Free Republic

The opportunity to vote in the comfort and safety of their own home appeals to many German voters — especially when COVID-19 infection numbers are rising. Election organizers expect as many as 50% mail-in ballots this time around, a significant increase from the 28.6% in the last election, in 2017. Mail-in voting was introduced in Germany in 1957, and until 2008 those wishing to post their ballots had to apply for permission and provide a reason why they couldn’t show up at their local polling stations. Supporters argue that postal voting is more inclusive and benefits groups such as disabled...

KABUL, Aug 16 (Reuters) - Taliban fighters in the Afghan capital, Kabul, started collecting weapons from civilians on Monday because people no longer need them for personal protection, a Taliban official said. "We understand people kept weapons for personal safety. They can now feel safe. We are not here to harm innocent civilians," the official told Reuters.

How top officials traded the security and stability of Afghanistan, and by extension, America, to instead promote unfounded fears about white domestic terrorists. hile Taliban forces rapidly overtook territories across Afghanistan earlier this month, Joe Biden held an overdramatic ceremony at the White House to once again perpetuate phony narratives about the events of January 6. Biden, falsely claiming officers died as a result of the Capitol protest, signed legislation passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate to bestow the Congressional Gold Medal to the United States Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan Police for their actions that day. “A mob of...

With Monday's disastrous, tone-deaf national address deflecting any responsibility or semblance of reality in relation to his failed withdrawal from Afghanistan, Joe Biden's presidency has already shrunk... beyond recognition. It seems like the last several presidents all endured the same, clichéd headline at some point in their presidency. "The Incredible Shrinking Presidency." It began in 1992 when Time Magazine gave the cover story treatment of "The Incredible Shrinking President" to harm George H. W. Bush and prop up the chances of Bill Clinton. The media kept propping Clinton up through his scandals and failures and only came around to a...

During an interview aired on Friday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) said the border is the worst national security crisis the country faces and it’s “easier to get across our southern border than it is to get a table for dinner in New York City.” Hagerty said: “This is the gravest national security crisis that we face as a nation. They’ve come and they’ve absolutely collapsed the border. Maria, it’s now easier to get across our southern border than it is to get a table for dinner in New York City....

Following Biden’s disastrous pullout, it’s clear that many Afghan citizens will come to America. Even if the administration doesn’t ship them in, they’ll head for our southern border, just as every other Third World immigrant is. And here’s where the problems arise: Recently arriving Afghan immigrant men (unlike the ones who came to the West decades ago) have an appalling record of sexual assault against women and children once they’re in the West. Remember in 2014 and 2015, when Angela Merkel opened Europe’s gates to the people fleeing the Syrian Civil War and the other fallout from Obama’s “Arab Spring”?...

August 17, 2021 Tuesday of week 20 in Ordinary Time Basilica of St. Hyacinth, Chicago, Illinois Readings at MassLiturgical Colour: Green.First readingJudges 6:11-24 ©'Peace be with you; have no fear; you will not die'The angel of the Lord came and sat under the terebinth at Ophrah which belonged to Joash of Abiezer. Gideon his son was threshing wheat inside the winepress to keep it hidden from Midian, when the angel of the Lord appeared to him and said, ‘The Lord is with you, valiant warrior!’ Gideon answered him, ‘Forgive me, my lord, but if the Lord is with us, then...

There will be blood! That’s the one thing that can be said with any certainty about the catastrophe in Afghanistan. The ensuing question, of course, is who is responsible for the inevitable bloodletting? The Taliban obviously. Their record for savagery long precedes the current debacle. But the cast of characters is much larger. There are a series of corrupt Afghan governments that despite the deluge of American treasure and blood failed to create a meaningful military force. There were the neo-cons whose delusion of regime change and nation building appealed to American hubris but had no correspondence to political realities....

Vessel congestion outside the busiest US gateway for trade with Asia is clogged with the most inbound container vessels in nearly six months. Bloomberg data shows the number of containerships queuing off the coast of Los Angeles has reached 37 on Sunday evening, that’s three less than the all-time-high observed on Feb. 1. On Sunday, the average waits for berth space, a designated location in a port used for mooring vessels when vessels are not at sea, was 6.2 days, compared with 5.7 in late June. That number topped eight days in April. Readers may recall the collapse of the...

The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) on Tuesday launched joint live-fire assault drills in multiple locations near the island of Taiwan in response to recent collusion and provocations by the US and Taiwan secessionists. The PLA Eastern Theater Command on Tuesday dispatched warships, anti-submarine warfare aircraft and fighter jets in surrounding maritime and aerial areas near the southwest and southeast of the island of Taiwan for military exercises including joint live-fire assaults, and also for testing the command troops' integrated joint operation capabilities, Senior Colonel Shi Yi, spokesperson of the command, announced on the same day. Recently, the US and...

