Free Republic

With a sturdy job market, healthy consumer balance sheets, and low inflation, the economy is probably not headed toward a recession. But to continue America’s prosperity and guard against a potential economic slowdown caused by the ongoing trade war with China, President Trump should lower one of the most oppressive of all federal taxes — the payroll tax. The payroll tax is imposed on both employees and employers to fund Social Security, Medicare, and other social-insurance programs. Since 1955, the basic payroll tax has nearly quadrupled from 4 percent to 15.3 percent. Today, almost 70 percent of taxpayers pay more...

[Catholic Caucus] Thank You, Abp. Viganò A reflection from Fr. Paul Kalchik A year ago, Abp. Carlo Maria Viganò issued a letter to the Universal Church, and promptly went into hiding, his letter confirmed and validated in numerous ways over the ensuing months. Francis’ papacy continues on unchanged and the "homosexual current" in the Church maintains control.  For myself as a priest, as the victim of priest homosexual abuse, Abp. Viganò's letter prompted me to write my own letter to Pope Francis; this letter has been left unanswered, although it was made public.  As the victim of priest homosexual abuse, Abp. Viganò's letter prompted me to write my own letter to Pope Francis.Tweet It...

Graduating M.B.A. students this year have had no trouble landing very good jobs. In most cases, starting pay has hit record levels and placement rates for schools are at or near records as well. Yet, for the second consecutive year, even the highest ranked business schools in the U.S. are beginning to report significant declines in M.B.A. applications and the worse is yet to come, with many M.B.A. programs experiencing double-digit declines. Last year, the top ten business schools combined saw a drop of about 3,400 M.B.A. applicants, a 5.9% falloff to 53,907 candidates versus 57,311 a year earlier (see...

<snip> There are two methods of manipulation, ‘persuasion’ that the left uses to get gun control and the media is able to optimize both tactics with mass shootings.The first ploy is to pounce on a tragedy before the bodies are cold.Rahm Emanuel gave voice to this technique when he instructed: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” Translation: if you have a horrific massacre, get right in there while the emotions are raw, while the victims’ families and survivors...

Back in 2017, Queerty, a prominent LGBT news and advocacy site, gleefully shared a recut of the trailer for the award-winning movie, “Call Me By Your Name,” featuring clips from Disney’s “Monster’s University.” In 2018, on the site Dan Tracer lamented that explicit sex scenes between the two main characters, a 17-year-old boy and a 24-year-old man, were cut from the main release.Describing the decision, Tracer wrote, “James Ivory, who won the Oscar for writing the film’s screenplay, says his original script called for full-frontal from both the film’s two stars. Both Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer’s contracts, however, nixed...

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The New York Times has published a series of essays about slavery, race, and American politics under the heading “1619 Project.” These essays cover an enormous amount of terrain: music, constitutional theory, economics, management, ethnic identity, and more.Many conservatives responded negatively, which at first perplexed me. Slavery was a huge part of American history and has affected every facet of our society. A collection of articles outlining this history seems as good a topic as any to write about.But zoomed out from the mostly mundane minutiae of individual articles — in the absence of slavery and thus without as...

VIDEO The Democrat National Committee had a summer meeting meltdown in San Francisco on August 22. This is an hilarious preview of what promises to happen next year at the DNC convention in Milwaukee.

On May 28, 1993 Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12850. This improper EO changed the way the U.S. made trade deals with China and led to the loss of tens of millions of American manufacturing jobs. The story of how this was done not only proves that the Clintons are behind the loss of American jobs, but shows how Bill Clinton established a Democratic strategy for manipulating foreign policy that was copied by both Hillary while she was Secretary of State and Obama while he was president. At the time, U.S.-China trade relations were conditioned upon China’s humanitarian treatment of...

Facebook has banned The Epoch Times, a conservative news outlet that spent more money on pro-Trump Facebook advertisements than any group other than the Trump campaign, from any future advertising on the platform. The decision follows an NBC News report that The Epoch Times had shifted its spending on Facebook in the last month, seemingly in an effort to obfuscate its connection to some $2 million worth of ads that promoted the president and conspiracy theories about his political enemies. “Over the past year we removed accounts associated with the Epoch Times for violating our ad policies, including trying to...

