Free Republic

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is blaming Iran for drone attacks Saturday against Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure. The attacks, attributed to Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, sparked huge fires at a vulnerable chokepoint for global energy supplies. But in Saturday tweets, Pompeo says "there is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen" and points the finger at Tehran. He adds, "Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world's energy supply."

Our safety and progress are being held hostage by the GOP leadership, and no amount of Twitter-inspired meetings can stop that. I hope Cruz's professed love of the law motivates him to push his party into making some. Ninety percent of Americans, Democrats and Republicans, agree that we need a fix to the problem of gun violence in this country.

Just after securing the GOP presidential nomination in May 2016, Donald Trump landed in New Mexico and declared to a rally crowd, “We’re going to win this state.” Six months later, Hillary Clinton beat him there by eight percentage points. But even as Democrats have increased power in New Mexico, President Trump is convinced he can compete. On Monday, he returns to the state for the first time since taking office to hold a re-election rally near Albuquerque.

The socialist-driven economic and humanitarian crisis ravaging the beautiful country of Venezuela should give every American pause. It is not just that this ideology, which has failed the people of this South American nation, is now establishing a footing here in the United States—but it’s also because our beacon of hope that shines throughout Latin America is being threatened by America’s adversaries. As White House Senior Advisor Ivanka Trump met with Venezuelan refugees in Colombia last week, she promised, “we stand with the people of Venezuela in their struggle to restore democracy, freedom, and the rule of law.” No doubt...

A South African court has partially banned flying the country's apartheid-era national flag, saying such display amounted to "hate speech" and "harassment". Wednesday's landmark ruling in South Africa's Equality Court in Johannesburg barred the so-called "apartheid flag" - comprised of three stripes of orange, white and blue with the emblems of Britain, the Orange Free State and the South African Republic at its centre - from being displayed except for academic, artistic or journalistic purposes.

“If you need a license to drive a car, you should need a license to buy and possess a gun,” said U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, a Presidential candidate, and the bill’s author. The measure, dubbed the Federal Firearm Licensing Act, would require individuals who want to buy or receive a firearm to first get vetted by and be issued a license from the U.S. Department of Justice. In addition to an extensive background check, applicants would have to complete firearms training “which must include a written test and hands-on training to ensure safe use and accuracy,” and submit fingerprints. Further,...

When classes resumed in August, a number of school districts in the Florida Panhandle found that many of their students never came back. In Bay County (Panama City, Mexico Beach), the school district lost more than 3,200 students. Weeks into the new school year, school officials in Bay and Jackson counties had to handle students who needed to be involuntarily committed under the Baker Act for mental health reasons. “Before the storm, the Baker Act was not something we tracked. It was so unusual. It was something unfortunate that happened to a student,” said Sharon Michalik, spokeswoman for the Bay...

The voter polls are starting to stack up like Lincoln logs intended to build a house of uncertainty and confusion around voters. The shock thirsty media can’t help themselves and insist on using polls as reliable predictors of the election. It’s laughable considering the polls in 2016 had Hillary winning by a landslide. Why is America so consumed with the numbers produced by skewed samples and bias questions? Projections and polls are entertaining and easily manipulated but they cannot account for one thing, the immeasurable will of the voters. We are inwardly armed with the solid knowledge of economic growth...

September 29, 1949—September 13, 2019

“Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written.” I’ve been struggling with that sentence — the opening statement of the introductory essay to the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project on the legacy of slavery in America — for a few weeks now. It’s a very strange formulation. How can an enduring “ideal” — like, say, freedom or equality — be “false” at one point in history and true in another? You could of course say that the ideals of universal equality and individual liberty in the Declaration of Independence were belied and contradicted in 1776 by the unconscionable...

Laws that require abortion seekers to wait a period of time between counseling and the procedure can drive up the share of women of having riskier second-trimester abortions, suggests a new study distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research. What’s more, their abortion costs are likely to go up. Researchers from Texas A&M University analyzed the impacts of Tennessee’s mandatory waiting period (MWP), which was enacted in 2015 and requires that a minimum of 48 hours elapse between in-person counseling and a woman’s abortion. The policy increased the share of Tennessee women getting second-trimester abortions in 2016 by 4.1...

