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Cell phone question. I havnoe an unconnected cell phone I want to use text. Is there a way to do normal texting without a cell phone line?

The war on drugs is winding down, and the war on tobacco is ramping up. E-cigarettes, a safer nicotine-delivery alternative, have contributed to plummeting use of traditional cigarette smoking. Yet the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has effectively made it harder for cigarette smokers to switch by limiting vapes from the market. The agency also recently announced a ban on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars, which will push more products onto the black market, with all sorts of unintended consequences.

Who should run New York’s legal marijuana shops? Former pushers, according to Governor Kathy Hochul, who announced Thursday that those with a marijuana arrest record will be first in line for retail licenses. Supporters of the plan frame it as both fair and good business sense. Those individuals most affected by the “war on drugs,” they argue, should get first shot at profiting from legal marijuana. And those with prior experience selling pot would just be transplanting their skills to a now-legal market. In reality, the proposal is yet another misstep in New York’s march to legalization. Running a reasonable...

As I watched old Fred Astaire movies, I was struck by the sheer perfection of his movements and his flawless syncopation. I had the conscious thought that America would be so much better off if Fred Astaire's work ethic and search for perfection were applied to our own culture. One Fred Astaire dance, in particular, stands out as the quintessence of hard work and purity of effort: "Puttin' on the Ritz." Astaire, in his iconic top hat and tails, takes the music and reshapes it to his dance. He doesn't merely dance to the music; the music dances to him....

US retail gasoline prices soared to another record on Monday as global refineries struggled with adding new capacity ahead of the driving season. Before diving into Goldman Sachs’ new commodity note explaining how global refining will be tight for the foreseeable future, last week, Saudi Energy Minister said, “the bottleneck is now to do with refining … many refineries in the world, especially in Europe and the US, have closed.” Goldman’s commodity analyst Neil Mehta outlines a rash of refinery retirements, reduced Russian energy exports, recovering jet fuel demand, and tight global inventories for products, particularly diesel, have supported higher...

US retail gasoline prices soared to another record on Monday as global refineries struggled with adding new capacity ahead of the driving season. Before diving into Goldman Sachs' new commodity note explaining how global refining will be tight for the foreseeable future, last week, Saudi Energy Minister said, "the bottleneck is now to do with refining ... many refineries in the world, especially in Europe and the US, have closed." Goldman's commodity analyst Neil Mehta outlines a rash of refinery retirements, reduced Russian energy exports, recovering jet fuel demand, and tight global inventories for products, particularly diesel, have supported higher...

As the trial against Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann begins, questions have emerged over the judge’s apparent conflicts of interest.,/A>Judge Christopher “Casey” CooperIn additional to having been “professional acquaintances” with the defendant, US District Judge Christopher “Casey” Cooper, an Obama appointee (who was on Obama’s transition team), is married to lawyer Amy Jeffress who’s representing key ‘Russiagate’ figure Lisa Page in her lawsuit against the FBI. Jeffress also served as a top aide to former Attorney General Eric Holder, while current Attorney General Merrick Garland presided over the 1999 wedding of Cooper and Jeffress. Amy JeffressIn a Wednesday Zoom call,...

Truth: More than 63 million children have had their lives legally taken by abortion since 1973 under Roe.The pro-abortion machine has been working overtime to churn out lies about preborn babies and laws designed to protect them. Just Wednesday, after a bipartisan majority in the U.S. Senate defeated the legislature’s most radical abortion bill in history, pro-aborts on Capitol Hill and in the corporate media were declaring that “Republicans” (in fact a bipartisan majority that included Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin) had used the “filibuster” (rather than a simple 51-49 vote) to defeat the bill.The lying started more than 50 years...

You may have heard somewhere along the way that the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a leftist icon, was a critic of the Court's controversial 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. She was, without question, a strong opponent of legalized abortion -- but believed that Roe itself was "too sweeping and vulnerable to attacks," as a New York Times piece put it last year. More context:Ruth Bader Ginsburg wasn’t really fond of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that in 1973 established a constitutional right to abortion. She didn’t like how it was structured. The ruling, she...

The Supreme Court sided with Senator Ted Cruz in a 6-3 decision issued Monday morning in a case brought against him by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over how loans from candidates can be repaid following an election cycle. The decision was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett while Justice Elena Kagan wrote the dissent and was joined in the minority by Justices Breyer and Sotomayor.Sen. Ted Cruz, who clerked on the Supreme Court, has won his case in FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate. The court ruled 6-3 that...

