Free Republic

Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant is appointed Supreme Commander of all Union Armies by President Abraham Lincoln.

Calling all FReepers: We need your help to keep the lights on. Please donate today if you can. Wouldn't it be great if we could wrap this baby up today? FR is funded solely by contributions made by the liberty loving patriots who love and use it. We are beholden to no political party. No advertisers, no outsiders, no sugar daddies, no corporate string pullers. Definitely no government subsidies or tax breaks. No 501c or other IRS non-profit status. This means no commercial ads. No annoying pop-ups. No ad tracking. No mail campaigns. No spam. No third-parties -- not even...

Police say a fight over a brownie has left a 14-year-old Houston boy dead of a stab wound to the eye and another 14-year-old boy is in juvenile custody charged with aggravated assault. Houston Independent School District police say the victim died Friday of the knife wound suffered Wednesday afternoon. District Police Chief Paul Cordova said the fight erupted after school Wednesday outside a convenience store across from the Jane Long Academy in southwest Houston. He said that when the victim was loaded into an ambulance, he still acted as if the fight were continuing. No identities have been released...

Satellite images of a facility near Pyongyang suggest that North Korea may be preparing to launch a missile or a satellite. The increase in activity is around a site known as Sanumdong, where North Korea assembled most of its ballistic missiles and rockets. It comes after reports earlier this week that North Korea's main rocket launch site at Sohae had been rebuilt. Work to dismantle Sohae began last year but stopped as US talks stalled. On Friday US President Donald Trump said he would be disappointed if North Korea was to resume weapons testing. "I would be surprised in a...

All flights in and out of Newark Airport were temporarily halted Saturday morning after a flight from Canada to Florida diverted there with a possible fire in the cargo hold, officials said. The plane landed on Runway 4 and remained there while airport firefighters responded — and all 189 passengers were evacuated via emergency slides, officials said.

Surveillance video on a Martin County school bus shows a bus aide yelling at a student to take off a Trump hat, then grabbing it off of his head. Now, the Martin County Sheriff’s Office is investigating whether the bus aide committed a crime. Gunnar Johansson, 14, said this week, students were allowed to wear a hat to school if they made a donation to March of Dimes. He decided to wear a Trump, Make America Great Again hat, “to show my pride in Trump America,” Johansson said. He boarded his bus to Hidden Oaks Middle School, and within seconds,...

The left-leaning fact-checking website Snopes butchered facts about a PAC controlled by Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her top aide in a story published Thursday. Ocasio-Cortez and Saikat Chakrabarti, her former campaign chair and current chief of staff, obtained majority control of Justice Democrats in December 2017. The PAC, which had raised more than $1.8 million before her June 2018 primary, has been widely credited with manufacturing her upset victory over incumbent Democrat Joe Crowley. Snopes writer Dan MacGuill falsely claimed in his story that Chakrabarti, who served as executive director of Justice Democrats, “was not an official agent or...

Roy D. Mercer prank phone call to a Navy Recruiter. Roy D. Mercer is a fictional character created by disc jockeys Brent Douglas and Phil Stone on radio station KMOD-FM in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Brent Douglas, who performs Mercer's voice, uses the character as a vehicle for comedy sketches in which he performs prank calls.

President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” policy pushed Americans’ wages up by 3.4 percent in the last 12 months, according to employment data released March 8.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she doesn’t recycle her plastic bags because her city’s recycling program is too “tough” for her to understand On February 24, 2019, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a live video on her Instagram account where she was talking about different political issues while peeling and cutting sweet potatoes.A guy named Gob Abierto posted several different excerpts from that video in a string of tweets at this link, which has since been deleted. I watched a bunch of those excerpts before the tweet string was deleted. The internet archive has a copy of the same tweet string at this link, but...

Many Californians are gearing up to spring their clocks forward for daylight saving time this Sunday but a ballot measure passed in November could make this time switch the state’s last. Proposition 7, approved by 60 percent of voters in November and sponsored by Assemblyman Kansen Chu, D- San Jose, repealed the 1949 initiative that started daylight saving time in California. The proposition also allows for state Legislature to adjust the state’s daylight saving time, whether it be by a couple days or all year. “If signed by the governor, the bill will bring California closer to abolishing the outdated...

