Free Republic

Aug 26 (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Friday upheld a ban on smoking in federally subsidized public housing. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) properly enacted a 2016 rule requiring state and local public housing agencies to ban cigarettes, cigars and pipes inside housing units and indoor common areas, and outside within 25 feet of those spaces. Six tenants and a smokers' rights group, the New York City Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment ("NYC Clash"), challenged the ban, known as the Smoke Free Rule. They said it improperly invaded...

Could NASCAR soon be hitting empty? A recent gas shortage may have long-reaching effects and could potentially affect the sport. NASCAR has plenty of races left on its schedule for the season. The next races in the Xfinity and Cup series will be on May 15 and 16th at the Dover International Speedway in Delaware. It remains to be seen whether a gas shortage could affect those races or future events. Currently, a pipeline shutdown has caused gas shortages across the Southeast and East Coast. On May 7, hackers hit Colonial Pipeline with a ransomware attack. This effectively caused a...

The Arizona Free Enterprise Club led the fight against the measure that many believed would weaken Arizona’s election integrity.Arizona Free Enterprise Club President Scot Mussi said the Supreme Court correctly determined that Free and Fair lacked enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.“The ruling today vindicates what we knew all along: the radical Free and Fair election initiative lacked enough lawful signatures to qualify for the ballot,” said Mussi in a press release. “The other side knew it too, and that is why their lawyers tried to get the court to adopt a rigged methodology to calculate the final number...

The Arizona Democratic Party nominee for Governor, Katie Hobbs, is ignoring increasing pressure to face off with Republican Party nominee Kari Lake in a debate. Both supporters and detractors are questioning Hobbs’ decision to skip out on the Citizens Clean Elections debate, which has traditionally provided Arizona voters with an opportunity to compare the candidates’ performance under fire on the same stage and at the same time. From supporters like Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts, to opponents like the Republican Governor’s Association, Hobbs’ is facing criticism for her decision to deny Arizonans an election cycle tradition. “Fresh off her refusal...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Sunday she’s "very worried" that measures taken by the Federal Reserve to tame inflation are going to put "millions" of Americans out of work. During an appearance on CNN’s "State of the Union," Warren said she’s concerned that the Fed’s continued raising of interest rates could "tip" the country into a recession. "I am very worried about this, because the causes of inflation, things like the fact that COVID is still shutting down parts of the economy around the world, that we still have supply chain kinks, that we still have a war going on...

The RNC has discovered some audio of John Fetterman, the Democrat candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, talking about his dreams for the state’s prison population, especially those in prison for murder. Given the state’s soaring prison rate, Pennsylvania voters who haven’t drunk too deep from the leftist Kool-Aid may want to pay attention to what he said...because he’s completely out of his mind. Moreover, this is not because of his stroke, which has slowed his speech; this is leftism, pure and simple. In the two videos that seem to date from 2020 (hat tip: Red State), Fetterman freely voices his...

All honest people understand that the Democrats’ plan to pay off $10,000 in student loan debt for those earning less than $125,000 is incredibly corrupt. However, aside from the obvious vote buying, one reader, who wishes to remain anonymous, suggested to me that there’s a more nefarious purpose to all this. I thought he had a point, so I’m sharing it with you. The obvious problem with the plan is that facial corruption: Democrats are taking taxpayer money to buy votes. There are other problems I’m sure you’ve seen discussed elsewhere: This is a tax and Biden lacks constitutional authority...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s PAC has pulled $ million of its ad dollars out of Arizona, leaving Blake Masters to fend for himself ahead of the November election. The Senate Leadership Fund, McConnell’s powerful PAC, will pull $8 million out of Arizona, underscoring the anti-establishment nature of Trump-endorsed Masters’s insurgent campaign against Democrat incumbent U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly. The news, broken by Politico, comes amid an ongoing feud between McConnell and 45th President Donald Trump, who heavily supported Masters during the primary. Polls currently show Masters behind Kelly, and the incumbent Democrat has raised $40 million compared to Masters’...

J.D. Vance, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for Ohio’s U.S. Senate seat, told Breitbart News Saturday the Democrat leadership in the country “has benefited from the destruction of what made the country great in the first place.”Vance, on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Saturday this weekend, said that it is a “pretty simple argument” that the current leadership in the county benefit from destroying the country while there has been an increase in inflation, a rise in gas prices, an open border, defunding the police, and shipping American jobs to China.Listen:“If you’re a working-class guy in Ohio, you didn’t benefit when they shipped...

This week, Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser announced that “no unvaccinated child will be permitted to receive instruction in any school building unless they get vaccinated within the first 20 days of the Fall semester.” She also rejected the option of continuing remote lessons, saying “we’re not offering remote learning for children. Families will need to comply with what is necessary to come to school. Look, the remote lessons we have been offering have not been satisfactory. Too many parents have quibbled over the content. We need to return to direct in-person instruction free of parental scrutiny and interference.” More...

