Free Republic

Protesters boo and confront former Mayor Pete Buttigieg for hypocrisy during a minimum wage picket with McDonald’s employees in Charleston, South Carolina on 2/24/2020.

WASHINGTON—America’s current national debt stands at roughly $23.3 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury Department’s “Debt to the Penny” website, which is so precise that visitors can pick a specific date in the recent past—say Jan. 1, 2000—and get the exact amount on that day: $5,776,091,314,225.33. While based on those figures, the national debt has more than quadrupled in that time frame, it’s actually much worse than that, according to calculations by Bill Bergman. “This calculation highlights some of the pitfalls and perils of false precision,” Bergman, the director of research for the Chicago-based nonprofit advocacy group Truth in Accounting...

On Monday, the Oregon Senate was scheduled to convene at 11 a.m. to conduct business in the short legislative session. Of the twelve Republican senators, eleven failed to attend, denying quorum and grinding the business of the Senate to a halt. Senate Minority Leader Herman Baertschiger (R-Grants Pass) blasted the President of the Senate for rigging the vote to move the bill out of the Ways and Means Committee for a vote on the floor. This marks the third time in less than a year that Senate Republicans have blocked priority legislation of the Democrats by denying quorum. Oregon's Democrats...

    ~The FReeper Canteen Presents~ Road Trip: Fort Irwin, CaliforniaFort Irwin National Training Center is a major training area for the United States military and is a census-designated place located in the Mojave Desert in northern San Bernardino County, California. Fort Irwin is at an average elevation of 2,454 feet. It is located 37 miles northeast of Barstow, in the Calico Mountains.One of the features of the base is the presence of 12 mock "villages" which are used to train troops in Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) prior to their deployment. The villages mimic real villages and...

LSU product Joe Burrow is on track to become the No. 1 overall pick in this year’s draft, and he has a lot of strengths going for him, in terms of his skill set, but hand size isn’t one of them. And while it may seem silly, it’s important to point out that many of the game’s best quarterbacks have hands that are at least 9 1/2 inches, if not bigger. Smaller guys, such as Drew Brees, have been able to counteract the issues about their height with their large hands. Burrow measured only nine inches at the NFL Scouting...

Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders lead the latest South Carolina poll of Democratic voters, garnering double-digit support that far outpaces the rest of the pack. Support appears to have collapsed for climate activist and billionaire Tom Steyer, who had been polling in the low double digits after saturating the Palmetto State with campaign advertising. Steyer now polls at just 7%. The numbers were released by Public Policy Polling and show Biden with a robust lead over Sanders with 36% to 21%. “PPP’s newest poll of Democratic primary voters in South Carolina finds it looking like a...

House Republicans have found evidence that Russia Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team may have misled the courts and Congress and are considering making criminal referrals asking the Justice Department to investigate those prosecutors, a key lawmaker says. Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Just the News that his team has been scouring recent documents released by the FBI, including witness reports known as 302s, and found glaring evidence that contradicts claims the Mueller team made to courts and Congress. "We're now going through these 302s, and we're going to be making criminal referrals...

<p>A lone cloud resembling an ocean wave was spotted in the clear winter sky in New Hampshire Monday morning.</p> <p>The Mount Washington Observatory, a non-profit organization that maintains a research facility on top of the New Hampshire peak, tweeted the photo this morning. They said, "Mother Nature waved back!", and explained how these clouds form.</p>

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea reported 60 new cases of the coronavirus, increasing the total number of infected patients in the country to 893, the Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said on Tuesday. (Please see link, for original article)

A brief history of the development of coastal defense in US history.

House Democrats held a panicked hearing this month about how to respond to the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which upheld the right of corporations to spend in elections. Their concern was the undue influence corporate spending might have on the coming elections. In the entire 2016 campaign cycle, corporations spent less than $300 million on federal races, less than 5% of total spending. Meanwhile, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already spent more than $360 million on cable, broadcast and radio advertisements since declaring his candidacy in mid-November. That doesn’t include Mr....

