Free Republic

This past year, my wife and I developed a delightful habit of “Monday’s with Eli.” He is my soon-to-be 5 year-old grandson. He has a nearly 4 month-old baby brother, whose time in the womb was the occasion for our weekly baby-sitting duties. With my retirement, his presence was a new challenge to “find things to do.” He is an energetic boy, bright, with quick interest in almost anything around him. Our duties took us on long walks in the local arboretum, visits to the local dam, a train-yard, and countless forays into the woods across the street. There have...

The biggest political scandal in America right now is playing out in New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo is in a lot of trouble – and rightly so. The Democratic governor did not merely wildly mismanage his state’s response to the Covid emergency, while netting himself a lucrative book deal and an Emmy. He did something worse. In the middle of a public health emergency, he used his office to help one of his largest political donors shield itself from legal consequences as 15,000 nursing home residents died from Covid-19 – and then he and his administration underreported that death...

Donald Trump’s connection to the conservative movement to this day remains a subject of acrimonious dispute among the right-wing intelligentsia — some have embraced the 45th president as the movement’s authentic leader, while others regard him warily as an interloper, a New York Democrat who captured the party from the outside. Nobody on the right ever disowned Rush Limbaugh. Throughout his career, they agreed he was a pure representative of conservative thought. George Bush courted him with an overnight visit to the Lincoln Bedroom and the presidential box at the 1992 Republican National Convention. National Review declared him “Leader of...

Dinesh D’Souza did a podcast pointing out Nancy Pelosi’s very peculiar behavior regarding events at the Capitol in the days leading up to January 6. In the five weeks since then, Pelosi has turned Washington, D.C. into an armed, walled city and is working with the White House to crack down on dissenting views – meaning, any views that run counter to the Democrat party narrative. There’s something weirdly un-American about what we’re seeing now.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) launched another scathing attack on former President Donald Trump, accusing him of dividing the United States into a "dark and dangerous place" by continuously claiming the November election results were fraudulent. In a statement entered into a congressional record that was released on Thursday, the Utah lawmaker said Trump's denial of the election results was "one of the most reprehensible acts" possible and warned that the perpetuation of this "big lie" threatens the American people.

Already known for its "fact-checking" of controversial issues such as the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and COVID-19, Facebook now will mobilize a panel of scholars to "debunk myths about climate change. CNBC described Facebook's move as "further leaning in to the 'arbiter of truth' role that the company once renounced." The experts will come from the likes of the University of Cambridge, George Mason University and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Facebook announced Thursday, CNBC reported, it will add a section to its climate change information hub that will features facts, misconceptions and falsehoods. The social...

Artist's impression of the Cygnus X-1 system. (International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research) ------------------------------------------------------------- Astronomers have revisited the very first stellar-mass black hole ever identified, and found that it's at least 50 percent more massive than we thought. The black hole in the X-ray binary system Cygnus X-1 has been recalculated to clock in at 21 times the mass of the Sun. That makes it the most massive stellar-mass black hole ever detected without the use of gravitational waves, and it's forcing astronomers to rethink how black holes form. Cygnus X-1 was first discovered as an X-ray source in 1964,...

The scandal that's embroiled Albany is going to Washington. Senate Republicans plan to ask President Biden's pick for attorney general, Judge Merrick Garland, at his confirmation hearing about whether he'll investigate the alleged cover-up of nursing home coronavirus deaths by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The hearing is scheduled to begin Monday and run into Tuesday. Cuomo, a Democrat, has denied he covered up nursing home deaths. "When Judge Garland testifies before this Committee, we expect him to commit the Department of Justice to fully investigating this cover-up to determine whether any criminal laws were violated and to prosecute any...

Juan Williams, the lone liberal co-host on Fox News chat show The Five, had a question. Like people across the country after Donald Trump’s rally in Tampa, Florida, on Tuesday, he wanted to know what was going on with all the Trump supporters holding up “QAnon” signs and wearing “Q” shirts.

On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) stated that he had planned to stay in Cancun “through the weekend and to work remotely there,” but he “started to have second thoughts almost immediately.” Cruz said that after their house lost power for two days, “Our girls asked — said look, school’s been canceled for the week. Can we take a trip and go somewhere warm? And Heidi and I, as parents, we said okay, sure. And so, last night, I flew down with them to the beach. And then I flew back this afternoon....

