Free Republic

The Iowa caucuses are two weeks away, and the New Hampshire primary follows a week later. This is the official starting gun for the 2024 elections, but the battleground has already been laid. When RedState reported earlier in December on Kate Cox and the lawsuit over Texas' Heartbeat Law, this prescient statement was made.Tragically, in the case of Kate Cox, the agenda bled through. Whether Cox was driving this or someone was driving Cox is yet to be seen. But it was clear the focus was to challenge the Texas law in order to create an issue that would carry...

Lake Shasta's months-long decline has started to level off thanks to several rainstorms that soaked northern California this month. The lake, which is California's largest reservoir, reached nearly 100 percent capacity in May after its water levels were in a dire state since 2019 due to a prolonged drought in the state. Levels leapt 60 feet in January as an abnormally wet winter accompanied by more than a dozen atmospheric rivers soaked the Golden State, and the levels continued to rise until they reached 1,064 feet in late May, just 3 feet short of full pool. The levels have steadily...

Last week I wrote about how a good deal of former President Donald Trump's popularity is fueled by pure spite by the people whose lives have been damaged or made harder by the Biden administration's destructive policies. His popularity has risen in part because the Democrats have made it very clear to the American people that they fear Trump, and if the people who've made your life miserable are telling you that they're afraid of someone, you're probably going to gravitate toward that figure and attempt to put him between yourself and them: My theory is that as Biden and...

A new California law is set to take effect in the beginning of the new year that will require police officers to inform drivers of the reason for a traffic stop before proceeding with any further questioning. The legislation, which was passed in the fall of 2022, is intended to be a significant step in addressing pretextual stops and creating more transparency. Before AB 2773, officers were not required to immediately tell a driver the reason for the traffic stop. The measure also requires law enforcement agencies to include the reasons for each traffic stop on arrest reports. Typically, the...

When we look back on 2023 from whatever surreal future it forks into, we’ll remember it as the year that at least this much became clear: AI will forever change how we work, learn, create, interact with (mis)information, and think about ourselves. To determine the 2023 Word of the Year, we, the humans here at Dictionary.com, gave ourselves a prompt: Using lexicography and data science, choose a single word that best represents, at this moment, AI’s many profound ramifications for the future of language and life. Like the output of many prompts, the result may not be what you were...

***** Tunes For Our Troops ~ The Freeper Canteen Music Dedication Presents: Happy New Year’s Eve! (Almost) *****~ Support The Artists You Hear Throughout The Canteen ! ~ ***** Warning: Not all music may be appropriate for children! Please click with caution. Thank you! Tunes For The Troops This music is provided for the entertainment of our Troops, Veterans, Allies & their families! Enjoy the variety of musical selections that the Canteen DJs provide throughout the thread. Please ping any DJ with your requests for the Troops! All music is removed on Monday.Thanks to all the DJs for their...

Over 4M portable blenders recalled due to potential fire, laceration risks The recalled BlendJet 2 Portable Blenders were sold across the U.S. and Canada. The recall involves around 4.8 million blenders that have numbers between 5201 and 5542 as the first four digits of the serial number, located on the bottom of the base.

Billionaire entrepreneur Brad Jacobs, renowned for founding seven successful companies, including the Fortune 500-listed United Rentals, has set his sights on disrupting a new sector: the building-products distribution industry. In a recent interview with ResiClub, Jacobs revealed his plans to establish a significant presence in the sector through his latest venture, QXO, a building-products distribution company. A Proven Playbook: Growth Through Acquisitions Known for his executive role as chairman of XPO, a truckload carrier also listed on the Fortune 500, Jacobs outlined his strategy for QXO – growth through acquisitions. With a history of leading teams through 500 acquisitions, Jacobs...

The Turkish Super Cup final between Galatasaray and Fenerbahce in Saudi Arabia was postponed because of a disagreement between the clubs and the host nation's authorities. The match was scheduled to kick off at 17.45 GMT but, with thousands of fans inside Riyadh's Al-Awwal Stadium, it was called off at 19:00. The Turkish Football Federation and the clubs blamed "problems in organising" the match after authorities refused banners referring to the revered father of modern Turkey Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Galatasaray and Fenerbahce were expected to arrive for the showpiece between Turkey's league champions and cup winners with banners bearing Ataturk's...

Persecutor Jack Smith is rightly worried. Even with a Trump Hanging Judge, and an all-but-certain DC hanging jury, things aren’t going his way. He’s moving Trump be denied the right to bring up anything about January 6 in a January 6 trial—none of this silly right-to-mount-a-defense nonsense--and that Trump generally be entirely muzzled about pretty much everything else. Hey, you can put innocent Americans in pre-trial detention for years, so why not? But his biggest problem is Presidential Immunity. Smith would have us believe Trump doesn’t have any of that ephemeral, never-before-imagined power. At American Greatness, Paul Ingrassia explains why...

