Free Republic

Citing the precedent established by his executive order mandating covid vaccinations as a condition of being allowed to hold a job, President Biden solved the problem of inadequate access to abortions by issuing a mandate requiring all states receiving any federal money to provide free abortions to whoever wants them. The President pointed out that "this much more lenient mandate actually expands people's rights in a way that the vaccine mandate did not. With the vaccine mandate everyone who wanted to keep their job was required to take the vaccine injections. Right now, my abortion mandate allows those who don't...

Exercise-based physical therapy is noninferior to arthroscopic partial meniscectomy for patient-reported knee function at five years among patients with a degenerative meniscal tear, according to a study published online July 8 in JAMA Network Open. Julia C.A. Noorduyn and colleagues compared the five-year effectiveness of arthroscopic partial meniscectomy and exercise-based physical therapy in 321 patients aged 45 to 70 years with a degenerative meniscal tear. Participants were randomly assigned to arthroscopic partial meniscectomy or 16 sessions of exercise-based physical therapy; 87.1 percent competed the five-year follow-up (mean follow-up, 61.8 months). The researchers found that mean improvement was 29.6 and 25.1...

People who have taken antibiotics in the past three months pay more attention to negative facial expressions, according to research by postdoc Katerina Johnson. This may explain how antibiotics increase the risk of developing depression. The use of antibiotics negatively affects the microbial community in the gut, previous research has shown. That can then have knock-on effects on the rest of our health, Johnson explains. "We know that the gut microbiome in animals and humans not only affects physical health, but also interacts with the brain, influencing emotions and cognition." Johnson investigated whether there are differences in the way people...

REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. (AP) — President Joe Biden said Sunday he is considering declaring a public health emergency to free up federal resources to promote abortion access even though the White House has said it doesn’t seem like “a great option.” He also offered a message to people enraged by the Supreme Court’s ruling last month that ended a constitutional right to abortion and who have been demonstrating across the country: “Keep protesting. Keep making your point. It’s critically important.” The president, in remarks to reporters during a stop on a bike ride near his family’s Delaware beach house, said...

Join with fellow FREEPERS to pray for AMERICA: For those in Authority in Government, Family, Military, Business, Healthcare, Education, Churches, and the Media. This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. (1 John 5:14) Forum threads labeled [Prayer] are closed to debate of any kind. This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. 1 JOHN 5:14 Religion Forum Threads labeled [Prayer] are closed to debate of any kind.

On May 5, Youngkin updated the state’s telework policy for all state employees to begin working in-person full-time by July 5, a change the governor’s office stressed would provide “options for and supports the use of telework where appropriate.” Youngkin said it would help “balance the demands of government services with the needs of our public servants.” If you feel like you can't work with a new governor, then you should leave. That’s what should have happened in DC under Donald Trump. Folks who say they serve the government no matter who is in charge picked sides all of a...

Detailed accounting of the first four days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine showing the Russian strategy and how it was derailed. Starts at 24:20. Video here.FYI, this is a very good channel for daily updates showing the location of the front lines. It has been interesting to watch the large Uke salient in Donbas shrink over the past few weeks.

Zulu is the sort of film that it's become imprudent, even inadvisable, to write about. Nearly six decades since it was released, its subject matter – a battle between white colonial troops and an African army – would certainly never be attempted by a filmmaker today, and certainly not in the same manner as it was in 1964, which it's worth remembering is as far away from us today as the Civil War was from the first stirrings of the Roaring Twenties. (These temporal comparisons are facile, to be sure, though we've certainly seen as radical a social transformation in...

Unfunded state debt for things like retired public employees health care coverage continues to balloon to an unsustainable level, according to a new report. The American Legislative Exchange Council released its report Thursday on “Other Post-Employment Benefit (OPEB) Liabilities,” which total about $959 billion. The Center Square recently reported on the huge debt levels for state pensions, which have grown to more than $8 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Thursday’s ALEC report details the other state employment obligations that are not included in pensions that public employees can receive after they retire. This can include things like life insurance, health insurance...

The New York Times is famous for its anthropological studies of conservatives — what wags have called “gorillas in the mist” coverage. The newspaper’s latest anthropological installment is “The Rise of the Far-Right Latina.” That smearing label tells us less about the three Hispanic Texas Republicans profiled in the piece than it does the paper’s hysterical liberal bias and the left’s general obtuseness. Even prosaic conservatism, grounded in the country’s history and traditions, qualifies as “far-right” to woke reporters like Jennifer Medina, who never bothers to examine in the article the “far-left” character of the Democratic Party and progressive movement...

