Free Republic

Former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley officially kicked off her GOP bid for the White House on Wednesday, telling a packed South Carolina rally that it’s time to move past the “faded names of the past” — a clear reference to Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Haley, a former South Carolina governor, addressed supporters in Charleston just one days after revealing she was throwing her hat in the ring to challenge 76-year-old former President Trump in the 2024 Republican primary in a bid to take on President Biden, 80, who has yet to formally announce a reelection...

HONOLULU (KHON2) — Hawaii is mourning the loss of an iconic local surf photographer. Just weeks after filming water shots at the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational Larry Haynes unexpectedly passed away after a surfing session on Thursday, Feb. 9. On Sunday, Feb. 12, his friends and family found the last moments of his life, which Haynes himself caught on video. It was pure joy as he did what he loved. Get Hawaii’s latest morning news delivered to your inbox, sign up for News 2 You “Here it is. He had this incredible life right up till the end. He...

An anecdote about Super Bowl Sunday Best for MassHere is an interesting anecdote from a friend in Kansas City, MO.At the Oratory yesterday [TLM], there were tons of red ties and dresses but no jerseys or sweatshirts. At the Novus Ordo parishes though (at least the two I asked about) they were filled with stadium wear.And it’s not like those people were on the way to a game or Super Bowl party in the morning.But the people who go to the TLM are the problem and they must be suppressed.

Decades-long mantras about “vanishing habitat” and ever-growing threats to wildlife have long been used to justify locking up more land through federal ownership or other restrictive measures. The perfect example is the Biden administration’s proposal to conserve 30% of the nation by 2030—aka “30 by 30.” Exactly what the administration envisions is ambiguous, as it hasn’t defined words like “conserve” and “protect,” although insiders at the Department of the Interior say the 30% language is being incorporated into many Interior Department documents.

In a bid to bolster a couple of weak spots in his plans for reelection in 2024, President Biden took up the "pen" he so boldly boasts he has as a key weapon for saving democracy, to issue a pair of new executive orders. In one of the EOs he ordered Americans "to ignore the House Republican investigation of my son Hunter and my brothers. They are just businessmen trading on my name and fame. Their deals with foreign governments have brought a lot of cash back into our country and helped us recover from the Trump recession I inherited...

Three Years In, How Did the Lockdowns Go?Three years ago this month, a very small group of highly guarded ruling-class people from the UK, US, and Europe, were gathering to figure out how to lock down the country and the world. They held Zoom meetings and went to burner phones and plotted how to convince Trump to betray his own instincts. And this week three years ago, the World Health Organization sponsored a trip to Wuhan, China, and other cities to discover how they did it: how they utterly crushed a pathogen by smashing the liberties of the people. The...

WASHINGTON (NEXSTAR) – Lawmakers are pushing for higher pay for federal and dc government employees. “The government workers must have 8.7%,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said. Tuesday, Booker joined other lawmakers and activists to demand better pay for federal employees across the country. “When we are united we are strong,” Booker said. Together they are backing the Fair Act, to give federal employees an 8.7% pay increase. “We’ve got to stop calling, by the way what I just did, which is a pay increase, which it is not. It’s fair pay,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Penn.) said. Fitzpatrick is one of...

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) emphasized on Wednesday that the state’s bottled water recommendation for people living near this month’s train derailment that allowed chemicals to escape into the air is out of an “abundance of caution.” DeWine said in an interview on “CNN This Morning” that the air around the town of East Palestine, where a train that was carrying 20 cars of hazardous chemicals derailed on Feb. 3, has continued to remain safe as officials have conducted tests. He said officials have conducted one test of water from a well in the village that showed it was safe...

Vice President Kamala Harris told Politico during an interview Tuesday the U.S. military downing a suspected Chinese spy balloon should not impact diplomatic relations with communist China. “I don’t think so, no,” she told the outlet while arguing the Biden administration seeks “competition” with Beijing and “not conflict or confrontation.” The vice president also noted she made similar comments to the Chinese communist dictator Xi Jinping in November when they met at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Bangkok. “Everything that has happened in the last week and a half is, we believe, very consistent with our stated approach,”...

