Free Republic

As homeschooling rapidly grows, so too are state-level efforts to "oversee" families. Oregon, Washington state, and even Iowa are trailblazing another assault on constitutionally protected individual rights. The state legislature in Oregon is currently mulling over a bill that “directs Oregon Health Authority to study home visiting by licensed health care providers.” The bill contends that home visits are “necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health and safety.” There’s a similar scheme being conjured up in Washington. In January, Gov. Jay Inslee (now a 2020 Democrat presidential contender) declared: “My budget would also offer universal home visits....

President Trump on Wednesday urged fellow Republicans to “stay united” in the face of a Democrat-led effort to nix his declaration of a national emergency at the border. “Senate Republicans are not voting on constitutionality or precedent, they are voting on desperately needed Border Security & the Wall,” he tweeted. "Our Country is being invaded with Drugs, Human Traffickers, & Criminals of all shapes and sizes. That’s what this vote is all about. STAY UNITED!" The House voted last week to block Trump’s emergency declaration, which could help free up billions of dollars to fund a wall on the southern...

Around the 20th of March Paul Joseph Watson will launch a major new video platform with him in charge and serving as a central feature. The network is unrelated to any video project Paul Joseph Watson has been involved with in the past. Watson made the announcement today on the now-blacklisted video network of an Austin, Texas area broadcaster famous for his concern regarding the illuminati, AntiFa and traditional frog sexuality and herbal supplements. PJW did not expound on the question of if his impending new network is the outgrowth of new public concern regarding banning, shadow-banning, deboosting, etc.

In the French city of Grenoble, two “youths” on a scooter tried to pass a bus on the right while they were fleeing from the police. The bus was on a bridge at the time. When the driver moved right to make way for the police, the poor mischievous youngsters were squashed between the bus and the wall of the bridge. Needless to say, the local culture-enricher community in Grenoble took severe umbrage over the actions of the infidel bus driver and the infidel police.

Kelly’s publicist, Darryll Johnson added that Kelly was unable to pay the whole debt because his other legal troubles have prevented him from working. In 2009, Kelly was ordered to begin making payments of nearly $21,000 a month. He did not attend that hearing and has since often refused to make the payments.

City homicides have spiked nearly 30 percent through the first two months of 2019, leaving the NYPD scrambling to redeploy cops to troubled areas to stanch the bloodshed, the department said Monday in its monthly crime-stats briefing. Through Sunday, the five boroughs have seen 53 murders this year, a 29.3-percent jump from the 41 slayings logged over the same period in 2018, according to the latest NYPD numbers. The year’s troubling trend began in January, which saw 22.7 percent more murders than the first month of 2018. The situation grew even worse in February, which registered 24 murders — or...

Former CIA Director John Brennan said that, "not knowing," he would not be surprised if indictments produced by special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation were delivered this Friday. In an interview Tuesday night with MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell, Brennan said if a Trump family member is indicted that would signal the end of Mueller's investigation because Trump would probably fire him. "I wouldn't be surprised if for example this week on Friday, not knowing anything about it, but Friday is the day the grand jury indictments come down and also this Friday is better than next Friday because next Friday is the...

It never ceases to inspire wonder to see the potential of those whose parents never intended them to be born. It also stands as a constant reminder of the potential of any life to achieve greatness, no matter what the conditions of their conception. Nick Hoot is a dedicated athlete with a tenacious drive. He displayed this tenacity even as an infant when he survived an abortion attempt despite being partially dismembered by the abortionists’ tools. He has only part of each legs and is missing a developed set of fingers. Yet, ever since he was a toddler, his relentless...

Back at the start of the year, an unexpected controversy arose regarding the London Marathon’s rules and regulations for guide runners who support visually-impaired participants in the race. For years, London’s official policy said guide runners could not receive a medal, despite having traversed the 26.2 miles with their partner like every other finisher. (In reality, volunteers at the finish line handed everyone a medal who wanted one, and a London Marathon official told Runner’s World UK they didn’t enforce the rule. But many were upset at the principle of the stance.) Runner’s World UK and other media outlets sourced...

I couldn't resist posting this.

In response to public pressure and increasing scrutiny over the pay of its warehouse workers, Amazon enacted a $15 minimum wage for all its employees on 1 November, including workers at grocery chain Whole Foods, which it purchased in 2017. All Whole Foods employees paid less than $15 an hour saw their wages increase to at least that, while all other team members received a $1 an hour wage increase and team leaders received a $2 an hour increase. But since the wage increase, Whole Food employees have told the Guardian that they have experienced widespread cuts that have reduced...

