Free Republic

I'm smelling college admissions scandal: David Hogg managed to get into Harvard with a below average SAT score.

A man said by federal prosecutors to have been a top leader of New York's notorious Gambino crime family was shot and killed Wednesday on Staten Island. Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, 53, was found with multiple gunshot wounds to his body at his home in the borough's Todt Hill section just after 9 p.m.

Today’s Cryptogram WQR XERCJVNWVRNQ, WEG MPJ’SS AX XERCJVNWVRNQ. GWSX QWDEXLNX You can find this little fun word game, to combat early dementia and senility in us baby boomers, in several daily publications, unfortunately they are copyrighted so we can't use them here. So, we're just going to make up our own. The way it works is a letter stands for another letter. For example: AXYDLBAAXR is LONGFELLOW (does not apply to today's cryptogram). Beware, the game is very addictive. If this is your first time, don't be intimidated. PLEASE DO NOT post the answer in general comments, but DO post...

Senator Bernie Sanders-led vote aims to halt US military aid to the Saudi-Emirati coalition amid humanitarian disaster. 12 Mar 2019 Saudi Arabia's army fires artillery towards Houthi rebel positions in this 2015 file photo [Reuters] Saudi Arabia's army fires artillery towards Houthi rebel positions in this 2015 file photo [Reuters] MORE ON YEMEN US Senate passes bill to halt military support to Saudi in Yemen today Yemen's warring sides trade blame after women and children killed 2 days ago Nearly 100 civilians killed or wounded every week in Yemen: UN 5 days ago 19 million Yemeni children suffer malnutrition and...

Stormy Daniels says she regularly fears that President Trum could win reelection. “I will be voting,” the adult-film star told an audience of almost entirely women on Tuesday at The Wing in Washington. “Some days I’m like, ‘There’s no way — this is gonna be amazing,'” Daniels told moderator Jane Mulkerrins, a freelance journalist, when asked during the Q&A session about the prospects of what might happen in the 2020 presidential election. “Other days I’m like, ‘This motherf---er’s going to win again,’” she said of Trump. Daniels, who was born Stephanie Clifford, sued Trump and his former lawyer Michael Cohen...

<p>President Donald Trump has filled 20 percent of the nation’s federal appeals seats in his swift bid to reshape the judiciary with strong conservatives, and the emphasis could soon shift to accelerating district court confirmations.</p> <p>The appeals court milestone was underscored with Neomi Rao’s confirmation on Wednesday to the seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that was vacated by Trump’s second Supreme Court appointment, Justice Brett Kavanaugh.</p>

I’ve decided to discuss the Trump presidency in purely mathematical terms....Under my new approach, I will provide a numerical evaluation of the Trump presidency, which I call: TRUMP BY THE NUMBERS!...No editorializing, no invective, no opinion.

U.S.—Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren left a brutal 1-star review for Ancestry.com on a popular consumer review site, sources confirmed Tuesday. Internet users noticed a particularly negative review of the site's DNA testing and family tree analysis services. They were then able to link the account, JefeWarren2020, to the presidential candidate's official email address. "Site suggested I was only 1/1024th Native American, even though I have a lot of anecdotal family stories from my mama and my papa that suggest otherwise," she wrote in the bitter review. "Very bad services. I would not use them again." "I even used...

It's way too early to be thinking this, much less saying it, but what the hell: If Donald Trump is able to deliver the sort of performance he gave today at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual meeting of right-wingers held near Washington, D.C., his reelection is a foregone conclusion. There is simply no potential candidate in the Democratic Party who wouldn't be absolutely blown off the stage by him. I say this as someone who is neither a Trump fanboy nor a Never Trumper. But he was not simply good, he was Prince-at-the-Super-Bowl great, deftly flinging juvenile...

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Wednesday ordered two Boeing 737 Max jets — one model of which was involved in the fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 people — to be temporarily grounded in the U.S. The agency said the decision was made to ground both the Boeing 737 Max 8 and 737 Max 9 models "as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the site and analyzed." "The grounding will remain in effect pending further investigation, including examination of information from the aircraft's flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders," the FAA...

Beto O'Rourke all but announced his 2020 presidential candidacy in a wide-ranging interview published Wednesday in Vanity Fair magazine, confidently saying he was "just born to do this" -- a move that would contradict his multiple previous assurances that he would not seek the White House, and further crowd a Democratic primary field already chock-full of progressive candidates. The move seemed inevitable Wednesday night. KTSM reported it received a text message from O'Rourke earlier in the day saying he will seek the Democratic presidential nomination, writing: "I'm really proud of what El Paso did and what El Paso represents. It's...

