Free Republic

“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”—John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children There can only be one winner emerging from this year’s Super Bowl LIV showdown between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs, but the biggest losers will be the hundreds of young girls and boys—some as young as 9 years old—who will be bought and sold for sex during the course of the big game. It’s common to refer to this evil practice, which has become the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity...

Savage Arms clever MSR acronym for branding the guns, using the tagline "MSR stands for Modern Savage Rifle". Although the four-gun family includes two MSR-15 models in 5.56mm (the Recon and Blackhawk), our focus here will be on a dynamic duo of aptly named, hard-hitting MSR-10s, the Hunter and the Long Range. And while the company’s slick new AR-15 rifles are already gaining a reputation as straight shooters, the chance to zero in on building a better AR-10 was a perfect fit for Savage – offering opportunities to play to the brand’s strengths, including long range accuracy and innovation. SAVAGE...

...When you read the Trump plan closely, you realize it is a mirror image of the Oslo Accords. Rather than Israel being required to prove its good will, the Palestinians are required to prove their commitment to peace. (...) Will Benny Gantz and his Blue and White party agree to abandon the Oslo blood libel most of its members embrace, and accept that Israel is capable of asserting its sovereign rights to these areas? Or will they hide behind the legal fraternity braying for Netanyahu’s head and preserve the anti-Semitic Oslo paradigm for their friends in the Democratic Party? And...

Thursday, Facebook Head of Health Kang-Xing Jin said the firm would “remove content with false claims or conspiracy theories that have been flagged by leading global health organizations and local health authorities that could cause harm to people who believe them.” He added that Instagram would also ban or restrict hashtags and conduct “proactive sweeps” to remove content spreading misinformation about the virus. Twitter meanwhile has adjusted its search prompt to lift information from “authoritative health sources” to the top of the page when users make searches about the coronavirus. Facebook has gotten into hot water over how it deals...

If Aesop were still around, he might be tempted to replace the fox with Joe Scarborough in his fable of the sour grapes. On today's Morning Joe, sour-grapes Scarborough claimed to be "fine" with President Trump's impending acquittal. Trying to console himself, Scarborough claimed that although Republicans will vote not to allow additional witnesses, the testimony that John Bolton would have given will nonetheless be "shouted from the mountaintops," and "will only make the Republicans look worse."Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

During his 1972 gubernatorial run, Senator Bernie Sanders told high school students that the U.S. had committed acts in its war with Vietnam that were “almost as bad as what Hitler did.” An article in Vermont newspaper The Rutland Herald reported on the comments, made while Sanders was campaigning for governor as a member of the Liberty Union party. The article was first unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon. The North Vietnamese “are not my enemy,” Sanders told a class of ninth graders in Rutland while on the campaign trail. “They’re a very, very poor people. Some of them don’t...

No excerpt from Bloomberg allowed, story here. The article says the number of consumers who thought raising taxes on the wealthy would help the economy fell from 49% in 2018 to 43% in 2019, and the number who thought it would hurt rose from 22% to 31%. It is based on a University of Michigan survey.

DES MOINES, Iowa — Of course Donald Trump packed the Knapp Center arena on the campus of Drake University, filling all 7,152 seats in the stands, with more on the floor. Of course another 1,000 people or so, kept out by the fire marshal, hung around in sub-freezing temperatures outside to watch the president's speech on a big screen. Of course the Trump event dwarfed those of any of his Democratic rivals days before the Iowa caucuses. Here in the first-voting state, President Trump is just bigger than his opponents. And if that message isn't made clear by just looking...

Donald Trump's most famous and flamboyant lawyer vanished from his trial Thursday - turning up in Miami to fight back against a tidal wave of criticism for his extraordinary defense that anything a president does to get re-elected is unimpeachable. The Harvard professor surfaced in Florida as other academics and attorneys reacted with astonishment to his position, which he then said he had never actually said. On CNN he told Wolf Blitzer that he had a commitment in the state Thursday and it was difficult to change his flight because the Super Bowl is on this weekend in Miami. He...

Joe Biden is done. A year from now, you can see him at Costco selling his newest book, “I Would Have Gotten Away with it if it Weren’t for those Meddling Kids.” Of course, it won’t be as successful as Hunter Biden’s book, “How to Make Millions from the Comfort of Your Home” but it will be the first honest work for Joe in almost five decades. The only person who doesn’t know he is finished yet is Joe himself, much like Hillary. Predictions about Democrats are difficult, especially in primaries. They seem to be breaking every barrier lately when...