In the coming months, as the Democrats push harder against America’s fabric, “Leave us alone” is not an effective opposition. I’ve previously recommended a strategy for turning the political tide that involves getting involved locally. These battles will not be won from the top down. We must build our case from the bottom, converting people one at a time. It is often said that the battle is too big and the left will overpower us. In a way that’s true. They are too big because conservatives fight alone. Numbers are important. The more of us that band together to help,...

The South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham called Joe Biden after his victory over Donald Trump to tell the president he only joined attacks on his son, Hunter Biden, as a “bare minimum” to satisfy Trump supporters.The detail was included in a lengthy profile of Graham and his Washington maneuvers published by the New York Times. It said the call, intended to “revive a friendship damaged by [Graham’s] call for a special prosecutor to investigate the overseas business dealings” of Hunter Biden, was “short, and not especially sweet”. […] Once Trump did represent the Republican party as its nominee for...

On Tuesday, August 17, an official iron curtain descends over New York City, as unvaccinated New Yorkers are bared entrance to all indoor restaurants, bakeries, catering halls, event spaces, grocery stores that contain indoor dining, fast food restaurants, bars, hotel banquet rooms, coffee shops, nightclubs, museums and galleries, cabarets, bowling alleys, movie theaters, live music, concert venues, aquariums and zoos, professional sports arenas, stadiums, convention centers, exhibition halls, performing arts theaters, arcades, pool and billiard halls, recreational game centers, casinos, gyms, fitness centers, indoor classes, pools, fitness studios, dance studios, and sports classes. Mayor de Blasio announced on Monday that...

Military flights evacuating diplomats and civilians from Afghanistan restarted early Tuesday after the runway at Kabul airport was cleared of thousands of people desperate to flee after the Taliban seized the capital. The number of civilians at the airport had thinned out, according to a Western security official at the facility, a day after chaotic scenes at the Hamid Karzai International Airport left at least five people dead as US police fired gunshots to disperse crowds of people desperate to flee the Taliban takeover. A US official told Reuters that two gunmen who had appeared to have fired into the...

It is no longer morning in America. Now many are mourning America. Primitive Taliban savages just routed allegedly American-trained Afghan forces, waltzing across Afghanistan in a matter of days. Resistance-- and the erstwhile Afghani government-- collapsed like paper lambs because the Afghan forces did not believe in their cause and the government didn’t either. Much as those in charge of the U.S. no longer believe in American exceptionalism and the founding principles on which their nation was proudly built, and because of which it succeeded beyond any other in human history. The Biden administration claims that the Afghanistan fiasco is...

Sooner or later, the piper must be paid and, in this case, the price has turned out to be chaos and death. We tried before the election, to get you to see Biden for what he is. Evil, arrogant, self-centered, and bereft of any qualities of statesmanship or even good judgment. You didn’t listen. You believed the media stories; that the laptop was fake; that he was in his bunker, rather than campaigning, because of the evil virus; and that he wanted to heal the country and knew how to do it. Guess you’ve graphically gotten your comeuppance now. Argue...

The Afghanistan defeat will be more disastrous than we can now imagine. State Department spokesman Ned Price gave a press conference where he informed the Taliban about U.S. expectations. He announced that, "a future Afghan government that upholds the basic rights of its people, that doesn’t harbor terrorists, and that protects the basic rights of its people, including the basic fundamental rights of half of its population, its women and girls, that is a government that we would be able to work with." Price did not have a clue about how inane this sounded. The country is in chaos, the...

Candidate Biden promised to unite America. President Biden divides it – and worse. Welcome to the new America -- the United States of Dystopia: open borders, massive increases in government, reckless spending, crushing debt, demonized and defunded police, coddled criminals, cancel culture, identity politics, censorship, and socialism. America is becoming unhinged. Who should we blame? One immediate candidate is the progressive wing of the Democrat Party, which now controls the beltway bureaucracy, the White House, most of Congress, and the mayors and councils of our urban ghettos. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in Alice Through the Looking...

Although the White House had intended to keep Biden under wraps for as long as possible, the demand that he say something – anything – about the unfolding debacle in Afghanistan forced him to leave Camp David for a 20-minute statement, after which he refused to take any questions. The important part of what he said boils down to one sentence: We had to leave and everything that went wrong was Trump’s or the Afghans' fault. Biden is a craven coward, a feckless fool, a dismal dummy, and a man who will soon have more blood on his hands than...

Since helping to execute a search warrant for evidence in a drug trafficking ring and being shot by Kenneth Walker -- the boyfriend of Breonna Taylor -- in the process, my life has never been the same. Three days after the tragic death of George Floyd -- which left the nation in an uproar -- the 911 call in which Walker says that someone had broken in and shot his girlfriend was released to the public. Though I wanted to respond and set the record straight about what had transpired that night, I couldn’t say anything about the case, because...