Free Republic

Former President Donald Trump continued to denounce the federal government after his arraignment on Tuesday, calling on House Republicans to “defund” the Department of Justice and the FBI until “they come to their senses.” Trump made the call in a Truth Social post on Wednesday morning, just one day after the former president was charged on 34 counts of falsifying business records in a Manhattan courthouse. Neither government agency is directly involved with that criminal case, which centers on hush money payments Trump allegedly made to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about a sexual affair. “REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS...

Environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run for president in 2024 as a Democrat. The filing was confirmed Wednesday by his campaign treasurer, John E. Sullivan. The 69-year-old is the son of former New York senator, US attorney general and assassinated 1968 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy. In March, Kennedy tweeted that he was considering a run. “If it looks like I can raise the money and mobilize enough people to win, I’ll jump in the race,” he...

Former President Donald Trump has moved into his biggest 2024 lead yet over President Joe Biden as voters appear unconcerned about his legal woes. In the just-released Rasmussen Reports survey, Trump moved ahead of Biden 47%-40% with support from women and independents. Trump was trailing Biden 42%-45% in February, the last time the national polling firm conducted a 2024 head-to-head survey. Trump announced his candidacy in November. Wednesday’s survey is the first 2024 general election testing since the Manhattan hush money indictment against the 45th president was released last week. It was conducted before Tuesday’s hearing, during which Trump pleaded...

Through a mutual friend, I got something ESR said, and it struck me as profound:“Voltaire can be inverted. If you’re willing to commit atrocities, this is a sign that you believe absurdities.” –Eric S. RaymondThe context was a discussion of AI and AI advancements but that is not important right now.The important thing is the actual meaning of those words.We’re surrounded by not particularly bright or educated (though a lot of them are very credentialed and confuse that for intelligence), but very passionate people causally saying things like We need to reduce Earth population by several billion, or We must...

In a somewhat surreal moment at the Country Music Awards last week, co-host Kelsea Ballerini joined with several drag performers to belt out a campy version of her single, “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too),” a protest anthem taking aim at Tennessee laws crafted to prevent both child mutilation and the potential arrested development and bone loss often caused by hormone therapy for “transitioning” youth considered too young to consent to such procedures. The performance was of course steeped in Queerness, both in the pretend “oppression” of performers literally center stage at a televised awards show, and in...

The Donald Trump indictment is our Late Roman Republic cirque du jour, and until now I’ve recused myself from writing about it. I had to wait for that one tiny detail to emerge, that one giant tell, so absurd that it required the special attention of the man who invented drunkblogging. Only now, on Day Two of our accelerating descent into Total Banana Republic from Partly Banana Republic, has that absurdity come to light. To see that absurdity in all its slimy glory, we must venture now to the pages of POLITICO, the semi-official mouthpiece of all goodthinking Outer Party...

The climber, identified by friends as Meg O’Neill, had been attempting to scale the frozen Raven Falls when a massive ice column split and fell in Indian Canyon Sunday, the Duchesne County Sheriff’s Office, O’Neill managed to push a 21-year-old woman out of the way of falling ice, which officials wrote “probably saved her life.” But O’Neill wound up crushed beneath “two huge blocks of ice,” resulting in her death. A 34-year-old man who accompanied the two female climbers was severely injured after falling 40 feet.

"And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. "And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence."...

Back in 2008, Don Lemon was co-anchoring CNN’s “Live From” weekday show with Kyra Phillips, a gig that he landed after he arrived at the network two years prior from local news in Chicago. For months, tensions between the pair kept mounting. On more than one occasion, a “Live From” producer and a newsroom supervisor had to pull Lemon off the air during a commercial break because of the anchor’s provocative antics, not unlike his recent declaration that the 51-year-old Nikki Haley isn’t a viable presidential candidate because she “isn’t in her prime.” Amid the charged atmosphere, sources say Lemon...

Doctor burnout has been linked to overprescribing opioids and antibiotics, a new study suggests. The study published in the British Journal of General Practice found that general practitioners who work long hours are up to five times more likely to prescribe high levels of medications. Researchers at the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) center at the University of Manchester surveyed 320 GPs over 57 practices between December 2019 and April 2020 for signs of burnout including emotional exhaustion, low job satisfaction and feeling detached from colleagues and patients. They linked the burnout scores to an analysis of...

