Free Republic

RIVERSIDE, Calif. (April 14, 2020) — Three Southern California churches that want to keep their doors open during the coronavirus outbreak sued Gov. Gavin Newsom and other officials on Monday, arguing that social distancing orders violate the First Amendment right to freedom of religion and assembly. The suit, filed in the federal court for the Central District of California, also names state Attorney General Xavier Becerra and officials of San Bernardino and Riverside counties. The suit seeks to block Newsom’s month-old stay-at-home order and two county orders designed to slow the spread of COVID-19 by having people mostly stay at...

SNIP Sessions, who was the first — and for a long time only — senator to endorse Trump in 2016, left the Senate to become Trump’s attorney general in February 2017. He had held the Senate seat for 20 years. But his relationship with the president quickly turned sour after he recused himself from a decision to appoint a special counsel to investigate Trump after it was revealed that Sessions did not disclose a meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Nevertheless, Sessions said Tuesday he doesn’t have any regrets. “No, you don’t regret things like that,” Sessions said when asked...

Morning "All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head." Psalm 22:7 Mockery was a great ingredient in our Lord's woe. Judas mocked him in the garden; the chief priests and scribes laughed him to scorn; Herod set him at nought; the servants and the soldiers jeered at him, and brutally insulted him; Pilate and his guards ridiculed his royalty; and on the tree all sorts of horrid jests and hideous taunts were hurled at him. Ridicule is always hard to bear, but when we are in intense pain it is...

Here’s a shocker: The U.S. crude death rate (mortality from all causes) is the lowest it’s been since the CDC has been tracking deaths attributed to the flu, pneumonia and all causes. VIEW GRAPHS AND DATA....

Former President Obama is set to endorse Joe Biden’s White House bid later on Tuesday, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The endorsement comes as Biden all but locked up the Democratic presidential nomination after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), his lone remaining rival, withdrew from the race last week. Sanders endorsed Biden on Monday. While Obama has long spoken of his affinity for Biden, he maintained that he would not endorse in the presidential race until a clear nominee had emerged.

Coverage of COVID-19 has dominated the news and resulted in skyrocketing ratings for the nation’s cable news networks. And according to a survey conducted March 10-16, 2020, as a part of Pew Research Center’s Election News Pathways project, responses to that coverage and the pandemic itself vary notably among Americans who identify Fox News, MSNBC or CNN (the three major cable news networks featured in the analysis) as their main source of political news.In particular, the responses to COVID-19 news from those whose main source for political news is MSNBC or Fox News are strikingly different. The views of those...

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There are similarities in the sexual assault allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford and Tara Reade. Ford accuses Justice Brett Kavanaugh of pinning her to a bed, groping her over her clothes, and covering her mouth at a high school party in the early 1980s. Reade accuses Biden of forcibly penetrating her with his fingers when she worked for his Senate office in 1993.The allegations are both decades old. Both are denied by the accused men. That does not render them false. It does, however, offer an instructive case study in media bias.Reade’s allegation is against a Democrat, Ford’s...

Germany has made a bit of name for itself during the world-wide coronavirus outbreak as having a relatively low death rate that some reports attribute to the nation’s dedication to tracing transmission rates and seeking where in the country the outbreak began. But Germany recently bucked yet another convention in the fight against the virus when it announced that a study it had conducted in one of its hardest hit towns may indicate that COVID-19 is possibly not as deadly as suspected and not spreading through casual contact but rather close, sustained contact over a period of time. Professor Hendrick...

Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are voicing their displeasure at the idea of returning to Capitol Hill next week, when lawmakers are scheduled to come back following a nearly monthlong coronavirus-caused recess. “I have no interest in going back now. How do you get there? Train? Plane?” House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey told C-SPAN Monday of returning to Congress on April 20. Lowey (D-NY) told the network that she “certainly” did not expect the House of Representatives to return next Monday, saying, “I don’t think it’s possible.”

If this virus leads to tightening academic grants, defunding activist departments, making students more fiscally responsible, and shuttering nonessential bureaucracy in higher ed, then thatÂ’s a good thing. An average higher education scholarship is about $2,000 a month. The average salary of a gender studies professor is about $100,000 a year. The average publication cost of an academic journal of womenÂ’s or fat studies (yes, it exists) is similar.The average annual tuition for a student pursuing these courses while borrowing money from taxpayers, much never to be paid back, is about $25,000. The University of Michigan, for example, pays a...

