Free Republic

A man who telecom regulators say was apparently behind a barrage of racist robocalls in six states — sowing hate in response to the killing of an Iowa college student by an undocumented immigrant and a white supremacist’s murder trial in Virginia — is facing a proposed fine of nearly $13 million by the Federal Communications Commission. The man, Scott D. Rhodes, who anti-hate groups say is a white supremacist and runs the website Road to Power, was “apparently” responsible for more than 6,000 robocalls in 2018 “with the intent to cause harm,” the F.C.C. said on Thursday. The commission...

The way the fabric of space and time swirls in a cosmic whirlpool around a dead star has confirmed yet another prediction from Einstein's theory of general relativity, a new study finds. That prediction is a phenomenon known as frame dragging, or the Lense-Thirring effect. It states that space-time will churn around a massive, rotating body. For example, imagine Earth were submerged in honey. As the planet rotated, the honey around it would swirl — and the same holds true with space-time. Satellite experiments have detected frame dragging in the gravitational field of rotating Earth, but the effect is extraordinarily...

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) announced Thursday night she would vote in favor of witnesses. Bitter Mitt Romney, an angry Never-Trumper, said he would like to see John Bolton testify. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., may have the votes needed to bring the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump to a merciful end, perhaps as soon as Saturday. With the Democratic Party needing four GOP defections to prolong the trial — the GOP has a 53-47 majority in the upper chamber — Collins was a willing participant. “I believe hearing from certain witnesses would give each side the opportunity to...

Former National Security Adviser John Bolton on Thursday defended the impeachment inquiry witnesses who have been attacked by President Trump, implicitly hitting back at similar criticism he has faced for his role in the process.

Luis Gomez is in a back room hidden behind columns of tires at his family’s tire shop in Des Moines. He’s got his tablet open and he’s scrolling through his Facebook friends to see who he can call to ask about their caucus plans, but the timing is tricky. It’s 9:00 on a Tuesday morning and a lot of people are at work. He’s wearing a “Bernie Beats Trump” button, a permanent fixture on his coat. Gomez, a 31-year-old Mexican immigrant, is in the country as a legal resident, so he can’t participate in the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3....

Ten to 20 years from now, we will not be talking about impeachment, and believe it or not, we won't still be talking about Donald Trump either. We will be talking about our debt crisis. For all the good that came from this era, the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations will all be remembered as the ones that caused the crisis that will hammer our children and grandchildren. To understand where we are, it's helpful to review the past few years of this issue's development. At the Bush White House, where I worked for eight years, we knew we had...

“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...