Free Republic

WASHINGTON, D.C. — With Ketanji Brown Jackson joining a growing number of women on the United States Supreme Court, Justice Clarance Thomas has taken to wearing noise-canceling headphones to help drown out the incessant chatter. "What on earth do these womenfolk need to be talking about all the time?" said Thomas. "Why do you need 11,000 words to discuss whether a man using a girl's bathroom is a First Amendment right? The Constitution ain't that complicated! I can't take it anymore!" Justices Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch have also found ways to cope with the increased noise level, often sneaking away...

Westminster is buzzing with rumours circulated by political correspondents extremely close to both the governing Conservative Party and the man himself, that Boris Johnson will run to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, just 15 weeks since he announced his resignation in July. Liz Truss announced her resignation Thursday lunchtime, bringing to an end the shortest-ever term of a UK Prime Minister, a withdrawal precipitated by her inability to deliver on her policy programme amid brutal party infighting and what appeared to be a counter-coup against her administration by the pre-Brexit Remainer element inside the party.

Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time Luke 12:49–53 Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus declares his desire to spread eternal life among human beings. He said, “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!”What is that fire? His forerunner, John, gave us a clue: “I am baptizing you with water, for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. . . He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Jesus came in order to torch the world with the heat and light of the divine Spirit,...

Deepak Bhargava has a big idea: America should live up to the best parts of our national identity and become the most welcoming country on earth for immigrants and refugees. Bhargava’s Statue of Liberty Plan proposes welcoming 75 million people over the course of the next decade. To do that, and to counter broad authoritarian appeals, we need a new narrative about immigration, rooted in progressive values. Bhargava is a distinguished lecturer in urban studies at the City University of New York and a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and his ideas come at a crucial moment. In the...

Trafalgar Group chief pollster Robert Cahaly says a lot of Republicans aren't being reached by pollsters. "I think there's a certain segment of the Republican electorate that's just not getting polled," Cahaly said on the Wednesday edition of the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show. "There's an important chunk of people that are what I call submerged voters that you cannot get on the phone and you cannot reach them any other way." According to Cahaly, mainstream polling's numbers have started coming close to the Trafalgar Group's numbers, resulting in some elected officials denying the accuracy of the numbers....

London Mayor Sadiq Khan is facing criticism on social media for flying 7,000 miles from the United Kingdom to Argentina to participate in a climate change summit. Khan began his three-day visit to Argentina Wednesday to speak at the C40 summit with almost 100 other mayors after taking a 7,000-mile overnight flight from London to Buenos Aires, Evening Standard reported. The move earned sharp pushback from critics on social media who accused Khan of hypocrisy for the 14,000-mile round trip flight’s carbon emissions.

Most gun owners, including Republican ones, said they support several proposed laws to prevent people with a high risk of violence from accessing guns. Gun safety organization 97Percent, which touts itself as a bipartisan group of both gun owners and non-gun owners, noted in its report on the research that this defies the current perception that there is an “intractable divide” over gun control in the U.S. “The myth of an intractable divide in our country is merely that: a myth,” the group said in its report. More than 70 percent of gun owners said they support laws prohibiting gun...

Donald Trump answered questions under oath Wednesday in a lawsuit filed by E Jean Carroll, a magazine columnist who says the Republican former president raped her in the mid-1990s in a department store dressing room. The deposition gave Carroll’s lawyers a chance to interrogate Trump about the assault allegations as well as statements he made in 2019 when she told her story publicly for the first time. Details on how the deposition went weren’t immediately disclosed.

The story of the first sin begins not with a choice, but with a lie. As much as we tend to emphasize “free-will” as the origin and dominant factor of human sin, we do well to remember the true nature of our lives. Things are much more complicated than freedom can account for. Rather, we act in the context of lies and deception, some from outside and some from within. It is only the “truth” that can set us free – that is – only reality as it is constituted by God can set us in the position of making...

In March 2022, a prominent Muslim preacher, Uthman Ibn Farooq, told the world he had been stabbed in downtown San Diego by a man shouting anti-Muslim slurs at him. He recorded the incident as it happened and subsequently posted the video to social media, garnering sympathy from his thousands of Muslim followers and leaving many wondering if they’d be the next victim of an “Islamophobic” hate-crime. If someone had been stabbed and reported it to SDPD, there would be an SDPD crime case. My understanding is there is no crime case. Lieutenant Adam Sharki, Public Information Officer, San Diego Police...

Conservative media personality Megyn Kelly sparked criticism this week with a tweet expressing outrage at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) decision to add a coronavirus inoculation to the required list of vaccinations for school children. “A scary # of kids are dying after taking the Covid vax — from myocarditis among other injuries,” Kelly wrote in her post on Wednesday afternoon. “HOW DARE THE CDC ADD THIS TO ITS LIST OF SCHOOL VACCINATIONS? Don’t listen. Be v careful w/ your teenage boys in partic but girls too. These are not honest brokers. This is dangerous!”

