Free Republic

(Get Maine Lobster) A Maine lobsterman recently made a 1-in-a-100-million catch when he pulled up a rare lobster with a bright blue, speckled shell, the color of fairground cotton candy. The lobsterman, Bill Coppersmith, caught the so-called cotton candy lobster on Nov. 5 in Casco Bay, an inlet of the Gulf of Maine. "Bill and his crew were extremely excited," said Katie Oross, a spokesperson for the seafood company Get Maine Lobster, for which Coopersmith is a contract fisherman. Coppersmith named the baby-blue crustacean Haddie, after his granddaughter, and he quickly alerted Get Maine Lobster of the catch, Oross told...

Belarus has joined forces with Russia to carry out joint military exercises on its western border to Poland, near where about 4,000 migrants are trapped in freezing makeshift forest camps. Minsk released details and images of the “joint tactical battalion group” exercise with paratroopers, which it said was necessary due to an “increase in military activity” near its border. The move came as Turkey has announced that, with immediate effect, flights from its airports with Belavia, the Belarus national airline, were forbidden from carrying citizens of Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Increasing numbers of people from these and other countries in...

Money from the Child Tax Credit program is set to hit U.S. parents' bank accounts on Monday. After that, the sixth and final check is scheduled to be deposited on December 15. The future of the expanded Child Tax Credit program remains in limbo amid negotiations over scaling back President Joe Biden's $3.5 trillion social spending plan, which included an extension of the CTC through 2025. To slash spending in the bill, some lawmakers want to limit the tax credit's renewal to just one or two years. As talks among Democratic lawmakers continues, the future of the family assistance measure...

Parents are now more aware than ever that their right to raise their own children is in danger. Recent election results in Virginia and elsewhere testify to that awakening. A lot of the news focused on the public school curriculum of critical race theory, which pits children against one another based on their race. Parents never signed on to that. But they’re also waking up to a host of other disturbing trends in public education. An extremist sex education curriculum includes pornography and pushes transgenderism. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) instruction tells kids exactly how they should feel and relate...

When Kyle Rittenhouse is acquitted, many cities will likely experience what we saw last year following the release of the George Floyd video. It may even be worse this time if the powers-that-be get their way. But unlike the BLM and Antifa riots that sprung up after the Floyd video, the riots that will come with Rittenhouse’s acquittal have had months of planning and coordination. At the heart of the conspiracy are mainstream media and Big Tech. They’re doing their part to make sure there’s as much carnage as possible. Let me break it down briefly before getting into more...

German newspaper Berliner Zeitung has published a report seeking to answer why an “unusually large number of professional and amateur soccer players have collapsed recently.” Headlined ‘Puzzling heart diseases in football,’ the report begins by highlighting the case of FC Barcelona’s Sergio Agüero, the 33-year-old striker who recently had to be withdrawn from a match after 41 minutes suffering from dizziness and breathing difficulties. The article lists a large number of recent cases of footballers who have had heart problems or collapsed on the field, in some cases leading to death.

News flash: Prices are going up. They are going up broadly across many products and services. And they are going up quickly. Inflation is here. It's already bad, and there are many signs that it could get worse. In the wake of this news, resident Joe Biden has announced that he's committed to continuing with his massive new government spending program. It's hard to overstate how crazy this is. The good news for Republicans is even amid all their problems and disarray, with his reckless and rigidly ideological spending plans, Biden may soon be passing them political power. The bad...

If you were wondering why leftists are so invested in a self defense trial, this guy will spell it out. They don’t see it as a trial about a young man’s defense of himself, but rather as being about white resistance to “transition of political hegemony” to “multiracial majority”. Yeah, White people. Just give up the franchise. You’re not allowed to opt out. Let’s not be confused from the schizophrenic fever delusions of Berger. The only people who benefit from multiracialism are the alien elite ruling the world at the moment. This big gay brown utopia fantasy nonsense is purely...

The federal government will run out of money in 21 days from Friday. In October, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) allowed Democrats to authorize $480 billion in new debt to keep the government open. But that money will likely run out December 3. Democrats must find a way amid reconciliation negotiations to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling, a task Democrats kicked down the road with McConnell’s help last month. When McConnell aided Democrats in funding the government, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was not appreciative to senate Republicans for bailing him out, according to media reports. Schumer’s antics caused...

