Free Republic

A German landlord was fined on Tuesday for advertising that he would only rent to German citizens. The 81-year-old was fined €1,000 ($1,100) for the discriminatory advertisement after a prospective tenant from Burkina Faso was rejected and then complained to authorities. A district court in the southern city of Augsburg banned the landlord from placing further advertisements that are limited to just Germans under threat of more substantial fines. […] The complainant, who was moving from Munich, told the court that the landlord swiftly ended an introductory phone call after he realized the applicant was foreign. The landlord told the...

Screen grab of video shows sailors and Marines at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida lined up in tribute as the parents of slain Ensign Joshua Kaleb Watson drove onto the base. (Benjamin and Sheila Watson via Facebook) Hundreds of sailors and Marines stood in long lines on both sides of a road at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, in a silent and moving tribute Sunday as the parents of slain Ensign Joshua Kaleb Watson drove onto the base. Benjamin and Sheila Watson posted a 10-minute Facebook video of their slow ride past the saluting service members. The only sounds...

Merriam-Webster just gave the personal pronoun “they” the word of the year title: Merriam-Webster recently added a new definition to its online dictionary to reflect use of “they” as relating to a person whose gender identity is nonbinary. In October, the American Psychological Assn. endorsed “they” as a singular third-person pronoun in its latest style guide for scholarly writing. Of all of the wokeness that I am not very woke about, the pronoun nonsense probably holds the least hope for me every achieving wokeitude. I am still too much a fan of science to believe that there are 6,000 genders...

Angelle Terrell is a Cajun who grew up in Lafayette (the capital of Cajun Louisiana), but who moved to Baton Rouge when she got married. For those outside of Louisiana, Baton Rouge, where I live, has a French name, and it’s in the southern part of the state (where the Cajuns are), but it is not a Cajun city. Sometimes it feels like Shreveport South. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — it’s the capital of a state, the northern half of which is Anglo Protestant — but it does give you an idea of why a Cajun woman from...

House Democrats and the White House have struck a deal on a historic trade deal to update the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced Tuesday. Pelosi announced the deal on a head spinning day in Washington just one hour after she joined Democrats in setting out two articles of impeachment against Trump. The agreement on the trade pact is important to Pelosi and Democrats, who want to show they can legislate even as they move toward just the third impeachment of a U.S. president in history. Republicans have repeatedly criticized Democrats as being consumed...

Friends, Americans, and Democrats, we’re finally getting somewhere in the political root canal they’re calling an impeachment inquiry. The Dems are going to announce articles of impeachment today, neither of which involve the word “bribery,” which they’ve been barfing up like toddlers with a stomach flu for the last two months. WaPo: Democrats are expected to unveil two articles of impeachment against President Trump on Tuesday that will focus on abuse of power and obstructing Congress, After all of the shrieking drama coming from the Democrats the past few months, “abuse of power” and “obstructing Congress” sound like half-hearted “Daddy’s...

The small but mighty personal pronoun “they” has been declared the 2019 Word of the Year by Merriam-Webster, officials announced Tuesday. “They” won the top spot on the annual, data-driven list after receiving a 313-percent search increase on the dictionary publisher’s website in comparison with 2018, the Associated Press reports. In September, Merriam-Webster expanded the definition of “they” as relating to a person whose gender identity is non-binary. Weeks later, the American Psychological Association recognized “they” as a singular third-person pronoun in its latest scholarly writing style guide.

Nancy Pelosi is letting impeachment stand in the way of passing a new trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Monday. He added that the focus on impeachment could wind up costing her the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. “There is one person holding this up,” Navarro said in an interview Monday on Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM. “This thing is locked and loaded and ready for Nancy Pelosi to pull the trigger. House Democrats have been delaying passage of the U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement, or USMCA, for months. The Democrats have...

Senator Elizabeth Warren envisions a future where our cars don’t run on gas but on the algae growing in our seas. That’s according to her “Blue New Deal” proposal out Tuesday that’s essentially a Green New Deal for the oceans. And what goes in our cars is only one quick example of the ways she would transform our relationship with the sea if she wins the presidency. This idea of a Blue New Deal has been floated earlier this year. But Warren, whose array of comprehensive climate plans is really quite impressive, is the only presidential candidate so far to...

