Free Republic

This show has grown a tremendous amount over the last year. We’re grateful to everyone who has joined us on this journey, but we’re also especially grateful to those people who were here from the very beginning. If you were here at the beginning, you might remember the promise we made to you then: We told you that our goal was to force ourselves off the air. We promised to never sell out to Big Pharma or corporate sponsors or anybody else. We promised to never stop fighting, to keep exposing everything until there is nothing left to expose. Today’s...

SUNLAND PARK, N.M., (Reuters) - Seventeen-year-old Santi sits in his car outside shops in Sunland Park, New Mexico, watching a pulsing blue dot on his mobile telephone. Human smugglers have hired him to pick up migrants here, less than a mile from the Mexican border, and take them to nearby El Paso, Texas. His shiny red mobile phone pings every 15 seconds. He and the migrants share locations, as a contact on the U.S. side messages instructions. The high schooler with a high-fade haircut is among a growing number of U.S. teenagers in communities from Texas to California recruited to...

Xi Jinping's Easter: Another crackdown on the unofficial Church​Authorities have detained bishop Shao Zhumin of Wenzhou: he had been freed at the beginning of November after a previous arrest. Msgr. Cui Tai, bishop of Xuanhua, has also disappeared. He had been under house arrest for more than 10 years and there are suspicions of torture.Rome (AsiaNews) - Before the Easter holidays, a new clampdown by the Chinese regime has arrived against the "unofficial" (underground) Church, recognised by the Vatican but not by Beijing, Catholic sources in China have revealed to AsiaNews.On April 7, the authorities forced Msgr. Shao Zhumin, bishop...

President Biden emphasized on Monday while announcing his new controls on so-called “ghost guns” that acquiring gun makers’ internal documents is crucial to scrutinizing said makers’ marketing of “deadly products.” Biden segued from so-called “ghost guns” and pushed for other gun controls, then praised the Sandy Hook Elementary School families who sued Remington over the December 14, 2012, Sandy Hook shooting. The gun used in the Sandy Hook was a stolen Bushmaster rifle, and Bushmaster was owned by Remington at the time. Biden noted, “Remington agreed to release thousands of pages of internal documents,” as part of the settlement with...

In a post all about doubting the good faith of the left, he seems to have a blind spot as far as doubting the good faith of the left's frequent allies, the GOP "Establishment." He casts this as the "Establishment" actually supporting the right's policy positions, but being too cowardly and too weak to stand up to the media to push for them. In fact, the "Establishment" despises the right's positions. They are liberals. They always say the same thing: "Guys we're totally on your siiiiiiide on this issue, it's just not the right tiiiiiime for this, we have to...

DENVER (AP) — The nonprofit that distributed most of the $350 million in donations from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to election offices in 2020 said Monday that it won’t disburse similar donations this year after backlash from conservatives suspicious that the contributions tilted the outcome of the presidential race toward Joe Biden. Instead, the Center for Technology and Civic Life is launching a different program. Dubbed the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, the $80-million, five-year effort is intended to create a network for the nation’s thousands of local election officials, who can apply for aid to improve their technology and...

HOUSTON (AP) — Three people who have worked for the top elected official in Harris County were indicted on Monday after being accused by prosecutors of steering a nearly $11 million contract for COVID-19 vaccine outreach to a political consultant with ties to local Democratic officials. Alex Triantaphyllis, Aaron Dunn and Wallis Nader were each indicted on one count of misuse of official information and one count of tampering with a record, according to court records. Triantaphyllis is chief of staff for Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, while Wallis Nader is a policy director and Aaron Dunn is a former...

You might have heard of PFAS, a synthetic chemical found in legacy firefighting foams, non-stick pans, carpets, clothes and stain- or water-resistant materials and paints. PFAS stands for "per- and poly-fluorinated alkyl substances." These molecules, made up of chains of carbon and fluorine atoms, are nicknamed "forever chemicals" because they don't degrade in our bodies. There is global concern about PFAS because they accumulate in our bodies over time. There was no way to reduce the amount of PFAS found in the body—until now. Our new randomized clinical trial, has found regularly donating blood or plasma can reduce blood PFAS...

At the Albany airport and guess who sits across from me?? Our esteemed Senator Kiki Gillibrand.. so when she gets up to leave I snapped a pic of her downing all the drinks on the table after everyone else left.....lol. and of course no tip on the table either.

