Free Republic

The moment usually comes during Greg Petras’s commute through the rolling hills and cornfields of southern Wisconsin. Somewhere between his home near Madison and the factory he runs on the edge of the small town of Brodhead, the news will turn to the trade wars and Donald Trump will again claim that China is bearing the cost of his tariffs. That’s when Petras loses it. “It’s just an outright lie, and he knows it,” says Petras, president of Kuhn North America, which employs some 600 people at its farm-equipment factory in Wisconsin. For Kuhn, Trump’s trade war has produced a...

Meghan McCain has some thoughts about President Trump’s canceled meeting with leaders of the Taliban. This morning on The View, the conservative co-host absolutely skewered the “secret” Camp David summit, which Trump revealed (and then promptly canceled) in a series of tweets on Saturday. McCain described the Taliban meeting as “the dumbest” idea out of “all the bad crap things” Trump has done, adding, “If that ended up happening, I would create a coup.” News of the secret Taliban meeting first surfaced on Saturday night, when Trump tweeted, “Unbeknownst to almost everyone, the major Taliban leaders and, separately, the President...

Maybe he should convert to YouTube. A pastor and self-proclaimed “former homosexual” is suing Vimeo after the video-sharing website shuttered his account for posting clips lauding conversion therapy. Church United pastor James Domen’s Manhattan federal court suit says Vimeo shut down his account for posting five videos relating to “religion and sexual orientation” — but claims the video platform actually did it as part of an effort to silence him. “Church United’s account was deleted in an effort to censor James Domen from speaking about his preferred sexual orientation and his religious beliefs,” says the lawsuit, which says Domen spent...

DURANGO, Colo. — Every summer night throughout the American West, hundreds of tourists and western music fans sit down to a meal and a show at a modern-day chuck wagon. At these venues, a throwback to the covered wagon kitchens that were part of cattle drives, audiences polish off plates loaded with meat, baked beans, a potato, applesauce, a biscuit and cake, and then watch a house band tell corny jokes and play cowboy songs popularized by people like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry in the 1930s and ’40s. The bands are not just the entertainment; they are the main...

Flint, Mich. A Southwestern High School teacher says her car was stolen from the school parking lot by a student and is accusing the school district and police of not doing anything. Special Education teacher Mary Toth spoke exclusively to Fox 66/NBC 25 News. Toth says on August 13th the student was supposed to be helping her clean her classroom. She says she left her purse in the classroom when she stepped out. She says when she returned, she later discovered that money and keys were stolen from her purse. She says the student then stole her 2015 Chevy Malibu...

Canterbury Archbishop Caught Lying? Abp. Justin Welby cites a non-existent convention to justify silence on abortion LONDON (ChurchMilitant.com) - The Anglican archbishop of Canterbury has come under severe criticism for apologizing for a historical massacre in India while citing a non-existent convention to excuse his absence from a parliamentary debate on abortion. None of the 26 bishops who serve as voting members of the House of Lords were present during the debate on July 17 for the critical vote that resulted in the imposition of abortion on Northern Ireland. Justin Welby has now defended the bishops' absenteeism, citing convention. There is nothing in...

US President Donald Trump will be joining PM Narendra Modi at a mega event in Houston named "Howdy, Modi!". The September 22 event will be the first time a US president and Indian Prime Minister will be addressing a joint rally. Amid speculation if Trump would join PM Modi at the Houston event, White House issued a statement to confirm that he would attend the rally. This is the third successive meeting between Trump and PM Modi within the span of a few weeks after the G20 and G7 summits. More than 50,000 Indian-Americans from across the US have registered...

A Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation in New York made news this week after it featured the sculpture of a pagan deity in its chancel. The United Presbyterian Church of Binghamton hosted “the Sviatovid idol” which depicts a ninth-century Slavic deity, as part of a September 6-7 festival of lights. Sviatovid (alternately known as Svetovid, Svantovit, Sventovit, or Svantevit) was a local Slavic god of war, fertility, and abundance in the Baltic region. In the early twentieth century, an idol was discovered near the Zbruch River in Western Ukraine (accessible with free JSTOR account). This idol pictured was originally thought to...

No amount of growth or good intentions will change this fact. [Cut] Furthermore, it’s not what Biden says in prepared remarks that’s problematic, it’s what he says off the cuff and under pressure that to me reveal an antiquated view on racial matters and racial sensitivities. It was the way he advocated for the 1994 crime bill, a bill that contributed to America’s surging mass incarceration, which disproportionately affected black and brown people in this country. The bill did some good, but the harm it did cannot be overlooked or understated. Rather than fully owning up to to the disastrous...