Singapore will close its borders to all new visitors from mainland China, including foreigners who have been there within the past 14 days, becoming the first Southeast Asian country to do so in a bid to stem the spread of the deadly coronavirus. The island nation has China as one of its biggest trading partners and is a popular destination for Chinese tourists. Figures from the Singapore Tourism Board showed that 248,000 travellers from the mainland entered Singapore last November, while 3.42 million mainland Chinese tourists visited in 2018. The visa suspension will come into effect immediately so travellers can...

Remainers are scrawling 'I love EU' on 50p coins with permanent marker and releasing them back into circulation, in a last-ditch attempt to anger Brexit voters. Karen Hoyles, from Devon, posted pictures of her defaced coins online, calling for others to follow suit. In an appeal to her Twitter followers, she hoped for people to 'get their creative juices flowing' and release '10million' 50ps with the phrase.

Today’s CG is from me Z AZNN LIIR SVF ZC RBI NZKBR, ZC RBI LVXCZCK VCI, ABIC XGZCYXVMH JGNN VC SVFX LZNY HPZC GCY SVFX QNFI ISIH HMGXPNI QIRRIX RBGC RBI HPS. ----TNGFYZG MGOIN 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...

China has admitted it was too slow to react to the coronavirus outbreak which has sparked a global panic and left at least 213 people dead - amid claims that Beijing could be covering up a higher death toll. The secretary of the ruling Communist party in Wuhan said the virus's impact on the world 'would have been less' if measures had been taken sooner. The killer virus has spread around the world with the first cases in Britain confirmed today and governments scrambling to close their borders and retrieve their worried citizens from Wuhan. China has since imposed a...

Welcome to The Hill’s Morning Report. TGIF! Our newsletter gets you up to speed on the most important developments in politics and policy, plus trends to watch. Alexis Simendinger and Al Weaver are the daily co-creators, so find us @asimendinger and @alweaver22 on Twitter and recommend the Morning Report to your friends. CLICK HERE to subscribe! Senators today are expected to move toward acquitting President Trump on two charges without questioning witnesses as the third impeachment trial in American history lumbers toward a rancorous conclusion. Republicans feel confident they have the votes to acquit Trump by this weekend after Sen....

Willy Wonka could reportedly return to screens as a woman in a new prequel film. Bosses at Warner Bros. are allegedly considering taking on a female actress to play the role of the iconic chocolatier, after two previous adaptations starred Johnny Depp and Gene Wilder. It's also been reported that after Warner Bros. acquired the rights to the character from the Dahl estate in 2016, they are in the process of putting together a production team for the film.

This is as close to a positive article on anything-or-anyone-Trump you’ll read in this lifetime: Melania Trump is said to be focusing on her tasks amid President Donald Trump's impeachment trial What else, pray tell, would they have her do? Go out to lunch/dinner with friends (like a certain former-FLOTUS) so they can bitch about the traffic jams and otherwise mischaracterize that? The FLOTUS is, reportedly, happy with her life in the White House despite reports saying she's 'miserable' Nooooo! How dare she?! She has no business being happy after all the effort they’ve put into ruining not just her...

For many decades of our modern era, it's been an article of faith that our Founders enshrined the profession of journalism into the “freedom of the press” clause of the Bill of Rights. That understanding is wrong. It’s clear from the dictionaries of the day, as well as the writings of the Founders and other authors of the era, that what this First Amendment freedom refers to is the printing press, the device which made the wide dissemination of written speech possible, and which was the target of censorship and confiscation efforts by British authorities, both before and after the...

New York City’s antiquated method of calculating property taxes has long allowed owners of multimillion-dollar brownstones in Brooklyn and high-rise co-ops by Central Park to pay less in taxes than working-class homeowners in the South Bronx, relative to the value of their properties. Now, a high-level city commission empowered by the mayor and City Council speaker is proposing a major overhaul that would fundamentally shift the tax burden to those wealthier neighborhoods and lessen it for low- and moderate-income homeowners. In a preliminary report posted online Thursday, the commission recommended that the city assess most homes, including co-ops and condominiums,...

Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg has already dropped a fortune in support of his 2020 presidential bid — including, reportedly, $10 million for ad time during Sunday’s Super Bowl. Now, the exact figures are coming to light. And they are staggering. According to the Drudge Report, the Bloomberg campaign, on Friday, will release the numbers in a filing to the FEC. And the filing will state that campaign ad spending has already topped nine figures. And that’s just in advertising attacking President Donald Trump. Drudge, reporting through a Bloomberg campaign source, says the campaign has spent in excess of...