Free Republic

A sham within a sham.

As part of his proposed $1.9 trillion relief bill, President Biden wants to send $350 billion in unrestricted cash to state and local governments to fill their budget holes. But while Covid-19 has depressed state tax revenue, the prospect of federal aid has encouraged many of these supposedly blameless states to keep piling on costs. Nowhere has that been more evident than with the pay raises dished out in recent months to government employees. As private businesses hold on by their fingernails, public-sector labor unions have their hands out, demanding the pay raises set forth in labor contracts negotiated before...

DALLAS – Attorneys for the state of New York asked a bankruptcy judge Friday to throw out the National Rifle Association’s bankruptcy case, saying the case was filed in bad faith. In a 41-page brief filed in the bankruptcy court in Dallas, New York’s attorneys asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Harlin DeWayne Hale to appoint a Chapter 11 trustee if outright dismissal was denied.The state asserts that the NRA filed the bankruptcy petition while claiming to be solvent and "in its strongest financial condition in years," according to the petition.The NRA filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after the New York...

A white father was rejected from joining the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education’s Parent Advisory Council on Tuesday, apparently due to the color of his skin.The council had recommended Seth Brenzel, a gay white man, for the role. But following much discussion, school board Commissioner Mark Sanchez eventually pushed back the vote so that people of color could apply for the position, KGO-TV reported.The current ethnic makeup of the PAC seemingly played a role in the school board’s decision.“In a district that has so many monolingual families and specifically so many Chinese-speaking families, this is not OK...

Veteran Republican strategist Steve Schmidt announced Friday that he has resigned from the board of the Lincoln Project. The move comes after a week in which revelations surfaced that the organization, an influential critic of former President Trump, knew about allegations of sexual harassment involving one of its co-founders several months before acknowledging them publicly. Schmidt made the announcement in a lengthy post on Twitter in which he shared a personal account of sexual abuse from a Boy Scout medic, a yearslong fight with depression and an apology for posting the private messages of a former Lincoln Project official a...

One condemning piece of footage for the Democrats’ impeachment case shown by former President Donald Trump’s defense team on Friday contained House Speaker Nancy Pelosi raising concerns about the integrity of the vote following the 2004 presidential race.Her comments during the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6, 2005, focused on irregularities seen with the voting machines and ballots — i.e. the kinds of issues Trump raised in the aftermath of November’s election.Trump’s legal counsel David Schoen presented the Pelosi clip to senators sitting in trial to debunk the House impeachment managers’ argument that Trump incited the incursion into the Capitol...

Why does the Left want to silence conservatives? Why do rank-and-file Democrats go along with this abomination? Leftists have bad intentions, but how about the Democrats who enable them? I prefer to think they’ve being manipulated.As worried as we should be about the hyperexploding national debt and our inevitable fiscal catastrophe, I am even more worried about the Left’s success in turning America into a police state (ironic, given its simultaneous war on the police).People still able to summon their rational faculties during this pandemic have to be concerned about this insane, concerted effort to control people’s thoughts and speech....

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo has been mocked online for failing on Friday to mention the scandal surrounding his older brother Andrew, the governor of New York. One social media user said she was 'disappointed', while another joked that there was 'big news coming out of New York state' that Chris Cuomo ignored. 'How convenient,' said another. Andrew Cuomo, 63, has been rocked by the confession on Thursday of his top aide, Melissa DeRosa, that they deliberately hid data on nursing home COVID deaths, in the midst of a Justice Department investigation into their handling of the pandemic. He is yet...

I saw a couple episodes of The Last Kingdom on Netflix at my daughter's house. No chance of seeing it at home as I have no television or cable. It was actually very good. I learned later that it was based on a series of books by Bernard Cornwell. It's about a Northrumbrian man who was captured as a child by Danes and raised by them. His lifelong goal is to retake his homeland from his uncle who usurped his title.

Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu of California appeared to let the cat out of the bag on Thursday with regard to why the National Guard is still in the country’s capital in large numbers more than three weeks after President Joe Biden’s inauguration.In remarks during Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, Lieu appeared to imply that troops are still treating Washington, D.C., as an occupied military zone because the former president will not bend the knee and disavow his stance that the 2020 election was stolen from him.To put it more simply, Lieu appeared to state that if Trump were to simply concede...

