Free Republic

LACKAWANNA COUNTY, Pa. -- An area veteran is tossing his hat into the political ring, announcing he is running for Congress. Staff Sgt. Earl Granville posted a video on his website Thursday morning explaining why he is running as a Republican for Congress in the 8th District against incumbent Democrat Matt Cartwright. The 8th Congressional District covers much of northeastern Pennsylvania. Granville joined the Pennsylvania National Guard in 2001 and went on to serve tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He was severely injured in an attack in Afghanistan and lost his leg.

Out of respect for the three US firefighters who lost their lives operating a Large Air Tanker, flags will fly at half mast in NSW tomorrow.

If the reports are true that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends on expressing support for the campaign that Russian President Vladimir Putin is conducting against Poland over the past few months, then it is a bad joke at the expense of the victims of the Holocaust, and its survivors, in whose name world leaders are gathering on Thursday at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem. At the center of Putin’s campaign is the accusation that Poland caused the outbreak of World War II, while minimizing the large role played by the Soviet Union.

LONDONDERRY--Police arrested a Subway manager for allegedly groping a male employee. Lyne Caron, 36, of Derry was charged with two counts of sexual assault by sexual contact, both Class A misdemeanors. According to the arrest warrant, a 30-year-old man employed at the Subway at 10 Nashua Road in Londonderry went to the police station the day after the alleged Nov 19 assault. He claimed that about 6:30 p.m., Caron reached behind with her back to his front and grabbed him outside his clothing and inside his pants while he was at the front counter. He told police Caron then...

The family of Botham Jean plans to file a separate lawsuit against South Side Flats, the apartment complex where former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger fatally shot him, a family attorney said. Attorney Lee Merritt said Saturday that a confusing layout on the upper floors, coupled with a faulty door mechanism, created circumstances that led to Jean’s death in September 2018. Jean, 26, was shot inside his own apartment by Guyger, who said she entered his home by mistake, believing it to be hers.

GREENVILLE, North Carolina -- An angry KFC employee rammed his SUV into the side of the restaurant when he was bamboozled by his paycheck. The man stopped by the restaurant to pick up his check on Tuesday morning and wasn't pleased. Police say he slammed the vehicle into the restaurant near the drive-thru, according to a WCTI report. Police told WCTI he didn't get the paycheck he expected. A vertical crack in the brick building went up the entire building. Charges are pending for the man, who was driving a white Ford Explorer. Around 10 people were inside the KFC...

The UN’s top court ruled on Thursday that the Rohingya face a “real and ongoing” threat of genocide in Myanmar, and emergency provisional measures should be implemented to protect the Rohingya inside the country. The provisional measures should be implemented to protect the Muslim Rohingya minority in Myanmar during the next stage of the hearing, said the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The court also ruled that it has jurisdiction over the genocide case and the next stage of the hearing can go ahead. The Gambia brought the case to the ICJ on behalf of an organization of Muslim nations,...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said on Wednesday that 45 GOP senators are prepared to dismiss the charges against President Trump and effectively end the Senate impeachment trial. The Kentucky senator told the Washington Post on day two of the Senate impeachment trial that 45 Republicans are ready to dismiss the charges against Trump. (Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the upper chamber.) He estimated that “five to eight” want to “hear a little more.” “There are 45, with about five to eight wanting to hear a little more,” Paul told the Post. “I still would like to dismiss it, but...

Three years into the Trump administration, we see a clear pattern forming. The Obama administration implemented labor rules that make the labor market less flexible, often at the expense of smaller businesses, but in ways that made unions happy. The Trump administration then takes these rules away. The latest example is the dismantling of the Obama Labor Department's joint employer rule. As the new Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia and the Office of Management Director Mick Mulvaney explained recently in The Wall Street Journal, "When joint employment exists, two separate companies are responsible for ensuring that workers receive the federally...

The assisted living senators are not dealing well with these long hours. – The U.S. Senate has, more than at any other time in its history, become a home for elderly citizens during the 21st Century. This is in large part due to the fact that it has also more and more become a place to accumulate massive amounts of wealth at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer in recent decades. No one wants to voluntarily leave the gig when there’s always so much more wealth to be grafted. Thus, this ongoing Kabuki dance of an impeachment trial takes place...

