Free Republic

Republican Representative and vice chair of the House January 6 Committee Liz Cheney has received thunderous applause from a GOP crowd for saying Republicans needed to make a choice between supporting Donald Trump and the Constitution. Making a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, on Wednesday, she reflected on the revelations from the committee hearings. A video of the moment has also gone viral, with over 180,000 views on Twitter.

MADRID (AP) — NATO was facing rebukes from Moscow and Beijing on Thursday after it declared Russia a “direct threat” and said China posed “serious challenges ” to global stability. The Western military alliance was wrapping up a summit in Madrid, where it issued a stark warning that the world has been plunged into a dangerous phase of big-power competition and myriad threats, from cyberattacks to climate change. NATO leaders also formally invited Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, after overcoming opposition from Turkey. If the Nordic nations’ accession is approved by the 30 member nations, it will give...

Plano-based First Guaranty Mortgage Corp. laid off the majority of its staff on Friday. The mortgage lender terminated 428 of its 565 employees who work for its Plano office, according to a notice the company provided to the Texas Workforce Commission. Some of those employees work remotely from out of state, according to the letter. The notice said the layoffs were caused by “significant operating losses and cash flow challenges due to unforeseen historical adverse market conditions for the mortgage lending industry, including unanticipated market volatility.” Additionally, the notice said recent efforts to obtain funding that could have prevented the...

IPray For The Peace of JerusalemGenesis 29Jacob Arrives in Paddan Aram 29 Then Jacob continued on his journey and came to the land of the eastern peoples. 2 There he saw a well in the open country, with three flocks of sheep lying near it because the flocks were watered from that well. The stone over the mouth of the well was large. 3 When all the flocks were gathered there, the shepherds would roll the stone away from the well’s mouth and water the sheep. Then they would return the stone to its place over the mouth of the...

Johnny Depp’s spokesperson just broke a lot of hearts. On June 7, Poptopic reported that the Walt Disney Co. was preparing a hefty deal of more than $300 million to plead for Depp’s return to the popular “Pirates of the Caribbean” film franchise. The little-known Australian pop culture website cited a “trusted source close to Disney.” Unfortunately for fans of Captain Jack Sparrow, the actor’s spokesperson has declared the report “false,” People magazine reported Tuesday. Poptopic’s report said Disney was drafting a $301 million offer, including “a sizable donation to a charity of Depp’s choice.” It said the actor would...

According to the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department, a Johnstown woman accused of raping a 13-year-old kid she was tutoring handed herself into authorities on Monday. After a lengthy investigation, Kristin M. Bellinger, 39, of Johnstown, was charged with second-degree rape, a class D felony. She is charged with having repeated sex with a young male in 2019. According to deputies, Bellinger was giving the youngster tutoring outside of her responsibilities as a special education instructor at the Hamilton-Fulton-Montgomery BOCES at the time. The charges were initially brought up by the student with HFM BOCES administrators. The district said in a...

Nearly all Republicans feel the country and economy are headed in the wrong direction. Three-quarters of Democrats agree. Americans remain deeply pessimistic about the state of the country and the economy. A view that is reflected in President Joe Biden’s approval rating, which continues to hover around 39%. About 9 in 10 Republicans disapprove, along with nearly three in 10 Democrats. The national dissatisfaction is bipartisan. Most Americans, 85%, say the country is headed in the wrong direction. A majority of Republicans have been unhappy with the direction of the country since Biden’s election. Democrats had been positive about how...

Nadine Dorries has said she expects sporting bodies to reserve competitive women's sport "for people born of the female sex" after holding a meeting with a number of governing bodies. The culture secretary, whose department also covers sport, said on Twitter that "asking women and teenage girls to compete against someone who was biologically born a male is inherently unfair". It is the latest intervention in the debate over transgender rights in sport and follows the decision by FINA, the international swimming federation, to ban trans athletes from elite women's competitions. FINA's decision sparked outrage from the likes of Tom...

President Joe Biden is not the unifier-in-chief Americans are supposed to believe he is. Instead, he continues to divide the nation with his rhetoric, while pushing hard for progressive policies the average family couldn’t care less about. On Wednesday, just 5 days after SCOTUS overturned Roe, Biden plunged to his all-time low in the RealClearPolitics average, sinking below 38%. This is the lowest approval ever, marking a monumental dip for the first time in the Biden presidency. Moreover, Democrats thought that the recent SCOTUS decision would have energized its base, thus catalyzing a resurgence of support for the party. That...

Chinese agents pretending to be concerned Texans executed an online disinformation campaign against a company building a rare earth minerals facility in Texas for the Department of Defense, the cybersecurity firm Mandiant revealed on Tuesday. The Pentagon later released a statement confirming Mandiant’s findings. Mandiant found that agents for a pro-China disinformation campaign used fake social media accounts to cast doubt on Lynas Rare Earth Ltd. and other mining firms in an effort to weaken the rare earth minerals supply chain in the United States and elsewhere. Mandiant said Chinese actors lied about being local Texans online in order to...

