Free Republic

While there has been much public attention on the U.S. Supreme Court’s present consideration of the “independent state legislature” theory in Moore v. Harper involving North Carolina’s redistricting, that case would not immediately upend the 2020 Presidential Election. In contrast, a little-known case that appeared recently on the Court docket could do just that. The case of Brunson v. Adams, not even reported in the mainstream media, was filed pro se by ordinary American citizens – four brothers from Utah — seeking the removal of President Biden and Vice President Harris, along with 291 U.S. Representatives and 94 U.S. Senators...

Iran sentences Belgian aid worker to 28 years: Family Belgium and Olivier Vandecasteele’s family insist he is innocent, effectively held as a hostage in Tehran’s efforts to force Belgium to release an Iranian agent convicted of terrorism. Published: 14 December ,2022: 03:42 PM GST Updated: 14 December ,2022: 05:53 PM GST Iranian authorities have imposed a 28-year sentence on jailed Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele, a spokesman for his family said Wednesday. The 41-year-old was arrested in Iran at the end of February and was at one point being held in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, reportedly suspected of spying. Advertisement...

President Joe Biden said Tuesday at the White House that Republican bans on transgender surgeries were transphobic and connected to anti-semitism. “Folks, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia — they’re all connected,” he said. The president spoke about laws passed by Republican states to make irreversible gender transitioning procedures for children illegal, arguing they were transphobic and inspired by hate. “We need to challenge the hundreds of callous and cynical laws introduced in the states targeting transgender children, terrifying families, and criminalizing doctors who give children the care they need,” he said.

around 11:15 AM -- paramedics got a call for a medical emergency at an L.A. hotel ... and they found Stephen there, dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

America’s Lebanese fantasy hits a road-bump Lebanon Follow Tony Badran Published: 13 December ,2022: 12:39 PM GST Updated: 13 December ,2022: 01:25 PM GST For the past two years, the Biden administration has been hell-bent on getting Saudi Arabia to underwrite the US project of administering Lebanon. And for two years running, the Kingdom has refused, having no desire to bankroll an Iranian equity run by Hezbollah. The administration, however, is demanding US allies suspend disbelief and pretend that Lebanon is in fact a real, normal state. In the latest iteration of its Lebanese project, the Biden team is trying...

(Daily readings from the USCCB)And Jesus said to them in reply, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the good news proclaimed to them.” Luke 7:22One of the greatest ways that the transforming power of the Gospel is proclaimed is through the works accomplished by our Lord. In this Gospel passage, Jesus points to the works He has done to answer a question about His identity. The disciples of John the Baptist came to ask Him...

Elon Musk is performing a great public service by releasing the Twitter Files, which show how the social media company he recently purchased suppressed news about the Biden family’s foreign dealings. While the company’s actions, which occurred weeks before the 2020 election, raise knotty questions about free speech, they are a distraction. The more urgent issue is the conduct of our own government, specifically the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which created the landscape where censorship and disinformation could thrive and possibly change the outcome of the presidential contest. Here is a brief chronology which focuses on the bureau’s key role...

One by one, they go to start their business day only to find a baffling message from their payments app informing them: “You can no longer do business with PayPal.”There is little or no explanation. They have somehow offended the sensibilities of someone somewhere deep inside the bureaucracy. They are simply told via an email from PayPal’s Risk and Compliance Department that, after an internal review, “we decided to permanently limit your account as there was a change in your business model or your business model was considered risky.”In case there is any doubt, the email adds: “You’ll not be...

“‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went away. But when the wheat sprouted and bore grain, then the tares became evident also. The slaves of the landowner came and said to him, “Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?” And he said to them, “An enemy has done this!” The slaves said to him, “Do you want us, then, to go and gather them...

Journalist Grant Wahl’s cause of death has been revealed following an autopsy after his sudden passing while reporting at the World Cup in Qatar. Wahl’s widow, Dr. Celine Gounder, told CBS News on Wednesday that her husband’s death was due to a heart condition. “He had an autopsy done here in New York by the New York City medical examiner’s office, and it showed that he had an aortic aneurysm that ruptured,” Gounder said during the interview. “It’s just one of these things that had been likely brewing for years, and for whatever reason it happened at this point in...

Jesus went up to Jerusalem at Passover and entered the temple (see John 2:13-17). What he saw appalled him. Merchants had taken over the house of God! He came seeking a house of prayer, and what he found was a preoccupation with the promotion, display and sale of religious merchandise. The religious leaders were counting their profits. Men of God had become peddlers of religious merchandise, running about promoting their goods. Tables had been set up everywhere in God’s house to promote and sell sheep, oxen, doves, candies, incense and other merchandise for religious purposes. Money changing hands made the...