A large bloc of Republican Senators reportedly skipped large portions of Wednesday’s impeachment trial, flouting Senate rules requiring them to remain in their seats at all times during the proceedings, according to journalist Michael McAuliff. “Just counted 21 empty seats on the GOP side of the Senate, 2 on the Dem side, a couple hours into [Adam] Schiff’s presentation. Some are just stretching their legs, but most are not in the chamber. Some of them have been out of there for a while,” McAuliff said. That means more than one-third of 53 Republican senators tasked with deciding the president’s fate...

Changes in how the most widely used credit score in the U.S. is calculated will likely make it harder for many Americans to get loans. Fair Isaac Corp., creator of FICO scores, will soon start scoring consumers with rising debt levels and those who fall behind on loan payments more harshly. It will also flag certain consumers who sign up for personal loans, a category of unsecured debt that has surged in recent years. The changes will create a bigger gap between consumers deemed to be good and bad credit risks, the company says. Consumers with already-high FICO scores of...

Last week, the Herald Publication in Mascoutah, Illinois revealed that the City of Fairview Heights entered into an agreement with the IDOT to install automatic license plate readers (ALPR) on highway trusses to allegedly “prevent, deter and solve crimes.” Which is typical government doublespeak to explain away Big Brother tracking innocent motorists. Taken at face value, Fairview Heights reasons for tracking everyone is nothing new, they use the same cookie-cutter excuses that law enforcement across the country have been using. But what really caught my eye was the “other resolution approved by the council.” The other resolution calls for the...

Last month, The Atlantic magazine ran a powerful article by Peggy Orenstein about young men in America. Titled "The Miseducation of the American Boy," the article is poignant and deeply troubling. And yet I was struck by the fact that Orenstein misses some obvious causes and connections. She mentions, for example, that the interviews she conducted over two years revealed young men who are broadly supportive of the dreams, aspirations and general equality of young women. They are tolerant of and form friendships with gay classmates. According to the contemporary narrative, these trends should portend progress and better emotional and...

Marie Bailey and her husband used to live in Seal Beach, Calif., about 28 miles south of Los Angeles. But several years back, after years of talking about it, the couple left California and moved to Texas. Now they live in a bigger house in the Dallas area, pay less money in taxes – and love their life in the Lone Star State. “Everyone in California is nervous about taxes and prices,” Bailey told the Dallas Morning News last year. “We became much more calm when we came here. You are in a constant rat race in California to afford...

Most presidential campaigns feature a familiar refrain: Each candidate promises to create millions of new jobs. The 2020 primaries are unusual in that nearly all the Democratic candidates, including Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg, are solemnly pledging to destroy millions of jobs by ending the shale oil and gas revolution. The Democrats’ war on fossil fuels was on full display at the debate in Los Angeles last month, where Joe Biden, the supposed moderate, was asked if he would rein in America’s shale oil and gas production even if it meant “thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands”...

In July 2018, Commentary published an article by Yuval Levin that caused everyone who thinks about the balance of power among the branches in Washington, D.C., to say: "Of course! That's it exactly!" It had long been observed that Congress had, over the course of several decades, relinquished its powers to the executive and the courts. That wasn't news. Others had remarked that geographic sorting and gerrymandering had increased the ideological polarization of the two parties. This spurs members of Congress to side with presidents of their own party more than with their fellow legislators. Levin's insight went further. The...

Joe Biden, the 2020 Democratic presidential frontrunner, said Wednesday he wants "no part" of a witness swap reportedly being discussed by some members of his own party. Under the hypothetical deal, Democrats would reportedly offer up Biden or his son Hunter Biden to testify at President Trump's Senate impeachment trial in return for testimony from a Republican figure, such as ex-national security adviser John Bolton. The Washington Post quoted the former vice president admitting that it was "not an irrational question" but said Trump's trial was a "constitutional issue." He said he does not want to see the trial turn...

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took a shot at Greta Thunberg -- the famed teen climate activist -- on Thursday over her push at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, for companies to immediately cease all investments in fossil fuels. Mnuchin was at a news conference in the Alpine town when he was asked about Thunberg's earlier appeal to abandon older sources of energy, according to Reuters. "Is she the chief economist? ... After she goes to college and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us," he was quoted saying.

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