Free Republic

A season for quiet reflection.A time to choose the high road,and stay just a bit above the fray.The perspective is better there.Posted from: MOTUS A.D.

Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin are locked in a tied race nearly one week out from Virginia's gubernatorial election, according to a poll released on Monday. The survey from the Republican polling firm Cygnal shows McAuliffe and Youngkin tied at 48.3 percent support each among likely voters in Virginia eight days from Election Day. The poll showed Republicans leading Democrats on the generic General Assembly ballot, 48.7 percent to 47.9 percent, within its margin of error. The poll also showed relatively high unfavorable ratings in Virginia for President Biden, who is watching this race ahead of next year's...

WASHINGTON, Thursday, Oct. 24. The official number of the killed, wounded and missing at the Leesburgh fight have been received. We had 79 killed and drowned, 141 wounded, and there are 193 missing. The missing may be prisoners or straggling. An evidence that the falling back of the Confederates at Fairfax Court-house, three weeks ago, was a sudden and unexpected movement, is furnished in the fact that they set up telegraph poles, and stretched the wires upon them, from Fairfax to Falls Church, and had only completed the work on the Thursday previous to the Sunday when our troops advanced....

Yesterday I attended an in-person program at the Manhattan Institute with the title “Deconstructing Wokeness in K-12 and Corporate America.” There were two panels and a speech totaling close to three hours. Presenters included something of a who’s who of the movement opposing the spreading cancer of Critical Race Theory in schools and corporations: Christopher Rufo and Jim Copland of the Manhattan Institute, Vivek Ramaswamy (author of the new book Woke, Inc.), Paul Rossi (the guy who blew the whistle on CRT at Grace Church School, who is currently affiliated with the Educational Liberty Alliance), and Asra Nomani (Vice President...

Having your name associated with images of puppies in unbearable pain seems pretty bad. So it’s safe to say it’s been a pretty bad week for Dr. Anthony Fauci. A bipartisan group of congressmen wants to hold hearings on $375,000 of taxpayer money that the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases invested in scientific research in which Tunisians drugged beagles, locked them up, and had sand flies peck at them and deposit larvae on them. The beagles were “de-barked” — a term I can never forget now. It means that their vocal cords were snipped, to spare Tunisian ears....

Big Tech is preventing us from telling the truth. It simply won’t allow thought with which it disagrees to appear on its platforms. The official Twitter account of Congressman Jim Banks (R-Ind.) was recently suspended because he tweeted, “The title of first female four-star officer gets taken by a man.” The tweet was in reference to Rachel Levine, President Biden’s assistant secretary for Health & Human Services (HHS), being sworn in as a “four-star admiral” of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps earlier this week. Upon promoting Levine, a biological male, the administration called him the “first-ever female four-star...

Orwell, in 1984, teaches us that the Leftist Party will not be satisfied until Republican Congresspersons Jim Banks and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and all their GOP colleagues, agree that R. Levine is a woman. On learning that Twitter sanctioned Rep. Jim Banks for daring to refer to Assistant Secretary of Health R. Levine as a man (and that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene also referred, but without sanction, to Dr. Levine as a man) I turned, for insight on this peculiar assault on the concept of objective reality, to a classic novel on the nature of totalitarianism: 1984, by George Orwell....

... 1.7 million illegal migrants were recorded on the southwest land border, making it the highest number of illegal crossings since at least 1960, when the government first began keeping a record. It was nearly four times higher than the previous year, with 27% of migrants stopped having been detained at least once in the previous 12 months, reported CGTN.... ...Meanwhile, 479,000 migrant families were recorded — around 48,000 fewer than in 2019 — and almost 147,000 children crossed the border without parents or guardians, reported US Customs and Border Protection. It marked the largest number of minors since 2008...

The American people must never lose sight of what makes our country great as we march toward victory in our ongoing efforts to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic. We will defeat this enemy while being true to our highest values, upholding the religious liberty and civil rights of our fellow citizens by rejecting vaccine mandates. Oppressive COVID vaccine mandates are sweeping across this country, causing misery. Millions of Americans are threatened with losing their jobs. Some are from Joe Biden’s executive orders requiring all federal employees and contractors to get the vaccine, others from private-sector employers following Biden’s lead in their...

Replacing 30-50 cops per year requires a significant investment of time and money. Replacing 400+ seems a Herculean for a well-managed and united city – and nearly impossible in the chaos created by the Seattle and Washington political establishment. While the ticking of the clock exposes problems for major US cities, the calendar also remains far from friendly to the safety of their citizens and businesses. As unprecedented numbers of police officers opt to resign, retire – or even face termination - protesting working conditions and the vaccine mandate, many of America’s cities race towards lawlessness. A recent conversation with...