What's up with Kamala Harris on her five-day official visit to France representing the United States of America? Going to a foreign country and mocking the locals in their own accent is no way to make friends or project U.S. influence abroad. In fact, it's not something anyone with any manners at all would do, let alone jet into someone's country to do. This is the best America can do? It's the sort of thing a high school student might do — before he gets his college admissions rescinded. Worse still, it's very bad, given that she's on what's supposedly...

Vice President Kamala Harris said Friday that inflation is “a source of stress for families” due to the high cost of food and gas, but claimed President Biden’s nearly $2 trillion social spending bill would fix the problem — despite doubts from centrist Democrats who control the bill’s fate. Harris said at a press conference in France that the Biden administration takes the issue “very seriously” — adopting a new, more sober White House stance after officials for months insisted that rising prices were “transitory.” “Prices have gone up and families and individuals are dealing with the realities that bread...

All too often when their work goes awry, election pollsters turn to feeble excuses such as “polls really aren’t predictions. They’re just snapshots in time.” That is nonsense, because no pollster takes on the hard work of conducting election surveys with the expectation that those surveys will be embarrassingly wrong. A refreshing departure from the blame-dodging tendency came the other day, following the outcome of the New Jersey governor’s race in which the incumbent Democrat, Phil Murphy, narrowly defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli. The result represented another setback for pollsters, whose pre-election surveys collectively estimated Murphy’s lead at nearly 8 percentage...

America's "Great Resignation" is continuing as the so-called "quits" rate — the percentage of workers who handed in their notice — rose to a record 3%, reflecting that 4.4 million people quit their jobs in September, the government said on Friday. The number of unfilled jobs remained at 10.4 million in October, bucking expectations that job openings would decline slightly during the month. But the quits rate signals that Americans are switching jobs for better pay, quitting to start their own businesses or continuing to struggle with child care and school schedules as the pandemic lingers. The decision by millions...

MEMORIAL OF SAINT JOSAPHAT, BISHOP AND MARTYR LUKE 17:26-37 Friends, in today’s Gospel passage, the Lord compares the clueless behavior of our time with that of Noah. Listen to his warning: "Jesus said to his disciples: ‘As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the Son of Man.’" Those aren’t very reassuring words. Then he specifies: people were eating and drinking, marrying and being given in marriage, right up to the time of the flood, and then, when it came, with shocking suddenness, they were destroyed. The end of an old world...

The number and percentage of U.S. workers voluntarily leaving their jobs reached an all-time high in September, according to data released Friday by the Labor Department. Roughly 4.4 million U.S. workers quit their jobs in September and the quits rate rose to 3 percent, according to the latest edition of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLTS) survey, each a new record. The number of job openings stayed roughly even in August at 10.4 million. The surge in American workers voluntarily leaving their jobs is the latest sign of growing worker power in the recovering labor market.

NSBA's letter to the White House caused a political firestorm FIRST ON FOX: Newly released emails shed light on the discontent within the National School Boards Association (NSBA) after its letter to the White House suggested that parents might be engaging in domestic terrorism. Obtained by Parents Defending Education (PDE), the internal emails show multiple state-level officials expressing dismay over the now-infamous letter's content and the purported process for reviewing it. "Clearly, this was orchestrated and the letter contrived for political theater," reads an email from Sally Smith, executive director for the Alabama Association of School Boards. "If NSBA is...

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that the Gulf nation of Qatar has agreed to represent American interests in Afghanistan following the closure of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in late August. The announcement suggests the Biden administration has little confidence that it will reopen the embassy in the near future. But Blinken said the U.S. had “offered an opportunity” to leave Afghanistan to all American citizens “who we’ve identified as being prepared to depart, having the necessary travel documents.” Several hundred Americans are reported to still be in Afghanistan, though not all have indicated they want...

And note-- O'Keefe is in a lawsuit with the New York Times. The FBI launched a political raid on Project Veritas' offices, and the personal homes of James O'Keefe and his reporters -- with battering rams at the ready -- and then not only seized his private, confidential, protected communications with counsel, but then immediately leaked them to the corporation they are politically allied with whom James O'Keefe is suing. The New York Times immediately ran a hit piece which they intend to help their court case, claiming that James O'Keefe talked to his lawyers about how to avoid breaking...

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) partied maskless this week, popping into a reelection fundraiser for a fellow Democrat. The event featured dozens of maskless individuals in an enclosed room, some of whom posed for pictures cheek-to-cheek. Meanwhile, New York continues to force 2-year-olds to mask up.