#China says the #coronavirus #epidemic is calming down, but is it really so? Stephen K Bannon, host of #WarRoomPandemic sat down with me to discuss the most critical aspects of this pandemic: What’s the truth in China? Why did the Chinese government still refuse to let the American experts in? Could the virus be made in a lab? Why does the Chinese Communist Leadership rush #biosafety legislation? Could America see generic drug shortages if the epidemic prolongs? - Subscribe for updates: http://bit.ly/SimoneGao Zooming In is a weekly in-depth/investigative report program hosted by the award-winning journalist Simone Gao. Described as a...

An income-based MBTA fare option could attract tens of thousands of new rapid transit and bus riders and could prompt hundreds of thousands more trips on the RIDE paratransit service, according to an ongoing T study. If the MBTA set the qualifying income at 200% of the federal poverty level, between 50,000 and 90,000 new commuters would ride the subway or bus every year, MBTA Deputy Director of Policy and Strategic Planning Lynsey Heffernan told the T's board Monday.

4.8% fatality rate. Analysis of 50,404 patients “According to Meta-analysis, among the clinical characteristics of patients with 2019-nCoV infection, the incidence of fever is 90.9% , the incidence of cough is 70.8%, and the incidence of muscle soreness or fatigue is 41%. The incidence of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) was 14.8%, the incidence of abnormal chest CT was 95.6%, the proportion of severe cases in all infected cases was 21.3%, and the mortality rate of patients with 2019-nCoV infection was 4.8%.” https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.18.20024539v1

New York City transportation authorities have inflicted lots of bike lanes on locations where they are particularly inappropriate. But for sneering, arrogant disregard — make that contempt — for the surroundings, none can equal the plan for a “protected” bike lane along Midtown’s Sixth Avenue from West 35th Street to Central Park South this year. . . . . [T]he Sixth Avenue lane raises the bar for malicious streetscape tampering. A bike lane right on the doorsteps of Manhattan’s most vital office towers seems willfully spiteful — a thumb in the eye of profit-making capitalism with a slap at the...

Before Shirley Temple, she was the young queen of Hollywood, earning $1 million a year, but her movie career did not last long. Diana Serra Cary, the silent film sensation known as Baby Peggy whose career in Hollywood came to a crashing halt when she was the ripe old age of six, has died. She was 101. Cary, who from 1921 through 1924 appeared in as many as 150 short films and a handful of popular features, died Monday in Gustine, California, according to Rena Kiehn of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum. Without uttering a word onscreen, the emotive...

UK—Have you ever tried to imagine living in a perfect world ruled by communism, but previously only received the information from catchy folk songs which praise the system? Well, lucky for you, it is now easier than ever to understand what a full-blown communist utopia actually looks like. That's because John Lennon's commie classic "Imagine" has been rereleased with more realistic lyrics to reflect the harsh realities of communism. Lennon, long dead---though not by way of communism, since he was blessed to live in a capitalist country---would be proud of the change, due to its artistic value in realism.

The deportation of a Nazi death camp guard from his residence in Queens, New York, in 2018 by ICE was described as the removal of the "last known Nazi collaborator from the United States." That’s not quite true. There’s another Nazi collaborator living on Fifth Avenue. He’s a billionaire and untouchable because his dubious fortune has been used to finance the Democrat Party, radical leftists, assorted anti-Semites, and opponents of ICE: the agency that should step in to remove the aged Hungarian from the United States. The legal basis for removing Soros is quite clear. The Holtzman Amendment states that...

As we see Google increasingly becoming both politically correct in what it provides as search results (and I have not found other search engines to be much better), as well as (it seems to me) favoring pages that provide brief, cursory info (likely due to mobile devices), then I want to create a custom search engine for conservative (mainly political/ideological) issues, which Google enables one to do. And which is relatively easy to do, and here it is as of now, https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=011383487679067898861:gug5bh6z5ol (look for search bar in top left corner). That is the public URL, though Google provides a code...