Free Republic

Former President Barack Obama has made an unusual request to install a massive 2,500 gallon commercial-grade propane tank at his Martha’s Vineyard estate, according to reports. The cost of installing the large tank and filling it with gas could reportedly cost up to $75,000.

While Democrat John Fetterman holds a strong lead over Mehmet Oz in the Pennsylvania Senate race, the Pennsylvania Governor race is much closer in the early days of the race. Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee, holds only a 4-point lead over his far-right Republican rival, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, with just under 13 percent of voters remaining undecided in the race in the newest USA Today Network/Suffolk University poll. That puts Shapiro’s advantage over Mastriano within the poll’s 4.4% margin of error.

The FDA has followed highly promising results from trials demonstrating the hair regrowth potential of a common arthritis drug with a landmark approval, giving baricitinib the green light as a treatment for severe alopecia areata. The move makes the drug the first ever FDA-approved drug for systemic treatment of the disease, and will take the form of a daily pill that proved hugely promising in recent Phase 3 trials. Baricitinib is a drug originally developed to treat rheumatoid arthritis, and recently began to attract interest from scientists researching treatments for another autoimmune disorder in the form of alopecia areata. This...

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday he would consider using his emergency war powers to increase gas production in a letter to oil companies. Biden warns oil companies in his letter that “at a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable.”

The FDA’s Vaccines & Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) is meeting today to discuss emergency use authorization for the mRNA COVID-19 shots for children ages 6 months to 5 years. 🚨LIVE NOW: FDA Panel on EUA products for infants and toddlers ages 6 mo.-4 years old happening now. https://t.co/D7S1SwJ8UE — Lindsay (@TexasLindsay) June 15, 2022 In the meeting, the FDA discussed the case of a 17-month-old female infant that suffered multiple seizures in the clinical trials.

At least 2 200 households near Flagstaff, Arizona were ordered to evacuate late Monday, June 13, 2022, due to threats posed by the growing Pipeline Fire. Due to conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property, Flagstaff Mayor Paul Deasy signed a declaration of emergency for the Pipeline Fire, allowing him to govern by proclamation and impose regulations as needed. The fire started on Sunday morning, about 10 km (6 miles) north of Flagstaff, producing a noticeable plume of smoke and forcing recreationists in the area to leave immediately, especially those in the area of Schultz Pass...

Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow used a Tuesday press conference to urge Congress to make it harder for people to buy “those crazy guns.” Fox News quotes Burrow saying, “With everything that’s going on, if you’re not going to outlaw everything, you’ve gotta at least make it harder to get those crazy guns that everybody is using.”

Israel will act anywhere in the world to protect its citizens, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warned on Tuesday, as security agencies remained on high alert over Iranian plans to kill or abduct Israelis visiting Turkey. “These days, we see attempts to harm Israelis in various sites abroad,” Bennett said at a memorial ceremony for soldiers who fell in Operation Peace for Galilee, the 1982 Lebanon War. “The arms of Israeli security will do everything to thwart these terrorist attacks and to neutralize in advance those who send the terrorists,” Bennett stated. “We will not hesitate to use the force of...

Taiwanese Legislative Speaker You Si-kun warned China on Sunday that Taiwan possesses supersonic missiles capable of reaching the Chinese capital city of Beijing. In a speech on Taiwan Overseas Network, which was translated by Taiwan News, You warned China against invading Taiwan and offered the “strategic clarity” of letting China know that a war would also be costly for the mainland. You, who previously served as the Premiere of Taiwan’s executive branch (a role separate from that of the Taiwanese President) from 2002 to 2005, said that when he was premiere he was made aware of Taiwan’s Yun Feng supersonic...

Earlier this afternoon former AG Bill Barr laughed hysterically when he was asked about the evidence of voter fraud presented by “2000 Mules” during his pre-recorded testimony at the Jan 6 show trial. “Uh, the election was not stolen by fraud. And I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that, including the ‘2000 Mules’ movie,” Barr said as he laughed hysterically. Barr cited the lack of photographic evidence. And then mocked the geo-tracking cell phone data. snip In the video below, a man dressed in street clothes exits the front passenger seat of a postal...

There’s really no other way to say it: White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is really bad at her job. You’d think every Biden White House press conference would be a home run because, despite the president being largely incoherent, the press corps is exceedingly friendly to Democrats. Nonetheless, there are no home runs for President Joe Biden’s new press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre. It seems everything she says is a swing and a miss. That’s been the case since Jean-Pierre inherited her post from her predecessor Jen Psaki, who left the White House spin team for the one over at...

