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Gov. Gavin Newsom offered a message of hope in his Tuesday press conference celebrating the arrival of the vaccine, but cautioned that the state has many dark and difficult months ahead amid the deadliest surge since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. "There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but we are still in the tunnel," Newsom said. "And that means we're going through perhaps the most intense and urgent moment since the beginning of the pandemic." In the past seven days, 163 Californians have died on average a day, compared with 41 a day a month...

For four years, we heard that President Donald Trump is a threat to freedom of the press. The Washington Post signaled its own faux bravery by adopting the slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" at the top of its masthead. CNN began running commercials about facts being facts, and apples being apples rather than bananas (unless, presumably, those apples identify as bananas). The New York Times championed its own supposed stunning intrepidity in covering the Trump administration. Those four years followed eight years during which the sitting president of the United States, Barack Obama, treated the press as lapdogs. He fed...

A plan is gaining traction to withhold desperately needed COVID relief money from those who refuse to get vaccinated. The New York Times, in a recent cultural exposition on the lingering social effects of the evolving COVID-19 response, quotes several epidemiologists. The sources also offer their prognostications. The fully unsurprising consensus among the managerial class? "Normalcy" (i.e., life before the pandemic) will never be revived. The measures instituted in March massively restricting freedom of movement (and virtually every other civil liberty) are here to stay. In the New York Times piece, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health associate Amy...

The French Laundry reportedly received more than $2.4 million through the Paycheck Protection Program while smaller, less-renowned restaurants struggled to get approval at all from the federal program designed to help small businesses during the coronavirus pandemic, an ABC7 News analysis showed. The more than $2.4 million given to the French Laundry was 17 times more than what the average Bay Area restaurant received from the PPP, according to ABC7. This is just the latest example of how the bulk of PPP funds have gone to larger companies, while smaller mom-and-pop establishments struggled to get any federal assistance at all....

Vaccination refusal among the parents of pediatric population is emerging globally, regardless of religious or political background or geographical location. In many countries legal systems advise how to react to vaccination refusal (44). For example, in Croatia vaccination is mandatory, the law is clear, but the practice of vaccination and the court judgments are not standardized. The legislators are unlikely to enact legal limitations of religious or philosophical exemption (4,5). The number of vaccination refusals based on religious exemption is increasing. The question is whether religious freedom is a threat to public health, in this case to the vaccination system...

As long as Republicans allow unreciprocated decency to stand in the way of victory, they will be losers forever. And, right now, the leader of the losers is Attorney General William Barr. In the weeks before Election Day, Barr reportedly instructed prosecutors and senior colleagues to prevent the Department of Justice's (DoJ) investigation into Hunter Biden’s brand of corruption and crony capitalism from leaking to the public. His goal was to “keep the Justice Department out of campaign politics,” although Biden’s transgressions are directly relevant to a presidential election featuring his father. Ultimately, Barr sat silent as the left-leaning mainstream...

President Donald Trump should pardon Edward Snowden. Who? I know, it's embarrassing -- Assange, Manning, Snowden... Who did what? I got them confused before I researched this topic. National security isn't my beat. I finally educated myself this month because I got a chance to interview Snowden, the CIA/NSA employee who told the world that our government spied on us but lied to Congress about it. Now Snowden hides from American authorities. We talked via Zoom. Fourteen years ago, when Snowden worked for the CIA, and then the NSA, he signed agreements saying he would not talk about what he...

Cardinal Raymond Burke is warning that the World Economic Forum's "Great Reset" initiative in response to the coronavirus pandemic is an attempt to manipulate "citizens and nations through ignorance and fear" at the same time that Marxist materialism is taking hold in the United States. Burke, the former archbishop of St. Louis and now a member of the highest judicial authority in the Roman Catholic Church, made his comments in his homily on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Dec. 12, Rome correspondent Edward Pentin writes on his website. "The worldwide spread of Marxist materialism ... now seems...

It’s just the flu, bro. https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3915684/posts Farrakhan calls the COVID vaccine “toxic waste”. I can’t remember the specifics but that is about 3 or 4 times that I have agreed with Farrakhan over the GOP conventional wisdom over the past year. - A key point about this Coronavirus hoax that we are in the middle of - it won’t really matter when it goes away. We won’t go back to a free and perfect life. The reason is that the left always requires a crisis in order to subvert existing societal structures. When Coronavirus goes away, climate change will take...

