Free Republic

Nearly half of all U.S. voters think members of Congress should vote as their constituents would want them to vote, rather than based on their own personal preferences, according to a new Just the News Daily Poll with Scott Rasmussen. Asked if U.S. representatives should "vote for [policies] they prefer or should they vote to reflect the views of their constituents," 45% said politicians should opt for the views of those who elected them. Just 33% said they should "vote for the policy they prefer."...

IMG NSSF.org U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- There are only five states which currently ban the open carry of handguns in most public areas, most of the time. They are: Illinois, New York, California, Florida, and South Carolina. New Jersey and Hawaii ban open carry in practice, but legally, anyone with a permit can open carry. It is just extremely difficult to obtain a permit.South Carolina is moving toward restoring the right to openly carry handguns in public with House Bill 3094, labeled “Open Carry with Training”.The bill is reasonably easy to read and understand. From scstatehouse.gov:TO AMEND SECTION 23-31-210, CODE OF...

On this date in 1864, a bustling market Saturday in Port-au-Prince, Haiti was enlivened with the public executions of eight Haitians for cannibalistic murder. It was perhaps the signal event in a long-running campaign against vodou (voodoo, vaudoux) in whose service the murder was supposedly committed. The charge sheet had it that a man intent on an occult rite to propitiate the spirit world had slaughtered his own young niece and with several friends and family devoured her remains. It made for some great copy. “The eye of the law has penetrated into the midst of the bloody mysteries of...

A campaign to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom officially reached its 1.5 million signature requirement. The deadline for signature collection is March 17. Organizers for “Recall Gavin 2020” said Friday they have surpassed the 1.5 million signatures required to place the proposal on this year’s ballot. The signatures still need to be verified. Once verified and approved, the recall election would happen sometime over the summer according to the local San Diego station ABC News 10. California’s GOP representative Kevin Kiley tweeted late last night that everything is official: LinkAlthough Gov. Newsom’s performance with respect to the pandemic has been...

The final battleship battle in history has long been considered a one-sided slaughter. The Battle of Surigao Strait, which was part of the larger Battle of Leyte Gulf, took place from October 24-25, 1944, and was one of only two battleship-versus-battleship naval battles of the entire campaign in the Pacific during the Second War II. Both were fought between the United States Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN).

As we endure the political circus and charade of impeachment proceedings, does this reflect a great nation? The Book of Proverbs personifies wisdom as a woman calling out in the streets offering counsel. Is anybody in D.C. listening? How did we get to this contemptible place? In 2008, presidential candidate Obama promised to fundamentally transform America. Well, "mission accomplished." Perhaps I give the former president too much credit, as he didn't build that, but his philosophy and policies directed our culture onto a path such that now everything has become political. It's infected our education, science, businesses, and even health...

“He has views and he is entitled to his views,” Kaine said when I confronted him about his son’s Antifa-related arrest, after Kaine tried to pin the Charlottesville rally violence on his Republican opponent Corey Stewart in their first debate in the 2018 U.S. Senate race in Hot Springs, Virginia. Kaine maintained that his son is peaceful, and Kaine’s staffer Ian Sams, a former Hillary Clinton factotum, stepped in to shut down the line of questioning. Kaine did not answer as to whether his son is still part of any Antifa groups.

When Barack Obama ran in 2008, I was virulently opposed to his candidacy. I wasn’t a huge McCain fan, but at least I knew he had America’s best interests at heart, something I never felt about Obama. Four years later I had issues with Romney, but for similar reasons, I voted for him. Once Obama was in office, I disagreed with almost everything he did for eight years, whether Obamacare, DACA, GM, DADT, or virtually everything race-related. I disagreed with his trading for Bowie Bergdahl, his pardon of Chelsea Manning, and his commutation of the sentence of FLAN terrorist Oscar...

Poet W.B. Yeats came to recognize something precious and profound at center of his this-worldly identity during family vacations in County Sligo: his Irishness. In 1923, at the age of 58, Yeats accepted the Nobel Prize the only way he could — as an Irishman on behalf of Ireland. What motivated the committee was "[Yeats's] always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." Symbols That Shame And SaveBut what about that black preacher poet across the Atlantic, that slave-descendent Baptist of that land where so many Irish found refuge in...

The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. If you have specific question about a plant/problem you are having, please remember to state the Growing Zone where you are located. This thread is a non-political respite. No matter what, you won’t be flamed, and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack...

