Free Republic

Many Americans are awakening to the fact that we seem to have no local control of a lot of local things: public schools, our terms of employment, local governments, local elections. That last one popped again recently with the release of my colleague Mollie Hemingway’s deeply reported 2020 election investigation book, “Rigged.”That book, and some great corroborating independent reporting, show that 2020 election chaos was part of an effective and well-funded plan to help Democrats win by rigging the playing field. One key strategy deployed to that end has become default on the left yet still often goes unremarked and...

VIDEOBannon Derangement Syndrome. It ranks almost as high as Trump Derangement Syndrome. We saw an example of Bannon Derangement Syndrome when the House January 6 Committee voted to recommend criminal charges when Steve Bannon refused to cooperate with their highly selective probe. Ironically, Bannon would probably be happy to voluntarily appear before the House January 6 Committee but only AFTER the new GOP controlled Congress comes into session in 2023 when they can start investigating what REALLY happened that day.

Illinois governor eyes lifting 'certain mask mandates' before holidays © Greg Nash Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) said on Tuesday he is hoping to lift “certain mask mandate” before the holidays if cases decline in the state. “We want to remove the mitigations as we approach the holidays,” Pritzker said at a COVID-19 briefing, The Chicago Tribune reported. “That’s an important marker for us.” “We want to make sure that these numbers keep going down,“ he added.

Human beings aren't great at assessing risk. In 1979, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky posited a new branch of behavioral economics, which they titled prospect theory. One of their key findings was that human beings are naturally loss-averse -- we generally are willing to forego the probability of gains in order to minimize the chance of losses. Because of our loss aversion, human beings are also subject to what Kahneman and Tversky label the "planning fallacy": our self-serving bias toward believing that we are capable of planning for contingency more successfully than we are. As Kahneman writes, "Exaggerated optimism...

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — A failure to limit global warming could mean a “death sentence” for small island nations like the Maldives, including the end of their livelihoods and cultures, the country’s environment minister said Wednesday. A report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said earlier this year that the world is likely to exceed the 1.5 C increase in the 2030s, earlier than expected. “The difference between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees, for us, really is a death sentence,” Aminath Shauna, the Maldives’ minister for environment, climate change and technology, said in an online interview. She said...

An avid but non-partisan peruser of social media could be forgiven for believing that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is responsible for more deaths than Republican tax cuts, the rollback of net neutrality, and Pol Pot combined. Whenever DeSantis opts for freedom over the shrieking jackboot preference of the COVID panic porn crowd, Facebook and Twitter light up with dire predictions of no one making it out of Florida alive.I would like to count how many different ways they’ve been wrong but I don’t have access to computers at NASA or Caltech.This dance has been going on since last summer, and...

Food shortages were reported to be spiking across the country Tuesday as President Joe Biden struggles to resolve the supply chain crises crippling the nation. “People are hoarding [food],” CEO and founder of Saffron Road, a producer of frozen and shelf-stable meals, Adnan Durrani told the Seattle Times. “What I think you’ll see over the next six months, all prices will go higher.”

Speaking during an interview with Fox News Monday afternoon, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield said that more than 40 percent of people who have recently died from Wuhan coronavirus in Maryland were fully vaccinated. “A lot of times people may feel it’s a rare event that fully vaccinated people die. I happen to be the senior advisor to Governor Hogan in the state of Maryland. In the last 6-8 weeks, more than 40 percent of people who died in Maryland were fully vaccinated,” Redfield said, responding to the death of former Secretary of State Colin...

It’s all there for the taking. Crises or scandals have piled one atop another at the embattled White House and among the ruling Democrats on Capitol Hill. The president appears increasingly unequal to the task of governing. His party appears equally dysfunctional, feuding over how much of the taxpayers’ money to seize for a spending binge aimed at dramatically expanding the power and reach of the federal government. If only by default, the GOP has been gifted with an opening as wide as a proverbial ocean to seize the day and press the advantage of simply not being the Democrats.

