Free Republic

Military planes making evacuation runs into Kabul are dropping flares and carrying out nosedive combat landings amid fears that Islamic terrorists may try to shoot one down as Afghans trying to flee the Taliban have described at least 20 civilians being killed in the chaos. US military planes are doing rapid diving combat landings to beat the threat of a missile attack, with video showing a French transport plane yesterday deploying flares designed to confuse heat-seeking technology which may have been stolen by Islamic State in Afghanistan. Taliban forces controlling all access points to Hamid Karzai International Airport are not...

Politics hide corruption in complexity. Congress passes bills of thousands of pages and the implication and damage are hidden until the effects are made part of what must be dealt with on a daily basis. Our legal system has become a corrupted labyrinth of exclusions and exceptions with confusing motions filed by both sides as cases move through the system. The final judgments make us scratch our heads wondering how they came to a judgment. We do not know because the process is so complex that only one with special knowledge can understand how the judgment was reached. The battle...

GLOBAL POLITICS Biden administration appears to have stockpiled military equipment for Taliban months before collapse By NEWS EDITOR August 19, 2021 Reading Time: 2 minutes WASHINGTON — For months, the Biden administration was stockpiling military equipment for the Taliban before the collapse of the Afghan government. The report comes from Reuters who shares that well over a month before the Taliban’s march across the country, the Biden administration was sending military equipment to Afghanistan amid a “planned withdrawal.” The plans of the Biden administration were not very well thought out or executed. But perhaps this was the plan all along....

According to Wikipedia, the Peter Principle is described as "a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their 'maximum level of incompetence; employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.'" There is no greater example of this premise than our present occupier of the Oval Office, President Joe Biden. During the decades Biden spent in the Senate, he was merely one of a...

Joe Biden is unfit to be President of the United States. It was obvious when he was running for office that he lacks the physical stamina and mental acuity for the job. It has become increasingly obvious since January that the part-time President has either hidden from the media or stumbled through the kind of scripted press conferences that Americans rightly used to deride as the hallmark of banana republics. The handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan has exposed Biden's incapacity. The painful truth is now undeniable. He must go — even if that means Kamala Harris, who has been...

EXCERPT Book Review of Shorting the Grid by Meredith Angwin Shorting or Bloating the Power Grid? 1 out of 5 stars Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2021 With all the plaudits given this book, I’m sorry I must be the one to say that I found it to be full of half-truths and misleading data analysis that is apparently being used by advocates for bloated Capacity Power Grids (such as unions, both political parties and both nuclear and renewable energy interests), hypocritically all in the name of lowering electricity prices for consumers. I will let readers decide...

Liberal comedian Bill Maher took on the woke takeover of media. On his HBO show Real Time on Friday evening, Maher welcomed former New York Magazine writer Andrew Sullivan as a guest on the show. Sullivan singled out academia as the biggest cause of the woke takeover as universities have been allegedly teaching students to think of themselves as part of racial and sexual groups instead of as individuals. Academia has not be unique to the problem however, as Sullivan was recently pushed out of New York Magazine for not toeing the woke line. “You were at New York Magazine,...

A doctor has been accused of sacrificing livestock for Santeria witchcraft in his flat after investigators discovered 22 farm animals being kept in his New Jersey home on Thursday. When authorities arrived at Emilio Otero's property on Van Horne Street they were met with "seven to nine" goats, several chickens and even a dead pigeon nailed above a door. The investigators from the Division of Environmental Health for Jersey City visited the apartment after a tip off from Emilio's neighbours. Animal service agents were called to the flat and they removed at least 22 farm animals that had been kept...

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on Sunday called on Tokyo to release the Islamic republic's funds that have been frozen in Japan because of US sanctions over its nuclear programme. "Delaying the release of Iran's assets in Japanese banks is unjustifiable," Raisi told visiting Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, the government website reported. Japan and to a larger extent South Korea are both major exporters of technology, and hold billions of dollars in Iranian assets. These funds have been frozen since the former US president Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew Washington from a landmark nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions on Tehran in...

Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer blasted President Biden’s Friday press conference on the debacle in Afghanistan, saying the president has put Americans “just one stray bullet away from a bloodbath in Kabul.” “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a politician, particularly at a perilous moment like this, be so in denial, out of touch, out to lunch and all around clueless,” Fleischer, who served in the George W. Bush administration, told host Rita Cosby on WABC Radio Friday. “Joe Biden’s judgment on so many issues, for so many decades, has been so wrong, and we’re seeing it...