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for students at Yale Law School, who are responding to news that the Supreme Court may overturn Roe v. Wade with calls to accost their conservative classmates through "unrelenting daily confrontation" and toss the Constitution by the wayside. Members of the law school’s conservative Federalist Society, first year law student Shyamala Ramakrishna said in an Instagram post, are "conspirators in the Christo-fascist political takeover we all seem to be posting frantically about." Why, she asked, are they still "coming to our parties" and "laughing in the library" without "unrelenting daily confrontation?" Some of...

Nearly two-thirds of Americans want abortion laws to be decided by voters and their elected state representatives instead of the courts, according to a new poll. And this is expected to become a reality if the United States Supreme Court overturns the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. A survey of 1,200 registered voters conducted by pollster Scott Rasmussen and RMG Research from May 5–7, asked respondents for their thoughts on the contentious issue of abortion. The poll comes after Politico published a leaked draft majority opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, where...

A new study from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University has found that just 37% of Christian pastors in the United States have a biblical worldview, demonstrating that spiritual awakening is "needed just as desperately in our pulpits as in the pews," according to the pollster.The nationwide study of about 1,000 Christian pastors found that just slightly more than a third (37%) of the U.S. pastors hold a biblical worldview. The majority (62%) possess a hybrid worldview known as Syncretism.The study, released Thursday, showed that 41% of senior pastors — as compared to 28% of associate pastors —...

Mayor Lori Lightfoot imposes a 10 p.m. curfew for unaccompanied minors in Chicago on weekends

Radical leftist gender theory has spread rapidly like a cancer upon society in recent years. And while many have caved to the woke mob in promoting such absurdities as the notion that men can become women, women can become men, or that there are more than two genders, an increasing number of Americans believe that the country has gone too far with the acceptance of trans identities, according to a poll from NBC News. “Thirty-three percent of Americans say society has gone too far in accepting transgender identities, while 35% say the country has not gone far enough to end...

President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that there was no threat to Russia if Sweden and Finland joined NATO but cautioned that Moscow would respond if the U.S.-led alliance bolstered military infrastructure in the new Nordic members. Putin, Russia's paramount leader since 1999, has repeatedly cited the post-Soviet enlargement of the NATO alliance eastwards toward Russia's borders as a reason for the conflict of Ukraine. But Putin, who has in recent months rattled Russia's nuclear sabre at the West over Ukraine, made an unusually calm response to Finland and Sweden's bids to join NATO, the biggest strategic consequence of Russia's...

The Russian Ministry of Defence says that an agreement has been reached regarding the evacuation of wounded Ukrainian soldiers from the besieged Azovstal plant in Mariupol to the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.On 16 May, an agreement has been reached regarding the evacuation of the wounded [soldiers] as a result of negotiations with the Ukrainian military personnel blocked at the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol.According to the Russian Ministry of Defence, a ceasefire at Azovstal has already begun and a humanitarian corridor has been opened to transport wounded Ukrainian soldiers to a hospital in Russian-occupied Novoazovsk, a town located in the...

The highest-profile case brought so far by John Durham, the Special Counsel tasked with pinpointing the origin of the plot to frame Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, as a Russian spy and traitor to America, starts Monday in a D.C. courtroom. Durham’s case combines all the worst elements of media frenzy — Rachel Maddow’s fainting couch moments, “Trump Stole the Election” fake headlines, and packing peanut-weight Pulitzer Prizes — in a melodrama embodied in the person of Michael Sussmann, Hillary Clinton’s attorney and the man who represented the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election cycle. Durham is trying Sussmann...

Hart Research Associates, a Democrat-run polling organization, released a poll taken from May 5 to 10 that asked voters about various issues as well as their general feeling about how the country is doing. The numbers are spectacularly grim for Joe Biden and the Democrat party generally. These numbers do two things: they bode well for Republicans taking over Congress in the midterm elections, and they make Democrat cheating more difficult because it's impossible for Democrats to have final outcomes that deviate too much from the mood of the country. It's not a random opinion to say Hart Research is...

Alleged Vice President Kamala Harris certainly has a way with words, similar to the relationship the sixth-grade bully has with other kids’ lunch money. Before we get to the clip and the patented VodkaPundit Quick & Dirty Transcript™, take a moment to ponder that Harris appears to be reading from prepared notes. VIDEO "That is especially true when it comes to the climate crisis which is why we will work together and continue to work together to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work together as we continue to work, operating from the new norms, rules, and...