Lily Mestemacher, who appears in a mugshot to be a biological man with a beard and is described by local news reports with female pronouns, was arrested and charged with False Reporting of Placing Explosives.

Ford Motor Company has announced an unspecified potential battery issue has led the company to stop producing and shipping its electric F-150 truck model, according to reports. Motor Authority reported Thursday that the company had placed a “stop-build and an in-transit stop-ship order” on the truck. The automaker discovered the issue during its “pre-delivery quality inspections,” the outlet’s Joel Feder noted, citing Ford representative Emma Bergg. “The team is diligently working on the root cause analysis,” CNBC quoted Bergg as saying. It is not clear when Ford will begin producing and shipping the model again. “It depends on how long...

EAST PALESTINE, Ohio Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced that the criminal charges against a reporter who was arrested during an East Palestine train derailment newscast have been dismissed.

Extremist group Family Heritage Alliance said this morning that the safest place for kids are in families that have a married mom and dad. What a dangerous and un-American belief.

The captain of the boys’ soccer team that was dramatically rescued after being trapped in a flooded Thai cave for two weeks in 2018 has died. He was 18. Duangpetch Promthep was found unconscious in his dorm in Leicestershire, UK, on Sunday, and died at the hospital on Tuesday, the BBC reported. The cause of death has not been confirmed but it is not being treated as suspicious. The talented player’s passing comes just months after he arrived at Brooke House College Football Academy, where he received a scholarship last summer. “Today my dream has come true,” he wrote on...

An Axios article titled ‘Electric car road trips are perfectly doable — if you plan ahead’ is a prime example of leftists celebrating their own ignorance.Deep within a southeastern cove of Brooklyn lies Dead Horse Bay. Vintage debris washes up on its shores thanks to a decomposing underwater landfill. Old Clorox bottles, tires, men’s work boots, and shards of broken glass toss back and forth on the tide, continually churned together with old horse bones. The bones come from an 1850s-era factory that used the carcasses of dead horses to make glue, fertilizer, and other materials near the bay. That...

It’s Valentine’s Day morning, and the height of the breakfast rush at the Pismo Beach Coco’s is overwhelming the small but nimble staff. At the center of the flurry is the ringmaster, the restaurant’s longtime owner and general manager, Larry Puder. Puder, 66, is simultaneously ringing up tabs, handing menus to a large party walking in, gesturing for a server to put a new pot of decaf on and attempting to explain to an anxious customer why there are no more banana cream pies. “Jesus Christ, I’m so glad I’m getting out of this business,” Puder says under his breath...

It's been days since President Joe Biden directed the Pentagon to shootdown a number of "objects" he claims were a threat to U.S. airspace and commercial aircraft. There are no photos of the "objects," which White House officials say cannot be classified as balloons, and still no recovered debris after they were reportedly taken out by F-16 pilots using $400,000 missiles. As officials drag their feet on providing details about what exactly the objects were, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre won't say whether Biden scrambled fighter jets to shoot down benign and routine weather balloons. REPORTER: "If it turns...

If you are still wondering why the United States failed to prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially Afghanistan, all you need to do is watch today’s press conference of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Belgium. What a veritable clown show! The remarks by Lloyd Austin and General Mark Milley revealed two guys with an iron grip on delusion and a total lack of self-awareness.The audacity of these two failed military leaders to pretend they are qualified to offer advice to Ukraine on how to fight a first world military when their own dismal military records show they failed...

is well known that Charles Spurgeon came to Christ when he ducked into a small church to escape a snowstorm and heard the gospel proclaimed. Some wrongly think Spurgeon was thus suddenly converted to Christ out of a life of sheer paganism. Spurgeon himself used to talk about how he had suffered for a long time under the weight of sin before he finally found Christ. Because of the way he described himself as a great sinner utterly in debt to divine grace, many who heard him preach came away with the impression that he was a man who had...

China's decision to send surveillance craft into U.S. airspace should not impact America's relations with the country, Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday. Harris made the comments in a Tuesday interview with Politico, arguing the U.S. seeks "competition" with China, not "conflict or confrontation." "I don’t think so, no," she said regarding whether relations might be affected.