Charlie Crist, the Democrat candidate for Florida Governor, just announced that his running mate will be Karla Mats. Interestingly, her nickname has been “Karla Marx” due her public statement regarding Fidel Castro. It’s a weird position to take in a location to which people came to escape the squalor and depravity of communist Cuba under Castro. Her public praise of a communist dictator isn’t all she has going for her. She’s also the President of a teacher’s union, the United Teachers of Dade, which covered up for and protected a serial sexual predator for more than a decade. It was...

Germany's Catholic environmental Bishop, Rolf Lohmann takes a sceptical view of the debate on extending the operating lives of German nuclear power plants. In perspective, he said, it is ethically imperative to "phase out sooner rather than later, as nuclear energy remains a risky technology." Lohmann praised climate strike actions. Germany's Catholic environmental Bishop Rolf Lohmann takes a sceptical view of the debate on extending the operating life of German nuclear power plants. It is true that "it would be wrong to categorically rule out this measure in an emergency", the auxiliary bishop from Xanten told the weekly newspapers "Neue...

A federal judge has sided with former President Donald Trump and announced her “preliminary intent to appoint a special master” to review the documents seized by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago earlier this month.A “special master” would review documents and materials to determine which are protected by attorney-client privilege and executive privilege, barring the Department of Justice (DOJ) from using them.The decision by Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee, comes less than one week after Trump’s legal team filed a motion seeking an independent review of the seized documents. Trump’s motion filed Monday argued the FBI raid was a political...

China’s state-run Global Times on Friday harangued America and Europe for using coal power to make up for electricity shortfalls, even though China is building coal plants with wild abandon, digging up and importing mountains of coal to fuel them, and making it very clear that China’s industrial goals will not be compromised in any way to satisfy climate activists. There is a legitimate point to be made about the lunacy of Western societies spending billions on unreliable “green energy,” ruling out nuclear power for pseudo-religious environmentalist reasons, and then frantically turning back to dirty coal when solar panels and...

Republican Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake called for “firing” the federal government on Tuesday over the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida. .The former president announced Monday night that the FBI raided his home in Florida, reportedly in connection with an investigation into the potential mishandling of 15 boxes containing classified documents that were allegedly taken to his private home.Lake, who Trump endorsed during her primary race, condemned the FBI and the federal government over their alleged attempt to “take down ” Trump in a statement posted to Twitter.“This is one...

Red Dawn What were you doing when you were fifteen years old? I’ll bet you weren’t out conducting aerial reconnaissance hoping to use that information to destroy enemy Russian troops heading to your town. At least you weren’t unless you were part of the fictional account in the movie Red Dawn. Ukrainian President Zelensky has called on his people time and time again to do all they can to “repel the occupiers.” In numerous ways, civilians are playing critical roles in helping protect their homeland and taking the fight to the Russians. Fifteen-year-old ninth-grade drone pilot Andriy Pokrasa and his...

Ash, a 34-year-old accountant from Connecticut, graduated from college in 2009 year with more than $100,000 in private loans, she says. Still, she thinks of herself as relatively lucky. With the help of her husband, who didn't have his own student loans, they managed to pay them off in March 2022, after 12 years of making sacrifices so they could afford the monthly loan payments. Even if Ash, who asked Fortune not to share her last name to protect her privacy, hadn't completely paid off her loans earlier this year, she wouldn't have benefited from Wednesday's student loan forgiveness announcement....

As the war in Ukraine has passed the six-month mark, US and European officials say Ukraine has successfully used a method of resistance warfare developed by US special operations forces to fight back against Russia and bog down its vastly superior military. The Resistance Operating Concept was developed in 2013 following Russia's war with Georgia a few years earlier but its value was only realized after Russia's invasion of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in 2014. It provides a blueprint for smaller nations to effectively resist and confront a larger neighbor that has invaded. Russia's nearly bloodless takeover and annexation of the...

Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Republicans are hypocrites for attacking former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her handling of classified materials. At the same time, they defend “disgusting” former President Donald Trump in light of the documents removed from Mar-a-Lago. Anchor Chuck Todd said, “Let me start with the affidavit with you. It seems as if Justice wanted to charge the former president with a crime. Doesn’t it appear they already have enough evidence just simply on the mishandling of thes

Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Gov. Chris Sununu (R-NH) questioned the timing of the FBI’s raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Sununu said, “If you’re going to take unprecedented action and raid a former president’s house, you better have a strategy for unprecedented transparency. I think we’re all concerned about what might be in those documents. Some were classified, some weren’t, what the serious nature was, but show us! You’ve got to be able to show your cards when you’re taking actions like this.”