Thursday on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” host Chris Matthews described President Donald Trump as “heading up skyward in the craziness department.” Matthews said, “He wants to fight with everybody, including the quiet, American-loving Danes.” He continued, “I think going to war with Denmark is still freaking news. I’m sorry. It still makes my list. This is like a Mel Brooks movie.” He added, “He wants to go to war over Greenland if you wrote this description in Hollywood, nobody would buy it.” Matthews concluded, “If we were in a hospital and a good nurse or doctor we would have a chart with...

If you’re thinking “I didn’t know he was running,” that’s understandable. Moulton never managed to qualify for the first two debates even though the DNC broke them into two-night events to accommodate as many candidates as possible. I mean, Eric Swalwell managed to make the first debate. Imagine waking up in the morning to the reality that you’ve performed worse than Eric Swalwell.

Our Country has lost, stupidly, Trillions of Dollars with China over many years. They have stolen our Intellectual Property at a rate of Hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year, & they want to continue. I won’t let that happen! We don’t need China and, frankly, would be far....... better off without them. The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United States, year after year, for decades, will and must STOP. Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing.... your companies HOME and making your products in...

The value of the Chinese yuan fell to a fresh 11-year low against the US dollar on Friday, fuelling worries that China has given up on achieving any progress to end the trade war with the United States in the near term and so is moving to offset the effect of new tariffs with a weaker exchange rate. The weaker yuan, in turn, dragged down regional currencies, aided by central bank interest rate cuts, that would lead to an acceleration of capital outflows from Asia this year. Recent signs appear to indicate that China was preparing its economy for a...

Maliyah Smith took a flight last week from Omaha, Nebraska, to Atlanta, where she was going to find a future for herself. Tragically, the future ended just a few days later on an interstate in Lexington County. She turned 19 in early August. By Aug. 18, she was in a new town where the world was opening up for her. She had credentials to work in the medical field and talked about going to college. The pull of Atlanta’s opportunities might have been secondary to another factor easing Smith to the city — the chance to be with her big...

Engineers in World War I dug through the earth to build serpentine trenches borne from horrifically clear logic. If enemy soldiers ever breached it, the zigzagging pattern would prevent them from shooting in a straight line down the length of the trench — leaving only a relative few exposed to gunfire or shrapnel. That concept has been reinvigorated a century later, in a sense, for a western Michigan high school, to dampen the killing potential of a mass shooter. A $48 million major construction project at Fruitport High School will add curved hallways to reduce a gunman’s range, jutting barriers...

David Koch — the billionaire co-owner of Koch Industries and powerful political donor — has died. He was 79 years old. The death of the billionaire conservative icon, who stepped down from his role as executive vice president of the family’s company last year, was announced Friday morning by his older brother, Charles.

[Catholic Caucus] Catholic parish allows 1st-graders to sign up as ‘gender neutral’ for Communion class VISALIA, California, August 22, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — A Catholic parish in California gave parents the option to register their children as “gender neutral” when signing them up for faith formation classes. Good Shepherd Catholic Parish in Visalia, California, whose pastor was recently put on administrative leave over sexual assault allegations, allowed parents to select “male,” “female,” or “gender neutral” when signing up their children online for classes ranging from First Communion to Confirmation to general catechism. The parish is located in the Diocese of...

A new report on NBC News by radical feminist Marcie Bianco argues that “heterosexuality is just not working.” Women are increasingly opting out of heterosexuality because it is “the bedrock of their global oppression,” NBC News asserted in a bizarre opinion piece this week. “Men need heterosexuality to maintain their societal dominance over women,” writes Marcie Bianco for the NBC News website. “Women, on the other hand, are increasingly realizing not only that they don’t need heterosexuality, but that it also is often the bedrock of their global oppression.” Ms. Bianco lumps together a series of recent news stories, “from...

President Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski says he would shed his reputation as a partisan pit bull to become an effective bipartisan champion for New Hampshire in the Senate. But the famously in-your-face Trump ally said he’s worried about the personal cost. “The truth is, the only hesitation I have is the dishonest media distorting my record … and saying things that are untruthful and putting my family and friends through a smear campaign,” Lewandowski said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. With Trump all but endorsing him, Lewandowski would likely steamroll his Republican rivals in a September...