Free Republic

Many Californians right now are no doubt feeling the whipsaws of conflicting government policies. Not a month ago, they learned that the state will ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035, mandating that all new passenger cars and trucks sold in the state must be electric vehicles (EVs). Then, in a dizzying about-face, residents were asked not to charge their EVs to conserve energy as California’s electrical grid was pushed to the limit due to a punishing heatwave. A recent Newsweek headline perfectly summarizes the apparent absurdity of it all:Click to enlarge Today, about 1% of our vehicles are...

Investors are running scared. Chalk it up to the August CPI reading, which prompted a brutal sell-off on Wall Street last Tuesday. Stocks suffered their largest one-day drop in more than two years. Why? The market took a “glass half empty” view of positive news: The headline inflation rate decreased from 8.5% in July to 8.3% in August. As you can see, inflation has continued to trend downward since peaking in June:Click to enlarge Readers, this is good news. And it’s part of why our inflation nightmare could end within six months. Let me explain… The CPI core rate is...

Latest estimate: 0.3 percent — September 20, 2022 The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the third quarter of 2022 is 0.3 percent on September 20, down from 0.5 percent on September 15. After this morning's housing starts report from the US Census Bureau, the nowcast of third-quarter residential investment growth decreased from -20.8 percent to -24.5 percent.

New footage shows a forensics team working for allies of former President Trump spent hours handling voting equipment in a Georgia county elections office on Jan. 7, 2021, two months after the 2020 presidential election and the day after riots at the U.S. Capitol over the results. According to reports from The Washington Post and The New York Times, the videos show the Trump contractors copying data from voting machines in rural Coffee County, Georgia, as they handled poll pads with sensitive voter data.

There are eight happy people in four photographs on the cover of this publication. NOT ONE IS A WHITE MALE. ML/NJ

Last week, Joe Biden showed what it looks like when the ruling class loses all connection with the realities of the pain and stress of the people it serves. His White House shindig to celebrate his own economic accomplishments was an orgy of self-back-patting and bragging over the Inflation Reduction Act. Experts agree that it won’t reduce inflation, and there was a bit of irony to the fact that stocks plunged (and with them many ordinary people’s retirement savings) over terrible inflation news even as Biden was speaking. (snip) All of this happened just two weeks after Biden had announced...

by Josh Ford | 24NewsPresident David Olive of Bluefield College received news that the school’s basketball players continued to kneel during the National Anthem despite him telling them to stop immediately or face consequences.Some players continued to kneel as they reportedly believe it’s their way to take a stand against racial injustice.However, Olive shot back that the protesting reflects poorly on the Virginia school. He informed the team that he is suspending multiple players who refused to stop kneeling.“The basis for my decision stemmed from my own awareness of how kneeling is perceived by some in our country, and I...

Young man asking simple question of youngsters on the street and they can not answer.

Never mind that President Joe Biden declared “the pandemic is over” during a 60 Minutes interview Sunday night. In Illinois, it’s apparently still a “disaster” that warrants a declaration covering the entire state – all 102 counties. Gov. Pritzker issued his 34th Disaster Proclamation on September 16, 2022, marking more than 900 days of Illinoisans living under emergency rules. The governor has retained the use of Emergency Powers for more than two-thirds of his time in office.

White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci attempted to walk back a statement made by President Joe Biden during a recent interview that the COVID-19 pandemic “is over.” “What [Biden] really meant is that the very severe stage of the pandemic of having … 3,000 deaths a day—that stage is no longer present,” Fauci told Politico. “People should not be cavalier that we’re out of the woods,” he added. In a “60 Minutes” interview that aired on Sunday night, Biden was asked about the trajectory of COVID-19 in the United States. “The pandemic is over. We still have a...

Fear Is the Enemy We Must DefeatIn the last six months, five people I’ve approached about bringing the story of who they are and what they do to a wider public have turned down my request for an interview. A farming and homeschooling family out West, for example, would have made a wonderful article about work ethic, education, and values. In another instance, a woman with a message about the power of movies to change the lives of young people might have shared her philosophy with hundreds of others.They are all active, busy people, but a tight schedule wasn’t the...