From more cases of heat-related illnesses to increases in tick-borne diseases, family physician Paul Friedrichs has seen the impacts of climate change on the health of his patients. He understands all too well that climate change is a health issue. “Environment is so critical to our health,” he says. “Our environment determines a majority of our health conditions: Infectious diseases, toxins, radiation in the environment, the food we have access to, allergens — just so much of human health is related to where we try to live.” Consider this summer’s record-breaking temperatures (with July 2022 registering the third-hottest July on...

Introduction An epithet began in using it on Jews reciting the Biblical verse in Deuteronomy, 6:4 "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one..." Though Haredim, their Rabbis believe it's forbidden now days to ascend the mountain where the Temples stood and visit rather the Western Wall. However, those that are religious-Zionists and follow their masters that permit access, recite the above verse at the Temple Mount. (Some bow, as in Isaiah 27:13). Upon those scenes, the PA and Hamas, etc. came up with the phrase as supposed "talmudic", which is false, as it is Biblical. Since...

Mayhem broke out at labour union organised protests in Paris against the cost of living crisis befalling the French public this week, with black bloc-clad rioters clashing with police and smashing windows. An estimated 107,000 people took to the streets of France on Tuesday in protest against the growing economic crisis born out the energy crisis surrounding the war in Ukraine, and self-inflicted economic wounds such as years of lockdown restrictions which spurred rampant inflation, and failures by the government to perform maintenance on the country’s ageing nuclear power plants.

Environmental protesters determined to force the German automotive industry to decarbonize glued themselves to the floor at the Porsche pavilion in the Autostadt museum in Wolfsburg, Germany. Then they complained there was no place to poop. “Together with 15 other members of @ScientistRebel1 I have occupied the Porsche pavillion at @Autostadt, 9 of us glued to the floor and some of us on hunger strike until our demands to decarbonise the German transport sector are met,” self-described “experimental economist” Gianluca Grimalda tweeted. “VW told us that they supported our right to protest, but they refused our request to provide us...

While the United States contends with the newly detected COVID omicron BQ.1 subvariants, another highly mutated strain of the coronavirus called XBB is tearing across Southeast Asia, where in some countries, it has caused the number of cases to double in a day. Some more sensationalist reports have called XBB a “ nightmare variant ” due to its apparent ability to evade immunity and dampen some therapies. But infectious disease experts say it is too soon to jump to such broad conclusions. “That is pretty irresponsible reporting because it’s impossible to know what all these variants mean,” said UC Berkeley...

Dr. Paul Marik, Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance(FLCCC) co-founder, said at an FLCCC conference on Oct. 15 that long COVID and injury from the COVID-19 vaccines share many overlaps in their symptoms and mechanisms. Both diseases are systemic, affecting multiple organs, and tissues and are both driven by a high load of spike protein accumulated in these organs and tissues. These spike proteins trigger inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and autoimmunity. However, not everyone will experience these symptoms. Whether a person will suffer from vaccine injuries is dependent on both permanent factors and temporal factors impacted by actions and choices. Spike...

An Indianapolis police sergeant faces federal charges after shocking body cam video captured him stomping on the face of a handcuffed homeless man’s face as he lay on the ground. Sgt. Eric Huxley, 44, a 15-year veteran, has been indicted by a federal grand jury for violating the black man’s civil rights by using excessive force during the caught-on-video incident Sept. 24, 2021. Huxley, who is white, was charged with one count of deprivation of rights under color of law while using a dangerous weapon, resulting in bodily injury. The sergeant and two other officers — Sgt. Christopher Kibbey and...

The Ukrainian government on Thursday ordered restrictions on nationwide electricity use following a series of Russian missile and drone attacks that struck one-third of the country’s power plants. President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address on Wednesday night three energy facilities were destroyed in the last day alone. “We assume that Russian terror will be directed at energy facilities until, with the help of partners, we are able to shoot down 100% of enemy missiles and drones,” he said. “Please limit your electricity consumption.” Under the new energy-reducing program, power supply across Ukraine is restricted between 7 a.m. and...

More Russian troops have arrived in Belarus for military training, prompting anxiety in Ukraine. Some 9,000 Russian soldiers are expected to be stationed in Belarus for what is officially described as "exercises". But the troop movement -- which began on Saturday -- has prompted speculation in the West that the manoeuvres could be in preparation for a new attack on Ukraine. The last time Belarusian and Russian forces held joint exercises was in February. Many of those Russian forces went on to cross the Ukrainian border in their ill-fated push to capture Kyiv. The exercises were announced last week by...