four college cases dealing either with freedom of speech or with freedom of association. One case involves unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination in the dissemination of student fees at a public university in California. Another involves unconstitutional interference with the belief requirements of a religious organization at a public university in Colorado. But the other two cases deal with administrators at private schools that claim to be Christian while simultaneously destroying the careers and lives of people who hold dissenting but entirely...

For as far back as anyone can remember there’s been a roadside memorial honoring military veterans along Preston Fall City Road in King County, Washington. For more than 10 years, local residents have decorated a rock wall with American flags and POW flags – a reminder of the price that many of our countrymen have paid to keep our nation free. Recently, someone complained to King County leaders about the sign – saying the patriotic display was “offensive.” So, last week a King County road crew took down the display – tearing flags off the rock face. Well, that decision...

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper revised rules in 2013 in a way that made it easier to "unmask" the names of lawmakers or congressional staffers who are incidentally caught in foreign surveillance. The new procedures implemented by Clapper uprooted the previous set of rules that had been in use for just over two decades, according to a report from The Hill. The report relied in part on a newly released memo by the ODNI created in 2013 that said the lawmakers or staffers' names could be unmasked if an intelligence agency under the executive branch thought that "the...

As a new week begins, I usually sift through the best Monday morning evidence of Trump haters embarrassing themselves over the weekend—a target-rich environment—coupled with a search for one piece that might offer the best help to those who cannot grasp what the Trump era even means. Over at The Federalist, senior contributor David Marcus had a piece that I had to digest slowly. I had enjoyed Anthony Scaramucci’s rollout as White House Communications Director, and winced at his inexplicable disaster of an interview with The New Yorker. But on balance, I saw more to like than dislike, and the...

North Korea 'Will Be Handled,' Trump Declares U.S. President Donald Trump uttered assurances during the start of his Cabinet meeting on Monday morning that the threat from North Korea will be taken care of. "We’ll handle North Korea. We’re going to be able to handle them. It will be handled. We handle everything," Trump said in response to a question from a reporter. Asked later in the day whether a U.S. response might include a first strike on North Korea, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders replied, "As we said many times before, the president's not going to broadcast...

Most Americans are at least somewhat aware of what is happening at American (and European) universities with regard to conservative speakers. Universities disinvite conservative speakers, never invite them or allow the violent (or threatened violent) prevention of them. No non-left-wing idea should be permitted on campus. But we may have hit a new low. Let me explain. For years, I have been conducting symphony orchestras in Southern California. I have conducted the Brentwood-Westwood, Glendale and West Los Angeles Symphony Orchestras, the Pasadena Lyric Opera and the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. I have studied classical music since high...

Health Care: Now they tell us. After spending months pumping out stories about how great ObamaCare is, the news media are now admitting that, lo and behold, ObamaCare is unsustainable. What's changed? On Saturday, The New York Times ran a big story that began this way: "Republicans have failed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Now, can it be repaired?" Repaired? Up until last week, the Times had been reassuring its readers that ObamaCare was doing just fine. In an April story, for example, it said that "growing evidence suggests that the markets are far from collapse. Several...

President Donald Trump on Saturday threatened to end “bailouts” for members of Congress and insurance companies if lawmakers don't pass a new health care bill in the near future. “If a new HealthCare Bill is not approved quickly, BAILOUTS for Insurance Companies and BAILOUTS for Members of Congress will end very soon,” Trump tweeted. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said Trump’s warning is a “clear threat” to take away health care from members of Congress and their staff. Murphy then asserted that the president does have the “power to cut off health care for leg branch employees & crater exchanges.” He...

A self-described "email prankster" in the UK fooled a number of White House officials into thinking he was other officials, including an episode where he convinced the White House official tasked with cyber security that he was Jared Kushner and received that official's private email address unsolicited. "Tom, we are arranging a bit of a soirée towards the end of August," the fake Jared Kushner on an Outlook account wrote to the official White House email account of Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert. "It would be great if you could make it, I promise food of at least comparible (sic)...