Officers with the Eufaula Police Department in Alabama responded to a home to remove a gray rat snake from the resident's toilet. Photo courtesy of the Eufaula Police Department/Facebook Sept. 19 (UPI) -- Police in Alabama responded to a residence to deal with an unusual situation when the homeowner found a snake in their toilet. The Eufaula Police Department said officers with the day shift responded to help a homeowner who found a snake in their toilet bowl. "We never know from one day to the next what kind of call we will receive during our shift," the department said...

The Pentagon has ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms’ rules.According to the researchers’ report, the accounts taken down included a made-up Persian-language media site that shared content reposted from the U.S.-funded Voice of America Farsi and Radio Free Europe. Another, it said, was linked to a Twitter handle that in the past had claimed to operate on behalf of Centcom.One fake account posted an inflammatory tweet claiming that relatives of deceased...

During President Donald Trump's presidency, the Left repeatedly assured Americans that Trump was simply intolerable — more unbearable than every other Republican — due to his rudeness, his crassness and his divisiveness. For four years, the President's Twitter account inspired outrage and hurt feelings amongst Democrats. We were supposed to believe he was history's worst president because he called reporters "crazy" and "wacko" and politicians "losers." Many even linked his rhetoric to actual violence. If Democrats truly felt this jarred by the rhetoric of the former president, where is their outrage against President Joe Biden? The president's latest speech, in...

According to Ukrainian defence officials, units of Russian troops are now trapped at the Dnipro river after the recent counter-offensive. During an appearance on the Ukrainian parliament’s television channel on Monday, September 19, Nataliya Humenyuk, the head of the joint press centre of Ukrainian Defence Forces of the South, claimed that units of Russian troops in the Kherson region are now ‘sandwiched’ between the right bank of the Dnipro River and the advancing Ukrainian forces. “The fire control that we maintain over crossings and transport arteries across the Dnipro makes them understand that they are sandwiched between the defence forces...

Pro-Kremlin separatist officials in Ukraine’s Kherson region announced on Tuesday they will hold a referendum this week to become part of Russia. The leaders called on Moscow to endorse the referendum results immediately, according to Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-appointed leader of Kherson. Saldo said in a Telegram post that he was hopeful Kherson would vote to be "a part of Russia, a fully-fledged subject of a united country.” Russian news agencies stated that the referendum would occur between September 23 and 27, and would be similar to other votes in regions of Ukraine occupied by Russian troops, Reuters reported. .....

For the first time, the number of arrests of undocumented immigrants along the southwestern border exceeded two million in one year, according to newly released government data, continuing a historic pace of undocumented immigrants coming to the country. The number of arrests at the border increased slightly from July to August, with a total of more than 2.1 million for the first 11 months of the 2022 fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. In an unusual step, Biden administration officials gave some reporters a background briefing on Monday before Customs and Border Protection’s routine monthly release of data. Officials...

CANNES, FRANCE - MAY 22: Woody Harrelson attends the photocall for "Triangle Of Sadness" during the 75th annual Cannes film festival at Palais des Festivals on May 22, 2022 in Cannes, France. (Photo by Samir Hussein/WireImage) Legendary “Cheers” actor Woody Harrelson told Bill Maher the “last people” he would trust with his own health is “Big Pharma and Big Government” — and he explained why. During the 61-year-old actor’s appearance on the “Club Random with Bill Maher” podcast Sunday, the TV actor and host discussed the response to the COVID-19 pandemic over the last two-plus years. The two agreed that...

The number of people killed on U.S. roadways fell slightly from April through June, the first decline in two years as pandemic-era reckless driving appeared to ease. But the government says the number of deaths remains at a crisis level. Estimates from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show that 20,175 people died in crashes from January through June, a 0.5% increase over the same period last year. Yet the second-quarter decline ended a string of seven straight quarterly increases that began in the summer of 2020 with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The agency estimated that 10,590 people...

Two decomposed bodies were found in the home of a former longtime Rhode Island mayor on Monday, according to a report. The shocking discovery was made by police in the city of Woonsocket, according to WJAR, where an elderly man and elderly woman were found in the home of ex-Woonsocket Mayor Susan Menard. Menard served as the city’s leader for more than a decade, beginning her tenure in 1995 before she left office in 2009, according to the city. Her tenure as mayor is apparently the longest in the city’s history. It’s not yet known if Menard is one of...