Free Republic

HYANNIS PORT, Mass. - A 22-year-old granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy died Thursday at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, the family said in a statement. Saoirse Kennedy Hill, 22, was the daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy's fifth child, Courtney, and Paul Michael Hill, who was one of four falsely convicted in the 1974 Irish Republican Army bombings of two pubs. The Kennedy family released a statement on Thursday night, following reports of a death at the family's compound in Hyannis Port. The statement was issued by Brian Wright O'Connor, a spokesman for former congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II....

The U.S. economy added 164,000 jobs in July and unemployment held steady at 3.7 percent. Economists surveyed by Econoday had forecast a gain of 151,000 for July and for unemployment to decline slightly to 3.6 percent. While the economy has continued to grow this summer, it has shown signs of slowing from the rapid 3.1 percent rate of growth in the first three months of the year. Manufacturing has been a weak spot while consumer spending and the labor market have been strong. Economic growth slowed to a 2.1 percent rate in the April through June period.

ustin Walker, who vigorously advocated for the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation of his former boss, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, drew pointed questions Wednesday during a Senate hearing on his own federal court nomination after the American Bar Association deemed him “not qualified” for the bench. Walker, 37, a litigator at Dinsmore & Shohl who also teaches at Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville, was tapped by President Donald Trump for a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky. A former clerk to Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit,...

Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) told Breitbart News in an exclusive statement Thursday that he will introduce “common sense” legislation to better project the cost of federal budgeting by including the interest cost of government spending. Sen. Daines introduced the Budgetary Accuracy in Scoring Interest Costs (BASIC) Act Thursday, which would require both the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation to include projected interest expenses associated with legislative proposals. Daines said that including interest is necessary to accurately account for the budgetary cost of the legislation. Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and David Perdue (R-GA), two fiscal hawks,...

The District of Columbia's new Catholic leader - the country's lone black archbishop - on Thursday issued his first public statement since his installation, lambasting President Donald Trump's recent tweets about members of Congress of color as "diminishing our national life." Wilton Gregory, who came to Washington in May, is known through his long, prominent career for being nonconfrontational on hot-button issues in public, but working quietly behind the scenes - a model similar to the man he replaced, Cardinal Donald Wuerl. But on Thursday, Gregory signaled that he wants to use his higher-profile perch in the nation's capital to...

Today’s Cryptogram OZAOUZ IGZ UAWZUT FZMINRZ XEZT FNSUV CIUUR SWRXZIV AK FGSVHZR. –DARZOE K. WZCXAW Today's Cryptogram is from The Arkansas Gazette You can find this little fun word game, to combat early dementia and senility in us baby boomers, in several daily publications. 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 your time and any tips you might...

In Wednesday evening's Democratic presidential debate circus, the left's favorite darlings turned on one another with a selfish vengeance, which was a positive development for the country and mildly entertaining. The glorious infighting continued among progressive commentators. This acrimony, coupled with the public exposure of the left's crazy ideas, surely diminished the party's image among sane voters. The more leftists reveal their inanity and extremism, the better for President Trump and the nation. As one lifelong-Democrat African American caller told Rush Limbaugh the day after the debates, "The Democratic Party is no longer recognizable to me." The consensus was that...

My name is LZ Granderson and I smoke pot. Not in a wishy-washy/Clintonesque “I didn’t inhale” sort of way, but rather in a depending-on-what-time-you-are-reading-this-I-could-be-high-right-now sort of way. Because I’m a black man of a certain age with a head full of locs, this proclamation could easily be met with a cynical shoulder shrug followed by “of course you smoke pot, look at you.”

SEOUL, South Korea—North Korea fired what appeared to short-range ballistic missiles twice Friday into the sea off its eastern coast in its third round of weapons tests in just over a week, South Korea’s military and presidential office said. Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the launches were conducted at 2:59 a.m. and 3:23 a.m. from an eastern coastal area and said the projectiles flew 137 miles (220 kilometers) on an apogee of 15 miles (25 kilometers) and at a max speed of Mach 6.9. South Korea’s presidential office, which held a meeting presided over by chief national security adviser...

TGIFF! Its Fiddle Friday. On June 14, 1923 Fiddlin’ John Carson entered a building on Nassau Street in Atlanta and recorded The Little Old Log Cabin In The Lane. This week I posted the story this historic building is being torn down to be replaced by a Margaritaville hotel (https://thewesterner.blogspot.com/201...) . Carson’s recording was believed to be "one side of the first documented recordings of a southern rural musician." We now know that is not quite right. “Eck Robertson recorded several sides of fiddle music on Victor before Carson made his first recording, and one of the discs was released...

