Free Republic

𝐃𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐫 𝐇𝐚𝐦𝐥𝐢𝐧 @HamlinIsland Putting love into the world comes back 3xs as much… thankful for everyone who has reached out and prayed. This will make me stronger on the road to recovery, keep praying for me! 🫶🏾3️⃣ 2:14 PM · Jan 7, 2023

J.S. Bach, “The Musical Offering,” BWV 1079, orchestral arrangement, conducted by Igor Markevitch

“FWIW, @ByronDonalds is not a historic candidate for Speaker. He is a prop. Despite being Black, he supports a policy agenda intent on upholding and perpetuating white supremacy. His name being in the mix is not progress — it’s pathetic,” Bush tweeted Wednesday. If progressives like Bush actually cared about black people being used as props or tokens, she would have had a problem with Joe Biden wanting specifically a black woman to be his vice president before selecting Kamala Harris. She would have wagged her finger at Democratic pundits and strategists advocating a black female to take a Supreme...

A “relentless parade of cyclones” from the Pacific Ocean is expected to bring additional flooding and heavy snow to parts of the West Coast this weekend after the region was pummeled by heavy precipitation and hurricane-force winds amid intense storms over the past week. The National Weather Service (NWS) said the main focus of the storms will be on Northern California, where tens of thousands of people already lost power and at least two people were killed on Thursday as a result of a storm. The NWS said the heavy precipitation hitting Northern California on Saturday morning will strengthen at...

Houston, Texas – An armed robber was shot to death by a patron at a taqueria on S. Gessner just before midnight on Thursday night. Surveillance video shows a male in a black ski mask walking around the taqueria and robbing customers at gunpoint. A bald man seated near the robber jumped into action and shot the suspect dead.

As I post this, it is the evening before the 233rd anniversary of the first ever SOTU, American time. Nobody now knows definitively how to fight terrorism. Being ruled by fear of them can drag us down to where they are. I recall reading a Douglas MacArthur quote somewhere along the lines of "I cannot fight the enemy, if I cannot see him." Understanding the enemy is a part of this process. In approaching such problems, which modern leader comes closest to emulating George Washington?

Victoria Lee, a mixed martial arts prodigy and younger sister of current ONE Championship champions Angela and Christian Lee, has died at the age of 18. Lee’s death, which occurred on Dec. 26, 2022, was announced on Angela Lee’s personal Instagram account on Saturday morning. The cause of death was not disclosed at the time of the announcement. All the latest sports news from Hawaii’s sports station As a wrestler at Mililani High School, Lee won an HHSAA championship in the 117-pound weight class in 2020. She signed her first professional mixed martial arts contract later that year at the...

'In the morning it was morning, and I was still alive,' wrote novelist Charles Bukowski, presumably after something of a late and drunken evening. One imagines that newly elected Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy must have woken up Saturday with just such a feeling. 'That was easy, huh?' McCarthy quipped in his late-night acceptance speech, just a short time after Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers had to be physically restrained as he appeared to lunge at top GOP rebel, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who had just derailed McCarthy's speakership – again – on the 14th vote. Thankfully members of Congress...

A son of left-wing billionaire and philanthropist George Soros has made repeated visits to President Joe Biden's White House as he boosts Democrats with campaign donations and has promoted his frequent meetings with Democratic politicians, records show. George Soros, founder of the major liberal grant-making Open Society Foundations network, has often kept a low profile while influencing Democratic politics through the bankrolling of myriad causes. Alexander Soros, his 37-year-old son who has been more public on social media about his cozy relationships with lawmakers, has made six separate trips to the White House since Biden assumed office and gained influence...

The Fourteenth Amendment protects the rights of “any person” to due process when a state deprives him or her of life, liberty, or property, and to the “equal protection of the laws.” By overruling Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court eliminated Roe’s deeply flawed holding that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.” Since a sound case can be made that interpreting “person” to include all human beings is consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment’s original public meaning, Congress should do so for purposes of its power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. KEY TAKEAWAYS...

