Free Republic

During a conference call about the Silicon Valley Bank bailout yesterday, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) asked representatives from the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation (FDIC) if they had a way to censor information on social media to prevent a run on the banks, according to Republican members of the House of Representatives who were on the call. The members said there were roughly 200 people on the Zoom call, including Senators, House members, and staff members from both parties. “On our conference call, led by [Senate President Chuck] Schumer, with Fed, FDIC, and Treasury,...

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) says House Republicans are building their case against Dr. Anthony Fauci. In an interview with Newsmax host Benny Johnson, Jordan noted that Congress could issue a criminal referral to prosecute Fauci, but it won't happen. There "could be a referral, but you would refer it to the Biden Justice Department. I don't know that — they're going to pursue that, but you can definitely do that," Jordan said. "We could do a referral potentially. I would, frankly, prefer just to have Dr. Fauci come back in and take another round of questions here, but we're building...

Russian fighter jet collides with US surveillance drone over Black Sea, forcing US to bring down drone, US military says This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.

Recently, Tucker Carlson focused the nation's attention upon the notable silence of American Christian leaders on the Biden administration's persecution of Christians by asking, Where are all the professional Christians? You have to wonder ... [w]here's ... all these people who are [should be] defending Christianity ... as actual Christians are being arrested for being Christians?" (emphasis added). There are a host of excuses such professional Christian leaders might offer to explain or justify their silence. But for the most part, most of these excuses have been debunked by people like Eric Metaxas in his latest book, Letter to the...

I read that a third of the illegal immigrants crossing the English Channel in those boats are Albanian. There is no war in Albania. These people are NOT fleeing persecution or anything like that. It's a joke. They need to go home. UK gov't got its Illegal Migration Bill passed last night : 312-250

In January, the US Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) and the India Electronics and Semiconductor Association (IESA) decided to form a private-sector task force to strengthen collaboration between the two countries in the global semiconductor ecosystem. The move came as the world’s fifth-largest economy was actively seeking strategic alliances around semiconductors while moving to bring chip manufacturing to the country. Fast forward to this week, the US Commerce Secretary, Gina Raimondo, who is on a four-day trip to India, resumed discussions with her Indian counterparts on the coordination of investment and policies to spur private investment into India’s chip industry. The...

Researchers at the University of Oxford in collaboration with 25 teams across the world have published the largest study to date of the genetic basis of endometriosis. New global study shows the experience of Endometriosis is rooted in a person’s genetics© Shutterstock Their study included DNA from 60,600 women* with endometriosis and 701,900 controls. It revealed compelling evidence of a shared genetic basis for endometriosis and other types of pain seemingly unrelated to endometriosis, including migraine, back pain and multi-site pain. The study has also revealed that ovarian endometriosis has a different genetic basis from other disease manifestations. The results...

Why We Should Let Bad Banks Fail Bad banks need consequences. Let them fail.By now, you’ve likely heard about regulators closing down Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and now Signature Bank as well.While I’m not going to go into all the details, the basic story is described well in this article on Seeking Alpha. Essentially, SVB received a large influx of deposits as the Federal Reserve flooded the market with dollars during COVID.From there, SVB went out and bought government bonds to store that money. But then, the Federal Reserve started enacting policies which moved interest rates up. The problem? As...

UPDATES: Western military sources told AFP Tuesday there had been an "incident" involving a US-made Reaper drone flying over the Black Sea, an area of intense NATO military activity close to the Ukraine war frontlines

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday night that fighting in Bakhmut and throughout eastern Ukraine remains “very tough.” “It is very tough in the east, very painful,” Zelensky said in his nightly address to the Ukrainian people. “We need to destroy the enemy’s military might, and we will. Bilohorivka and Maryinka, Avdiivka and Bakhmut, Vuhledar and Kamyanka — and all other places where our future is being decided. Where our future, the future of all Ukrainians, is being fought for.”

Most Americans have moved on from the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM)-driven ransacking of some 200 American cities, which resulted in as much as $2 billion in property damage and at least 25 deaths. But that time must be remembered for more than rioting and destruction. The BLM pressure campaigns, harassment, and moral blackmail also amounted to possibly the most lucrative shakedown of corporate America in its history. Today the Claremont Institute's Center for the American Way of Life published the most comprehensive database to date tracking corporate contributions and pledges to the Black Lives Matter movement and related causes...