As soon as it was learned that fully vaccinated Colin Powell died of COVID complications, the “experts” came out to tell the public that the vaccine did not fail. They said that Powell died from other diseases, rather than COVID itself. His final illness, nevertheless, was characterized as "complications" from COVID. Now, one line of thought is that the vaccines are useless, given that they didn't protect Powell. But it's doubtful that any of these experts really know what did Powell in. It could just as easily be that Powell died of other causes even as he had COVID, but...

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President Biden and former President Donald Trump are tied in a new poll looking at a potential matchup in the 2024 election — with Trump surging past Biden among independents. If the election were held today, 40 percent of likely voters would punch Biden’s ticket, and 40 percent would pick Trump, while 14 percent said they would choose another candidate, a Grinnell College National Poll released Wednesday found. Both also registered strong support from their respective political parties — with 80 percent of Republicans backing Trump and 87 percent of Democrats in Biden’s corner. But among independents, Trump has the...

The recent successful launch of a hypersonic nuclear-capable missile by China once again provides unwelcomed justification that our Intelligence Community continues to miss the mark. Unfortunately, we currently have no defensive system capable of engaging this threat to our national survival. Despite the fact that as a nation we expend billions of dollars to fund numerous three-letter agencies, history has proven that those who are charged with reading the intentions and capabilities of our potential competitors are never able to get it quite right. This week’s unpleasant “surprise” is yet again another in an extensive list of American intelligence failures.During...

The University of Oklahoma wants to hire an assistant professor that has a 'culturally responsive and sustaining mathematics pedagogy.' Though the listing does not specify a salary, the Glassdoor jobs platform estimates a comparable position at the university earns around $83,000. The University of Oklahoma is seeking a mathematics education professor versed in “equity and social justice.” The incumbent will teach within the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education, which according to the job posting, “aspires to become a diverse and inclusive community of learners who engage in transformative scholarship with and in communities to advance justice and promote human dignity.”...

It’s always been just a little odd that the guy the Democrats most need to get on board to get their big transformational plans enacted is Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, while at the same time the centerpiece of those plans is to put the most important industry of West Virginia, coal mining, completely out of business. That sounds like it’s going to be a tough sell. Is there any argument that might convince this guy to get with the program? In one of the funniest articles I have read anywhere recently, the New York Times thinks that it...

France’s tourism minister says he is considering whether to make the health pass compulsory for using ski lifts — which would largely rule out French skiing holidays for the unvaccinated. Tourism minister Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne is still working with industry representatives to make the definite plan for the 2021/22 ski season, but says that making health passports compulsory for ski lifts is “under consideration”. A full announcement is expected within the next few days. The health passport is already compulsory for many leisure activities in France including trips to bars and restaurants. It is also compulsory for long-distance train travel or...

As recently as late August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said private businesses in his state were free to require that their employees be vaccinated against COVID-19. His press secretary explained that "private businesses don't need government running their business." Abbott evidently reassessed that premise because last week, he issued an executive order that says "no entity in Texas can compel receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine by any individual, including an employee or a consumer." For anyone who genuinely cares about overweening government interference with free enterprise, Abbott's order is just as objectionable as the pending federal rule demanding that private...

If voting machines are connected to the internet, they can be hacked. While there is evidence that there were cyber-attacks in all 50 states, the sad truth almost a year after the 2020 election debacle is that our voting machines are still connected to the internet. We are still vulnerable to cyber attacks in our future elections. Now is the time to take steps to prevent future cyber election fraud. Minimizing or eliminating their internet connectivity for the 2022 elections is still possible with some prudent steps that we can take now.

2:18 video scene here. Lonesome Dove is the best western ever made. This is my favorite scene with Gus. Enjoy! *HISTORICAL CONTEXT - The Western author Louis L'Amour was a maniac for historical accuracy. He wrote a series of fictional short stories about Chick Bowdrie, a late 19th century Texas Ranger. I have summarized his author's notes to describe this stage of Texas history: **Texas Rangers had wide discretionary power enforcing the law due to the great distances and bad weather. If jailing a "criminal" meant a family or others might suffer a Ranger would make a judgement based on...

Most college students, including a majority of white students, believe that racism is so rooted in America that whites need to be “re-educated” on the issue, and one way is through the forced teaching of critical race theory.