A spiritual retreat center in Western Massachusetts, home to 19 acres of bucolic fields and forested trails, may become a residential treatment facility for young men who need to detach from technology and overcome their debilitating addiction to video games. Odyssey Behavioral Healthcare is awaiting a special permit approval from the town of Leyden, near the Vermont border, to launch the Greenfield Recovery Center, intended for people with “gaming disorder.” The voluntary program could accommodate about 30 patients who are on average between 18 and 25 years old, said Dr. David Greenfield, an Odyssey clinical partner and founder of the...

Mr. President, go play golf. You obviously have been working too hard. So, give yourself, the country and your Twitter account a break. Go silent for a while. Go Tweetless during the August recess. And forget frenzied Mar- a-Lago. As painful as it might be, take a page from Barack Obama’s laid- back presidential playbook, or even Bill Clinton’s, and go to Martha’s Vineyard for a week or so. You can play 18 holes of wonderful seaside golf with some locals in the early morning August mist at Farm Neck at Oak Bluffs. If you look carefully, you can probab

I know it’s FLOTUS Friday but I checked all the newsfeeds and the only coverage the MSM deemed newsworthy about our First Lady was this story. It’s about Ilhan Omar been a U.S. citizen for 6 years longer than Melania Trump. This provided the opportunity to rerun the “Donald Trump made racist comments about the Squad!” outrage story again, thus checking off a lot of boxes in the “newsworthy” category.I guess Ilhan’s seniority in the citizen department qualifies her to make anti-American and anti-Semitic comments with impunity. A Tale of Two Immigrants: one loves her adopted country and the other wants...

The need for a back-up or hide-out pistol goes hand in hand with holsters made for out of the way places, like ankle holsters. I have used ankle holsters that ranged from wearable to painful but I have finally found one that you can actually carry the gun in without noticing it. These are intended for maximum concealment, not fast draw, but ankle holsters are never very good for fast draws. The Gun Sox Stretx Holstering System from Cheata Tactical consists of a well padded stretch sock-like section that goes between the ankle and the knee. It comes in the...

The United States Secret Service is moving forward with plans to outfit its agents with Glock 9 millimeter (mm) pistols to replace the agency's existing Sig Sauer .357-caliber duty weapons -- part of a larger move among U.S. law enforcement agencies towards the lighter, more efficient guns. “The Secret Service has been one of the few agencies that has maintained Sig Sauer as a permanent duty weapon for more than 20 years,” said Donald J. Mihalek, a retired senior Secret Service agent and ABC News contributor. The Secret Service and Glock declined to comment on the move, but a federal...

Beyond a few comments, talk of abortion was mostly absent from both nights of the second round of Democratic debates. This went noticed by pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood, which decried how “voters missed an opportunity to hear how Democratic candidates will approach a fundamental issue that impacts their lives,” lumping, as they’re prone to do, abortion with healthcare. The omission was also noticed by National Review’s Alexandra DeSanctis, who pointed out that Democratic candidates and their media allies usually refer to abortion in euphemastic language. On both nights, the issue was raised by the candidates rather than the moderators,...

Announcing a no-prosecute is a big disappointment. In looking for collusion, Trump folks had prosecutions for lying to the FBI held over their head in order to get cooperation and testimony. Apparently, the heavy handed tactics of the DOJ used on the rest of us are too harsh for Comey. It must be nice to get that professional courtesy.

U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- There have been startling developments in the investigation of the disastrous no-knock raid in Houston on 28 January 2019. A middle-aged couple was killed and four police wounded. In the light of contradictory police stories, the family of the couple who died hired an independent forensics firm to document the evidence at the home at 7815 Harding Street. The independent investigation took place after forensic data collection done by the local government authorities. The independent investigators invited the Texas Rangers and the Harris County Institute for Forensic Science to attend the investigation. Both declined the invitation. The...

Last weekend, the president got bored and decided to see if he could make Democrats defend one of the most dangerous, mismanaged places in the country. And of course, he could. It wasn't hard. He just sent a flurry of tweets criticizing the city of Baltimore and Rep. Elijah Cummings. President Donald Trump called Baltimore a "disgusting, rat and rodent invested" hellhole, a "corrupt mess" that "no human being" would want to live in. A lot of people who've never been to Baltimore claimed to be deeply offended by those remarks. One person who seemed to agree with them was...