Public schools who want to institute mask mandate rules can't be denied federal funds, even if their state governments try to pressure them out of mask mandates, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said. The Florida state government threatened to withhold funds for schools in Broward and Alachua counties if they imposed mandatory mask rules. But the Biden administration has proposed using federal funds to make up the difference, with Cardona specifying Sunday that the schools "do not have to get the green light for [their] governor to use these funds." "We have to do everything in our power to keep them...

WASHINGTON — Hundreds of officials who worked for former Republican President George W. Bush are endorsing Democratic White House hopeful Joe Biden — the latest Republican-led group coming out to oppose the re-election of Donald Trump. The officials, who include Cabinet secretaries and other senior people in the Bush administration, have formed a political action committee — "43 Alumni for Biden" — to support the former vice president in his Nov. 3 race, three organizers of the group told Reuters, which first reported the story. The group on Wednesday put out a statement announcing its formation.Bush was the country's 43rd...

While only booster doses of Pfizer and Moderna have been announced, Murthy said they are waiting on efficacy data for a second Johnson & Johnson shot. "We anticipate the people who receive J&J will likely need a booster as well," Murthy said. MORE: Why you shouldn't rush to get a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot before it's your turn Asked about the safety of taking a third shot, Murthy emphasized that the booster distribution plan is "contingent on the (Food and Drug Administration) FDA and the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) CDC Advisory Committee doing their full and independent evaluation."...

A British man was sentenced to six weeks in prison for not wearing a face mask, and the judge also ordered him to undergo mandatory psychiatric treatment because he dared to question the effectiveness of face masks. Benjamin Glynn, 40, was detained in Singapore after video of him not wearing a face mask on a train went viral in May. “According to reports, Glynn delivered a rant in court – in which he described the proceedings as “preposterous” and “disgusting” – and said masks were not effective in preventing the spread of Covid,” reports the Guardian. This outburst prompted the...

We all know there was funny business during the 2020 election. There is no way 81 million Americans voted for Joe Biden. You’ll never convince me otherwise. The 2020 election was not fair, and Democrats knew how to exploit the COVID crisis to set things in motion. Secretaries of State cannot just change election laws willy nilly. They need the state legislatures to sign off on changes. In Pennsylvania and Michigan, such tweaks were executed without approval from their respective state legislatures for an obvious reason. They were Republican majority bodies. The team gathered to argue the election discrepancies was...

“‘Thine is the dominion, O Lord, and Thou dost exalt Thyself as head over all. Both riches and honor come from Thee, and Thou dost rule over all’” (1 Chronicles 29:11-12). Trust God, who controls everyone and everything. In Daniel 6, King Darius chose 120 princes to help him govern his kingdom. Over the princes he appointed three presidents, with Daniel being the first president. The princes and other two presidents were jealous of Daniel, so they devised a scheme against him. They told the king that he should make a law requiring every person to make his requests only...

DAVENPORT, Fla. — By June, Meli Feliciano’s family appeared to have finally found a measure of stability after being jolted by the economic devastation of the coronavirus pandemic. Her husband had secured a good job in construction, and she was receiving hundreds of dollars in weekly federal and state unemployment aid, giving her some breathing room while she submitted job applications each week. She kept records of it all in a pink binder that her daughter had once used in kindergarten. That’s when calamity struck. Her husband fell ill, temporarily wiping out his income. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) slashed...

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) — General Motors is recalling all Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles sold worldwide to fix a battery problem that could cause fires. The recall raises questions about lithium ion batteries, which now are used in nearly all electric vehicles. President Joe Biden wants to convert 50% of the U.S. vehicle fleet from internal combustion to electricity by 2050 as part of a broader effort to fight climate change. The recall announced Friday adds about 73,000 Bolts from the 2019 through 2022 model years to a previous recall of 69,000 older Bolts. Gm says in rare cases the...

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III has ordered six commercial airlines to provide passenger jets to help with the growing U.S. military operation evacuating Americans and Afghan allies from Kabul, the Afghan capital, the Pentagon said on Sunday.Mr. Austin activated Stage 1 of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, created in 1952 after the Berlin airlift, to provide 18 airliners to help ferry passengers arriving at bases in the Middle East from Afghanistan, John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement.The current activation is for 18 planes: four from United Airlines; three each from American Airlines, Atlas Air, Delta...

The American-nurtured Afghan military of the last 20 years that had suffered thousands of prior casualties evaporated in a few hours in the encirclement of Kabul. Enlistees apparently calculated that their own meager chances with the premodern Taliban were still better than fighting as a dependency of the postmodern United States — despite its powerful diversity training programs. Forces more powerful than the Taliban, in places far more strategic, will now leverage an ideologically driven but predictably incompetent administration, a woke Pentagon and politically weaponized intelligence communities. Why not, when President Joe Biden trashes both American frackers and the Saudis...