Free Republic

Back in 2010, RNC Chair Michael Steele was heavily criticized and eventually lost his position because donors were angry about what they believed was luxurious spending on private jets, floral arrangements, chauffeur services, and member meetings in expensive tropical locales. Donors were used to frugality from the RNC under the George W. Bush administration, when “Karl Rove would bitch if there were flowers on the tables” and staff holiday parties were catered by Chick-fil-A. Despite Joe Biden’s economy and three straight cycles of election losses, the RNC’s big-spending days are back with a vengeance. Perhaps because of these losses both...

Early Benchmark Revisions of State Payroll Employment Please consider Early Benchmarks for All 50 States and the District of Columbia for the second quarter of 2022. Estimates by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia indicate that the employment changes from March through June 2022 were significantly different in 33 states and the District of Columbia compared with current state estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Current Employment Statistics (CES). Early benchmark estimates indicated higher changes in four states, lower changes in 29 states and the District of Columbia, and lesser changes in the remaining 17 states. In the...

A federal grand jury indicted seven Twitter users and a podcaster Wednesday on behalf of the Securities and Exchange Commission, charging the eight men with conspiracy to commit securities fraud. The eight influencers are alleged to have used their presence on social media platforms Discord and Twitter to run a “pump and dump” scheme from at least January 2020 to April 2022. So-called meme stocks mentioned by their accounts included GameStop and AMC...

A Kentucky Supreme Court judge struck down the state’s so-called school choice program Thursday. The state’s highest court unanimously ruled House Bill 563, officially called the Education Opportunity Account Act, as unconstitutional. The legislation creates an almost dollar-for-dollar tax credit for Kentuckians who donate to scholarship-granting educational nonprofit organizations. ... ...“It’s always been clear to the plaintiffs and their supporters that the Kentucky Constitution prohibits any attempt to divert tax dollars from our public schools and students without putting the question to voters,” Campbell said in a statement. ...“We simply can’t afford to support two different education systems — one...

ARIZONA Published December 14, 2022 10:28am EST Arizona police have arrested a longtime suspect in the case of missing boy, 10-year-old Jesse Wilson, who was later found dead just a few miles from his home in a Phoenix suburb. The boy's adoptive mother, Crystal Wilson, 54, of Gainesville, Georgia, was arrested Monday and charged in connection with the boy's death, the Buckeye Police Department said. Wilson was indicted by a Maricopa County grand jury last week on one count of abandoning or concealing a dead body. She now awaits extradition back to Arizona, Fox 10 Phoenix reported. Buckeye Police Chief...

The FBI has identified the deceased woman who was found wrapped in a trash bag off Florida's Gulf Coast last weekend and are now calling her death "suspicious." Heather Rose Strickland, 34, was the woman who was found floating Saturday off Egmont Key at the mouth of Tampa Bay, the FBI’s Tampa Field Office said. "Heather Rose Strickland was last seen on December 5, 2022, leaving HCA Florida Largo Hospital at 201 14th Street Southwest in Largo, Florida," the bureau said. "Originally from the North Florida region, Strickland spent the last five years in the Clearwater-St. Petersburg area." "The FBI...

NEW ORLEANS — The man who killed two bicyclists after the Endymion parade in 2019 while driving drunk has had his prison sentence reduced. Tashonty Toney was serving 90 years in jail, the maximum allowed under law. However, court records show that Judge Laurie White has lowered his sentence to 65 years. Toney was caught in a video striking a group of bikers on Esplanade Avenue in Mid-City. In the video, you see the victims innocently pedaling their bikes on Esplanade Avenue after Endymion last March. Video of deadly Endymion Night bike crash shows Tashonty Toney flee scene Less than...

“Wisdom is before him that hath understanding; but the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth. A foolish son is a grief to his father, and bitterness to her that bare him” (Proverbs 17:24-25).

Al Arabiya English Benjamin Netanyahu is preparing to become the Prime Minister of Israel for the third time. He has until December 21 to form a government before taking office. In a wide-ranging interview with a group of print and television journalists at Al Arabiya, Mr. Netanyahu discussed Israel’s relations with Arab states, the US alliance structure in the Middle East, unrest in Iran, Israel’s new hard-right government, the future of the US-brokered maritime border agreement with Lebanon, and the Russia-Ukraine war. Mr. Netanyahu reiterated the paramount importance of normalization with Saudi Arabia, which would be a “quantum leap” toward...

4 teens shot, 2 killed after classes let out at Benito Juarez High School in Pilsen Four teenagers have been shot, one of whom has been killed, after classes let out of Benito Juarez High School in the Pilsen neighborhood on Friday afternoon, according to emergency officials. DEC 16 2022 Benito Juarez High School in the Pilsen neighborhood on the city's Lower West Side. Update 2: According to police, the two deceased teens are 14 and 15, both shot in the head. The other teo victims are both 15. Update: According to Supt. David Brown, a second teen has died....