In deeply conservative eastern Washington state, a prominent state lawmaker kicked out of his Republican Party caucus labels the coronavirus as a foreign bio-weapon, accuses Marxists of using the pandemic to advance totalitarianism and rails against lockdown restrictions imposed by the Democratic governor. A California teleconference last week to consider sport fishing limits in rural areas unprepared to handle influxes of anglers descended into chaos — with callers branding state officials as “fascists” and declaring it was time to “make fishing great again.” Across the U.S., elected officials from Pennsylvania to Oklahoma suspicious of big government and outraged with orders...

A region of Iceland is erupting for the first time in 800 years, raising concern of disruptions in air travel for centuries to come. The Guardian of London reported that since Jan. 21, the Reykjanes peninsula southwest of Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, has experienced more than 8,000 earthquakes. About 10 centimeters of land has risen due to magma intrusions underground, the paper said. "It seems that after being relatively inactive for many centuries, this region is waking up," Lancaster University volcanologist Dave McGarvie told the Guardian. The area is fed by five volcanic systems, the Guardian said, "which seem to come...

One of the understandable results of massive business closures, layoffs, and tens of millions unemployed because of the coronavirus pandemic has been that a lot of people canÂ’t pay rent. Hence the rent strike movement now gaining momentum in large cities nationwide.The idea is that instead of just not paying your rent because you got laid off, you organize with other tenants in your building or neighborhood and collectively refuse to pay rent, forcing your landlord to negotiate a rent freeze or some other form of relief.If thatÂ’s all there were to rent strikes, thatÂ’d be understandable. Millions of...

Thursday's unemployment update confirms that over the last three weeks, nearly 17 million Americans have been laid off because of the shutdown. That's one-tenth of the nation's workforce. It's not just an economic fact. It's a public health disaster. If the shutdown is dragged on, as many public health experts recommend, it is almost certain to kill more Americans than coronavirus. The academics and public health officials who have concocted models of the virus's spread are telling us that we have to continue the shutdown to save thousands of lives. But none of their models considers the deaths that will...

There are supposedly real benefits to being an atheist, ten of which I’ve listed below (those in quotes are from actual atheists[1]):1. I can embrace new scientific theories about human origins, without being saddled with the belief that a god created everything.2. I’m free from church hierarchy telling me what I can and can’t do.3. I can embrace a woman’s right to make choices when it comes to her own body.4. I don’t have to give my money to a church, so that the pastor can afford his own personal jet.5. People don’t look down on me intellectually because I...

Beaten down by the coronavirus outbreak, the world economy in 2020 will suffer its worst year since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the International Monetary Fund says in its latest forecast. The IMF said Tuesday that it expects the global economy to shrink 3% this year — far worse than its 0.1% dip in the Great Recession year of 2009 — before rebounding in 2021 with 5.8% growth. It acknowledges, though, that prospects for a rebound next year are clouded by uncertainty. The bleak assessment represents a breathtaking downgrade by the IMF. In its previous forecast in January, before...

In this spring season, America’s future is fraught with uncertainties as a result of the pandemic unleased by Communist China’s malicious concealment of a virus it had apparently developed in a Wuhan laboratory. Will the nation be able to “re-open” as the president desires, or will it descend into a long-lasting depression with millions unemployed? At the same time, a much greater uncertainty haunts the horizon. This uncertainty is a product of the ferocious hate for the president and his supporters ginned up by the political Left ever since the 2016 election. The anti-Trump fervor is so intense it has...

Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt greatly alarmed the Orthodox Christian church. Many in the church saw the invasion as a fulfillment of Daniel 11:42, where the Antichrist is prophesied to invade and take Egypt. Daniel 11:42: “He shall stretch out his hand against the countries, and the land of Egypt shall not escape.” The Orthodox church was also alarmed by the attempt made by Napoleon to create a Jewish state in Palestine. This regathering of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel would fulfill many Biblical prophecies that Jews spread out to the four corners of the world would once...

On CNN's State of the Union on Sunday, Dr. Fauci made comments that were wildly distorted by the media. “You could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives," he said. “Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But you’re right. Obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down.”During the Coronavirus Task Force...