Free Republic

President Biden’s $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan'' could soon become law. The budget-busting legislation, sold as emergency COVID response and “stimulus,” passed the Senate over the weekend. But even the liberal-leaning fact-checking website PolitiFact is pointing out that almost all of the bill’s spending is unrelated to the health effects of COVID-19. “Total spending directly on COVID-19’s health impacts ranges from $100 billion to $160 billion,” fact-checker Jon Greenberg writes. “At the high end, direct COVID-19 spending represents about 8.5% of the bill’s $1.9 trillion cost.” Of the bill’s nearly $2 trillion in spending, PolitiFact reports that just $14 to...

OKLAHOMA CITY - First-degree manslaughter charges will be filed Wednesday against five officers involved in the shooting death of 15-year-old Stavian Rodriguez. According to the Oklahoma City Police Department, the soon-to-be-charged officers were identified as Corey Adams, Jared Barton, Bethany Sears, John Skuta and Brad Pemberton. Rodriguez, who was accused of armed robbery last Nov. 23 at a southwest Oklahoma City convenience store, was confronted and shot by police.

Frustrated by a lack of timeline for reopening, event professionals in Pennsylvania are urging Gov. Tom Wolf to ease COVID-19 mitigation restrictions for private events and weddings. The Private Event Professionals of Pennsylvania along with the Pennsylvania Restaurant & Lodging Association and the Philadelphia/South Jersey/Delaware chapter of the National Association for Catering and Events said they are advocating for the safe reopening of the wedding industry. The groups want to see the event industry reopen at 50% capacity effective immediately with plans for how to reach 100% operating levels. They launched LetPAMarryUs.com, a site designed to “save Pennsylvania weddings.” The...

Chinese Communist Party “experts” urged the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) on Tuesday to let China build and run a global database for “vaccine passports” documenting if every person on earth has received a Chinese coronavirus vaccine. The Communist Party launched its domestic “vaccine passport” system Wednesday, despite W.H.O. officials urging countries not to implement such a system due to unequal access to vaccines and the variety in the quality of the available offerings around the world. The “vaccine passport” — A digital certification that confirms a person has received a coronavirus vaccination — joins China’s larger “social credit system,” which...

Bloomberg Businessweek’s latest “equality issue” has questioned whether the thousands of pages of U.S. tax code are — wait for it — “racist.” It’s as if the left isn’t even trying to make sense anymore. The cover of the new issue led with a picture of Emory University Law Professor Dorothy Brown — who made the argument that the tax code is racist. The picture was captioned with a leading question: “Is The Tax Code Racist?” The actual story headline was just as bad: “A Tax Code Optimized for White Wealth Leaves Black Americans Behind.”

Samurai Hitman - Saturday Night LiveBack when Saturday Night Live was funny. John Belushi and the Not Ready For Prime Time Players - Samurai Hitman. Jane you ignorant ... Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin

The Senate on Wednesday voted to confirm Merrick Garland as U.S. Attorney General, handing the reins of the Justice Department over to a longtime federal judge who's pledged to de-politicize the agency. He was confirmed by a vote of 70 to 30. Among the Republicans who voted in Garland's favor were Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Republicans who voted against Garland included two likely 2024 presidential candidates, Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas. "America can breathe a sigh of relief that we're...

Go for the gold? The U.S. government went for it. FBI agents were looking for an extremely valuable cache of fabled Civil War-era gold — possibly tons of it — when they excavated a remote woodland site in Pennsylvania three years ago this month, according to government emails and other recently released documents in the case. On March 13, 2018, treasure hunters led the FBI to Dent’s Run, about 135 miles (220 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh, where legend has it an 1863 shipment of Union gold was either lost or stolen on its way to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia....

Professor Edwin Driver arrived in Amherst in 1948 as one of the first Black teachers hired at a flagship state university in the country. But the 23-year-old sociology instructor at what would become the University of Massachusetts Amherst says he was denied pay raises for decades, despite being one of its most published professors. Driver and his wife, who was from India, also encountered roadblocks trying to buy a house in the mostly white college town. Their three children faced racism from neighbors and school officials alike. ... Kamm Howard, co-chair of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in...

When the state announced its own version of lockdowns and face mask mandates last spring, Peaster briefly experimented with remote learning. But a survey of parents and students showed that a majority didn’t like it. When it came time for classes to start in August, Peaster simply ignored most of the mandates. They continued their classes as usual. For both teachers and students alike, if you wanted to wear a mask you were free to do so. If not, you didn’t. It was as simple as that. They didn’t move the student’s desks any further apart. Nobody was learning “remotely”...