Raskin pointed to breaking news that occurred late Friday night. Attention was called to Herrera Beutler's conversation with McCarthy, where the minority leader allegedly recounted a conversation he had with President Trump. According to Herrera Beutler, McCarthy allegedly told Trump to "call off" the riots at the Capitol. The president allegedly said it wasn't his supporters who caused the chaos and violence at the Capitol. "Needless to say, this is an additional, critical piece of corroborating evidence further confirming the charges before you, as well as the president's willful dereliction of duty," Raskin said before the vote. "For that reason,...

President Trump’s defense team gave their opening arguments on why he is not guilty of inciting the January 6 Capitol breach.Speaking from the Senate floor on Friday, the President’s lawyers called the impeachment trial an act of political vengeance by Democrats, arguing that the President’s words are protected under the freedom of speech.“This appalling abuse of the Constitution only further divides our nation when we should be trying to come together around shared priorities,” defense attorney Michael van der Veen stated.

In my January 12 statement in support of the article of impeachment, I referenced a conversation House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy relayed to me that he'd had with President Trump while the January 6 attack was ongoing. Here are the details: When McCarthy finally reached the president on January 6 and asked him to publicly and forcefully call off the riot, the president initially repeated the falsehood that it was antifa that had breached the Capitol. McCarthy refuted that and told the president that these were Trump supporters. That's when, according to McCarthy, the president said: "Well, Kevin, I guess...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) responded to reports of the Biden White House considering imposing travel restrictions on the state, telling reporters that it would be a “political attack against the people of Florida” as well as “unconstitutional,” “unwise,” and “unjust.” “We will oppose it 100 percent,” DeSantis said Thursday in reaction to the reports of the Biden White House considering domestic travel restrictions on states such as Florida and California due to fears of spreading variant cases of the Chinese coronavirus. “It would not be based in science. It would purely be a political attack against the people of...

With the result of the second impeachment charade a forgone conclusion in Washington, let us now turn to the final partisan tool remaining in Democrats’ torture closet: The 14th Amendment.This amendment allows Congress to banish from future federal office any current or former politician deemed by congress to have “engaged in insurrection.” Its adoption after the Civil War was designed to prevent officers or political leaders of the Confederate regime from being elected to Congress or the presidency.In a normal world, it would be impossible for Congress to punish a man for engaging in “insurrection” after Congress had just acquitted...

HERAT, Afghanistan — A fuel tanker exploded Saturday at the Islam Qala crossing in Afghanistan's western Herat province on the Iranian border, injuring at least seven people and causing a massive fire that consumed more than 500 trucks carrying natural gas and fuel, according to Afghan officials and Iranian state media.It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the blast. Wahid Qatali, Herat’s provincial governor, said Afghan first responders did not have the means to put out the huge fire and had requested support from Iran in the form of fire-fighting aircraft.“For the time being, we can’t even talk about the casualties,”...

Democrats and the left-wing media are continuing to falsely accuse President Trump of calling for violence. Democrats are ignoring all the times they literally made threats against President Trump’s life.

Nancy Pelosi has slammed Andrew Cuomo's claim that COVID aid is short of the $15billion needed and said the federal package is worth $70bn - on the same day the governor was exposed for hiding the true nursing home death toll. The House Speaker sent a letter to congressional Democrats touting the settlement, which would far exceed the under-fire governor's demands, as she strongly rejected his repeated claims the state was being short-changed in a rare rebuke from a close ally. The slap down is a fresh blow to Cuomo as he struggles to salvage his administration from a growing...

Personal-finance guru Dave Ramsey says people need a $1,000 emergency fund. He also says that if a $600 or $1,400 stimulus check would be a lifeline for you during the current pandemic state of emergency, “you were pretty much screwed already.” The radio host and author argued against President Joe Biden’s proposed round of stimulus checks while speaking on Fox News on Thursday, telling “America’s Newsroom” that “I don’t believe in a stimulus check.” “You have a career problem. You have a debt problem. You have a relationship problem. You have a mental-health problem,” he continued. “Something else is going...

North Dakota has risen up in defiance of Joe Biden's recent executive order as the state House of Representatives passed a bill to ban transgender athletes from competing in female school sports events. State lawmakers passed the bill on Thursday that requires school athletes to participate on sports teams that correspond with their biological sex.