Prince Harry could be barred from the US and has put visa 'at risk' after admitting about his illicit drug usage, immigration experts have warned. The Duke of Sussex, 38, confessed to doing cocaine, smoking cannabis and taking hallucinogenic mushrooms in his upcoming memoir. Typical applicants would be denied a visa over their history with illegal substances, but US authorities note entry into the country is granted on a 'case-by-case' basis. It is unclear if Harry, who moved to California with his wife Meghan Markle in 2020, detailed his drug use on his visa application. Immigration experts warn that if...

The operator is going off the hook for millions of customers. Starting in January, AT&T customers with digital landlines won’t be able to dial 411 or 0 to reach an operator or get directory assistance. AT&T in 2021 ended operator services for wireless callers, although customers with home phone landlines can still access operators and directory help. Verizon, T-Mobile and other major carriers still offer these services for a fee While operator services may be nearly obsolete, it’s important to consider emergency circumstances where a caller may need to reach an operator and the customers who still rely on these...

The new slim Republican majority in the House of Representatives lacks something besides its slim majority and the battle over leadership positions. It lacks intellectual depth. The Reagan administration may have been the last one to challenge Americans to think for themselves, and for that matter, just to think. Perhaps this lack of thinking and intellectual depth in our politics is caused by instruments and websites that do the thinking for us. We now tune in to whatever newspaper, cable network or website reinforces our beliefs and care little about how ideas were developed, whether they work and who benefits...

s right-wing protestors descend upon Drag Story Hour events across New York, they have frequently been met by a loosely connected movement of counter protestors that includes many progressive Jewish groups. Since September, right-wing activists have routinely protested Drag Story Hour events, where a person dressed in drag reads to children. The aim of these story times, according to the founder of the Drag Story Hour New York chapter, is to promote literacy while giving children positive queer role models. At the Queens Public Library in Jackson Heights on Dec. 29, at least five members of the Proud Boys, a...

The facts about the Second Amendment in a short video.

DETROIT (AP) — The Michigan attorney general said Friday there’s “clear evidence” to pursue charges against pro-Donald Trump Republicans who claimed they were the state’s presidential electors in 2020, despite Democrat Joe Biden’s 154,000-vote victory. Dana Nessel referred the matter to federal prosecutors last year, but no public action has been taken. A year later, she said it’s time for state authorities to step in. “Let’s be fair about what this was: It was an effort to overturn a lawful election,” Nessel, a Democrat, said. “That type of activity can’t go without any consequences. ... There are laws that specifically...

If Ronald Pestritto is right, then Barack Obama was wrong. Recall candidate Obama’s now famous (or should that be infamous?) pronouncement on the eve of his 2008 electoral triumph: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” More than that, if the Pestritto argument prevails, the Barack Obamas of our day may yet turn out to be the end of something rather than the beginning of something. According to Pestritto, the real transformers of America were the original progressives of better than a century ago and not their twenty-first century ideological descendants. The transformation that...

Video at https://twitter.com/Joshuajered/status/1611864541436203013Houston, Texas – An armed robber was shot to death by a patron at a taqueria on S. Gessner just before midnight on Thursday night. Surveillance video shows a male in a black ski mask walking around the taqueria and robbing customers at gunpoint. A bald man seated near the robber jumped into action and shot the suspect dead. According to Houston Police, the Good Samaritan then collected the money from the suspect and gave it back to the robbery victims. Houston Police want to speak to the man who shot the suspect, but he has not been...

On Wednesday, Salt Lake City public lands officials hiked for hours up a snowy trail to remove a mysterious device – one that’s popping up all over the foothills. It consists of a locked battery box, a solar panel, and an antenna, according to Tyler Fonarow, the city’s recreational trails manager. “These towers have been bolted into different peaks and summits and ridges around the foothills,” Fonarow explained, “and it started with one or two, and now it might be as much as a dozen.” The first ones appeared about a year ago, but Fonarow said many more were found...

Iszac Henig, a transgender male, joined Yale’s men’s swimming team after finishing last year as an All-American female swimmer. Henig has taken hormones for eight months amid his transition, but the senior’s times are “about the same as they were at the end of last season,” he wrote in an op-ed piece for the New York Times on Thursday. Henig wrote that during a meet in November among 83 swimmers, he finished in 79th place. “I wasn’t the slowest guy in any of my events, but I’m not as successful in the sport as I was on the women’s team,”...