Free Republic

For the last couple of months I’ve been wondering whether or not the Democratic Party is lost. I’ve written multiple times that they seem to be lost, but I’ve quietly been watching the trends to see if there’s any hope for the party to ever be moderate again. As of today, I see the only future of the party being one of extremism, socialism, bigotry, and idiocy. As much as I hate to give “credit” to someone whose policies I loathe, I must admit that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been extremely instrumental in the downfall of her party. She may...

Our open door along the southern border for people claiming to seek asylum is such a magnet for the world’s poor that a group of 116 people traveled all the way from Africa to Mexico to enter the United States. In video tweeted out by Customs and Border Patrol, the large group, identified as coming from Angola, Cameroun, and Congo (all desperately poor) can be seen wading across the water in the Rio Grande, some carrying children in their arms – an automatic entry into the United States under law that the House of Representatives refuses to change. There are...

There seems to be a similarity between international trade disputes and Texas Hold’em. There is always a certain amount of bluff that is part of the negotiations. The question is, how much is a bluff and how much is not. The Peoples Republic of China (PRC) has just revealed that they are going to use their stake in rare earth minerals production as their show card. Make no mistake -- the communist government is not bluffing. However, one good card does not make a winning hand. To understand the problem, we first must understand where rare earth mineral deposits are...

As a gunman opened fire inside Building 2 of the Virginia Beach Municipal Center on Friday, everyone was scrambling for safety. But not Ryan Keith Cox. "If it wasn't for him, there would have been several more people that had perished," city employee Christi Dewar told CNN affiliate WAVY. Dewar didn't budge when she first heard the gunshots. The building was under construction, and she thought that was behind the popping sounds. But she began to run alongside her colleagues when she heard people yelling "active shooter," she told WAVY. That's when she saw Cox, who told her to get...

Raymond Mikesell wanted to make Sunday supper, the kind he had growing up on the North Side of Pittsburgh that began with waking up early to the rich aroma of his mother’s sauce and ended with his siblings and cousins playing pick-up baseball or football in the backyard while the grown-ups sat on the porch with their Coleman coolers popping the tops off of Schmidt’s beers and solving the neighborhood’s problems. Large decorative bowls of steaming hot rigatoni, platters of greens and beans, meatballs, gravy, chunks of Parmesan cheese and crispy bread that melted in your mouth when you bit...

The man who pleaded guilty to throwing a 5-year-old boy from a third-floor balcony at the Mall of America in April received a sentence of 228 months (19 years) Monday morning. Two-thirds of that sentence must be spent in prison. Emmanuel Aranda, 24, was charged with attempted premeditated first-degree murder. During a hearing, Aranda said he knew throwing the child over the balcony could kill him. Aranda agreed to a plea deal in the case roughly three weeks ago. Through statements read in court, the family of 5-year-old Landen, who is still recovering, had a chance to address Aranda prior...

Death and taxes are said to be the only things in life that are certain. However, I’ll add another: Democrats never accept political defeat even when that includes election losses. With that in mind, the Democrat strategy going into the 2020 election is simple. They will play the race and gender card like it is some kind of sport. They’ll drudge up reparations for slavery while claiming voter suppression continues as if we are still in the post-Civil War Reconstruction period in America in the South where black voters continued to be disenfranchised by Democrats until the passage of the...

I know someone, now in the twilight of her life, who has lived on the same London street for the past 45 years. Many of her local friends have died or moved away. Where the street once buzzed with English, spoken in a variety of accents, now you can go through an entire day without hearing English. From her small terraced house, she hears Pashto over one garden fence, Romanian over the other. In the nearby row of shops, the English-speaking Indian-owned mini-supermarkets have given way to Polish shops outside which young men gather every evening, speaking Polish. The cockney...

Julián Castro on Monday released a plan that the Democratic White House hopeful said would reform the U.S. policing system and heal the relationship between police and their communities. With the "People First Policing Plan," Castro wants to set new national standards on police conduct, increase transparency and accountability in police departments, seek to end over-policing and address violence and harassment against minority citizens. “From Stephon Clark, to Pamela Turner, to Tamir Rice, far too many lives have been tragically cut short at the hands of a broken police system,” the former Housing and Urban Development Secretary said in a...

I just tried to buy some health insurance and gee whiz, I am not allowed! How about that? It seems in New York you can only buy it in November due to the Obamacare enrollment mandate. I just got off the phone with a broker who told me. What kind of insanity is this? So if I get some disease or severely injured from now till November I'm basically screwed. Isn't government intervention wonderful?

