Free Republic

Women can now terminate a pregnancy without leaving home by mail-ordering abortion pills, a new means of accessing abortion care that’s recently gained a footing in many states — including Illinois — as reproductive rights become increasingly under fire across large swaths of the country. The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday eased long-standing medication abortion restrictions that once required clinicians to dispense the medicine in person, a historic decision lauded by reproductive rights activists and condemned by abortion opponents. The FDA had already temporarily waived these requirements due to the unique challenges patients faced to accessing clinics and hospitals...

Today I got the greatest gift EVER from one of my students. I am a National Board Certified Special Education Teacher with 21 years experience. Over the years I have gotten a variety of gifts from my students. The kids I work with have disabilities ranging from Autism, Learning Disabilities, physical impairments, etc. Today I got a hug from a student with Autism!!! It was totally spontaneous and totally unexpected. Anyone who has experience working with children or adults with Autism know exactly how special this is!! I am typing this with tears in my eyes and a heart filled...

A U.S. district judge on Wednesday issued a sentence against a couple who took part in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that went beyond what prosecutors recommended, giving them jail time. The Department of Justice (DOJ) had asked that Brandon Miller and his wife Stephanie Miller be sentenced to home confinement as part of a 36-month probationary period. The Ohio couple was charged with entering the Capitol, with Brandon Miller livestreaming their actions on Facebook. As WUSA reported, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled, however, that their actions warranted time behind bars. "They didn’t just walk through a door. They...

WASHINGTON — All of the U.S. military services have now begun disciplinary actions and discharges for troops who have refused to get the mandated coronavirus vaccine, officials said, with as many as 20,000 unvaccinated forces at risk of being removed from service. On Thursday, the Marine Corps said it has discharged 103 Marines so far for refusing the vaccine, and the Army said it has reprimanded more than 2,700 soldiers and will begin discharge proceedings in January. The Air Force said earlier this week that 27 airmen had been discharged for refusing the vaccine order. And the Navy laid out...

Here’s a question -- what happens when you crush entire sectors of your own economy for nearly two years and then, to compensate for your crime, you decide to inject trillions of dollars of freshly printed cash into the system? What happens if you do that? Well, honestly, we don't really know what happens when you do that, because no one in history has ever been stupid enough to try it. It's going to be years before we really understand the consequences of all this, of our government's reckless coronavirus policy. But in the meantime, we can say with total...

Officials from big cities with vaccine mandates for public places say they don't expect the mandates to be permanent. But they also don't have a clear plan for when or how they will lift the mandates that require millions of Americans to show documents to enter restaurants, gyms and more. "It doesn't come with an end date because we don't know what's coming," Philadelphia Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole said of her city's vaccine mandate for restaurants. "We have winter and omicron on the horizon. It's very hard to predict what could happen next. We do want to roll this back...

University of Pennsylvania swimmer “Lia” Thomas (real given name “Will”), who has been shattering women’s records along with their dreams. In fact, he apparently is so proud about beating the girls — who he, if he was like so many other boys, was told for decades can do anything “as well or better” — that he boasted about burying them in the pool. “That was so easy, I was cruising,” Thomas reportedly said after a 200 freestyle event.

On this date in 1818, the last ruler of the first state established by the Al Saud who rule the modern state of Saudi Arabia lost his head to the Ottoman Sultan. The Ottoman state and its (largely independent) vassal Egypt begged to dispute the Wahhabi tribe’s authority in the Arabian peninsula (and its proclivity for raiding Ottoman caravans) and made war on the House of Saud throughout the 1810’s. The Battle of ad-Dir’iyah in 1818 settled the matter, with our day’s principal Abdullah I surrendering to the Egyptian general Ibrahim Pasha. We pick up the action from the third-hand,...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Thursday said to reporters that “it would be a great idea” for Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to switch to the Republican Party. The comment came after McConnell and Manchin had a meeting as negotiations continue for President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, The Associated Press reported. “As you know, he likes to talk,” McConnell said of Manchin. “It would not surprise you to know that I’ve suggested for years it would be a great idea, representing a deep red state like West Virginia, for him to come over to our side.”

In February 2020 when the fight against COVID was ramping up and the CDC was taking measures to address the pandemic, the agency was of course tasked to develop test kits under the Emergency Use Authorization Act. The kits were designed and mass produced for distribution to medical labs across the country. In record time, the CDC was able to develop a plausible kit to deploy. But there was only one problem. Specific flaws within test kits caused a massive flood of FALSE POSITIVES. Those numbers were then used by the Globalist Media to catapult their narrative of PANIC and...