Afraid that the Republican House majority in the next session of Congress might do serious damage to the President, Democrats are weighing strategies to deter any investigation into the Bidens' alleged multi-million-dollar influence-peddling schemes. In hopes of negating prosecution of Hunter, his friend, agent and lawyer Kevin Morris, paid off $2.8 million of the back taxes he owed. Morris also called for a "more aggressive" response including hitting critics, such as Fox News, with possible defamation lawsuits and figuring out a way to destroy the credibility of potential witnesses--Hunter's former business partner Tony Bobulinski and John Paul Mac Isaac, the...

Democrats are racing to release information about former President Donald Trump's taxes before Republicans take control of Congress early next year. Politico reported Friday that the House Ways and Means Committee will meet privately Tuesday at 3 p.m. to review the tax documents and vote on whether all or a portion of Trump's tax returns will be publicly released. After a lengthy legal battle, House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard Neal got his hands on Trump's tax returns in November.... ...They consist of Trump's personal returns and returns from eight business entities, Politico said. Democrats believe they're on solid...

Striations and residue found on stone tools in China reflect harvesting methods.Anew Dartmouth-led study analyzing stone tools from southern China provides the earliest evidence of rice harvesting, dating to as early as 10,000 years ago. The researchers identified two methods of harvesting rice, which helped initiate rice domestication...Wild rice is different from domesticated rice in that wild rice naturally sheds ripe seeds, shattering them to the ground when they mature, while cultivated rice seeds stay on the plants when they mature.To harvest rice, some sort of tools would have been needed. In harvesting rice with tools, early rice cultivators were...

Man on parole charged in triple slaying outside Portage Park bar According to records, Parsons-Salas was charged with first-degree murder in a 2009 Albany Park home invasion but the case against him was separated and a lesser sentence received after his codefendant confessed. He was paroled in October 2022. Chicago Journal Chicago Journal DEC 13 2022 | 4 MIN READ Paroled in the fall of 2022, Samuel Parsons-Salas, 32, was charged with three counts of first-degree murder Tuesday in relation to the slayings outside Vera Lounge in Portage Park. | Photo: Chicago Police Update: We've updated this post to include...

Twitter owner Elon Musk released another batch of Twitter files exposing the leftist Big Tech platform’s extensive collaboration with Big Government on its bloated censorship operations. Independent journalist Matt Taibbi summarized the new files on Twitter: “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.” Specifically, Taibbi reported the existence of “over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth” between January 2020 and November 2022. Then came the damning part: “[A] surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation,...

A federal judge granted government investigators access to email messages involving Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Scott Perry – the official whose cell phone was seized by the FBI in August, it was revealed Friday. U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell ruled that emails between Perry and other figures in former President Donald Trump's election overturn effort were not protected by privilege. This included 37 emails among Perry, former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, lawyer John Eastman, and Clark's aide Ken Klokowski, a former senior counsel in DOJ's Civil Division. That made them fair game for investigators .... ...The judge also ruled a...

It’s that time of year for hunkering down to watch a Christmas film with the family – and to hold the annual debate over whether or not Die Hard actually counts as one. This debate has now become, in some film history circles, as big a question as to the meaning of “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane or whether Han Solo or Greedo shot first in Star Wars. It’s even important enough to warrant a poll from YouGov, which concluded that Die Hard is not a Christmas film. The arguments around the “Christmassiness” of the 1988 movie revolve around three themes:...

When modern humans first migrated from Africa to the tropical islands of the southwest Pacific, they encountered unfamiliar people and new pathogens. But their immune systems may have picked up some survival tricks when they mated with the locals—the mysterious Denisovans who gave them immune gene variants that might have protected the newcomers’ offspring from local diseases. Some of these variants still persist in the genomes of people living in Papua New Guinea today, according to a new study.Researchers have known for a decade that living people in Papua New Guinea and other parts of Melanesia, a subregion of the...

The head of a historically black college has defended police being called to arrest a student who was arguing with her professor. Addressing the viral video of Leilla Hamoud, 20, being detained at Winston-Salem State University following a fallout with lecturer Cynthia Villagome over her essay, Chancellor Elwood Robinson said the school was in the right. 'We understand that the weaponization of police is a prevalent problem in our community, however, that is not what happened in this incident,' Robinson wrote in a letter to students and staff, adding that initial 'de-escalation efforts' had failed. 'We strive for a safe,...

Further excavations may reveal if the stones of the previously unrecorded cairn were raised to honour the dead or to display dominance over the area.An archaeological survey has identified a previously unrecorded Bronze Age monument in the Haaga district of the city of Turku on Finland's southwest coast. The site could possibly date back as much as 3,500 years.The cairn -- a pile of granite stones typical of Bronze Age burials -- is located at the highest point of a rocky hill area overlooking the Aura river.Stone burial cairns were typical for western Bronze Age culture which in Finland is...