The Federal Reserve under Berananke, Yellen and Powell kept monetary stimulus out there too long and rates too low, but Powell is now trying to reverse that trend to fight inflation. But how will that impact the housing market? (Bloomberg – Prashant Gopal) The housing slowdown is helping to solve one of the US real estate market’s most intractable problems: tight inventory. With fewer buyers competing, the number of active US listings jumped 18.7% in June from a year earlier, the largest annual increase in data going back to 2017, Realtor.com said in a report Thursday. And new sellers entered...

AP — JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A team searching a Mississippi courthouse basement for evidence about the lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till has found the unserved warrant charging a white woman in his 1955 kidnapping, and relatives of the victim want authorities to finally arrest her nearly 70 years later. A warrant for the arrest of Carolyn Bryant Donham — identified as “Mrs. Roy Bryant” on the document — was discovered last week by searchers inside a file folder that had been placed in a box, Leflore County Circuit Clerk Elmus Stockstill told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Documents...

Russia’s Vladimir Putin took a swipe at Western leaders who mocked his bare-chested horse-riding, saying that they would look “disgusting” in the buff. The Kremlin strongman made the snarky comment during a visit to the Russia-friendly Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan Thursday when asked about G7 leaders poking fun at him earlier this week. -snip- Speaking to reporters in Turkmenistan Thursday, the Russian president clapped back at the G7 participants, suggesting that they could not emulate him because, unlike him, they lead unhealthy lifestyles. “I don’t know how they wanted to get undressed, above or below the waist,” he said....

Success in God’s eyes is being totally fulfilled in ministering to him. Such servants aren’t striving to “make it” or seeking earthly security. They only want to know their Lord and to minister to him. Think about the 100 prophets hidden by Obadiah (see 1 Kings 18:4). They lived an isolated existence in caves during a severe famine for probably three to four years. These men had no outside ministry. They were completely out of the public’s view, likely forgotten by most people. They couldn’t even share in Elijah’s victory on Mount Carmel. No doubt, the world would call them...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said last week he would back a law banning the act of sodomy if the U.S. Supreme Court were to overrule a case deeming it unconstitutional. Paxton said during a Friday interview with NewsNation he would defend the law banning sodomy because the Supreme Court in the past has “stepped into issues that I don’t think there was any constitutional provision dealing with.” “They were legislative issues,” Paxton said. “This was one of those issues, and there may be more. It would depend on the issue and it would depend on the state law.”...

“‘Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it’” (Matthew 7:13–14). “Many” and “few” describe two groups of people. Those who enter through the wide gate and travel the broad way, toward the destination of destruction, are many. They include pagans and nominal Christians, atheists and religionists, theists and humanists, Jews and Gentiles—every person from every age, background, persuasion, and circumstance...

Thinking Through the Ukraine Crisis — the Causes“It would be extraordinarily difficult to expand NATO eastward without that action’s being viewed by Russia as unfriendly. Even the most modest schemes would bring the alliance to the borders of the old Soviet Union. Some of the more ambitious versions would have the alliance virtually surround the Russian Federation itself.” Beyond NATO: Staying Out of Europe’s Wars (p. 45). I wrote those words in 1994, at a time when expansion proposals merely constituted occasional speculation in foreign policy seminars in New York City and Washington, D.C. I added that expansion “would constitute...

This would be hilarious if it were not so serious. From this blog, comes the map below of Omicron BA.5 incidence in Germany. The former East Germany is outlined in green and you will note that it has a lower infection rate than the former West Germany. Which reflects the different vaccination rates of the two former German republics: The former East Germany has a lower vaccination rate than the former West Germany and this has resulted in a lower incidence of the latest covid variant. It seems, though the Berlin Wall fell more than 30 years ago, the former...

30 June 2022Thursday of week 13 in Ordinary Time Nonnberg Abbey, Salzburg Readings at MassLiturgical Colour: Green.First readingAmos 7:10-17 ©The Lord took me from herding the flock and sent me to prophesyAmaziah the priest of Bethel sent word to Jeroboam king of Israel as follows. ‘Amos is plotting against you in the heart of the House of Israel; the country can no longer tolerate what he keeps saying. For this is what he says, “Jeroboam is going to die by the sword, and Israel go into exile far from its country.”’ To Amos, Amaziah said, ‘Go away, seer;’ get back...

We can debate whether this is more Maoist, or Stalinist, or Stasi, or something else but the one thing it isn’t is American. We’ve all been aware of the stories about the FBI arresting conservatives—and by that, I don’t mean the way the FBI has hunted down every grannie and veteran who, made ignorant by the systematic removal of “no trespassing” signs and fencing, and the Capitol police holding open doors, entered the Capitol and wandered around reverently. That’s bad enough. But the FBI is also going after high-level, high-profile political operatives (advisors, politicians, journalists) who have dared challenge Biden’s...