The next day saw a discussion with Dispatch editor Jonah Goldberg, who also waved away the Hunter Biden laptop story, which he later stated on Twitter that he did not believe “on it’s face.” Goldberg’s flippant attitude and smug gatekeeping was a perfect example of how so many pundits and thinkers are now more interested in hearing what each other have to say and bathing in self-satisfied pontifications rather than in serving their audiences. But the ultimate irony is that former President Barack Obama was a special guest, appearing onstage alongside Jeffrey Goldberg. Breitbart reporter Charlie Spiering later summed up...

Russia has 'unleashed chemical weapons on Mariupol' with Ukrainian troops reporting they are suffering breathing issues and dizziness - as the besieged port city's mayor reveals more than 10,000 civilians have died in the conflict so far. The unidentified agent is said to have been dropped on the city from a Russian drone, according to unverified reports from the city's Azov regiment. Details of the assault, via the Telegram messaging app, say a 'poisonous substance of unknown origin' has led to the city's defenders suffering from symptoms including breathing issues, 'respiratory failure' and 'vestibulo-atactic syndrome'. The alleged attack came just...

Tucked at the end of a hotly debated passage in Lumen Gentium about the Church’s role in salvation comes one sentence that has not received as much attention. What follows the statement that “all the Church’s children” have received their holy Catholic faith not from merit, but from “the special grace of Christ,” is the most harrowing line of Vatican II: If they fail moreover to respond to that grace in thought, word and deed, not only shall they not be saved but they will be the more severely judged. (LG 14) These words are worth pondering deeply as we...

Philadelphia will mandate indoor masking on April 18, the city’s health department announced Monday. “The Philadelphia Department of Public Health established a benchmark system in February that uses case counts, hospitalizations, and the increase in case rates to determine which safety strategies are needed,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. “The seven day daily average of cases, 142 as of April 8, and a 60% increase in case counts over the past 10 days met the standards to reintroduce the indoor mask mandate.” ... “If we fail to act now, knowing that every previous wave of infections has been followed by a...

Poll says 60% of Democrats support reinstituting COVID-19 mask mandates Democrats support the reinstituting or continuation of COVID-19 mask mandates, despite the majority of Americans saying they oppose the idea, a new poll says. A Monmouth University poll released Monday asked respondents whether they "support or oppose instituting, or reinstituting, face mask and social distancing guidelines" in their state at the current time. Sixty percent of Democrats said they support it, compared with 12% of Republicans. Overall, only 34% of respondents said they support continued mask mandates, while 62% said they oppose.

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Quelle surprise! Actually, the source here is surprise enough, or perhaps better put, a measure of just how little the usual tactics of slinging accusations of racism at critics matter. HuffPo's Stephen Crockett castigates Black Lives Matter’s national organization as a corrupt racket, somewhat belatedly as Crockett himself pointed out on Friday...

President Joe Biden has asked India’s Narendra Modi not to accelerate the buying of Russian oil as the U.S. and other nations try to cut off Moscow’s energy income following the invasion of UkrainePresident Joe Biden asked India's Narendra Modi on Monday not to accelerate the buying of Russian oil as the U.S. and other nations try to cut off Moscow's energy income following the invasion of Ukraine. The Indian prime minister made no public commitment to refrain from Russian oil, a source of tension with the U.S. Meeting by video call, Biden told Modi that the U.S. could help...

The population of Far Eastern leopard in the wild has exceeded 120 this year, up from 35 in the early 2000s, moving away from the extinction line, Russia's PrimaMedia news agency reported Tuesday. Far Eastern leopard is the rarest of all large cats on Earth. It is listed as Critically Endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List in 2007. Researchers of the Land of the Leopard National Park acquired the data by using camera traps in the Primorsky Territory, Russia. The national park, established in Russia's Far East in 2012 and covering an area of...

UNIVERSITY CITY, Mo. (AP) — When the coronavirus pandemic first hit the U.S., sales of window coverings at Halcyon Shades quickly went dark. So the suburban St. Louis business did what hundreds of other small manufacturers did: It pivoted to make protective supplies, with help from an $870,000 government grant. But things haven’t worked out as planned. The company quit making face shields because it wasn’t profitable. It still hasn’t sold a single N95 mask because of struggles to get equipment, materials and regulatory approval. “So far, it has been a net drain of funds and resources and energy,” Halcyon...

Abigail Disney:"Like all radical ideologues, the right wing has finally run amok and is coming to devour the hand that feeds it. Business. For my part I am delighted. It is the business world that has been, either by act or omission, feeding the opportunist right wing to distract"