(CNN)A member of a scientific coalition advising Puerto Rico's government on the coronavirus pandemic recently joked about the island's high Covid-19 vaccination rate, attributing it to the proliferation of drug store chains on the island.... The Caribbean island -- in recent years pummeled by deadly hurricanes, rocked by earthquakes, beset by political unrest and saddled by debt -- has quietly managed to outpace even New England states with the highest vaccination rates in the country.... ..."Best I can tell, they've done this largely by not tying vaccines to politics," Jha wrote last weekend. "They pay less attention to mainland politics....

We shouldn’t be surprised that the same influences denigrating our real heroes are those elevating the voice and visage of Colin Kaepernick. “Believe in something,” Nike told consumers in 2018, “even it means sacrificing everything.” The advertisement features former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick giving a stoic stare to those social justice warriors being spurred to buy the company’s product. In what may be the swiftest example of the Mandela Effect taking hold on the American cultural psyche, many Americans believe that Colin Kaepernick was headlong into a promising NFL future when he boldly decided to take a knee during the...

It's been my experience that modern leftists have the disposition of Stalin, the demeanor of a middle school bully, and the temperament of a two-year-old. When they're not outright trying to kill you, they're either calling you names or crying about not getting their way. It's deeply disappointing to realize how effective these bad behaviors have been in bringing the West to heel. It has to be my way!-red-diaper babies deserved a good spanking this last century; instead, they learned that when you whine and stomp your feet long enough, you can poke someone else in the eyes, steal their...

Pray For The Peace of JerusalemHosea 6:1-3Israel Unrepentant 6 “Come, let us return to the Lord. He has torn us to pieces but he will heal us; he has injured us but he will bind up our wounds. 2 After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence. 3 Let us acknowledge the Lord; let us press on to acknowledge him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth.”_______________________________________________________God...

Two experts wrote about making an ethical case for abortion earlier this year. I disagreed, in a piece published by Townhall.com. Then, they responded. In April, Salon issued a piece with the headline reading, “Why the case against abortion is weak, ethically speaking.” Nathan Nobis, an associate professor of philosophy at Morehouse College, and Jonathan Dudley, a postdoctoral fellow in molecular genetic pathology at Johns Hopkins Hospital, argued that there’s a moral and ethical case to be made for abortion. “So, is abortion murder?” they asked. “Not unless other widely-accepted medical procedures that end human life are also wrong. But...

Discussions about the philosophical and ethical case behind coronavirus mitigation measures have abounded since the world tragically changed for the worse in March 2020. For many, including those of us on Team Reality, such measures - like lockdowns, masking, and vaccine mandates - were either overly burdensome, completely useless, or both. Lockdowns helped, for a short while, but anyone with an IQ over 60 should have known they weren’t sustainable and would do far more harm than good. Masks did absolutely nothing, and vaccine mandates were both tyrannical and, over time, are proving to be utterly useless and potentially harmful...

Laughing Pets, a pet-sitting and dog-walking company in Atlanta, Georgia, turned down a holiday job worth around $2,500 because it couldn't find enough staff. "We get, on average, four new inquiries per day and we have to turn all of them away," its owner Karen Levy told Insider. She said that she used to hire 12 members of staff, which has fallen to just five. As well as turning away prospective customers, she'd had to suspend some visits to long-term clients, too. "I may never get those clients back," Levy said, adding that she was even grateful for cancellations because...

Alec Baldwin got to play his dream role last week, and unfortunately for an innocent woman, it was a method-acting version of Ted Kennedy. Now, you note that I am mocking a guy whose probable gross negligence killed a lady and maimed a man, and this raises an important question – do we really want to live in a world where our reaction to a tragedy caused by an enemy is not sorrow and compassion but mockery? It doesn’t matter what we want. We do live in such a world, in large part due to the likes of Alec Baldwin....

I believe we are to honor authorities and obey the laws of the nation; so much so that if I were around during the American Revolution, like the Quakers, I wouldn’t have participated in the largely economically based rebellion against the Crown. However, the current situation concerning the vaccination mandates is something different on several levels. First, and most important for the Christian, is that the processes for developing these vaccines incorporates products derived from aborted fetuses. Both the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines are developed, proved, and processed on cell lines derived from fetal cells; while the Johnson and...

Christmas is a season of joy on many levels. For Christians, it marks the birth of Jesus, son of God, sent to the Earth for mankind’s salvation. For members of other religions or non-believers, it is a time of abundance, families gathering, schools and work closed, sharing gifts and delicious meals, camaraderie, and hopefully, peace and goodwill. Unfortunately for some it can be a lonely season, not celebrated but endured, without friends, family, a warm house, or food on the table. This year “some” may become “many” as the socio-economic trajectory of America is rapidly declining, and for too many,...