The recent implosion of Silicon Valley Bank escalated culture war arguments, as some conservative politicians who were already targeting certain investing approaches blamed the bank’s downfall on “woke” practices. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) called SVB “one of the most woke banks” because of its “ESG-type” policies — a reference to environmental, social and corporate governance-driven investing that has been embraced by billion-dollar asset managers and scorned by conservatives of late. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, widely believed to be gearing up for a 2024 presidential bid, said Sunday that Silicon Valley Bank’s diversity, equity and inclusion requirements “diverted...

Third Week of Lent Matthew 18:21–35 Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus tells a parable that illustrates God’s mercy. The Latin word for mercy is misericordia, which designates the suffering of the heart, or compassion—cum patior (I suffer with).Mercy is identical to what the Old Testament authors refer to as God’s hesed, or tender mercy. It is the characteristic of God, for God is love. The love that obtains among the Trinitarian persons spills over into God’s love for the world that he has made.Think of a mother’s love for her children. Could you ever imagine a mother becoming indifferent to...

Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (D) is set to join electrification nonprofit organization Rewiring America as a senior counsel. In a news release, Rewiring America said that Abrams, a former House Minority Leader in her home state of Georgia, will use her new role to help launch a national awareness campaign and also a network of communities working together to help Americans go electric. Abrams will also guide the nonprofit organization as it continues to build the tools and capacity to connect citizens and communities in the U.S. to machines, installers, Inflation Reduction Act incentives, and jobs in the...

A Eugene, Oregon, health teacher asked his freshmen students to describe their sexual fantasies in one writing assignment and to list fellow students with whom they would like to have sex in another. Parents were furious and Churchill High School is now reconsidering its under-fire curriculum. The teacher and sports coach wrote that students must, “Write a short story of a paragraph or two [about] a sexual fantasy …” Students were instructed to “choose 3 items [romantic music, candles, massage oil, feather boa, flavored syrup,] to use in your story. “Your story should show that you can show and receive...

Climate activists across Europe have pulled plenty of stunts over the past year, from throwing soup on a Van Gogh painting, to gluing themselves to various objects and roadways. In this embarrassing incident, British activists glued themselves to an oil tanker in Essex. The only problem? The tanker was carrying cooking oil, not crude oil. Big oil has been a primary target of protests like this one from the beginning, and the activism group Just Stop Oil is behind many of the aforementioned demonstrations. These protestors are part of a Just Stop Oil offshoot called Extinction Rebellion, which released a...

In the bowels of the disinformation industrial complex, which is all about rating conservative media outlets as 'disinformation' in order to persuade advertisers to defund them, NewsGuard has always stood a little apart. It says it's transparent. It says it's private. It says it's apolitical, and politics never occurs to them as they issue their utterly objective ratings. It's not like those creepy "Lives of Others" censors at the U.K.-based Global Disinformation Index who took $330 million in U.S. State Department cash to carry out their censor-the-conservatives blacklist, marketing it as objective truth-telling. Noo, siree. GDI was so naked in...

The cost of interest payments on the national debt will continue to grow as a financial burden for the U.S. over the next decade, even surpassing what the nation spends on national defense within a few years, a newly released budget analysis shows. The national debt hit $31 trillion last fall and is well on its way to $32 trillion this year. As that debt grows, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office projects that the federal government will shell out over $10 trillion in the next decade on interest payments alone. “To put this $10.5 trillion total in perspective, this means...

Only three out of 10 Republican voters said they believe America's best days are ahead, a new CNN poll finds.According to the March 8-12 survey of 1,045 U.S. adults who are, or lean, Republican, just 30% said America's best days lie ahead, while 70% said they are behind the nation....A similar poll on Sept. 5-9, 2019, found the same group believing the opposite, that America's best days were ahead, with 77% agreeing with the statement and 18% saying the country's best days were behind it.

Citing Iran’s mission to the UN in New York, Sputnik said after the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, Iran expressed its interest to buy combat aircraft, and Russia was a willing partner. “The mission added that the Su-35 combat aircraft are technically acceptable to Iran, so after October 2020, and the end of Iranian restrictions on purchases of conventional weapons (UN Resolution No. 2231), Iran completed the procedures for the acquisition,” the Russian news agency noted... Earlier, a video emerged showing Iran’s Khordad-3 & Mersad air defense systems coming out of what is reportedly an underground tunnel. Interestingly,...