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in his annual shareholder letter Tuesday that the government may need to seize private property to advance clean energy initiatives. Dimon discussed the need to quickly begin investing in solar projects and other green initiatives and suggested that the government should use eminent domain to seize property for those projects. “At the same time, permitting reforms are desperately needed to allow investment to be done in any kind of timely way. We may even need to evoke [sic] eminent domain – we simply are not getting the adequate investments fast enough for grid, solar,...

Vatican mum on Chinese bishop’s transfer without approvalROME – While the Vatican last year issued a rare public criticism of China for appointing a bishop without their approval, it has remained quiet on a similar incident that took place in the past few days, when a bishop was transferred to another diocese without Rome’s permission.On Tuesday, Bishop Shen Bin, leader of the nearby Diocese of Haimen (Jiangsu), was installed as the new bishop of Shanghai without prior the Vatican’s prior knowledge or approval.The Diocese of Shanghai has been de facto vacant for the past 10 years, since its Rome-approved bishop,...

In a recently surfaced video featuring a panel of “progressive prosecutors” speaking at Harvard Law School, at which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was scheduled to speak late last year, Bragg’s colleagues are seen and heard on the record boasting about their efforts to dismantle the American legal system and refusing to prosecute crimes. Bragg was scheduled to participate on the panel, but was reportedly unable to attend because, “he had what he thought was an important case starting [on the day of the panel] in Manhattan having to do with the Trump Organization,” the panel moderator says in the...

When putting through a custom order on anything, we’re often told it’s always best to give as much detail as you can to avoid any confusion. Even better if you give a picture or sketch reference. But for one Costco customer, this strategy turned their custom cake order rather pear-shaped. And we’re sorry, but we’re laughing along with the internet on this one! A Reddit user posted via r/mildlyInfuriating has shared how the supermarket giant got their order completely wrong despite them being very clear about what they wanted. Perhaps a little TOO clear.

Republican 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley raised $11 million in the first six weeks of her campaign, according to a report on Wednesday — only slightly more than former President Donald Trump took in over five days since his indictment. Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration, ​told Fox News that the contributions reflected the strength of her grassroots support, as she received 70,000 separate donations from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Her campaign noted that 67,000 of those donations were under $200. ​Haley, who launched her presidential run on Feb. 14​,...

A nightmarish futuristic fantasy about the controlling power of big corporations and an innocent cop who stumbles on the truth.

CHICAGO — The mayoral victory on Tuesday of Brandon Johnson, a once little-known progressive and former teacher, over a more moderate veteran of this city’s burly political realm injected confidence in the Democratic Party’s most liberal wing — and may have pointed a way forward for the party on the fraught issue of crime. Johnson, 47, walked back some of his most progressive positions, including budget cuts to Chicago’s police force. But he never disavowed the position that, in a city where violence and crime are surging, those in power must take a fundamentally different approach to public safety. Instead...

The main website of Bud Light parent Anheuser-Busch went offline for several hours on Wednesday, days after musician Kid Rock publicly feuded with the brewery for tapping a transgender influencer as a brand spokesperson. The outage persisted for more than two hours, with the company's main website, Anheuser-Busch.com, displaying a message reading: 'The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred'. The website seemed to resume functioning shortly before 4.30pm ET. The outage appeared to affect only the Anheuser-Busch site, while websites for the brewery's brands such as Bud Light and Busch Light remained functional. As well,...

The Biden administration is facing fierce scrutiny for a proposal that would drastically reduce the amount of dairy low-income families have access to while inflation sits at a four-decade high

Explanation: In this Hubble Space Telescope image the bright, spiky stars lie in the foreground toward the heroic northern constellation Perseus and well within our own Milky Way galaxy. In sharp focus beyond is UGC 2885, a giant spiral galaxy about 232 million light-years distant. Some 800,000 light-years across compared to the Milky Way's diameter of 100,000 light-years or so, it has around 1 trillion stars. That's about 10 times as many stars as the Milky Way. Part of an investigation to understand how galaxies can grow to such enormous sizes, UGC 2885 was also part of An Interesting Voyage...