Some numbers are constants, . . . They never change. For example, π (pi, 3.1416), the Ten Commandments, the Three Musketeers, 12 inches in a foot, and 11 million illegal aliens. Soon there will be millions of new voters in line with us at the polls or trying to jam handfuls of harvested ballots into the unguarded mailbox. A positive note – there won’t be a need for massive vote fraud anymore. But maybe we can try to limit the damage. If Biden and the Democrats insist that there are only those immutable 11 million illegals, then let’s limit amnesty...

February 13 2021 St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church – New York City, NY Saturday of week 5 in Ordinary TimeFirst readingGenesis 3:9-24 ©The expulsion from the Garden of EdenThe Lord God called to the man. ‘Where are you?’ he asked. ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden;’ he replied ‘I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.’ ‘Who told you that you were naked?’ he asked ‘Have you been eating of the tree I forbade you to eat?’ The man replied, ‘It was the woman you put with me; she gave me the fruit, and I...

I am a black American intellectual living in an age of persistent racial inequality in my country. As a black man I feel compelled to represent the interests of “my people.” (But that reference is not unambiguous!) As an intellectual, I feel that I must seek out the truth and speak such truths as I am given to know. As an American, at this critical moment of “racial reckoning,” I feel that imperative all the more urgently. But, I ask, what are my responsibilities? Do they conflict with one another? I will explore this question tonight.

What’s the theme that ties together Andrew Cuomo, the Lincoln Project, and California’s governing class? Since 2015 or so, a whole bunch of people who hated Donald Trump — and I am among those who believe the former president earned his animosity and scorn — chose to believe that anyone who stood in opposition to Trump had to be one of the good guys. A huge swath of the media world, elites across American society, and donors large and small, conflated political agreement in opposition to Trump with all other positive virtues. Outspoken opposition to Trump turned into an all-purpose...

Let’s get one thing straight. Even though Sleepy Joe Biden is the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, there are a host of serious questions about how the elections – note the plural – were conducted. Pennsylvania changed the election laws without constitutional authority, over the objections of the legislature. Ditto for Georgia. Required voter validation on absentee ballots was not performed. Chains of custody were violated, potentially letting phony ballots get counted, and on, and on. We just can’t have this happen again. But what’s a mother to do? First, we have to define the word. Fuzzy Leftist equivocation won’t...

The coronavirus pandemic hammered Pennsylvania’s economy in 2020. But the key to economic recovery -- once a more predictable regimen of vaccinations is firmly in place and Covid-19 begins to abate -- must be a careful study in what government should and should not do, stress researchers at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy. “With recently released state employer payroll data for December, the extent of the damage can clearly be seen,” say Frank Gamrat, executive director of the Pittsburgh think tank, and Jake Haulk, its president-emeritus. “Pennsylvanians lost jobs in nearly every sector, pushing employment to decade-ago levels,” the...

A white, male University of New Hampshire chemistry professor has resigned after being accused of posing as a female immigrant of color on Twitter to make racist and sexist comments.The university, which has not named the professor and described the person only as a faculty member, confirmed the resignation Friday after a four-month investigation.Toby SantaMaria, a graduate student studying plant biology at Michigan State who identifies with the gender-neutral term Latinx and was attacked online by followers of the Twitter account, welcomed the professor’s resignation.“Pretending to be a woman on the internet explicitly to bully, shame, harass, and create toxic...

Is it merely a coincidence that the Annual Trump Impeachment nearly coincided with Groundhog Day? This really is becoming as regular and tedious as Tom Brady in the Super Bowl. What’s that? Oh. Well, at least he’s a Trump supporter, which makes sense doesn’t it? Doesn’t everyone who has a supermodel trophy wife support Trump? I think I read that in Trophy Wife Aficionado magazine. (Or is that “MAGA-zine”?)

WASHINGTON — The lead lawyer for former President Donald Trump’s defense during the impeachment trial mistakenly referred to the Georgia Secretary of State as Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. When referencing Trump’s phone call to Brad Raffensperger, former Montgomery County district attorney Bruce Castor instead said Roethlisberger’s name in front of the U.S. Senate Friday afternoon, according to our partners at TribLive.com.

A new study finds that cultivation and enrichment of microbes on the face can infiltrate the lungs through unconscious aspirations and cause inflammatory responses and advanced stage lung cancer. The nose and the mouth were designed to take in oxygen without strain, uninhibited. The oxygen travels down the trachea and splits off into two tubes called the bronchi. From there, the oxygen travels down a series of bronchioles until it reaches the alveoli, which are tiny air sacs covered with blood vessels. These air sacs take the oxygen directly to the heart, where it is dispersed throughout the body. When...