Abstract Mainstream dietary recommendations now commonly advise people to minimize the intake of red meat for health and environmental reasons. Most recently, a major report issued by the EAT-Lancet Commission recommended a planetary reference diet mostly based on plants and with no or very low (14 g/d) consumption of red meat. We argue that claims about the health dangers of red meat are not only improbable in the light of our evolutionary history, they are far from being supported by robust scientific evidence.

FULL TITLE: Doctors Say Facebook’s Decision To Take Down An Anti-Abortion Fact-Check Sets A Dangerous Precedent (barf alert) After Facebook removed a fact-check from an anti-abortion activist’s video, doctors are warning of the dangers of putting politics over evidence when it comes to health care. A team of doctors working with fact-checking group Health Feedback on Aug. 30 determined a video from Live Action founder Lila Rose, which falsely claimed that abortion is never medically necessary, to be inaccurate and misleading. Facebook notified people who had shared the video that it contained false information, and a link to the fact-check...

Wolf depredations on livestock in Idaho reached a record level during the past fiscal year, which ended June 30. From July 1, 2018, to June 30, 2019, Idaho Wildlife Services conducted 264 depredation investigations related to wolf complaints from 136 livestock producers in 17 counties. Of those 264 investigations, 175 involved confirmed wolf depredations, said Todd Grimm, the Idaho state director of Wildlife Services, which is a federal agency that helps solve conflicts between humans and animals. “Last year we had a pretty busy year,” he said during the Idaho Wolf Depredation Control Board’s Aug. 21 meeting. “The cattle guys...

Univision anchor Jorge Ramos should not have been a moderator at ABC News' Democratic debate Thursday, and his line of questioning proved it, according to media reporter Joe Concha. Concha called out Ramos on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on Friday for what he said was partisan language intermingled with a question he asked South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg. During the debate, Ramos told Buttigieg that President Trump "called Mexican immigrants rapists and killers, tried to ban Muslims from entering the country and separated children from their parents -- His supporters have chanted 'Build the wall' and 'Send her back'." Ramos...

Today, September 14, is the 1,611th anniversary of the death of Saint John Chrysostom, the great patriarch of Constantinople. St. John perished while on his way to a more distant exile on the shores of the Black Sea in AD 407. Though an outstanding orator and one of the greatest theologians of the early Church, John became embroiled in the religious and political factions in Constantinople. He was particularly known for railing against the excesses of the imperial court, drawing the ire of the Empress Eudoxia, wife of Arcadius, who felt that John’s invectives against immodest and gaudy female dress...

Users find PCs silenced while Microsoft looks into search fix Microsoft seems unable to catch a break with its Windows 10 updates. No sooner than it acknowledged that its CPU usage fix borked desktop search for some, users complained that the patch has also caused audio issues.Released on 10 September for Windows 10 1903 (aka the May 2019 Update), KB4515384 is a security update that included a fix for Cortana's CPU-munching habit. Alas, it turned out that the fix left desktop search a tad broken for some users.While the support page for the update resolutely states (at time of writing)...

President Trump ripped into one of his fiercest critics, claiming she lacked the talent needed to succeed in media. Donald Trump Who the hell is Joy-Ann Reid? Never met her, she knows ZERO about me, has NO talent, and truly doesn’t have the “it” factor needed for success in showbiz and now works for the Comcast/NBC losers making up phony stories about me. Low Ratings. Fake News! Reid released a book in June that described Trump as "The Man Who Sold America." Joy Reid I wrote The Man Who Sold America as a history - just to get it all...

Rubber Duck

After a painstaking investigation into the Trayvon Martin shooting, I have produced a film and written a companion book, both called The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America. Only after I started the project did I realize I had stumbled onto the most spectacular case of identity fraud in modern American judicial history. Thanks to the folks at American Thinker for allowing me to reveal it here for the first time. I had originally set out to produce a documentary about the rise of 2018 Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum. The more I looked into Gillum’s success,...