There is perhaps no aspect of the gender-identity debate more emotionally fraught than the question of what to do about children who say they are transgender. In recent years, lavishly funded transgender-lobby groups have fought hard to implement what they claim is a medical “pause button” whereby gender-dysphoric children and young people are administered “puberty-blocking” drugs that, activists claim, buy these minors more time on the road to transition. Only the most pernicious of euphemisms can justify such a gung-ho approach to this medical intervention. For not only are these drugs experimental, but they are also, in almost every instance,...

Pray For the Peace of JerusalemLambs, Sheep, and Shepherds.Isaiah 11The Branch From Jesse 11 A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. 2 The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him— the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord— 3 and he will delight in the fear of the Lord. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; 4 but with...

NEW YORK - Sen. Elizabeth Warren has a book coming out about six key experiences and perspectives. The title should be familiar to those who have followed the Massachusetts Democrat’s career: “Persist.” Henry Holt and Company announced Wednesday that “Persist,” which the publisher calls “a deeply personal book and a powerful call to action,” will be released April 20. “Persist” will refer to Warren’s recent bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, won by Joe Biden, but is not a campaign memoir. “I wrote ‘Persist’ because I remain as committed as ever to fighting for an America that works for everyone,”...

The current crisis did not begin with Trump, contrary to the vain repetitions of the Never Trump crowd. The Left’s woes didn’t begin with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The political turmoil on both the left and right started a couple election cycles back with Bill Clinton and Chuck Schumer. What began with government good intentions and notions of correcting injustice caused one short-term fiscal calamity and continues as a rolling cultural catastrophe.Twenty-five years ago, the premise was this: minorities were being discriminated against when trying to buy homes. Black people, single women, and other marginalized folks were being blocked from access to...

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Looking at reporting and discussion of the 2020 presidential campaign, has any word been misused as often as "misinformation"? In much political debate, it was used to mean "information I don't like," rather than something that was provably false. That confusion extends to a new survey of American attitudes done by Gallup and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The survey questioned 2,752 respondents and was conducted in mid-November. Gallup found that 64 percent of Americans believe they were subjected to more "misinformation" in the 2020 campaign than in earlier campaigns. That number included 52 percent of Democrats,...

There is now every indication that Joe Biden will be sworn in January 20th as the nation’s 46th president. So is it time for every skeptical voice to hold silent? Is it time for everyone from President Trump on down to follow the insistent advice to give it up, let it go, move on? It is not. History is watching. First, to be clear, it has been pardonable for anyone, from some Trump voters to some members of Congress, to choose to sit out the home stretch of challenges. After a succession of courts, up to and including the Supreme...

The Charge Against St. Louis Couple for Defending their Home On 10 December 2020, in the Missouri Circuit Court, the Twenty-Second Judicial Circuit (City of St. Louis), Judge Thomas Clark, II, removed Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner from the prosecution of the criminal case against Mark McCloskey. The case before the court did not include Mark's wife, Patricia.The case caught national attention with the video evidence available. According to a St. Louis Today.com article, a motion will be filed to extend the ruling to Patricia:Defense lawyer Joel Schwartz said he’ll file a motion requesting that Stelzer adopt Clark’s ruling in Patricia...

Paris (AFP) - Measures imposed by governments to fight the Covid-19 pandemic have squeezed civil liberties worldwide, with authoritarian regimes seeking to exploit the restrictions as a way to shore up their sometimes shaky control on fast-changing societies, rights groups say. Demonstrations have been outlawed, elections postponed, and activists subject to even greater repression in a health emergency the political impact of which will still be felt when the pandemic is over. In Guinea in west Africa, the government has banned all demonstrations until further notice, citing the fight against Covid. Hungary in central Europe is under a state of...

Hong Kong (AFP) - Hong Kong civil servants swore a new pledge of allegiance to the government Wednesday in the first ceremony overseen by the city's leader to enforce greater loyalty in the governing class after last year's huge democracy protests. Chief executive Carrie Lam stood before a group of senior officials at a closed-door ceremony for the pledge, which all the finance hub's 180,000 civil servants will be expected to make in the coming weeks. Those taking the oath promise to uphold Hong Kong's mini-constitution and "bear allegiance" to the city and its government. A government spokesperson said the...

A West Kansas Republican mayor announced in a letter to city officials and on social media on Tuesday that she was resigning, effective immediately, over threats she received after publicly supporting a tenure of mask. Dodge City Mayor Joyce Warshaw said she was concerned for her safety after facing assaults, including threats by phone and email, after being quoted Friday in a USA Today article supporting the warrant, reported the Dodge City Globe. The city commission voted 4-1 on November 16 to impose a mask mandate, with a few exceptions. But Warshaw told NBC News on Tuesday that “threats, accusations...