Free Republic

President Donald Trump is moving fast to spend billions of dollars to build a wall on the Mexican border with money secured under his declaration of a national emergency, but he first must get past the courts. On Friday, a federal judge in Oakland, California, will consider arguments in two cases that seek to block the White House from spending Defense and Treasury Department money.... California and 19 other states brought one lawsuit; the Sierra Club and Southern Border Communities Coalition, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, brought the other. On Thursday, a federal judge in the nation's capital...

The world's crankiest cat with a permanent scowl that has inspired countless memes, a best-selling series of books and a movie has passed away, aged seven. Grumpy Cat, owned by Tabatha Bundesen from Morristown, Arizona shot to fame in 2012 in a YouTube video that got 15.7 million views, and earned more than Hollywood stars Nicole Kidman, Cameron Diaz and Matthew McConaughey during her time in the spotlight. Even amassing a reported $100M fortune was not enough to put a smile on the face of the internet sensation – real name Tardar Sauce - who was born with dwarfism and...

Robert Pattinson will play the Caped Crusader in the upcoming The Batman flick slated for a June 25, 2021 release. The 33-year-old British actor is the next in line to play the DC Comics superhero after Ben Affleck last played Bruce Wayne in 2017's Justice League. Pattinson is in talks to play Batman in the Matt Reeves led project according to Variety on Thursday night.

Speaking on state TV of the prospect of a war in the Gulf, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei seemed to dismiss the idea. "There won't be any war. ... We don't seek a war, and (the Americans) don't either. They know it's not in their interests." The ayatollah's analysis -- a war is in neither nation's interest -- is correct. Consider the consequences of a war with the United States for his own country. Iran's hundreds of swift boats and handful of submarines would be sunk. Its ports would be mined or blockaded. Oil exports and oil revenue would halt....

Saudi Arabia blaming Iran for the drone attacks on two oil pumping stations by Houth rebels from Yemen..... Airstrikes from the Saudi led coalition early Thursday on the Houthi controlled Yemeni capital of Sanaa killed six and wounded 72 including two Russian civilians..... British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt is now agreeing with the notion of an Iranian threat..... Making noise about the US-Iran situation is Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard.... Earlier in the week Gabbard posted a video naming those who want war with Iran.... President Trump rolled out a new immigration plan on the White House lawn Thursday afternoon........

Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., tweeted in response to anti-abortion legislation passed by the Alabama legislature: "I refuse to believe that these Republican men represent the views of most Alabamians. Their action is both unconstitutional and shameful. The people of Alabama deserve to be on the #rightsideofhistory -- not the side of extremists. Women deserve better." It seems much more likely that Jones is the one who is out of step. A 2014 Pew poll found that Alabama is among the most "pro-life" states in the country, with 58 percent saying the procedure should be illegal in "all or most cases."...

You have to work hard to get your dream job. But your dream job title might just be a pay cut away. According to one hiring expert, more and more job applicants initiate conversations about lowering their starting salaries in favor of getting the job title they want, with no change to their job description and responsibilities.

Celebrities are coming forward with their personal abortion stories. As more and more states -- including Georgia, Alabama and Missouri -- continue to pass legislation greatly restricting and nearly banning all abortion, several stars are speaking out against the bills by sharing their own stories alongside the hashtag #YouKnowMe. Busy Philipps came up with the phrase and hashtag when she discussed her abortion on her late-night show, Busy Tonight. "The statistic is that one in four women will have an abortion before age 45. That statistic sometimes surprises people, and maybe you're sitting there thinking, 'I don't know a woman...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former Fugees rapper Prakazrel “Pras” Michel appeared in court on Thursday and told reporters he is innocent of criminal charges that he conspired to funnel foreign funds into Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential re-election, while also plugging his upcoming album.... ...Last week, the Justice Department unsealed charges against Michel and Low Taek Jho, a wealthy Malaysian businessman with a tabloid partying reputation known as “Jho Low,” alleging they conspired to steer foreign campaign contributions into Obama’s 2012 campaign. It is a crime for foreign nationals to make political contributions in U.S. federal, state or local elections. Federal prosecutors...

Last month, the European Union’s Council of Ministers voted to allow Britain another extension in its Brexit deliberations. Despite Prime Minister Theresa May’s “success” in negotiating this extension, her Conservative Party recently experienced massive losses in local council elections with more than 1,300 Conservative councillors losing their seats. Since then, May’s party has tanked further in opinion polls. One recent poll has only 11 percent of the electorate supporting Conservative candidates in the upcoming May 23 elections for the European Parliament. Three years after voting to leave the European Union (EU), British voters must now suffer the indignity of voting...

