Free Republic

Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) urged his party to focus on President Biden heading into 2022, and not relitigating the 2020 election that former President Trump still falsely claims was stolen. McConnell, speaking to reporters during a weekly press conference, was asked if he was comfortable with the party embracing Trump. The former president was at a retreat over the weekend for Senate Republicans' campaign arm and endorsed Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) for reelection in Iowa earlier this month. “Well I do think we need to be talking about the future, not the past,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas tested positive for a COVID-19 breakthrough case on Tuesday, a department spokesperson said in a statement reported by CNN. Mayorkas was tested for the virus as part of routine pre-travel protocols, according to the statement from spokesperson Marsha Espinosa. He was preparing to travel to Colombia with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to CNN. Mayorkas is experiencing mild congestion and will continue to work from home.

Veteran country music star Travis Tritt announced he will not play venues that require proof of coronavirus vaccination or a negative test. In a statement posted to his official website, Tritt said he will be putting his money where his mouth is, emphasizing that any venue or promoter pushing extreme coronavirus protocols on his “fans will not be tolerated”: I’m putting my money where my mouth is and announcing that any venue or promoter mandating masks, requiring vaccinations, or pushing COVID testing protocols on my fans will not be tolerated. Any show I have booked that discriminates against concert-goers by...

I’m a sucker for secret menu items. During the few times I’ve visited In-N-Out, ordering Animal-Style fries (a huge upgrade on the chain’s otherwise crappy fries) made me feel like I was part of a clandestine club. Maybe not as secretive as the Illuminati, but close. I realize that the In-N-Out secret menu is far from secret, but there’s still a thrill to it. And if In-N-Out has a widely known secret menu, are there many more out there to be discovered? Turns out, yes—and they’re all in one place. TODAY reports on Hack The Menu, a website that consolidates...

Disgraced James Bond wannabe Christopher Steele granted an interview to George Stephanopoulos which has been turned into a "documentary" by George Stephanopoulos productions. Some might think it curious as to why Remington Steele has suddenly decided to come forward. It's no coincidence. You will remember that the Clinton campaign hired and paid Remington Steele to concoct a dossier on Donald Trump. You will remember that it was full of excrement that no one in the Mueller commission could validate. Even Peter Strzok said the dossier was a full of "bullsh*t" and probably Russian disinformation as well. The garbage dossier became...

Oregon’s central administrative agency on Monday inadvertently released the vaccination status of more than 40,000 individual state employees to The Oregonian/OregonLive and another media outlet.

The central principle of superconductivity is that electrons form pairs. But can they also condense into foursomes? Recent findings have suggested they can, and a physicist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology today published the first experimental evidence of this quadrupling effect and the mechanism by which this state of matter occurs. Reporting in Nature Physics, Professor Egor Babaev and collaborators presented evidence of fermion quadrupling in a series of experimental measurements on the iron-based material, Ba1−xKxFe2As2. The results follow nearly 20 years after Babaev first predicted this kind of phenomenon, and eight years after he published a paper predicting...

President Biden is set to participate in a CNN town hall in Baltimore this week where he will face questions from an “invitation-only audience” — as his administration juggles uniting the Democratic Party, a worsening border crisis and supply-chain bottlenecks creating empty shelves and threatening the on-time arrival of holiday gifts. On Monday, CNN announced the 90-minute town hall, which will be moderated by Anderson Cooper and air at 8 p.m. ET Thursday on the network. The president, who has recently been traveling across the country touting his “Build Back Better” agenda, could face questions regarding a number of crises...

Two humans are at least 99.9 percent genetically identical to each other. But it's that 0.1 percent or so that makes us special. This is what determines all our differences, from the unique ways we look, to our resistance or susceptibility to diseases such as HIV. Certain tiny tweaks in the genetic code can be incredibly helpful not only for the individual, but society. The more we know about these special genes (and the people who have them) the better, as it might be possible to create drugs that can mimic useful genetic differences. With that in mind, researchers are...

Southwest scrapped a plan to put unvaccinated workers with pending exemptions on unpaid leave after the Dec. 8 deadline. Both American and Southwest require their new-hire employees to show proof of Covid-19 vaccination before their first day. Large airlines are federal contractors and subject to a Biden administration order that requires their employees to be vaccinated or receive an exemption for medical or religious reasons.

