Free Republic

The US government has obtained intelligence that Saudi Arabia has significantly escalated its ballistic missile program with the help of China, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter said, a development that threatens decades of US efforts to limit missile proliferation in the Middle East.

Santa Clara County supervisors Tuesday refused to change a sanctuary policy that critics said allowed the county to release a violent felon, an undocumented immigrant who is accused of then breaking into a San Jose woman’s home in February and killing her.

The mass murder in Virginia Beach took place in Virginia Beach Municipal Building 2. Notice the elevated entrance, which prevents drive in car bomb attacks. The mass murder in Virginia Beach took place inside a secured location. The people inside were forbidden from possessing defensive firearms. It was a gun free zone. The shooter, who worked at that location, had an electronic pass which gave him easy access to the gun free zone.Coverage of this event was different than previous mass murders in the United States.  I mentioned, in an email, that something was different about this event. It...

Conservative columnist and author George Will on Wednesday said that the GOP has become a "cult" of President Trump, attributing the shift to an "absence of ideas." "It has become a cult," Will said on MSNBC after being asked whether the Republican Party had become the party of Trump. "It has become a cult because of an absence of ideas. Because they have jettisoned the ideas for years, decades, all the 20th century almost. Conservatives said we're for free trade. Trump said, by the way, you're not anymore. And they said, OK, we're not for free trade anymore. Or they...

RUSH: I gotta play for you audio sound bite number two. Phil Mudd. I think Mudd is a former CIA guy. (muttering) Yeah, former deputy director, CIA Counterterrorist Center. He’s routine guest on CNN, and he has (for the past two years) been selling the Steele dossier. He’s been promoting it. He has been one of the most vociferous Never Trumpers. He’s been in the Clapper and the Brennan camp. “Trump’s guilty, Trump’s gonna go, Trump’s gotta go, Trump’s a scumbag,” whatever it is. It’s no different than what anybody else at CNN has been saying, but since he’s former...

Walmart shareholders on Wednesday voted down a proposal backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to put company workers on its board of directors, according to CNN. The 2020 presidential candidate, speaking as a proxy for Walmart employees, offered the resolution earlier in the day at the shareholders meeting, saying, “The concerns of workers, not just stockholders should be a part of board decisions.” Sanders told CNN after the vote that he didn’t think CEO Doug McMillon had gotten the message.

The parents of victims of the Parkland school shooting are suing the Broward County school board and the sheriff's office for failing to take timely action against the school shooter who killed 17 people at the school in February 2018. According to CNN : The lawsuit says the school board failed to take reasonable steps to provide proper security and says the sheriff's department "negligently implemented and executed its policies and procedures" by not going immediately into the building where the shooting [was] happening. It is well known now that a deputy from the Sheriff's office, Scot Peterson, was on...

House Democrats plan to hold an event intended to highlight what they say is President Trump’s deteriorating mental health. House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) said he and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) will host Dr. Bandy Lee, a Yale School of Medicine psychiatrist who edited the bestselling book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” “We are planning to do something where she can make a presentation to other members, so that they'll be aware of what she's been working on,” Yarmuth told The Hill in a brief interview

[Catholic Caucus] Abp. Gregory’s Pro-LGBT Efforts Honored in Diocesan Newspaper Rainbow-colored ad heaps praise on former head of Atlanta archdiocese ATLANTA (ChurchMilitant.com) – In the wake of Abp. Wilton Gregory's installment as new head of the Washington, D.C. archdiocese, a dissident LGBT group in Georgia took out a rainbow-colored ad to thank their former archbishop. The rainbow-colored ad appeared in the official Atlanta archdiocesan newspaper, placed on behalf of Fortunate and Faithful Families, an organization of "Catholic families affirming their LGBTQ members." Fortunate and Faithful Families openly dissents from Church teaching on chastity, and associates with other dissident, pro-LGBT organizations like DignityUSA and...

Two reporters fired amid widespread industry-wide layoffs this year are launching a nonprofit organization to protect other journalists from a similar fate as big tech companies continue to threaten the industry's viability. Laura Bassett, a former culture and political reporter at HuffPost, and John Stanton, a former BuzzFeed News Washington bureau chief, founded the Save Journalism Project. It aims to save the industry from the "monopolistic power of big tech companies," according to a news release. According to the Save Journalism founders, firms like Google and Facebook dominate the digital advertising market, distributing news content without paying to produce it...