FULL TITLE: Tax collectors chase rich New Yorkers moving to low-tax states. Auditors inspect cell records, even your dog’s vet bills The cat-and-mouse game between state tax collectors and wealthy New Yorkers who are moving to Florida has reached new levels — and gone high tech. New federal tax laws limiting the deduction of state and local income taxes have created incentives for wealthy New Yorkers to move to Florida or other lower-tax states. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo last month blamed wealth flight for the state’s $2.3 billion revenue shortfall in December and January. “Tax the rich, tax the...

HHS will reallocate millions of dollars from some of its health programs to increase shelter capacity for the "overwhelming number" of migrant children, Secretary Alex Azar told Congressional appropriators in letters this week. Children who cross the border without parents or family are often referred to HHS for shelter, food and other services until sponsors are found in the U.S. But HHS's shelters are nearly full, and the agency needs to take funds from other programs to pay for more space, Azar said. That includes up to $286 million from health programs that fund Head Start, Alzheimer's care and cancer...

Roy Moore said he is "seriously considering" a 2020 rematch against the current incumbent Alabama senator. The fiery and controversial candidate, who became the first Republican to lose a U.S. Senate race in Alabama in 21 years for his defeat by now-Sen. Doug Jones, a Democrat, says that he is open to the idea of running for the GOP's nomination again. “I’m seriously considering it. I think that was stolen,” Moore said of the race during a Friday interview.

Democrats desperately want to turn the page on a painful week, but doing so is proving to be difficult. Freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who has been the center of a debate on anti-Semitism and other forms of hatred that has exposed deep divisions within the new majority, on Friday signaled she’s not going to stop battling on social media with her critics. Less than 24 hours after the House adopted a resolution broadly condemning bigotry in the wake of Omar’s comments about U.S.-Israel relations, she launched into a Twitter battle Friday morning with Meghan McCain over the thorny topic.

Watching Nancy Pelosi’s clown show caucus try to formulate how many ways they could hate hate in one resolution reminded me of the Monty Python scene in Life of Brian where Terry Jones’s character wants to join up with the People’s Front of Judea (or was it the Judean People’s Front?), and is interrogated as to his fitness: “You have to really hate the Romans to join our group! How much do you hate the Romans?” Jones: “A lot!” “Okay, you’re in.” But the resolution as passed has one seeming omission—among the categories of things House Democrats hate and deplore...

After decades of earnest public-information campaigns, Americans are finally recycling. Airports, malls, schools, and office buildings across the country have bins for plastic bottles and aluminum cans and newspapers. In some cities, you can be fined if inspectors discover that you haven’t recycled appropriately. But now much of that carefully sorted recycling is ending up in the trash. For decades, we were sending the bulk of our recycling to China — tons and tons of it, sent over on ships to be made into goods such as shoes and bags and new plastic products. But last year, the country restricted...

Money Observations: Living within Your Means. The movies and Television broadcast over and over to live on other-peoples-money and to live beyond your means. But in the "Everyday Millionaires" book by Chris Hogan and on the "Millionaire Theme Hour" with Dave Ramsey, millionaires say over and over again to live within your means and to get debt out of your lives. Indeed, I did not. for the first 20 years of work, I dabbled in credit and did not have an emergency fund. Soon I found myself living paycheck to paycheck while having a decent salary. I saw something I...

Rep. Ilhan Omar’s attempt to shame a news outlet for misquoting her blistering attack on former President Barack Obama backfired after she released audio of the interview that only served to confirm her remarks. The Minnesota Democrat, who’s faced controversy over comments perceived as anti-Semitic, got into hot water yet again after saying Obama’s “hope and change” message was a “mirage” and slammed the administration’s drone and border-detention policies. She told Politico that the Obama administration was responsible for the “caging of kids” at the U.S.-Mexico border, the “droning of countries around the world,” and that the 44th president “operated...

In the United States, women are still heavily under-represented in corporate leadership positions. Over the past 14 years, the percentage of female directors at the largest U.S. companies has increased by a meager 0.5% per year, and amounted to 26.3% in 2018, according to the most recent report of Corporate Women Directors International. If this growth rate remains unchanged, it will take nearly half a century to achieve gender parity at U.S. corporate boards. In other countries with similar gender disparities in corporate leadership, legislators have responded by adopting mandatory board quotas. The first country to act was Norway, which...