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un invited U.S. President Donald Trump to visit Pyongyang in a letter sent in August, a South Korean newspaper reported on Monday, citing diplomatic sources. The letter, the second Trump received from Kim last month amid stalled denuclearization talks between the two countries, pre-dated North Korea's latest launch of short-range projectiles a week ago. In the second letter, which was passed to Trump in the third week of August, Kim spoke of his willingness to meet Trump for another summit, one source reportedly told the Joongang Ilbo newspaper. The White House, the U.S. State Department...

There’s a bit of news in the case of Jeffrey Epstein. He’s the convicted sex offender who somehow managed to commit suicide in a New York jail last month while he was supposed to be under close watch. My public information request about his death— has been formally denied. Shortly after Epstein died in August, I filed a Freedom of Information request for public documents about his injuries and medical care for both the day he died and earlier, in July, when he reportedly attempted suicide. Member of the public and press are entitled to review documents and communications generated...

The leftstream media characterization of Joe Biden is that he is moderate, likable, and the most electable Democrat candidate.  He is affable Uncle Joe, the self-made lunchbox-toting common man of the people. In truth, he is none of the above. Joe the Moderate The "Biden as moderate" canard is getting increasingly hard to defend.  On the economy-, car-, and cow-killing $93-trillion Green New Deal, Biden was asked if it goes too far or is unrealistically promising too much. He answered, "No, no it's not." When previously asked if there would be any place for fossil fuels, including coal and fracking, in his administration, Biden answered,...

Back in 2016, California passed a new law (Assembly Bill 1887) establishing a naughty list of states that don’t conform to their high moral standards. The bill created a travel ban, forbidding state-funded or endorsed travel to states that failed to provide “protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.” They quickly began adding states to the list, including Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Kentucky. (Clever readers are probably noticing a pattern already.)This week, California’s woke Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, broke out his sharpie and added another name to the list. This time it was Iowa,...

Has anyone seen the new commercial for the HIV drug Truvada? The commercial states they are doing it for prep. However it later goes on to say it helps lower the risk of contracting HIV in high risk people. So basically it is a drug for people who cannot control their sex drive and have dozens of sex partners per year.

A weekend drone attack on Saudi Arabia that cut into global energy supplies and halved the kingdom’s oil production threatened Sunday to fuel a regional crisis, as the U.S. released new evidence to back up its allegation that Iran was responsible for the assault amid heightened tensions over Tehran’s collapsing nuclear deal. President Donald Trump said the U.S. had reason to believe it knew who was behind the attack — his secretary of state had blamed Iran the previous day — and assured his Twitter followers that “we are ... locked and loaded” depending on verification and were waiting to...

Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Ric Ocasek, lead singer of the rock band The Cars, died Sunday in New York at age 75. Police said they received a call around 4 p.m. for an unconscious male at a townhouse on East 19th Street. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Law enforcement sources confirmed the deceased was Ocasek. Ocasek and his band were inducted into the Rock Hall in 2018. The institution described the band as "hook-savvy with the perfect combo of new wave and classic rock." The band had 13 top-40 singles, including radio staples like "Good Times...

Is the New York Times "airbrushing" history again? It would seem so. On Saturday, November 22, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko presided over a commemoration in Kiev of the 75th anniversary of the famine genocide of 1932-1933 that took the lives of 7-10 million Ukrainians. Known as the Holodomor (Ukrainian for "murder by hunger"), it is one of the greatest mass murders in history, and one of the cruelest ... The New York Times prides itself on being the national "newspaper of record" and still carries its longtime motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print" in the upper left-hand corner...

[Catholic Caucus] Pope admits: Traditional Latin Mass is the Future Ok, he did not say that exactly... What he did say on September 12, however, would certainly lead to that logical conclusion: "To be modern, some believe that it is necessary to break away from the roots. And this is their ruin, because the roots, the tradition, are the guarantee of the future,” Pope Francis said Sept. 12 ...[i]n an a audience with nearly 200 members of the General Chapter of the Discalced Augustinians, the pope explained that “true tradition” is like the roots that bring a tree sap that...

PLANO — Beto O'Rourke on Sunday said Democrats should be bolder in their approach to issues related to gun control, immigration, criminal justice and climate change. "I'm a lifelong Democrat," O'Rourke told about 300 people outside of Artcentre of Plano. "For too long Democrats have played defense ... but just like Lucy with the football, every single time that we put our best foot forward and move forward in the spirit of consensus and comprise and start in that middle position, we lose it." O'Rourke called for a different, less compromising approach, noting that attempts at consensus building have led...

September 13, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — There has been a campaign to “infiltrate” the Church “that goes back centuries,” Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò said in a new interview with Dr. Robert Moynihan of Inside the Vatican. This campaign can be traced “in particular, to the creation in the middle of the 1700s of freemasonry,” said Viganò. “But of course this project was very deceptive, and oriented, or even included in some way, the forces of some members of the Church.” “This is described in the book Infiltration by Dr. Taylor Marshall, so you may find some indication of this process there,”...