The owner of a New York City supermarket chain predicted the food prices will increase sharply in the coming months, with some increasing 10 percent in the next two months. John Catsimatidis, the billionaire supermarket owner of Gristedes and D’Agostino Foods, warned that food giants such as Nabisco, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola will prioritize raising prices on products. “I see over 10 percent [price increase] in the next 60 days,” he said in an interview with Fox Business on Monday, adding that the trend will not drop “anytime soon.” Catsimatidis cited rising inflation and supply chain bottlenecks that are currently plaguing...

For a political press hopelessly addicted to speculation about the next big election, there are precious few data points to obsess over during the first year of a president’s term. New York City elects a mayor during this off-off-year, but it’s an election that’s typically too chaotic and too particular to really tell us much of anything about national trends. New Jersey elects a governor, but the Garden State has become so reliably blue that it hardly registers as a point of interest: Its days of electing gruff Republicans seem to be long gone. And so it must be periwinkle-hued...

There’s a lot happening in the world right now, so let’s get the most pressing stuff out of the way and sorted: was the late Gong Show creator/host Chuck Barris really an assassin for the CIA? Barris claimed in his 1982 memoir Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind to have been secretly working for the intelligence organization during the sixties and seventies—around the same time he was developing kitschy and iconic television shows like The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and The Gong Show. Is it possible that the unassuming and at-times silly Barris could be telling the truth here—or was...

A student at Oberlin College in Ohio described being "scared" and "angry" after the school announced a work crew would be installing radiators in a "safe space" dormitory for women and trans students, explaining the crew would likely be "cisgender men." "I was angry, scared, and confused. Why didn’t the College complete the installation over the summer, when the building was empty? Why couldn’t they tell us precisely when the workers would be there? Why were they only notifying us the day before the installation was due to begin?" Oberlin student Peter Fray-Witzer wrote in an op-ed published in the...

Protesters demonstrated Saturday against vaccine mandates in front of the New York Times building in New York City, chanting, “Defund the media!”

As everyone knows, the news media knows what's best for us and they always tell the truth. The only problem is that they use really big and complicated words that we simple folk just don't understand. How will you ever keep up? Well, don't worry! We prepared this special translation guide just for you, so the next time you're watching the news you'll be able to follow along! 1) "Debunked conspiracy theory" = a completely factual event that is 100% true and we don't like it 2) "This is dangerous misinformation" = we don't really agree with it but people...

A subvariant of the Covid Delta strain could be more infectious than its ancestor, experts warned today after data revealed the proportion of cases linked to the strain has doubled in a month. AY.4.2, as it is currently known to scientists, made up almost 10 per cent of all infections in England in the fortnight ending October 9. Virus-trackers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, which sequences thousands of Covid samples every week, say its prevalence stood at just four per cent in mid-September. Academics estimate it may be up to 15 per cent more transmissible than the original Delta, which...

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain voiced his "impatience with complaints about rising prices for food, gasoline, and other stuff. The fact is the American people spend too much on a lot of junk. This behavior is only possible because they have more money than they really need to survive. Billions of people around the world live on just a few dollars a day." "How can they do this?" Klain rhetorically asked. "Well, they don't own expensive gadgets like most people in America do. They don't own motor vehicles. They do most of their traveling on foot to destinations...

Started watching the Google Pixel 6 launch event. All of the speakers had their pronouns in a blurb next to their names. Then, they talked about how their cameras have been optimized to shoot underserved people of color. I had no idea that cameras were racist until today. Needless to say, I won't be buying their stupid phone.

Oleg Deripaska could be a target of Durham’s spygate probe SOURCE — NBC NEWS FBI agents on Tuesday swarmed the home of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska in Washington, D.C., an agency spokesperson confirmed to NBC News. The reason for their presence wasn’t immediately clear. The spokesperson said the agency is conducting “law enforcement activity at the home,” but wouldn’t elaborate. Deripaska is a billionaire oil tycoon with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. He was among two dozen Russian oligarchs and officials who were sanctioned by the Treasury Department in April 2018. A press release announcing the sanctions said...