Sixteen former DC officials and “legal experts” submitted a brief to the US Court of Appeals in President Trump’s immunity appeal, arguing against immunity for ex-presidents in criminal cases. The list of attorneys includes former Bushies, turncoat Bill Kristol, Ty Cobb, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, a Mike Pence advisor, and unhinged nutcase George Conway. Here are the so-called “principled Republican” experts who are sh*tting on Trump today:

[Catholic Caucus] The Poisonous Fruit of Amoris LaetitiaFiducia Supplicans directly flows from principles and premises articulated in the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia.In his magisterial history The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon identified the loss of civic virtue as the “secret poison” that undermined this sprawling global empire and inevitably led to its demise. The Catholic Church is not about to disintegrate in the same fashion as the Roman Empire, but its unity, grounded in the infallible papal magisterium, seems to be unraveling, and its eternal doctrines are no longer safe from radical revision. We can probably...

Into the Death Factory of the Hürtgen ForestThose of us who have been here awhile may remember an infamous poster with the handle "Deep_in_the_Hürtgen_Forest. Here is a bit of history about the Hürtgen Forest.

Ukraine and a coalition of other countries have submitted a request to hold an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council regarding the massive strike by the Russians on December 29th, according to Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dmytro Kuleba.He did not disclose other details."Ukraine, along with three dozen UN Member States, requested that the Ecuadorian Presidency convene an urgent UNSC meeting to address Russia’s missile and drone attack against Ukraine, which resulted in multiple civilian casualties and heavy destruction of civilian infrastructure.," said the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.From the evening of December 28, Russia massively attacked...

Although Washington, D.C. is empty at the moment, with key policy makers on holiday, the work of shaping a new narrative goes on. Two new articles this week, one in the New York Times and one in Politico, provide a road map to the Biden Administration’s desperate attempt to prevent the collapse of its Ukraine policy. The New York Times piece is an op-ed from an geriatric former editor, Serge Schmemann — Ukraine Doesn’t Need All Its Territory to Defeat Putin. Serge, despite a long career as a journalist specialized in foreign affairs, has forgotten the meaning of “defeat.” Michael...

There is a full-scale war of intimidation being waged by the far-left, and it has targeted yet another prominent figure on the right. Legal analyst Jonathan Turley was swatted on Friday according to Alan Henney, who reports on various crimes and police responses around Washington, D.C. That follows the swatting of three Republican lawmakers since Christmas. Specifically, Sen. Rick Scott, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Rep. Brandon Williams all reported incidents. Jonathan Turley then spoke out against the trend, noting that a lack of prosecutions is leading to an increased number of swatting calls because there is no deterrent.

A new aviation company has developed a type of jet fuel made entirely from human sewage. Chemists at a lab in Gloucestershire have turned the waste into kerosene. James Hygate, Firefly Green Fuels CEO, said: "We wanted to find a really low-value feedstock that was highly abundant. And of course poo is abundant." Independent tests by international aviation regulators found it was nearly identical to standard fossil jet fuel. Firefly's team worked with Cranfield University to examine the fuel's life cycle carbon impact. It concluded that Firefly's fuel has a 90% lower carbon footprint than standard jet fuel. Mr Hygate,...

It took two people 10 months to drive the Nissan Ariya from the North to South PoleChris and Julie Ramsey completed their 10-month road trip from the magnetic North Pole to the South Pole, making them the first people on Earth to drive a car, EV or ICE, over 18,500-miles from the top of our planet to the bottom of it. The couples’ Nissan Ariya was upfitted by polar mobility specialists at Arctic Trucks to accommodate the 39-inch tires, but aside from that was completely stock from the battery to the drivetrain and everything in between. The couple started their...

Access to the region by journalists, diplomats and others is tightly controlled by China, as is movement outside the region by Uyghurs, Kazaks and other Muslim minorities.China has said it will impose ban on US research company and two analysts who extensively reported on alleged human rights violations against Uyghur Muslim community in the country’s Xinjiang region. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning was quoted as announcing late Tuesday night that Los Angeles-based research and data analytics firm Kharon, its director of investigations, Edmund Xu, and Nicole Morgret, a human rights analyst affiliated with the Centre for Advanced Defence Studies, would...

Given the compressed timeframe, the novel constitutional questions involved, the importance of this case, and impending ballot preparation deadlines, Secretary Bellows has suspended the effect of her decision until the Superior Court rules on any appeal, or the time to appeal has expired. A copy of the decision is here: https://www.maine.gov/sos/news/2023/Decision%20in%20Challenge%20to%20Trump%20Presidential%20Primary%20Petitions.pdf