Free Republic

A Texas state judge ruled Wednesday that voters who are concerned about the safety of in-person voting amid the coronavirus pandemic are eligible for mail-in voting. The ruling was a win for the Texas Democratic Party, who sued election officials ahead of the state’s July 14 primary runoff in order to expand alternative polling options, though the decision is likely to be appealed. Prior to the Wednesday order, only Texas voters with a “qualifying reason” — advanced age, disability, incarceration or planned travel — could mail in ballots. But the temporary injunction from district judge Tim Sulak in Travis County,...

A Planned Parenthood official in New York State said the organization’s new telehealth service is so much in demand that one mother began her drug-induced abortion “at home with her children running around behind her.” Dr. Meera Shah, chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood Hudson Peconic, told the Associated Press (AP) the abortion chain is seeing “an uptick in patients seeking abortions” during the coronavirus pandemic. Advertisement “We provided a medication abortion to an EMT while she was sitting in her ambulance,” Shah said. “We provided abortion care to a mother who was at home with her children running around...

Governors and mayors across the country have taken unprecedented action by restricting the movement of healthy individuals, closing places of worship and public spaces, and interfering with business by ordering them to close their doors.There is a growing realization that government-imposed orders intended to contain the spread of the coronavirus are creating widespread devastation.One in four Americans has lost either part or all of their income since the end of March, and the GDP has fallen by 24 percent.US data shows that the case fatality rate might be as low as 0.1% — in other words, akin to the mortality...

AUSTIN (KXAN) — A group of protesters are outside the Governor’s mansion Thursday rallying to “restore livelihoods and end the madness sinking the Texas economy.” The group Reopen Texas has a 5-hour-long rally planned, from 12-5 p.m., and they say there’s a way to stimulate the economy in Texas and still contain the novel coronavirus that caused COVID-19. The group made it a point in its Facebook event that the protest will be peaceful. It asks the question, “how far are we willing to let things go before we take back our rights?” Justin Griess said the protesters want to...

Hello, lost generation. The Millennials entered the workforce during the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Saddled with debt, unable to accumulate wealth, and stuck in low-benefit, dead-end jobs, they never gained the financial security that their parents, grandparents, or even older siblings enjoyed. They are now entering their peak earning years in the midst of an economic cataclysm more severe than the Great Recession, near guaranteeing that they will be the first generation in modern American history to end up poorer than their parents.

Trump has built up a lot of buzz over the coming stimulus payments, saying he has hidden five golden tickets among the checks heading to Americans this week. Anyone who gets a golden ticket will win a free tour of Mar-a-Lago. Rumor has it that Trump will be watching them closely to see which of the winners has the qualities he looks for in a manager, with the best candidate getting hired as Mar-a-Lago's onsite McDonald's manager. "Who will win? Nobody knows!" Trump said gleefully as he carefully signed each of the golden tickets before hiding them among the stimulus...

President Donald Trump’s campaign accused abortion proponents of using coronavirus to “promote the killing of unborn children” after abortion activists said Republicans and Trump targeted abortion during the pandemic. The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) released an ad Wednesday “to hold Donald Trump and Republican politicians accountable for putting ideology over science amid the COVID-19 pandemic.” The 30-second ad, which is part of NARAL Pro-Choice America’s six-figure effort aimed at swinging voters, shows women discussing how Trump and Republicans are using the virus to limit abortion access. (RELATED: Pro-Life Lawmakers Urge Trump To Uphold Regulations On Fetal Tissue Research...

The governor of Michigan said Thursday that abortion is “life sustaining.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, discussed abortion in times of the coronavirus pandemic during David Axelrod’s Axe Files podcast posted Thursday. Whitmer, who has drawn criticism for the coronavirus restrictions she’s implemented, noted that while Michigan has put a hold on performing all elective surgeries, abortions can still be performed in the state and are considered essential. “We stopped elective surgeries here in Michigan,” she said. “Some people have tried to say that that type of a procedure is considered the same and that’s ridiculous,” she added, referring...

Is President Trump’s “Opening Up America Again” announcement one of the most courageous presidential decisions ever? Will Americans back it and accept the possibility of increased risk of death as a necessary sacrifice for the nation?