Last October, a pair of housing activists ambushed the mayor at my gym, knowing it’s the one place he’d reliably show. “I’m in the middle of doing my workout,” he told them. The most memorable of this city’s mayors tend to be energetic, king-size personalities with bad manners and little tolerance for inefficiencies. Fiorello LaGuardia, famously, wanted to be seen as the man who turned out the lights in City Hall when we went to sleep and turned them back on when we woke up. Ed Koch had his jack-in-the-box routine — “How’m I doin’?” — and appeared to be...

Grumpy Cat — the world’s most famous feline, whose frowning face spawned countless memes and an empire that includes plush toys, comics, books, calendars, perfume, sneakers, lottery tickets, and even her own Lifetime TV Christmas special — has died at age 7. “We are unimaginably heartbroken to announce the loss of our beloved Grumpy Cat,” read a statement released early Friday morning by her family and manager. “Despite care from top professionals, as well as from her very loving family, Grumpy encountered complications from a recent urinary tract infection that unfortunately became too tough for her to overcome. She passed...

Alabama's mostly Republican lawmakers and governor passed a strong abortion ban this week, and liberals are fit to be tied. "Today, I signed into law the Alabama Human Life Protection Act, a bill that was approved by overwhelming majorities in both chambers of the legislature," said Gov. Kay Ivey. "To the bill's many supporters, this legislation stands as a powerful testament to Alabamians' deeply held belief that every life is precious and that every life is a sacred gift from God." In today's secular culture, the governor's invocation of God is almost as bold as signing the bill into law....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6rpT2YfSng&feature=youtu.be This is a BRILLIANT interview with George Papadopoulos from yesterday. George goes into great detail about all the spying and deception. The Italian government’s actions are discussed especially. At the 2:27:00 mark of this Howie Carr Show (5/16/19) the interview with George begins. For anyone who has been following this long, ongoing “Deep State” coup attempt …….. this is for you.

New York--Move over, MAGA hat. MATH may be the next big thing in political headgear. Yes, as in mathematics. Or as 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang suggests at his rain-soaked rally in New York City Tuesday night: “Make America Think Harder.” The catchphrase is as good as any to describe the people wearing those hats in Washington Square Park. They’re the type to say they’re sick of emotional appeals from career politicians. They cheer when their candidate – a corporate lawyer turned CEO turned philanthropist – starts a sentence with, “I looked at the numbers” or “I did the math.”...

ZHENGZHOU, China (Reuters) - Dressed in a smart black pantsuit behind the wheel of her pearl-white Audi, Zhao Na has come a long way from her roots in rural Henan province, in central China. The 29-year-old real estate agent cheerfully admits to having shopaholic ways and a love of Louis Vuitton and Prada handbags, typifying a wave of free-spending consumers who have had the world’s top brands scrambling for a piece of China’s $5 trillion-plus retail market. “When I am flush, I am happy to part with money,” said Zhao, who once splurged around 60,000 yuan ($9,000) on a clutch...

I will tell you what I know of the way silence grows roots inside of a person, until all that is left is a brutal, crushing vacancy where a voice ought to be. I was 17 when I was raped by a classmate. He was someone I knew, someone I trusted, but in the end, none of that mattered. I would not find out until eight months later that I was pregnant as a result of the assault. My daughter, Zoe, would grow inside of me with a fatal congenital birth defect that took away her ability to think, or...

The text of Alabama's newly-passed abortion ban, HB 314, compares abortion to a number of genocide and historical ethnic cleansing events including the Holocaust, Stalin's gulags, the Chinese "Great Leap Forward," the Rwandan genocide, and the Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge. The bill, which makes it a class A felony with a maximum punishment of 99 years in prison for a doctor to perform an abortion on a pregnant person with no exceptions for rape or incest, also designates fetuses in the womb as people with the full rights of personhood under the law. "All of these are widely...

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To Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), the truth out of Alabama seems stranger than fiction. In response to the state’s Senate passing the country’s strictest abortion bill on Tuesday, Harris sent a fundraising email in which she asked people to organizations that provide money for abortion service and fight for reproductive rights — rather than her own campaign. She also compared the bill to the Margaret Atwood novel and Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” in which fertile women are enslaved, raped and forced to birth babies for childless couples. “This isn’t a scene from The Handmaid’s Tale,” Harris wrote Wednesday. “This...