Free Republic

Sen. Paul spoke with the 13 News from his Washington D.C. office Thursday. "He shut down the economy and he's not being very open about letting us get back to work. So, the 700,000 people out of work should call Gov. Beshear and say 'Thanks a lot, but we don't want to continue to be out of work, you've got to let us get back to work.' It is a mistake to let one person run the economy. It is what we always objected to in the Soviet Union and what we objected to as socialism or what is called...

The University of California system will no longer require SAT and ACT standardized test results for in-state freshmen applicants. (snip) Critics of the tests have long argued they put minority and low-income students at a disadvantage because the test questions often contain inherent bias that more privileged children are better equipped to answer. Wealthier students also tend to take expensive prep courses that help boost their scores, which many students can’t afford, opponents of the tests say. The University of California system has 10 campuses, from Davis near Sacramento and Berkeley in Northern California to UCLA in Los Angeles and...

TOKYO: CIECC, Softbank, Masayoshi Son is closing in on a 3 step deal. Step 1, US regulators approved, CIECC, Softbank, grab of the American fiber joule, US Sprint. Step 2, regulators approved, CIECC, Softbank, dump of US Sprint to German Deutsche Telekom AG (T-Mobile) sucks up U S Sprint shell (about $20 bil). Now, (as money laundries usually do), Step 3, clean cash, back to> CIECC, Softbank. The deal could be announced this month.

Sometimes, a good rant is all a writer can offer. Bear with me. Last Friday morning, some 3,500 New Yorkers lined up at a Catholic church in Queens to receive free food hours before it even opened, ­according to the New York Police Department. Catholic Charities has reported a 200 percent increase in demand over the past month and a half. By prolonging the coronavirus shutdown long after its core mission was accomplished, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have plunged tens of thousands of New Yorkers into poverty. It needs to end. Now. In mid-March, we...

May 22 2020 Friday of the Sixth Week of Easter Reading 1 Acts 18:9-18 One night while Paul was in Corinth, the Lord said to him in a vision, “Do not be afraid. Go on speaking, and do not be silent, for I am with you. No one will attack and harm you, for I have many people in this city.” He settled there for a year and a half and taught the word of God among them.But when Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews rose up together against Paul and brought him to the tribunal, saying, “This...

The New York Times was butchered on social media after an op-ed published on Thursday found a potential silver lining from the coronavirus outbreak: a meatless society. In a piece titled “The End of Meat Is Here,” writer Jonathan Safran Foer argues, “If you care about the working poor, about racial justice, and about climate change, you have to stop eating animals,” hoping that the disruption of the meat supply chain will encourage people to give up meat altogether. […] While vegetarians celebrated Foer’s meatless plea, passionate carnivores slaughtered the Times op-ed on social media. “C’mon; I already recycle,” Washington...

The researchers used advanced ancient DNA capture techniques to retrieve ancient DNA from 25 individuals dating back 9,500-4,200 years and one individual dating back 300 years from northern and southern East Asia... Prof. FU and her team found that these Neolithic humans share the closest genetic relationship to present-day East Asians who belong to this "second layer." This suggests that by 9,500 years ago, the primary ancestries composing the genetic makeup of East Asians today could already be found in mainland East Asia. While more divergent ancestries can be found in Southeast Asia and the Japanese archipelago, in the Chinese...

Here's one for the road.

I just spent a considerable amount of time reviewing everything I could find from our immensely powerful CDC on this subject, starting here at their index. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/php/open-america/contact-tracing/index.html Within that link you will find:https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/php/principles-contact-tracing.html Within that are many pdf documents with detail. The “principles-contact-tracing-booklet.pdf” is a pretty clear outline. The download link to that pdf is at the bottom of that page. Apple and Google (Android) have already introduced apps to support this massive tracking effort in support of the CDC. Apple in iOS 13.5 introduced an exposure notification API, which lets apps from public health authorities and governments worldwide help...

The Illinois House voted 72-43 to pass an expansion plan for voting by mail for the 2020 General Election. This vote followed a lengthy debate between Republicans and Rep. Kelly Burke (D-Evergreen Park) who sponsored the proposal in the House. Democrats discussed the possibility of implementing a vote-by-mail plan earlier this year, but the COVID-19 pandemic sped up their process. Sponsors say Senate Bill 1863 will give voters the opportunity to cast their ballots without going out in public, as there could potentially be a second round of COVID-19 spread this fall. If the bill passes out of both chambers,...

In the movie “Cliff Hanger,” John Lithgow’s character, Qualen, utters a line that reminds me of how unscrupulous Democrat muckety-mucks like the Clintons and Obama operate. Qualen says, “Kill a few people, they call you a murderer. Kill a million and you’re a conqueror.” Similarly, with the Clintons and Obama, commit a few crimes, they call you a petty criminal. Commit a million and you’re untouchable. Well, maybe not a million—then again. You get the point. We’re now seeing a cascade of unearthed evidence of what seems to be an apparent three-plus-year coup attempt by the Obama administration and media...

