Free Republic

Ilya Shapiro apologized for his “poor choice of words” in a series of tweets about Joe Biden’s potential Supreme Court pick. Here’s what he should have said instead. By now most readers are familiar with the Ilya Shapiro “controversy.” I use sneer quotes because, like virtually every cultural outrage these days, it’s aggressively dumb, clearly a bad-faith hit job perpetrated by deeply unhappy ideological fanatics without hobbies, and the target of the mob’s ire has said something true, if also sloppily, on Twitter. The now-deleted tweets read: Objectively best pick for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, who is solid prog &...

(The Hill) – Two judges on FOX’s “The Masked Singer” walked off the set in protest after it was revealed that former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was a contestant, Deadline and TMZ reported Wednesday.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The state has now collected more than a half-billion dollars more in revenue this fiscal year than was originally projected. The Justice administration announced Wednesday that revenue collections for January were $146.9 million ahead of estimates putting year-to-date collection totals at $540.8 million above estimates. Collections have topped estimates in each of the fiscal year’s first 7 months. The January surplus total represents the largest surplus amount. Gov. Jim Justice said the state continues to break all-time records. “These numbers just didn’t happen by someone rolling off a pickle truck,” Justice said. “When it comes down to...

COVID-19 narratives promoted by federal regulators and enforced by Big Tech for nearly two years are faltering as more researchers probe questions long deemed too controversial to study. Johns Hopkins University's Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise concluded that lockdown policies "have had little to no public health effects" while imposing "enormous economic and social costs." Researchers conducted a meta-analysis of U.S. and European studies of possible relationships between lockdown policies and COVID "mortality or excess mortality," prompted by two international studies that countered Imperial College London's staggering estimates of COVID deaths without lockdown....

But as Sherlock Holmes once sagely said, when you eliminate all possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. This weekend I heard Congresswoman Comrade Tlaib’s trial balloon that Biden needs to reinstitute (Obama’s) restrictions on U.S. oil and gas exports. As the sheer insanity of that platform permeated my brain, I took a step back and thought about what this past year of Democrat/Left policy-making has wrought in the energy/financial sector alone. The phrase, cui bono, kept coming to mind on a geopolitical scale. It is certainly the stuff of conspiracy theorists to think that the Democrat/Left is...

, 3 February 2022 Thursday of week 4 in Ordinary Time St. Blaise, Sebaste, the Philippines Readings at MassLiturgical Colour: Green.First reading1 Kings 2:1-4,10-12 ©David's dying exhortation to SolomonAs David’s life drew to its close he laid this charge on his son Solomon, ‘I am going the way of all the earth. Be strong and show yourself a man. Observe the injunctions of the Lord your God, following his ways and keeping his laws, his commandments, his customs and his decrees, as it stands written in the Law of Moses, that so you may be successful in all you do...

President Joe Biden's approval rating has dipped heading into the second month of 2022, after making some modest gains in the new year. The president enjoyed a bump in popularity in January, with his approval rating rising to 43.5 percent, but the figure now stands at around 41.8 percent, according to poll tracker FiveThirtyEight. The Biden administration has just entered its second year and in November the Democrats will face crucial midterm elections that will put the spotlight firmly on the president's agenda.

With some pundits advocating for price controls to fight inflation, it suddenly feels like the 1970s again. This type of overbearing intervention has never worked as marketed, something President Richard Nixon discovered in 1973 when he lifted the wage and price controls he had implemented two years earlier. Still, to those unwilling to learn from history, such controls will always seem sensible. Inflation amounts to rising prices, they say, so locking in prices is a supposed easy fix. But treating inflation this way is like masking a symptom rather than curing the illness. Inflation can no more be controlled by...

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Pray For The Peace of JerusalemEphesians 6The Armor of God 10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. 11 Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. 13 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your...

Americans are fed up with racial preferences. More than three-quarters of Americans believe resident Joe Biden should consider "all possible nominees" to succeed retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, rather than only Black women, according to a new poll. Likewise, nearly three-quarters of Americans, including a majority of Hispanic and Black people, oppose affirmative action. They don't want Black and Hispanic college applicants favored over other applicants who have higher test scores and grades, according to Pew Research. A group of Asian victims of Harvard's affirmative action are suing, represented by the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions. The Supreme Court...