NEW YORK (AP) — Dusting off old musical instruments, appreciating the outdoors more meaningfully, dumping the hair dye and letting the gray fly forever. The pandemic disrupted our traditions, practices and pursuits, how we mark milestones, what we do with our time, what’s important in routines. It replaced old with new, a kind of new that just might stick. Nearly three years after the World Health Organization declared the deadly spread of COVID-19 a pandemic, there’s plenty of old life mixed with the new. And, yes, the latter includes a whole lot of Zooming still going on among families, colleagues...

Apparently, despite the denials from the Biden Administration, someone at Bureau of Labor Statistics or someone in Congress or the Federal Reserve or the Biden Admininstration itself likely tipped the wink on the soft CPI report on Tuesday. Treasuries were well on the front-foot in the lead up to the below-estimate November CPO print, as a surge of buying took place seconds before the official 8:30 am New York release time. Over a 60 second period before the data, 13,518 March 10-year futures traded as the contract moved from 114-04+ up to 114-22. Gains were then extended up to 115-11...

This week, the Supreme Court will hear a case that will reignite a continuing conversation about what to do when long-established religious convictions clash with gay people’s civil rights. In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, a Colorado web designer, Lorie Smith, wants to create websites for clients’ weddings. She is a Christian, and because of her religious beliefs, she does not want to offer these services for same-sex weddings. However, she serves L.G.B.T.Q. customers for other design projects. This week’s legal arguments will most likely focus primarily on questions around free speech: Can the government compel artists or designers to...

The Department of Energy finally fired Sam Brinton after he was accused of stealing luggage in Las Vegas and Minneapolis. He was arrested for the Minneapolis crime and has a felony arrest warrant out for the Vegas crime. “Sam Brinton is no longer a DOE employee,” a Department of Energy said in a statement. “By law, the Department of Energy cannot comment further on personnel matters.” .....

There's a new chatbot in town, OpenAI's ChatGPT. It is a robot researcher with good communication skills; you can ask it to answer questions about various areas of knowledge and it will write short documents in various formats and in excellent English. Or write bad poetry, incomprehensible jokes, and obey a command like "Write Tetris in C." What comes out looks like it could be, too. ... Ask it how Gödel's incompleteness theorem is linked to Turing Machines – it being software, it really should know this one – and you get back: "Gödel's incompleteness theorem is a fundamental result...

… Pot farms across the state are shutting down as wholesale cannabis prices have crashed by as much as 95% since California voters legalized weed in 2016, according to SFGATE interviews with over a dozen California cannabis farmers, who could get as much as $2,000 for a pound of pot in 2016. Today, they’re lucky to get $400 — and some pot is selling for as little as $100 a pound. Economists have been predicting that legalization would cause a drop in wholesale pot prices since states first began discussing the pot reform. But cannabis farmers say that California’s government...

A two-year-old boy in the western Kasese District of Uganda survived an attack from a wild hippopotamus after it swallowed him and then threw him back up. The boy was playing at home in Katwe Kabatoro Town Council on Sunday when the hippo attacked him, swallowing him head first, according to local police reports cited by Newsweek. Locals saw the attack and threw stones at the hippo, causing the semiaquatic mammal to regurgitate the young boy and dash back to Lake Edward, which was half a mile away from the boy’s home. The boy, reportedly identified as Paul Yiga by...

Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration has funneled millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to a Chinese Communist Party-linked green energy company, according to reports. Biden’s Department of Energy (DOE) gave millions in taxpayer-funded grants to the Beijing-backed carbon capture company LanzaTech. The tax dollars were pumped into LanzaTech in the months after the company partnered with a Chinese state-owned entity. The move comes despite the DOE acknowledging that the company could face business-crippling sanctions. Since April 2021, LanzaTech has received more than $10 million in grant payments from the Biden admin, federal spending disclosures show. Sinopec is a Chinese state-owned...

Over the last few days, Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Bari have all reported out pieces of Donald Trump’s deplatforming, which is easily the most famous digital unpersoning in history. It is also the least compelling story in the series. While it’s good to finally know exactly what happened, it really just was what everyone assumed: Trump was not banned for violating policy. Trump was banned because Twitter employees, who donated literally 99% of their political contributions to the Democratic Party, demanded it be done regardless of their own rules. Altogether, the Twitter Files — an ongoing story — paint a...