CHESAPEAKE - Chesapeake’s City Council will skew a bit younger with the election of Don Carey, a 33-year-old retired NFL player. He easily beat longtime councilman Dwight Parker, 70, who lost his seat even as two other incumbents were re-elected. Carey had the strongest showing of all seven council candidates in the race for three at-large seats, with his 17,502 votes edging out Debbie Ritter’s 17,374, according to the latest unofficial results released Wednesday after officials finished counting a historically large number of absentee ballots. Parker, who served as vice mayor from 2006 to 2008, lost his bid for another...

More than 100 police officers in the U.S. have died from COVID-19 after fighting the virus on the front lines, according to a report from the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) obtained by The Hill via email Thursday. The FOP said in total, 111 police officers have died from the disease since the onset of the pandemic, but noted that the tally was reported deaths, not confirmed deaths. The group described the coronavirus pandemic as both a public health and public safety crisis. "The FOP knew at the beginning of the pandemic that law enforcement officers on the front lines...

Tributes from former first families have rolled in after the death from Covid-19 of Wilson Jerman, a former White House butler who was a fixture in Washington under 11 presidents. Jerman, who was 91, started working as a cleaner under Dwight Eisenhower and retired as an elevator operator during the presidency of Barack Obama. “With his kindness and care, Wilson Jerman helped make the White House a home for decades of first families, including ours,” said Michelle Obama. “His service to others his willingness to go above and beyond for the country he loved and all those whose lives he...

It turns out Memorial Day weekend will not be quite the big economic and social reopening moment that Sacramento residents and businesses owners had hoped. Sacramento County health chief Peter Beilenson on Thursday reversed his approval from earlier this week for fitness centers to reopen, saying state health officials had stepped in to tell him it’s too soon. Beilenson said state health officials also told him to back off of his plans to allow groups of up to 10 get together, with social distancing, starting this weekend. Read more here: https://www.sacbee.com/news/coronavirus/article242905031.html#storylink=cpy

Kevin Gough, a lawyer for Mr. Bryan, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In an interview last week, he said Mr. Bryan “had no role or involvement in that shooting. He has committed no crime. He is a witness.” Mr. Arbery’s family and civil-rights activists have pressed for weeks for authorities to charge Mr. Bryan, arguing he wasn’t simply a witness but was involved in the young man’s killing. In an April letter to the Glynn County Police Department, George Barnhill, the district attorney in Waycross who oversaw the case for a period before recusing himself, wrote that...

The owners of the Atilis Gym in Bellmawr, New Jersey intend to re-open tomorrow after today's New Jersey State Health Department notice at the door of the gym closing it down...... The latest twist in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia is the arrest of the man who made a video of the killing used as evidence to arrest the first two suspects..... Actress Lori Loughlin and her husband Mossimo Giannulli set to plead guilty in the federal college admissions case alleging a scam tomorrow..... The FBI says that an attack this morning at the Corpus Christi Naval Air...

President Trump is leading Joe Biden (D) in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, a Restoration PAC poll released on Thursday showed. The survey, taken May 9-13, 2020, among of 600 likely voters in Pennsylvania, shows President Trump leading Biden, the Democrat Party’s presumptive nominee, 50.2 percent to 45.5 percent. This is significant, as it reflects a 4.7 percent jump from the previous survey. Restoration PAC founder and president Doug Truax noted that the increase could stem from the backlash over Gov. Tom Wolf’s (D) stringent lockdown orders, which continue to bar several counties from reopening their economies, causing frustration among...

On Friday, the lockdowns end It's time. It's time to stand up to overreaching governors, mayors, and bureaucrats. It's time to open up our businesses while adopting responsible, common-sense safety measures. And it's time to support those businesses by showing up to purchase their goods and services. We're calling all Americans to Stand Up, Open Up, and Show Up this Friday, May 22. For months, we've complied with lockdown and "stay-at-home" orders supposedly designed to "slow the spread" of the dangerous COVID-19 virus. But even as the infection rate slowed and rural communities saw virtually zero transmission, power-hungry and terrified...

When the British handed over Hong Kong to China in 1997, China promised to respect it’s independence for the next 50 years. The shorthand for that plan was “one country, two systems.” But the two systems part of the plan could effectively come to an end tomorrow. China has tried and failed in the past to exert more control over Hong Kong, but this time it seems prepared to simply bypass Hong Kong’s government entirely and pass the new law via the mainland’s one party system: Security rules proposed by the Hong Kong government in 2003 would have empowered...