"Crossfire Hurricane” — the melodramatic code name for the FBI/CIA spy operation on candidate Trump and his early presidency — was run for the FBI by then-FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, Special Agent Peter Strzok, and others. Then-CIA director John Brennan ran it for the CIA. Brennan had to have help, but who was it? A lot of evidence points to the CIA’s then-chief of station in London in 2016-2017, and now the Director of Central Intelligence, Gina Haspel. President Trump claimed that the FBI and CIA’s spying on his campaign and early presidency was treason. Attorney...

This week, we commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the D-Day landings, the largest seaborne invasion in history. It was the crucial turning point in the war with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, one that began the liberation of German-occupied France and laid the foundations of the Allied victory on the Western Front. The D-Day landings: There were at least 10,000 Allied casualties, with 4,414 confirmed dead +8 The D-Day landings: There were at least 10,000 Allied casualties, with 4,414 confirmed dead It was also the moment that most perfectly exemplified and cemented the special relationship between Britain and America, the...

London Mayor Sadiq Khan made a video with lifestyle brand Elle UK criticizing President Trump for values he said were contrary to London’s values. The video posted Monday starts with Kahn holding a sign with the words “Dear Trump … Elle” in a building overlooking part of the city. “President Trump, if you’re watching this your values and what you stand for are the complete opposite of London’s values and the values in this country,” Khan said in a video posted to the lifestyle company’s Twitter account. “We think diversity is not a weakness, diversity is a strength, we respect...

If you are bewildered by the weird antipathy with which Democrats and the media regard Attorney General William Barr, consider a passage from the Nobel Prize acceptance speech delivered by Polish dissident Czesław Miłosz in 1980: “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.” Our government hasn’t yet devolved into the kind of totalitarian regime under which Poland groaned at that time, but there is a conspiracy of silence surrounding the skullduggery that led to the Russia collusion fraud, and Barr fired that metaphorical pistol on April 10,...

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Researcher Evette Alexander told Hill.TV this week that there is a gender divide on college campuses when it comes to prioritizing free speech versus inclusion. "Men and women felt quite differently on what they considered the greater priority," Alexander, who is director of learning and impact at the Knight Foundation, told Hill.TV's Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton in a "Rising" interview that aired Friday. "It was a predictor of whether they would favor free speech over inclusion or inclusion over free speech." "We found that a substantial majority of college men, 71 percent, said that promoting free speech was the...

DEERFIELD, N.Y. -- Gun rights advocates are standing behind a Central New York homeowner who shot and killed two people who were attempting to burglarize his home earlier this week. More than $6,000 has been raised in a GoFundMe campaign to help Ronald Stolarczyk with his legal fees. Stolarczyk, 64, of Deerfield, was charged with having an unregistered handgun after he shot the people who were burglarizing his home, police said. He was charged with criminal possession of a firearm, a felony, and remains in jail. The handgun was unregistered. Stolarczyk told authorities the gun was his father’s, and when...

Pope Francis is noted for his ambiguous statements, but I find the indeterminate meaning contained in the Abu Dhabi statement the most egregious. Here is why. Given the pluralism of world religions, many contemporary academics and pundits argue that Christianity can no longer claim itself to be the one true religion. Not only do those who profess other religious beliefs question Christianity’s uniqueness, but Christians, lay and ecclesial, do so as well. The ultimate question is: Is Jesus singular or is he merely one of many founders of various world religions? This issue assumed new prominence and urgency when in...

BALTIMORE - Baltimore’s mayor believes he has a solution to solving some of the violence in the city: Public boxing matches. After eight shootings and 11 stabbing incidents in the city over the weekend, Mayor Jack Young said he is trying to find ways to ease tensions in the city. "If they want to really settle them, we can have them down at the civic center, put a boxing ring up and let them go and box it out,” Young told WBAL. “Those kinds of things, you know, and the best man wins and the beef should be over. Those...

House Democrats are proposing a 3.1 percent pay hike for federal workers in 2020. The raise was included in the draft appropriations bill covering financial services and general government, which is expected to advance through a subcommittee hearing on Monday and advance to the House floor later in the month. President Trump blocked a scheduled 2.1 percent increase in pay to federal workers last year, in an order that froze federal pay. He later agreed to a 1.9 percent increase in federal pay that was included in a spending package passed by Congress. The draft bill with the pay hike...