Media Matters president and far-left activist Angelo Carusone is under fire after The Daily Caller unearthed hateful and inflammatory comments he made in the past about everything from transvestites to ethnicity. Carusone has been leading a campaign against Fox News host Tucker Carlson for things he said on a radio program several years ago. Sensing hypocrisy, Daily Caller reporter Peter Hasson uncovered an old blog in which Carusone allegedly used hateful rhetoric against a series of groups. “Carusone’s now-defunct blog included degrading references to ‘trannies,’ ‘jewry’ and Bangladeshis,” Hasson wrote. “Carusone posted a lengthy diatribe in November 2005 about a...

In April 2018, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand urged Senate leaders to pass her bipartisan Congressional Harassment Reform Act. "Congress has a sexual harassment problem -- and isn't taking it seriously," Gillibrand wrote in Fortune magazine. "If we can't clean up our own act, how can anyone expect Congress to do the right thing for victims and survivors in the rest of the country? Congress has to do better. I believe that elected officials should be held to the highest ethical standard -- not the lowest." Just a few months later, when a woman in her own office reported that a married...

Documents filed with the Supreme Court and unsealed on Wednesday revealed definitively, and for the first time, that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is the party seeking a grand jury subpoena and subsequent contempt citation against an unnamed, government-controlled foreign corporation that has resisted prosecutors' efforts at every turn. Fox News has previously reported on strong indications that Mueller’s office was behind the case, although neither his office nor lawyers for the unnamed overseas company would provide confirmation. The proceedings are believed to be linked to attempts by Mueller's team to secure information to present to an empaneled grand jury in...

March 14 2019 Thursday of the First Week in Lent Reading 1 Est C:12, 14-16, 23-25 Queen Esther, seized with mortal anguish,had recourse to the LORD.She lay prostrate upon the ground, together with her handmaids, from morning until evening, and said:"God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, blessed are you. Help me, who am alone and have no help but you,for I am taking my life in my hand.As a child I used to hear from the books of my forefathersthat you, O LORD, always free those who are pleasing to you.Now help me, who am...

The husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway blasted President Trump on Wednesday, claiming Trump has a problem with "pathological” lying. George Conway, an attorney who has become an outspoken critic of the president via Twitter messages, posted a thread that began when he called out Trump for claiming that Judge Amy Berman Jackson's sentencing of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort earlier in the day had exonerated the president from the Russian collusion narrative. “Have we ever seen this degree of brazen, pathological mendacity in American public life?" Conway asked in a tweet. "One day he makes a harmless...

Hillary Clinton investigators were told Obama DOJ 'not willing to charge' her on key espionage statute: internal chart An internal chart prepared by federal investigators working on the so-called "Midyear Exam" probe into Hillary Clinton's emails, exclusively reviewed by Fox News, contained the words "NOTE: DOJ not willing to charge this" next to a key statute on the mishandling of classified information. The notation appeared to contradict former FBI Director James Comey's repeated claims that his team made its decision that Clinton should not face criminal charges independently. Fox News has confirmed the chart served as a critical tip that...

Left-wing activists and liberal journalists were quick to mock former Rep. Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (D-TX) on Wednesday evening after he told Vanity Fair that he was “born” to run for president.

The first recorded instance of Uranus being spotted in the night sky is believed to date back to Classical Antiquity. During the 2nd century BCE, Hipparchos - the Greek astronomer, mathematician and founder of trigonometry - apparently recorded the planet as a star in his star catalogue (completed in 129 BCE). This catalog was later incorporated into Ptolemy's Almagest, which became the definitive source for Islamic astronomers and for scholars in Medieval Europe for over one-thousand years... This included English astronomer John Flamsteed, who in 1690 observed the star on six occasions and catalogued it as a star in the...

If you live in a cold climate like 15-year-old Chester Greenwood did, and had large, protruding ears, like Chester did, you might be thankful for his invention. National Earmuff Day honors the man who found a better way to keep our ears warm all winter long. After a day of ice skating, 15-year-old Chester came up with an idea to keep his big ears warm. Partnering with his grandmother who sewed tufts of fur between loops of wire, Chester soon had a working model.Farmington, Maine is now the “Earmuff Capital of the World” On March 13, 1877, he was awarded...