Free Republic

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced legislation on Thursday that would make the minimum pay for public school teachers in the U.S. $60,000 a year, following calls from President Biden to give teachers a raise last month. The Pay Teachers Act of 2023, co-sponsored by a number of lawmakers including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), would provide states with federal funds to establish minimum teacher salaries of at least $60,000 a year. It would also triple the funding of the Title I-A program, which provides funding to schools with a high percentage of students that come from low...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell suffered a concussion after a fall at a local hotel and remains hospitalized “for a few days of observation and treatment,” a spokesman said Thursday. The Kentucky senator, 81, was at a Wednesday evening dinner for the Senate Leadership Fund, a campaign committee aligned with him, when he tripped and was admitted to the hospital, his office said. The dinner was at the Waldorf Astoria Washington DC, formerly the Trump International Hotel, Washington D.C. Spokesman David Popp said McConnell is being treated for a concussion and “is grateful to the medical professionals...

Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) pressed Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw Thursday on the railroad’s history of lobbying against stricter safety regulations at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on the derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio. Whitehouse specifically cited a 2015 Obama-era regulation that required more modern electronic brakes for trains carrying hazardous materials, which Norfolk Southern called “not in the public interest” and lobbied to weaken before the Trump administration scrapped it outright in 2018.

...SNIP At the 37:30 mark, Judge Nap was asked about the files the CIA won’t produce related to the JFK assassination. His response was alarming: I’ll tell you a story about JFK. So Trump, as you know, I was privledged to be consulted by him many, many times during his Presidency on the phone. He twice considered me for the Supreme Court, another story for another time. But in one of our interviews, he said to me, don’t forget, I’m going to release the JFK files. I said, “I’m not going to forget it Mr. President, on the contrary, I’m...

Remind me again who the serial liars and deniers are? Tucker Carlson shows real footage from January 6th, and the media and the other Democrats squeal like pigs, denouncing the expository tapes as “lies” and Carlson a cherry picker. This is rich coming from Democrats and the media, who deliberately chose to show a small portion of the videos. The J6 committee was never seeking the truth. It was seeking to destroy President Trump to preclude a run for 2024. If they sought the truth, they wouldn’t have lied about the number of people who died that day, and they...

Officials in California are imploring residents to prepare for a powerful storm set to lash the region with torrential rain later this week as the state continues to recover from colossal amounts of snow that trapped mountain communities. Previous severe weather was responsible for the death of one person in the San Bernardino Mountains area. The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Office said the person died in a traffic accident. Other deaths since February 25 don't appear to be weather-related but investigations are ongoing, spokesperson Mara Rodriguez said. About 17.5 million people across central and Northern California -- including the San...

Former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield confirmed during testimony that he was excluded and kept out of the loop by Dr. Tony Fauci in early February 2020 after he suggested the COVID-19 virus was leaked from a laboratory and did not act like a naturally occurring SARS coronavirus. Dr. Redfield believed COVID came from a lab so Fauci excluded him from phone calls early on as he persuaded other doctors to side with him by handing out millions of dollars in research grants. The only thing that changed was the BRIBES and NOT THE SCIENCE! Chairman Jim Jordan was ON...

Horror fiction fans are used to being disgusted, but the hate-filled words of one of the genre’s leading writers have left many feeling truly sickened this week. The Horror Writers Association (HWA) announced it had decided to expel Thomas F. Monteleone, 76, who has written dozens of novels and edited the popular Borderlands horror anthology series since the 1980s. [M]uch of the outrage began when Monteleone posted on Facebook why he believed author Stuart David Schiff deserved his own Lifetime Achievement Award, writing: “Despite the last few LAA years looking very much like a very obvious DEI project, I am...

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned Wednesday the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut might fall to Russia in the coming days following months of intense fighting. His remarks came as Russia's Wagner mercenary group, which has spearheaded the attack on Bakhmut, claimed to have captured the eastern bank of the industrial town, devastated in the longest battle since Moscow invaded Ukraine a year ago. Wagner chief and Kremlin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin said on social media Wednesday that his forces "have taken all of the eastern part of Bakhmut", a salt-mining town with a pre-war population of 80,000.

The Democrat-constructed narrative of the Jan. 6 riot will continue to morph as more security footage from the Capitol emerges and people get to see that hundreds of protesters were let into the Capitol through a door left open and unguarded at times by police, says former Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.). In a wide-ranging interview Wednesday night on the "Just the News, No Noise" television show, Johnson cautioned that the Capitol riot narrative has so far been constructed of fragments from different partisans, starting with the second impeachment of Donald Trump and then the House Democrats'...