Three and a half years after candidate Donald Trump bragged he could shoot someone in Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote, a lawyer for President Donald Trump was asked about the same scenario in a court of law. Trump’s lawyer had gone before the judge to stop the release of the president’s tax returns, which the Manhattan district attorney had subpoenaed as part of a criminal investigation. Trump’s legal team was breathtaking in its hubris: Because he was the president, Trump was immune from the criminal laws of New York or any other state. Did the same argument apply...

Sen. Rand Paul suspects someone revoked President Trump's order to have former CIA Director John Brennan's security clearance revoked. The president announced in August that Brennan's security clearance was being stripped due to "erratic behavior" that disqualified him from having access to sensitive information. But the White House never followed through with the complicated bureaucratic process of revocation, a source told the New York Times in a report published last month. Asked to comment about it in an interview on CNN, Paul said the "deep state," in which federal or military officials defy a democratically elected government, was likely to blame."Now the...

On 2 October 2019, following an early dusting of snow in Highlands, a retired geography teacher from Inverness called Helen Rennie hiked up to a gentle slope near the top of Cairn Gorm, clipped on her skis and slid a short distance downhill... In doing so she made history, becoming the first person to ski on Scottish snow at least once a month, every month for ten years. Typically, when adventurers complete notable challenges, there is some sort of fanfare: cheering crowds, jostling camera crews, salivating sponsors. In Rennie’s case, however, the celebrations were far from extravagant. “I’m not really...

No excerpt from Bloomberg allowed, story here.

I spent the weekend searching for the meaning of malarkey. One guy I talked to said he thought malarkey was something he ordered at a Greek restaurant. Another said it was Hungarian cabbage soup. A young millennial I interviewed said it was an exotic bird. In my wanderings I talked to another young man who said he believed that malarkey was code for strong strain of Bolivian marijuana. His buddy said it was a county in Ireland.

Democrats have argued that Mr Trump betrayed his oath of office, and put his own political interests above those of the country, by seeking to pressure Ukraine into investigating his rival Joe Biden. Mr Biden's son Hunter was on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, while he was vice-president. The Bidens have denied any wrongdoing. Mr Trump is accused of trying to leverage $391 million in military aid to Ukraine to kick start a corruption investigation into Mr Biden. The president has called the impeachment inquiry a partisan "witch hunt" and denied doing anything wrong. Other articles of...

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Monday excoriated the FBI’s investigation into now-debunked collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia as a “criminal enterprise.” Graham made the stinging remarks following the Justice Department inspector general report’s release in which 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” involving three applications filed under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were detailed. The report, authored by DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz, stated the inaccuracies likely led to the FBI’s justification to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

A fund in which the Vatican’s Secretariat of State has invested tens of millions of euros has links to two Swiss banks investigated or implicated in bribery and money laundering scandals involving more than one billion dollars. The fund is under investigation by Vatican authorities. The fund, Centurion Global Fund, made headlines this week that it used the Vatican assets under its management to invest in Hollywood films, real estate, and utilities, including investments in movies like “Men in Black International” and the Elton John biopic “Rocketman.” Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra reported that the Centurion Global Fund has raised...

Today’s Cryptogram From today's Arkansas Gazette CPNM ZDI ONK LD, DV LVXNY ZDI ONK, EXFHK HM. EDTLKXUU PNU FXKHIU, ADCXV NKL YNFHO HK HM. —SDPK NKUMXV 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...

She's a keen environmentalist on a mission to halt and save the planet. And Brazilian supermodel Alessandra Ambrosio used her December cover story for to spread her message. The 38-year-old traveled to Arabia, which she called one of her favorite places, for the photoshoot in the warm waters around Abu Dhabi’s Zaya Nurai Island. Growing up in Brazil, Alessandro stated, 'I always cared about the ocean. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a marine biologist. I always spent quality time with my family and all my vacations by the beach. 'And of course, I always pretended to...

Nancy Pelosi, Serial liar Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler and Democrats continue to lose the trust of the American public as they pursue their unprecedented politically motivated impeachment hearings. Democrats changed the rules, stacked the hearings with second-hand and third-hand witnesses, blocked Republicans from their day of witnesses, cut off Republicans from any decisions or requested witnesses, blocked Republicans and the White House from interviewing their original “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella who is linked to Schiff, John Brennan, Susan Rice and Joe Biden. Democrats blocked the White House from confronting their accuser, interrogating their accuser and providing witnesses. The entire process has...