It's lonely at the top. That's what the Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon, discovered when the only other store in the world -- located in Australia -- announced it was closing. Although Sandi Harding, the general manager of the Oregon Blockbuster, is excited that hers is the last Blockbuster on the planet, she expressed her condolences for friends at the Australia store. "We all have a kinship with the other Blockbusters," Harding told CNN. The Oregon location has been open for more than 20 years. It offers customers the newest movie releases, but Harding says the classic older titles are the...

Kentucky officials publicly released records Wednesday that show employees in the secretary of state’s office used the voter registration system to look up political rivals, state investigators and a range of political operatives. It is not clear in many instances why the office of Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes was looking up people and their personal information — political affiliation, every home address ever on file, some Social Security numbers — but it has led critics to conclude her office abused its access to the system to gain information about her political opponents and those involved in multiple investigations...

About 50 miles south and east of Rome, high in the Apennine mountains, lies the Charterhouse of Trisulti whose isolated magnificence prompted the German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius (who stumbled upon it in the 1850’s) to write in his classic work Years of Wandering in Italy, “If a place exists where the human spirit can reach the gravest and highest meditation, this must be it, in one of the most sublime states of solitude I have ever seen.” Here, in this huge deserted monastery founded in 1204, which has 15,000 square meters of roof, President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and...

Border agents have been told to explicitly target Spanish speakers and migrants from Latin America in carrying out a Trump administration program requiring asylum seekers wait in Mexico, according to memos obtained by The Associated Press that reveal some inner workings of a top government priority to address the burgeoning number of Central Americans arriving in the country. The Trump administration launched the program in late January in what marks a potentially seismic shift on how the U.S. handles the cases of immigrants seeking asylum and fleeing persecution in their homeland. The program initially applied only to those who turned...

Sex trafficking, child prostitution, murder, rape, armed robbery, drug trafficking, human trafficking, extortion, money laundering, prostitution, racketeering, assault, kidnapping, and arms trafficking. This is just a sampling of the criminal, often violent activities engaged in by Mara Salvatrucha, otherwise known as MS-13; a vicious, brutal El Salvadoran street gang now firmly rooted in the U.S. MS-13 was formed in Los Angeles in the late 1970s by El Salvadorans fleeing their own country’s civil war. Today, there are an estimated 30,000-50,000 MS-13 gang members, having spread from LA into nearly every state in the U.S., and throughout Central and South America....

Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is proposing what some opponents are calling a draconian gas tax increase to fix the state’s crumbling road infrastructure. Whitmer’s budget proposal will include a 45-cent gas tax increase, which would be phased in over three separate intervals, the governor’s spokeswoman Tiffany Brown told reporters Monday. The rate would begin increasing in October, hit its second phase in April 2020, and ease into its final phase by the end of that year. The increase is expected to generate roughly $2 billion a year in additional revenue for roads, according to media reports. Whitmer, a Democrat...

Justices say court will need to decide if it is legal to deny state funding to religious institutionsThe newest member of the United States Supreme Court blasted the “pure discrimination” against religion that a New Jersey Supreme Court ruling made against the use of taxpayer funds for the historic preservation of churches. Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that barring religious organizations “because they are religious from a general historic preservation grants program is pure discrimination against religion.” From 2012 to 2015, Morris County, N.J., gave more than $4.6 million to 12 churches to fix facades, stained-glass windows and aging roofs under...

Last year archaeologists in Peru announced the discovery of a centuries-old ritual massacre, at a site they believed was the largest known case of child sacrifice ever found. Buried beneath the sands of a 15th-century site called Huanchaquito-Las Llamas were nearly 140 child skeletons, as well as the remains of 200 llamas. While the reasoning behind the gruesome mass murder of the boys and girls — who were only between the ages of 5 and 14 — cannot be definitively determined, the researchers now say the act was done out of desperation in response to a disastrous climatic event: El...

Moscow, March 5, Interfax - Christians were the force that helped the United States and Soviet Union to overcome the political tension of the 20th century, according to Metropolitan Hilarion, head of the Moscow Patriarchate's Department for External Church Relations. "In the 20th century, the nuclear arms race was an external global threat to the people of our planet. It is important to say that amidst the standoff between the superpowers that were the USSR and the U.S., it was Christians who built bridges between the two countries and created the conditions and grounds for normalizing relations between the two...