Free Republic

Kyrsten Sinema publicly and bluntly reaffirmed she would not support any change to the filibuster rules on Thursday, effectively killing her party’s hope of passing the most sweeping voting rights protections in a generation. Sinema took to the Senate floor around noon on Thursday and said she would not support any changes to the filibuster, the Senate rule that requires 60 votes to advance legislation. “While I continue to support these [voting rights] bills, I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country,” said Sinema, a first-term Democrat from Arizona. “We must address...

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter announced Wednesday a temporary policy for establishments serving indoor food or beverages. View the full order from Minneapolis here and from St. Paul here. The policy, which applies for licensed businesses at which food or drink is served indoors, will require customers to either show proof of COVID-19 vaccination or a negative PCR or antigen test taken within 72 hours of the visit. City officials said the policy will take effect on Jan. 19. There is not an explicitly listed expiration date for the policy, but Frey said the policy...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis confirmed that the Food and Drug Administration agreed to extend the expiration date for almost 1 million rapid COVID-19 test kits. The tests initially expired last September, but the expiration was extended to December before they expired again. The new extension will last for three months. "At the end of the summer they expired. The FDA agreed to extend it for three months, but during those three months there was almost zero demand for testing because we had such low COVID prevalence," he said during a press conference Wednesday. "The Division of Emergency Management had been...

U.S.—The SCOTUS has struck down Biden’s vaccine mandates on the grounds that they are unconstitutional. Experts say this sets a dangerous precedent of letting individuals make their own medical decisions. “What am I supposed to do now that I don’t have private companies working with the Federal government to force me to inject a foreign substance into my body?” said Linda Waddlebum, a concerned mother of 6 cats. “So dangerous and shortsighted. How will I stay healthy? I don’t even recognize this America anymore.” In response to the court’s decision, a large group of protestors has gathered outside of the...

A hardline judge has fined and ridiculed a 72-year-old Michigan man with lymphoma, ruling that he “should be ashamed” of being too weak to mow his overgrown lawn. Burhan Chowdhury of Hamtramck, a community about six miles north of Detroit, admittedly fell behind in yard maintenance after he was diagnosed with cancer of the lymph nodes in 2019. His overgrown property prompted local officials to subpoena Chowdhury. In now-viral footage of the Zoom court hearing on Jan. 10, Chowdhury’s breathing appeared labored as Judge Alexis G. Krot of the 31st District Court berated him. “You should be ashamed of yourself,”...

The budget blueprint Newsom detailed this week includes $2 billion over two years in grants and tax credits to incentivize housing development... “Moving away from investments in housing that don’t focus on climate, health, integrating downtown, schools, jobs, parks and restaurants.” Jason Elliott, Newsom’s top housing advisor, said the governor’s budget interlaces housing, cost-of-living and climate policies to simultaneously address California’s top issues. “The whole government...It’s better for equity, it’s better for inclusion..." The $2 billion includes $500 million in grants for nonprofit and for-profit developers or local governments to construct more units on existing, but underused, urban land close...

The number of actual Americans filing for jobless benefits for the first time spiked to 419k in the first week of 2022. That is the highest since May 2021. Seasonally-adjusted, initial claims also rose notably to 230k (against 200k expected). More… ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This trend will escalate as people walk away from the woke plantation theology that destroyed the country and delivered it into the hands of traitors. For the fedgov agents monitoring this site, ask yourselves how much longer you will be complicit in this evil.

n the Notes app on my phone, I keep a list called “Ingredients to Buy in the U.S.” Horseradish, cake flour, molasses, Chex Mix—I can’t find certain American foods in Madrid, so I lug them back with me, weight allowances be damned. But customs always swipes my most prized Proustian treasure, one that’s absent, astoundingly, in the Iberian Peninsula: good bacon. Smoky, crispy, sizzling slices of American-style bacon. Bacon is Spain’s biggest culinary disappointment. Flabby, elastic, and chronically undercooked, it’s always too thick or too thin, too salty or too bland. It boasts neither the heady campfire scent of American...