Lockdowns had “little to no effect” on saving lives during the pandemic — and “should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy,” according to economists in a new meta-analysis of dozens of studies. A group led by the head of Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics analyzed studies from the first surge of the pandemic to investigate widely pushed claims that stringent restrictions would limit deaths. Instead, the meta-analysis concluded that lockdowns across the US and Europe had only “reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average.” Worse, some of the studies even suggested that limiting gatherings in safe...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia. It is expected to affect 16 million Americans by 2050. The hallmarks of AD are amyloid plaques and tau neurofibrillary tangles in the brain. Efforts to develop new drugs that directly target amyloid or tau proteins haven’t yielded significant clinical benefits for patients. Another approach to developing AD treatments would be to seek existing drugs that could potentially be repurposed. A team of researchers led by Dr. Feixiong Cheng at the Cleveland Clinic developed a computational method for identifying FDA-approved drugs that might be effective against AD. NIH’s National Institute...

Washington -- Do not let the Democrats fool you. They are deeply in the glooms. Even smiling, happy-go-lucky Congressgirl Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is in the glooms, at least behind closed doors. It is not just the southern border where there roam more foreign-speaking bipeds than native Americanos. It is not inflation that is eroding the value of the dollar, even late at night when most Americans are asleep. Nor is it crime or the condition of the cities. It is a matter that President Joe Biden once took great pride in, that being his first Black vice president. Kamala Harris is...

OTTAWA -- Manitoba MP Candice Bergen is waking up with a new job today: unifying the Conservative caucus. The party's former deputy leader was elected by her colleagues to serve as interim leader after a majority of MPs ousted Erin O'Toole from the top job. Bergen faces a caucus that has spent weeks divided and angry over O'Toole's leadership since last year's election loss. The party must also start preparing to pick a permanent leader. It will be the third such race in the past five years. Party president Rob Batherson told members that its national council will be appointing...

One way of understanding the 2009-2014 Obama Administration policy of "reset" with Vladimir Putin's Russia is to recall two iconic incidents. The first was the 2009 "reset." Newly appointed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that she would pursue a "reset" detente with Russia. America would relax the prior Bush Administration's mild ostracism of Russia after its 2008 invasion of Georgia and softly start anew. The second was President Barack Obama's hot mic moment in March 2012 in Seoul, South Korea. Obama got caught asking Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to reassure Vladimir Putin. Or as Obama put it: "After my...

“You’re a racist!” We’ve all heard that often enough. In fact, as was once said in saner times about opportunistic patriotism, it’s now racism charges that are the last refuge of a scoundrel. But there is a way to counter these scoundrels and seize the advantage. No, the answer isn’t to explain yourself. It’s virtually always the case that racism-charge hurlers don’t care about Truth, anyway, but simply want to hurt you and win. The actual remedy? Remember that the best defense is a good offense and hit them back — hard. And the following short response should become standard...

Ferrari NV announced that soaring commodity prices would begin affecting the prices of its new supercars. The average cost for an Italian supercar, made by Ferrari, is between $200k-$400k, making it one of the most expensive production automobiles globally (besides French supercar maker Bugatti). During a 60-minute earnings call with investors on Wednesday, Ferrari discussed better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings as shipments jumped during the pandemic. However, the company explained that rising commodity costs would result in continued supercar inflation this year. Susy Tibaldi, a luxury analyst at Swiss bank UBS, asked Antonio Picca Piccon, the CFO of Ferrari NV, since inflation...

If you were raised correctly, you were told to apologize when you did something wrong, and you did it because your parents were right. Well, now they’re wrong. OK, they’re not completely wrong. If you do something that falls into the category of normal human error or regret, something for which you feel genuinely sorry for, by all means apologize to the person you’ve wronged. But if you do or say anything that the goon squad of fascists running the political left these days deems unacceptable, look them square in their vacant eyes and tell them to go straight to...

A coronavirus pandemic which lasts five years, another pandemic in a decade, and ever more transmissible variants are among the scenarios life insurers are predicting after COVID-19 claims jumped more than expected in 2021. The global life insurance industry was hit with reported claims due to COVID-19 of $5.5 billion in the first nine months of 2021 versus $3.5 billion for the whole of 2020, according to insurance broker Howden in a report on Jan 4, while the industry had expected lower payouts due to the rollout of vaccines. "We definitely paid out more than I had anticipated at the...