This coronavirus is a gigantic teachable moment. It’s teaching everybody a whole lot of things if they would just take the time to learn it — and the biggest thing, the absolute biggest thing that you have the opportunity to learn: How in the world can anybody sane want to keep this economy shut down? How can anybody sane be anything less than scared and outraged and mortified that 22 million people have been thrown out of work over something that may end up killing fewer than 50,000 people? It is unprecedented. And yet there are people who want to...

BEIJING — Elo started cooking as soon as he heard about the boys on the street. The Nigerian trader opened an informal restaurant in Foshan, a manufacturing city half an hour’s train ride from Guangzhou, where dozens of Africans became homeless last week. Evictions from homes and apartments started when Guangzhou authorities announced that five Nigerians had tested positive for COVID-19. Within days, a campaign was launched to test and track all Africans in the port city. The sudden and sweeping move was consistent with China’s response to the coronavirus. But it was propelled by a troubling logic that targeted...

Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel of Tel Aviv University, who also serves on the research and development advisory board for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, plotted the rates of new coronavirus infections of the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, France, Germany, and Spain. The numbers told a shocking story: irrespective of whether the country quarantined like Israel, or went about business as usual like Sweden, coronavirus peaked and subsided in the exact same way. In the exact, same, way. His graphs show that all countries experienced seemingly identical coronavirus infection patterns, with the number of infected peaking in the sixth week and...

President Trump on Thursday hosted phone calls with dozens of bipartisan lawmakers, including every Republican senator -- except Mitt Romney. The president asked the lawmakers to serve on a panel to discuss how to move forward with reopening the economy, called the “Opening Up America Again Congressional Group.” “The president announced that he will soon provide guidance to America’s governors to determine their ability to reignite the economies in their respective states,” the White House said in a news release. “The dialogue between the president, senior administration officials and the bipartisan group of members of Congress also included a range...

I’ve noticed those that suffer from severe Trump Derangement Syndrome will even shred apart their ideology in order to own President Donald Trump. MSNBC’s Joy Reid is the latest TDS sufferer to do this. She tried so hard to downplay the stimulus checks people will receive but instead admitted taxation is theft.

USH: Folks, 22 million people are not working, and it’s not because of the quirks and fates of America’s economy. It’s because we have shut it down and we have shut it down on the back of bad data. We’ve shut it down on the back of poor projections. You know, there’s any number of ways of looking at this. One of the ways of looking at it is it has taken whatever length of time that we’ve been shut down, what is it, six weeks or seven weeks, it’s taken less than two months to wipe out the roaring...

Watch the reaction of two kittens to the cat aphrodisiac known as "Silver Vine." Video, 3 minutes, 49 seconds

Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left. The new wine mourneth, the vine languisheth, all the merryhearted do sigh. The mirth of tabrets ceaseth, the noise of them that rejoice endeth, the joy of the harp ceaseth. They shall not drink wine with a song; strong drink shall be bitter to them that drink it. The city of confusion is broken down: every house is shut up, that no man may come in. There is a crying for wine in the...

This video shows two doctors stealing a Trump flag, as their young child begs them to stop and is terrified of them going to jail The video below is from Gulf Breeze, Florida. It shows two doctors – who are married to each other – stealing a Trump flag from someone’s lawn. As the two doctors steal the flag, their young child begs them to stop, and expresses concern that they could go to jail.And that’s exactly where they went. The Tampa Bay Times reported:Theft of neighbor’s Trump flag lands Florida doctors in jail, deputies sayThe two Gulf Breeze gynecologists are...

PRC moral turpitude forces us to consider the unthinkable. We often ascribe a basic level of humanity to even the cruelest leaders, but People’s Republic of China leader Xi Jinping’s actions have forced us to rethink this assumption. Although the emergence of the novel coronavirus now known as SARS-CoV-2 was probably not due to China’s actions, the emphasis that its authoritarian system places on hiding bad news likely gave the disease a sizable head start infecting the world. But most ominously, China’s obsession with image and Machtpolitik raises serious questions about its lack of moral limits. At some point the...

Jesse Watters said Thursday on "The Five" that he could feel a growing backlash to the ongoing restrictions imposed in response to the coronavirus pandemic as the White House prepared to roll out its guidelines for reopening the economy. "It's like when you go under water and you hold your breath, if you keep holding your breath, you're going to sustain brain damage or you're gonna drown," Watters said. "And you can tell this country is ready to stop holding its breath and get above water and get a gasp of air, because if you keep staying under water, you've...