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals declined Wednesday to hear “en banc” the case against President Joe Biden’s rule forcing large private employers to vaccinate or COVID-19 test their employees. The Daily Wire, first to challenge the Biden mandate in the Sixth Circuit, is the lead plaintiff in the case against the federal rule after the Sixth Circuit was picked by lottery to consolidate and oversee the rule’s numerous legal challenges. The Daily Wire and others petitioned the court to hear the case “en banc,” or in front of all 16 judges on the court, for a vote on the...

WHO IS "etabeta"? The most art-knowledgable of all regular responders to these threads. Her contributions have been so entertaining and informative that I asked her to grace us with her favorite Christian artworks. After some persistent persuasion, she acquiesced and delivered these, grouped by artist, with this explanation: "There are so many more paintings I love but tried to refrain myself..." BENOZZO GOZZOLI46 BENOZZO GOZZOLI "The Three Kings Approach Bethlehem"47 BENOZZO GOZZOLI "The Procession of the Magi"48 Detail Source SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO49 SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO "Visitation" LEONARDO DA VINCI50 LEONARDO DA VINCI "Virgin of the Rocks"51 LEONARDO DA VINCI "Virgin...

President Biden sounded like he’d been watching “Game of Thrones” as he warned Thursday that the unvaccinated “will soon overwhelm” US hospitals and vaccine refusers will experience “a winter of severe illness and death.” “It’s here now and it’s spreading and it’s going to increase,” Biden said of the new Omicron variant of COVID-19 at the White House, seated near his chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci. “For [the] unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death — the unvaccinated, for themselves, their families and the hospitals they will soon overwhelm,” Biden said. He urged people...

Pray For The Peace of JerusalemLuke 225 Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was on him. 26 It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. 27 Moved by the Spirit, he went into the temple courts. When the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the custom of the Law required, 28 Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying:...

Parents outraged over school staff who allegedly disguised the names of Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) clubs at a California middle school are planning to voice their concerns at a school board meeting this week in Salinas. Jessica Konen has alleged that school staff indoctrinated her then 12-year-old daughter in an LGBTQ club disguised as an “Equality Club.” She told The Epoch Times she plans to speak at the Dec. 15 meeting at Spreckels Union School District (SUSD) during public comments. Two teachers at Buena Vista Middle School in Salinas were recorded coaching other teachers to conceal the nature of LGTBQ clubs...

On Thursday’s broadcast of “CNN Tonight,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said that he thinks coronavirus will eventually become an endemic virus like the flu, but “Right now, COVID’s dominating our lives.” De Blasio responded to a tweet arguing that we can’t defeat the virus, but we should treat it like the flu by stating, “I agree don’t freak out. I agree one day it can and should be like the flu. And the flu takes some lives too. The flu’s not nothing. But the flu can be controlled. We all get our flu shots and life...

COVID is over. Oh, not with Anthony Fauci. Not with the media. Not with the sour-faced Karens ... But with normal people, especially outside the big urban areas, it’s over. The Atlantic scandalized its readers by reporting ... Where I Live, No One Cares About COVID.. No one cares. ... And with good reason... especially after the experience of the Diamond Princess cruise ship suggested that COVID was a lot less scary than we were told. ... the damages wrought by lockdowns ... have been worse than those wrought by COVID itself. ... People have seen through this, and they’re...

In June 2020, Bloods gang member Alexis Dubouchet allegedly tried to kill Samuel Diaz, then his supervisor at the New York City Housing Authority. According to police, Dubouchet used a folding knife to stab Diaz in the back of his neck and twice in the head, yelling, “You wanna f- -k with my life?” Although Dubouchet was a career criminal with 20 prior arrests and was charged with attempted murder in the attack on Diaz, he was freed on bail. Now prosecutors say he murdered someone while awaiting trial in the Diaz case, allegedly shooting Anthony Rios, 38, in the...

Do you remember Armand Hammer? If you're over 50, you may. Hammer was a business tycoon who died in 1990. He was most famous for his deal-making with the Soviet Union. Hammer would cut business deals directly with the Kremlin. This was unusual; most U.S. businesses had very few dealings with America's greatest adversary. Today, by contrast, many American multinational businesses see their growth as much or more tied to China, our new primary adversary, as they do to America. I began my career as a young lawyer on a special congressional committee set up to investigate the transfer of...

You've probably heard the saying: Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. In this day and age, those who really can't become Master Class instructors on how to fail. Scholars beware: Hillary Clinton's new course on "the power of resilience" is not for the faint of heart. Completing the three-and-a-half hour Master Class requires an extraordinary amount of preexisting intellectual resilience. Your humble reviewer, for example, was forced to confront his own lack of resilience when his failure to overcome the soul-destroying tedium of Hillary's lectures caused him to miss his original deadline. (Disclaimer: Unless you're getting paid to...