People inside Georgia’s DeKalb County Jail broke windows and lit small objects on fire during a Wednesday evening protest decrying domestic terrorism charges levied against more than 20 people after a violent demonstration at a nearby police training center construction site, according to local media. The 23 people charged with domestic terrorism following the destructive Sunday protest at the forest site of the planned training center, unofficially dubbed “Cop City,” were booked in DeKalb County Jail, according to 11Alive, and DeKalb County Magistrate Judge Anna Davis later denied 22 of them bond but granted $5,000 bond to accused Southern Poverty...

Mitch McConnell has fallen at a hotel in Washington and is currently in the hospital. Two questions immediately spring to mind, neither of which have answers at this point: is this the end of the dreary McConnell era of establishment Republican Me-Tooism? And is there some karmic relationship between Mitch’s fall and his throwing Tucker Carlson under the bus and affirming the Left’s bogus Jan. 6 “insurrection” narrative? We know little at this point about what is going on with Mitch. John Bresnahan of Punchbowl News tweeted late Wednesday night: @LeaderMcConnell has been hospitalized following a fall at a DC...

For two months before lockdowns came to the United States, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was broadcasting the lie that its Wuhan lockdowns killed the virus. Control the people, they said, lock them up, prohibit all human movement, and do it brutally for as long as it takes, and the virus called SARS-CoV-2 would be suppressed and eliminated. The CCP began its global campaign with preposterously fake videos of people collapsing in the streets from sickness, as if this common respiratory virus kills quickly like the one in the movie “Contagion.” It was a campaign of terror, or, as Robert...

The Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, told reporters on Wednesday that the embattled frontline town of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, could come under Russian control. He said: 'They have suffered big losses but at the same time we cannot rule out that Bakhmut may eventually fall in the coming days.' However, he played down the significance of the town, which Russia has carried out a months-long offensive to recapture, saying 'this does not necessarily reflect any turning point of the war and it just highlights that we should not underestimate Russia'. Four thousand people remain in Bakhmut, which has largely...

Santa Clara County deployed a variety of surveillance techniques on congregants of a local church that met during COVID-19, including tracking phone location data and parking a car in a nearby lot to observe behavior, court documents reported by independent journalist David Zweig reveal. Inspectors from the county’s COVID-19 Business Compliance Unit spent a total of 51 hours conducting stakeouts near Calvary Chapel San Jose between November 25, 2020 and January 3, 2021, observing everything from Sunday services to baptisms and prayer groups, Zweig reported. Enforcement officers, who were paid $219 an hour, wrote in great detail about church activities,...

The oldest living former U.S. senator turns 100 Thursday. James L. Buckley is among the few in American history who have served in the upper echelons of all three branches of our government. Jim Buckley served as a lieutenant in the Navy during the final years of the Pacific war. After the war, he attended Yale Law School and became an attorney. In 1970 Mr. Buckley won a historic third-party victory as the Conservative Party’s Senate nominee in New York. Serving as a U.S. senator until 1977, Mr. Buckley was an articulate and cordial agent of change and an advocate...

Second Week of Lent Luke 16:19–31Friends, today’s Gospel tells the story of the rich man and the poor man, Lazarus, at his gate.God is not pleased with this kind of economic inequality, and he burns with passion to set things right. Even though it makes us uncomfortable—and God knows it does, especially those of us who live in the most affluent society in the world—we can’t avoid it because it’s everywhere in the Bible.St. Thomas Aquinas says, "We must distinguish between ownership and the use of property." We have a right to ownership, through our hard work or inheritance. Fair...

The reputation of the “Iron chancellor” Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) was established by his remarkable achievement in unifying Germany through three short victorious wars, from 1864-1870, that completely remade the European balance of power, and then orchestrating a generation of peace through a series of complex treaties that placed his country in amicable relations with all the continent’s great powers, except the irreconcilable French who were kept in a permanent state of diplomatic isolation. However, in 1890, Germany’s blundering new sovereign, Kaiser Wilhelm II, dismissed Bismarck from office and subsequently rejected the renewal of the Russo-German Treaty of Accord, which...

The BBC is receiving backlash for airing a Bill Cosby documentary in which a self-proclaimed "fat sex therapist" argued for allowing men to pay to be able to drug and have sex with women. "If we actually grappled with the fact that sex negativity is what causes this type of behavior, then we could create a world where in an idyllically sex-positive world, someone is able to pay conscious women to come and be drugged so that I can get my kink out, my fetish on having sex with unconscious people," Sonalee Rashatwar said in a segment. "There’s a consensual...

Elephant Bird Egg What a whole Aepyornis egg would have looked like when freshly laid, seen in a market near the town of Toliara on the southwest coast of Madagascar. Credit: Gifford Miller More than 1,200 years ago, flightless elephant birds roamed the island of Madagascar and laid eggs bigger than footballs. While these ostrich-like giants are now extinct, new research from the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU Boulder) and Curtin University in Australia reveals that their eggshell remnants hold valuable clues about their time on Earth. Published on February 28 in the journal Nature Communications, the study describes...