Free Republic

Has any president ever assembled a more incompetent and less impressive Cabinet and group of senior advisors than President Joe Biden? This past week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen endorsed the idea of taxing “unrealized capital gains” – a terrible idea that is unworkable, economically destructive, and immoral. A capital gain is an increase in the price of an asset, whether it be a home, farm, business, corporate stock, art object, etc. The IRS taxes these price increases as income (even when the price increase is solely due to inflation) when the asset is sold, and the alleged gain realized. It...

The Washington Post and Rolling Stone issued corrections on stories about the House Republican-led Weaponization of Government Subcommittee after making claims about FBI whistleblower and former agent Stephen Friend. The Washington Post's correction, which was added to the top of an article published Friday titled "Democrats challenge credibility of GOP witnesses who embrace false Jan. 6 claims," stated: "An earlier version of this article erroneously said former FBI official Stephen Friend had not reported to a supervisor one of his concerns related to the use of a SWAT team in arrests related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riots. He said...

Two years ago, a slate of radical democratic socialists shocked the state of Nevada by winning all but one of the party leadership positions. In response, every paid staffer who worked for the Democratic Party resigned. Judith Whitmer became chairman of the party, and the civil war was on.The embittered establishment Democrats led by the remnants of the Harry Reid coalition formed an opposition party to the regular Democrats. Reid, the former Senate Majority Leader, almost singlehandedly turned Nevada from a reliable red state during the 1970s and ’80s to a swing state.The socialists won thanks to some radical union...

A certain political intelligence (take a wild guess what kind) leads to brilliant hashtags and hilarious entrepreneurship. Last Wednesday marked day one of Women’s History Month, an annual occasion described by the official website as a “national celebration” to commend the value and contributions of the female sex upon society. In the movement’s own words: Since 1995, presidents have issued a series of annual proclamations designating the month of March as ‘Women’s History Month.’ These proclamations celebrate the contributions women have made to the United States and recognize the specific achievements women have made over the course of American history...

For centuries, leaders often depended on bands of mercenary warriors to make up their military strength in times of war, but as national militaries evolved, these formations shank from prominence, with modern PMCs generally being focused on support roles like base or VIP security or logistics (even if their contracts grew massively post 2001). Wagner doesn't follow that example. A force tens of thousands strong, Wagner has helped spearhead the Russian offensives around Bakhmut, and taken on international prominence. In this episode, I look at the evolution of PMCs, Russia's modern employment of them, and the implications of Wagner's role...

More than 35 years after the world’s worst nuclear accident, the dogs of Chernobyl roam among decaying, abandoned buildings in and around the closed plant – somehow still able to find food, breed and survive. Scientists hope that studying these dogs can teach humans new tricks about how to live in the harshest, most degraded environments, too. They published the first of what they hope will be many genetics studies on Friday in the journal Science Advances, focusing on 302 free-roaming dogs living in an officially designated “exclusion zone” around the disaster site. They identified populations whose differing levels of...

The people in eastern Oregon are generally patriotic and sane, and they’re tired of being subjected to the misrule of the far-Left kleptocrats in Salem, who care about them only as a cash cow to fund their socialist pipe dreams. Accordingly, some have formed the Greater Idaho movement, which actually hopes to detach Oregon’s rural eastern counties from the state and attach them to Idaho. This movement, as fanciful as it seems, is gathering steam, and that has Democrats enraged. Whatever else it may be, their rage is revealing. Idaho Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow, a Democrat, said: “I’m very...

Director Steven Spielberg warned that "overt" anti-Semitism in the United States mirrors that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, leading up to the systematic extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust. "I find it very, very surprising," Spielberg told late-night host Stephen Colbert in an interview aired Friday. "Anti-Semitism has always been there," he said. "It's either been just around the corner and slightly out of sight but always lurking, or it has been much more overt like in Germany in the '30s." Spielberg lost relatives in the Holocaust and used his profits from the film "Schindler's List" to...

Portland Audubon Society Staff Audubon the man was hailed in his time as a pioneer, a visionary and a gifted artist as he set out to paint every bird in North America. But that’s only half the story, according to Stuart Wells, executive director of the Portland Audubon chapter. “What's not as commonly known is that he was also a slave trader and was staunchly against any abolitionist movements,” Wells said. “He dug up Native American graves and sold their skulls to folks that were trying to show that there was a difference in the skull structure of Indigenous people...