Latest poll from Georgia… https://surveyresearch-ecu.reportablenews.com/pr/georgia-senate-race-tied-kemp-leads-abrams-by-five Georgia Senate Race Tied; Kemp Leads Abrams by Five A recent ECU Poll of the 2022 U.S. Senate election in Georgia shows Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker tied at 46% among registered voters. In the race for Governor of Georgia, Republican Brian Kemp leads Democrat Stacey Abrams 50% to 45%. (The poll was conducted June 6-9, 2022, among 868 registered voters in Georgia, with a Credibility Interval, similar to a poll’s margin of error of ±3.9 percentage points.) The results of the poll reveal significant divisions between white and black voters. Warnock...

Fear of inflation continues to weigh on the markets. In an ideal world, inflation protection can do two things: 1) preserve wealth and 2) enhance wealth.In the middle of the 1970s, during the worst bouts of inflation, many investors had no choice but to pay a high premium for inflation protection or wealth preservation, with no expectation of wealth enhancement.You don’t have to settle for that dreary trade-off. Below, I’ll steer you towards a method of inflation protection that also conveys growth. In the meantime, the U.S. equities markets finished last week in the red, with the S&P 500 down...

Not realizing what lay ahead, Weinstein boasted of his support for the forces that were about to devour him. Yet the initial appellate body’s ruling was far from a foregone conclusion. During oral argument in December, that same body expressed grave doubts about whether Weinstein had received a fair trial. One issue concerned Juror 11, a Harvard-educated novelist named Amanda Brainerd. During voir dire, she denied that her debut novel, scheduled to be released a few months after the trial, concerned “predatory older men.” This was a transparent lie, but Brainerd was allowed to remain on the jury. When the...

Longtime observers of New York politics seem to agree about Nadler’s chances against Maloney. Among them is Peter King, a former congressman who represented nearby East Queens and Nassau County in the House for nearly 30 years. In an interview with National Review, he said the twelfth-district race is tilted in favor of Maloney, given the substantial overlap between her old and new districts. Unlike Maloney’s old seat, Nadler’s was rather heavily gerrymandered, stretching bizarrely from Upper Manhattan to the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in South Brooklyn — like a long snake along the length of the city — parts that have...

Why Biden’s Planned Student Loan Bailout Is Completely UnfairBecause we saved up and behaved responsibly, President Joe Biden will punish us. Nor is his plan fair to those who don’t go to college.We put five children through college (one is still attending). We saved up. We never took out any loans, as we didn’t want our kids burdened with debt. Our kids went to William and Mary, Mary Washington, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Pennsylvania. So far, the total costs for these colleges have been well more than $600,000.Last week, Biden forced taxpayers to assume nearly $6 billion...

The Federal Reserve is driving me crazy! US 30-year mortgage rates have hit the 6% level (and is higher with some major lenders). But the fear of The Fed raising rates even more is causing a rush to lock-in rates. Mortgage applications increased 6.6 percent from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending June 10, 2022. Last week’s results are compared to the prior week, which included an adjustment for the Memorial Day holiday. The seasonally adjusted Purchase Index increased 8 percent from one week earlier. The...

If There Is No God, Can Free Will Truly Exist?If God does not exist, then, quite obviously, concepts such as divine destiny or divine purpose do not exist. But what about free will? If there is no God, is there truly free will?In my book Has God Failed You? Finding Faith When You’re Not Even Sure God Is Real, I devoted one whole chapter to the question, “What if there is no God?”Simply stated, if we are all the products of an unguided, random evolutionary process, a process dominated by the survival of the fittest, can there truly be a...

Jane Austen fans were far from persuaded by Netflix's trailer for its upcoming adaptation of Persuasion. The streaming service released a two-minute-long trailer for the movie starring Dakota Johnson as the self-effacing heroine Anne Elliot, which is due to hit the screens on July 15. In spite of being set in the 19th century, the dialogue in the movie adaptation uses modern phrases - such as referring to Anne's former flame Captain Frederik Wentworth, played by Cosmo Jarvis, as an 'ex,' which has not landed well with purists of the period romance genre.

While some nerdy people like me thought that college was fun, and so stayed in it for life, for most people it is a chore to be completed with the goal of higher income. College is a big investment—of time, of expenses such as tuition, and of wages unearned due to one’s being in school. When we invest in a retirement fund, we see lots of data about rates of return. There is no guarantee about the future, but you can see the returns on various funds and stocks from previous years. No one buys expected losers. Colleges, however, generally...