Earlier this week, TikTok star and podcast host Sofia Franklyn went viral when she shared her first date ritual. In a viral video that’s racked up 2.1 million views, Sofia admitted that she always sends herself a drink from a fake secret admirer so her date knows she’s in demand. She wrote: “When I ‘got to the bathroom’ and pay the bartender to send me an ‘anonymous’ shot so my date remembers I have options.” Sofia then captioned the clip: “Men love some healthy competition!”

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The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday blocked the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test rule for most businesses with over 100 workers. The high court also ruled to allow vaccine mandates for most healthcare employees.

Some cannabis compounds can prevent the virus that causes COVID-19 from entering human cells — but smoking marijuana offers no protection against the illness, according to a study by Oregon State University.The researchers found that a pair of hemp compounds — cannabigerolic acid, or CBGA, and cannabidiolic acid, CBDA — bind to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, blocking a vital step in the deadly bug’s path to infect people.“These cannabinoid acids are abundant in hemp and in many hemp extracts,” said lead researcher Richard van Breemen at Oregon State’s Global Hemp Innovation Center in the College of Pharmacy and Linus Pauling...

The hunt for moons outside our solar system has just turned up another possible lunar world, a moon bigger than Earth that's orbiting a Jupiter-like planet. The planet and its moon — if it really is a moon — orbit a Sun-like star that's over 5,000 light years away, according to a report in the journal Nature Astronomy. "The moon is pretty alien compared to any moon in the solar system," says David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University. "We're not sure if it's rocky, we're not sure if it's gaseous. It's kind of in between the size of Neptune,...

From the 1960s until quite recently, the conventional wisdom in America was that going to college and earning a degree was a very good investment. The time and money that a student puts into it would be repaid very handsomely over his or her lifetime. College debt was called “good debt.” No need to worry about it. In 2009, President Obama told the nation that getting more people through college was an economic imperative, since we couldn’t afford to fall behind other countries that were surpassing us in “educational attainment.” More and more jobs would require deep postsecondary education, so...

SUPREME COURT STRIKES DOWN OSHA VACCINE MANDATEBREAKING: The Supreme Court BLOCKS the federal government's COVID-19 vaccine-or-test requirement for large workplaces. The court ALLOWS a vaccine mandate for workers at federally funded health care facilities to take effect nationwide.— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) January 13, 2022

Russian airborne troop units who departed on Jan. 6 to join the Collective Security Treaty Organisation’s peacekeeping force in Kazakhstan are expected to return in the coming days after successful completion of mission. This must be a rare page in American diplomatic history that a US Secretary of State has been literally off his rocker. Antony Blinken’s outbursts on the events in Kazakhstan were not only boorish but also illogical. Blinken questioned the decision by the president of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Kemelevich Tokayev to request help from the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) to deploy forces to help stabilise the grave...

“‘If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread’” (Matthew 4:3). Before Satan tempted Jesus more directly, he threw out a cynical challenge to test Christ’s deity. The devil’s conditional statement, “If You are the Son of God,” assumed that Jesus was indeed God’s beloved Son (3:17). But he hoped to persuade Him into a demonstration of divine power that would violate God’s plan, which called for Jesus to set aside His divine power while on earth and use it only when the Father commanded. If Satan could make Jesus presume upon His divine rights and...

Even though I preach to thousands, there are times that I feel far away from the warm presence of God. When I’m dry and empty, I have no great yearning to read the Word and little compulsion to pray. I know that my faith is intact, that my love for Jesus is strong and that I have no desire to taste the things of this world. It’s just that I can’t seem to touch God for days, maybe even weeks. Have you ever watched other Christians get blessed while you feel nothing? They testify of God’s answers to their prayers...

Over the past month, as Wall Street turned increasingly optimistic on US growth alongside the Fed, with consensus (shaped by the Fed's leaks and jawboning) now virtually certain of a March rate hike, we have been repeatedly warning that after a huge policy error in 2021 when the Fed erroneously said that inflation is "transitory" (it wasn't), the central bank is on pace to make another just as big policy mistake in 2022 by hiking as many as 4 times and also running off its massive balance sheet... right into a growth slowdown. The Fed is going from one huge...

Vice President Kamala Harris again attempted to duck questions about a possible shakeup of the Democratic presidential ticket in 2024 — this time by calling speculation that she and President Biden will part ways “gossip.” Harris also claimed she had not read a recent New York Times column that suggested Biden drop her from the ticket in favor of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.).