In a February 2021 bulletin sent out by the Oregon Department of Education, just below a feature on Black History Month, is a notice announcing a “micro-course” for educators titled “A Pathway to Math Equity.” The course promises to provide educators with “key tools for engagement [and] strategies to improve equitable outcomes for Black, Latinx, and multilingual students” and knowledge on how to “dismantle racism in mathematics instruction.” One might well ask, how can math—which more than any other subject deals in the realm of pure logic—possibly be racist? The “toolkit” provided as a resource for the first course...

Twice over the course of four days, an 800-year-old church in Stockholm was firebombed. On Sunday, Jan. 24, 2021, several Molotov cocktails were hurled at the 12-century Spånga church, located in a Muslim majority area. According to the church’s pastor, “the alarm was triggered when a window was smashed and flammable liquid thrown at the front gate and one of the windows. However, the fire was quickly put out by the police, who used a powder extinguisher.” The same church had been fire-bombed just four days earlier, on Jan. 20, 2021: two explosives were hurled at and smashed through...

Javad Zarif, Iran’s Foreign Minister, has shown he believes that the Biden Administration can be threatened into rapidly submitting to Iran’s demand that it lift all sanctions on Iran without there being any change to the 2015 nuclear deal. In an interview with a leading Iranian newspaper, published on February 6, Zarif insisted that the Americans must do this “within two weeks” of his interview. It’s easy to see why Zarif might have assumed this would be possible. Biden has repeatedly mentioned his intention to return to that deal, and has appointed the pro-Iranian anti-Israel Robert Malley to be...

Shower Pressure Fixed - After installing a new Pressure Tank to solve rapid cycling of Pump - I got good pressure in the Shower for just 3- 4 minutes. I had previously removed the water restrictor in the Shower Head to try to get better flow. However, the high flow gave me good pressure at the beginning of the Shower but as time went the pressure in the tank got lower and lower but not low enough to turn on the pump. The FIX - put in a smaller restrictor (3/32" diameter hole). Now I get more than adequate pressure...

<p>My mother looked a bit flustered as I walked through her front door.</p><p>Do you know, a lady my age just stabbed her husband to death in their kitchen? They were a lovely couple, according to the neighbors. Always together, always working in their garden, always on holidays. Well, she stabbed him to death. Four times! In the kitchen!</p>

The Nation of Islam may be the largest racist religion in America. It is certainly the most influential with Louis Farrakhan’s original Million Man March drawing some 400,000 racists and allies of the hate group, including a young Barack Obama, who would later be photographed as a senator with the black supremacist leader at a Congressional Black Caucus event. House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn, the third highest ranking Democrat, and the kingmaker who got Biden the Democrat nomination and the White House, had thanked Farrakhan for, "offering up a number of precepts that we ought to adhere to.”...

The leftist NAACP, which never met a conservative it didn’t consider to be a racist hatemonger, is suing former President Donald Trump using an obscure law that was wielded against the Democratic Party-affiliated terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan who murdered blacks and their Republican enemies after the Civil War. The Ku Klux Klan Act is an unusual tool to pull from a cobweb-covered chest of old laws nobody knew were still in existence. President Ulysses S. Grant (he’s the guy on the $50 bill, millennials!) used the statute to declare martial law, penalize terrorist organizations, and use military force...

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Robert Spencer's new pamphlet delivers a robust defense of Western culture - and of America. To order Robert Spencer's new pamphlet: Stealing the West's Cultural Heritage, CLICK HERE. Foreword It has become fashionable of late among the leftist elites to accuse the West of pilfering its treasures — both physical resources and intellectual innovations — from native and minority cultures. The clear moral lesson, we are to understand, is that there is nothing particularly noteworthy or exceptional about Western culture and by extension about America. Instead, we should feel deep shame that our ancestors expropriated the physical and intellectual capital...

made their move to hold New York Gov Cuomo to account for what in the heck he did during the early days of the pandemic. Look, here is the hard truth – every politician made mistakes early as this no one knew what was going on, but the ones who were flexible and adapted (mostly GOP Governors by the way) will be remembered as the ones who got it right. The stubborn ones will not fare well in history most notably Governor Cuomo and Governor Newsom. Newsom is about to face a tough recall effort and now Cuomo may face...