Wendy’s has a commercial where a group of stereotypical Italian Americans crowd around an idealized white person and act crudely and threateningly towards him. They eat like slobs, eating spaghetti and meatballs, acting suspiciously of him, and generally make buffoons of themselves. They wear gold chains, have a darker complexion than the white man, and have very ethnic features such as black hair and big noses. Most obviously, the premise is that they are all mobsters and that the white man is there to defeat their evil. At the end of the commercial, two very non-Italian looking federal agents are...

Pope’s new teaching on death penalty appears in revised theological commentary on catechism Vatican City, June 5, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – The revised edition of the 1993 Theological Commentary on the Catechism of the Catholic Church will contain Pope Francis’ new doctrine on the death penalty. Although in recent decades Catholic popes have encouraged civil authorities not to use the death penalty, they did not label it intrinsically evil until 2017 when Pope Francis declared capital punishment to be “contrary to the Gospel.” In an interview with America magazine, the editor of the revised edition, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, said that Pope...

AOC slams FBI over double standard for white supremacists WASHINGTON – Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proclaimed on Twitter Wednesday that “Neo-Nazis are getting off the hook,” sharing a video of a back-and-forth she had with FBI leadership over who gets defined as a terrorist. “This hearing was wild,” Ocasio-Cortez said. The New York Democrat questioned Michael McGarrity, the assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, at a House Oversight subcommittee hearing Tuesday. AOC was trying to make the point that white supremacists – what the hearing was about – and Muslim terror suspects were treated differently under the law. “Doesn’t it...

A short time ago, my wife and I were having lunch in a small restaurant on a Sunday, and nearby was a lady pastor, dressed in black clergy garb and collar. She was sitting with several couples around a large round table. It appeared this was a group from her church, having lunch after their service. As they ate, there was a lively discussion about “fundamentalist” Christians, and how deluded they are. “The problem,” this lady pastor laughed, “is that so many people are stuck in the mindset of what they have always been taught. But now we KNOW so much...

Multibillion-dollar business software provider Salesforce announced on Thursday that it would no longer do business with anyone who legally sells certain firearms or ammunition magazines. The corporation, worth around $120 billion, updated its Acceptable Use and External Facing Services Policy to ban anyone using their software from selling nearly all modern semiautomatic rifles and many other semiautomatic firearms.

Boise will ask the Supreme Court of the United States to hear its appeal in the case of Martin v. Boise, the “camping lawsuit” that stemmed from a city ordinance that banned sleeping in public places. The city filed a petition to the court to ask for it to extend the deadline for the city’s writ of certiorari, which is an order of a higher court to a lower court to send documents of a case so that the higher court may review a decision. That request starts the review of the case and the process for determining if the...

At a campaign event in Detroit, Michigan, on Tuesday, 2020 Democrat presidential candidate and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said that climate change is an even bigger challenge than World War II. “America has faced huge challenges before, WWII and putting a man on the moon,” Warren said. “This environmental catastrophe bearing down on us may be the biggest challenge yet.” Warren’s disconcerting comparison to WWII must mean her plans to prevent climate change are drastic indeed. To handle this global threat, Warren weirdly implies we must have to mobilize a greater American industrial base than was in place during WWII,...

I recently wrote about the coming civil war over the issue of abortion, and day by day, state by state, the divide is getting more pronounced and more extreme. Let’s take a look at a map of America to see where things stand at the moment. As broken down by NBC News, the states of Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia – forming a connected chain – along with Utah, have passed strong pro-life bills. Of interest is the fact that, in most of these states, the bill passed with overwhelming approval in each of the legislative...

While Illinoisans will be paying higher taxes, Gov. J.B. Pritzker says he’s going to give state lawmakers at least a $1,600 pay increase because they’re hard workers. Pritzker said he’ll sign the budget bills being sent his way, despite the ire from taxpayers that lawmakers gave themselves a raise while doubling the state’s gas tax. Pritzker was asked multiple times in Chicago Tuesday if he’d line-item veto more than $280,000 in lawmaker pay increases when he gets the budget that was passed in overtime session. “Look, this was a highly negotiated budget,” Pritzker said. “We had the Republicans and Democrats...

If you’re among the 99, don’t wish for the 1 lost to remain so– Jesus certainly didn’t. And yet when you disputed a pastor’s decision to minister to the lost, you wish just that. Last Sunday President Trump made an unexpected visit to McLean Bible Church in Northern VA and requested prayer, which was granted on their main stage by Lead Pastor David Platt. Platt later issued a statement in response to many in his church who were angry with his decision to pray for the president. Prior to praying for President Trump, Platt read 1 Tim 2:1-6 from the...