Former first lady Michelle Obama will be inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame (NWHF), the organization announced on Monday, International Women's Day. She will join several other inductees who will be honored with a ceremony in October. "Advocate, author, lawyer, and 44th First Lady of the United States—the first Black person to serve in the role—Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most influential and iconic women of the 21st century," NWHF said in a press release about the 2021 inductees.

This is a rather odd story that I’ve been following for a while now, so bear with me. It’s been featured on a couple of the Travel Channel’s conspiracy theory shows and you’ll see why in a moment if you’re not familiar with it. But a recent development may bring it out of the tinfoil hat column and at least into the realm of possibility. The tale starts in the 1860s when legend has it that a large wagon full of gold bullion was either stolen or “went missing” in a remote area of western Pennsylvania. The shipment had supposedly...

A New York judge tossed the defamation lawsuit from the campaign of former President Donald Trump against the New York Times. Judge James d’Auguste granted the newspaper's motion to dismiss on Tuesday, which focused on a March 2019 op-ed published under the headline “The Real Trump-Russia Quid Pro Quo.” Max Frankel, the executive editor of the New York Times from 1986 to 1994, wrote in the op-ed that Trump had "an overarching deal" with "[Russian President] Vladimir Putin's oligarchy" against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election — an arrangement that would deliver “a new pro-Russian foreign policy,...

A top U.S. admiral has said that Taiwan is in China's military sights, warning of possible military action in the next six years, as well as fears Beijing could overtake America's global leadership role in the coming decades. "Taiwan is clearly one of their ambitions ... And I think the threat is manifest during this decade, in fact, in the next six years," Adm. Philip Davidson, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday. Davidson also said China could overtake the United States' hegemony in global affairs and assume a world leadership role by...

Mexican drug cartels and human smugglers TAG 'asylum-seeking' migrants to the US with $500 colored wristbands that look like hospital bracelets to keep track of their movements U.S. Customs and Border Protection has learned that migrants illegally crossing the border have been using a system of colored wristbands The plastic wristbands were placed on the individuals by the drug cartels and human traffickers who ferried them over the Mexico-United States border The bracelets were marked 'arrivals' or 'entries' in Spanish and were spotted lying along the Rio Grande shore near the Texas border town of Penitas A Honduran migrant told...

The Supreme Court delivers another blow to a victim of egregious police abuse.On July 28, 2016, a group of Cleveland police officers dressed in plain clothes and driving in an unmarked car idled up to a house, where they spotted a man on the front porch. The man was named Shase Howse, and he lived in that house with his mother. The police proceeded to beat and arrest him. Last year a federal court ruled that those two cops were protected by the legal doctrine known as qualified immunity. And this morning, buried in the Supreme Court order, came...

So when we're determining the midpoint of Lent, we have two options. We can count out 20 days of the Lenten fast from Ash Wednesday forward (skipping the Sundays), or we can take the easier route and just count all the days from Ash Wednesday, stopping at 23 (since 23 is half of 46). Either way, we wind up at the Third Thursday of Lent. Since most Catholics don't attend daily Mass (and, historically, never have), the Church has long noted the milestone on the Sunday following the Thursday in the Third Week of Lent. The Fourth Sunday of Lent...

The Women's Prize for Fiction has made history by including a trans woman in its 2021 longlist. Torrey Peters has been listed for her debut novel Detransition, Baby, months after organisers faced fierce criticism for announcing entries will be accepted from anyone 'legally defined' as a woman. Detransition, Baby follows trans women Reese and Amy as they attempt to navigate forming an unconventional family when Amy de-transitions to become Ames and fathers a child from an affair with his boss Katrina.

Meghan Markle's former TV father is not impressed with the bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey that aired on Sunday. The actor, who played Robert Zane on Suits, slammed the interview as being "insensitive" due to it being carried out during the ongoing pandemic. "Today, 3,000 people are going to die in America from Covid. A couple of hundred people are going to die, even this hour, in the U.K.," he told LBC Radio. "It was quite insensitive and offensive that we are all complicit in this sort of palace gossip in the midst of so much death. I think it...

Amid Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s sexual harassment allegations, and the scandal over his administration hiding the disgustingly high number of nursing home and group home deaths, few are talking about the elephant in the room. The big scandal isn’t that Cuomo is a creep, because everyone knew that already. The scandal isn’t even that Cuomo lied about nursing home deaths. The real scandal is what lay behind the high nursing home deaths in New York and a handful of other states led by leftist governors such as Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Minnesota’s Tim Walz, and Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf. It is the story...