A California doctor plans to offer abortion services to women in Southern states such as Alabama, via a boat that operates as a floating clinic in federal waters off the Gulf Coast, according to news reports. Dr. Meg Autry, an OB-GYN in San Francisco, aims to raise about $20 million for the project known as PRROWESS, or Protecting Reproductive Rights of Women Endangered by State Statutes. “The project is being funded with philanthropy and the patients care is on a needs basis, so most individuals will pay little to nothing for services,” Autry said in an interview with NBC Bay...

RICHMOND, Va. -- Anti-abortion supporters rallied at the Virginia State Capitol Saturday afternoon to call on state lawmakers to limit access to abortion in the Commonwealth. More than 100 people turned out for the rally organized by Virginia's 5th District Congressman Bob Good in a push for a complete ban on abortions in Virginia. Additionally, Good and supporters criticized Republicans looking to compromise on the issue as it is now up to states to decide after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. While many states had so-called trigger laws or pre-Roe laws on the books that have begun to...

WASHINGTON—House Committee on Oversight and Reform Ranking Member James Comer (R-Ky.) today renewed his request to Department of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen for information regarding Hunter Biden and other Biden associates and family members’ suspicious foreign business transactions flagged by U.S. banks and called for all documents, communications, and records related to these transactions to be preserved. The Biden Administration has publicly asserted it provides suspicious activity reports (SARs) to Congress, but it is refusing to provide any reports generated for the Biden family and Biden associates to Ranking Member Comer. “The Biden Administration is restricting Congress’ access to SARs,...

President Nixon was determined to come to the aid of America’s ally and to demonstrate to the leaders of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China that even in the post-Vietnam era, the United States would be a global power to be reckoned with. For Operation Linebacker, the May-to-October interdiction campaign, he ordered the deployment to the combat theater of massive naval and air forces. By 15 May 1972, an unprecedented six aircraft carriers and 95 other warships and support vessels buttressed the naval power of the Seventh Fleet. During the same period, the B-52 strategic bomber forces...

More than twice as many Americans have lost a household member to a Covid vaccine injury as have lost one to Covid. That’s the shocking finding of a new poll of 1,500 Americans carried out by the polling company Pollfish. While 3.6% of respondents said someone in their household had died from COVID-19, 7.9% said one had died as a result of Covid vaccination. The poll also found that 8.5% said they had been injured by their vaccination, 5% that they had sought medical help, and 3.3% that they had been hospitalized, the same proportion who said that as a...

A film production company is relocating from Arkansas in response to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision last month to overturn Roe v. Wade, which now allows the GOP-led state's abortion trigger law to take effect. The movie, "Eric Larue," will now instead film in North Carolina, where abortion is still legal with some restrictions, FOX 16 in Little Rock reported. Arkansas' trigger law bans nearly all abortions in the state, and does not allow exceptions in cases of rape and incest. The law only permits the procedure when it is necessary to save the life of the mother in a...

A nationwide experiment is abandoned after producing only misery.Faced with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, Sri Lanka called off an ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture this winter. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April (2021), Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic.The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce...

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko might be bracing for a revolt from his own military officers after they recently expressed their opposition to the Russian war in Ukraine. Senior officers from the fifth brigade of the Special Forces warned in an open letter to Lukashenko, who is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, against sending troops to fight in Ukraine, describing that such decision is "pure suicide," the Express reported Saturday. "By entering the war against Ukraine, Belarus will be evicted from the community of civilized states and will be an international outcast for many years to come," the...

Rep. Kinzinger: In about 10 years, there's not going to have been a single Trump supporter that exists anywhere in the country.” “It's like Nixon. There were a lot of people that supported Nixon until he was out of office.”

he Charlottesville, Virginia, home of the Founding Father and America’s third president is one of our best-known national monuments, familiar from its appearance on the nickel since 1938. But the hilltop mansion designed by Jefferson himself, once preserved as a tribute to the author of the Declaration of Independence, now offers visitors a harangue on the horrors of slavery. “The whole thing has the feel of propaganda and manipulation,” Jeffrey Tucker, founder of the libertarian Brownstone Institute and a recent visitor, told The Post. “People on my tour seemed sad and demoralized.”