Not only did @UofDenver offer students to use ze/hir/faer pronouns- they actually sent out an official email to all students announcing the new pronoun choices. 15 options! This is what they’re focusing on. Imagine going into debt for this. And here is the "Vice Chancellor of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity, Christopher Whitt", from where such ideas emerge:

This is a compendium of some worst ideas coming from the California, Oregon, and Washington state legislatures this silly season. Indeed, it is the best argument for part-time legislatures if ever there was one. Bored with their constitutionally-tethered jobs: public safety, natural resources, water, lights, prisons, highways, law and order, and higher education, etc.; the state legislators on the West Coast, Messed Coast™ are working days and nights (unlike the DOJ), finding new ways to burrow into areas of your life where they are not wanted. California currently is the only one of the three West Coast, Messed Coast™ states...

A Florida motorcyclist is facing multiple charges after he blew through a red light while fleeing from local police and flipping them off seconds before getting T-boned by an oncoming truck. “Here’s a good way to get yourself killed,” the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office wrote in a Facebook post. The three-minute video shared by police shows Deputy Bissonnete attempt to pull over a group of motorcyclists who were “popping wheelies” late on Friday, March 3. The group ignored authorities requests to pull over and decided to speed off, leading police on a high-speed chase. Dashcam footage shows the group of...

In New Orleans, a former Innocence Project lawyer named Emily Maw is currently serving as an assistant district attorney. And it is going about as well as you would expect. Maw is now the focus of controversy for declining to press charges in at least 15 gun crimes that occurred over the Mardi Gras season. These crimes included at least one egregious case in which the defendant was carrying around a machine gun — a federal crime that carries a lengthy prison sentence. That particular defendant also had prior convictions, according to local news reports. Yet instead of prosecuting these...

5 March 20232nd Sunday of Lent St Piran's Chapel, Trethevy, Cornwall Readings at MassLiturgical Colour: Violet. Year: A(I).First readingGenesis 12:1-4 ©All the tribes of the earth shall bless themselves by youThe Lord said to Abram, ‘Leave your country, your family and your father’s house, for the land I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name so famous that it will be used as a blessing.‘I will bless those who bless you:I will curse those who slight you.All the tribes of the earthshall bless themselves by you.’So Abram went as...

New evidence suggests Dr. Fauci prompted the drafting of “Proximal Origins” to disprove the lab leak theory, the authors of this paper skewed available evidence to achieve that goal, and Dr. Jeremy Farrar went uncredited despite significant involvement.

A Norfolk Southern cargo train derailed near Springfield on Saturday night, the second loss of the company’s trains in Ohio in a month. Unlike February’s devastating derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, a company spokesperson assured the Columbus Dispatch no potentially harmful chemicals were involved. The train, which did not have passengers, derailed at around 5pm near the Clark County Fairgrounds, the Dispatch report detailed.

"He really left us with a very deep impression about the principles that, without ceasing to be an earthly man, he promoted in the international arena," the Russian diplomat said. On Friday, Russian Federation's Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov evoked the historical figure of Commander Hugo Chavez, the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution whose death anniversary Venezuelans will remember next Sunday. "We pay tribute to Hugo Chavez, who passed away 10 years ago, leaving a deep mark not only in the history of his country and Latin American, but also in the history of the world community," Lavrov said, pointing...

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Larry Hogan, the former Republican governor of Maryland who positioned himself as one of his party’s fiercest critics of Donald Trump, said Sunday he will not challenge the ex-president for the GOP’s White House nomination in 2024. “I would never run for president to sell books or position myself for a Cabinet role,” the 66-year-old Hogan wrote in The New York Times. “I have long said that I care more about ensuring a future for the Republican Party than securing my own future in the Republican Party. And that is why I will not be seeking...

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s decision Thursday on a local crime law sends a national message to fellow Democrats about how he believes they should address Republican criticism of the nation's rising crime rates. Democrats have focused predominantly on police reform since the George Floyd protests reignited a national debate over race and law enforcement three years ago. But rising violent crime rates and growing perceptions of unease in major cities have prompted a chorus of party strategists and officials to call for a tougher approach to counter Republican attacks.

Just The News reported Saturday that the feds have “politicized cases regarding Jan. 6 defendants and pro-lifers while retaliating against internal whistleblowers” as some of those same whistleblowers testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. And Fox News reported Thursday that according to another whistleblower, “the FBI created a threat tag following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year, but it later ‘shifted’ to focus on pro-life individuals,” as if they were the real threat. George Hill, a retired supervisory intelligence analyst in the FBI’s Boston field office, testified that...