Free Republic

9 February 2024 Friday of week 5 in Ordinary Time St. Apollonia Church, Elst, NetherlandsReadings at MassLiturgical Colour: Green. Year: B(II).First reading1 Kings 11:29-32,12:19 ©Solomon is unfaithful; the Lord moderates his wrathOne day when Jeroboam had gone out of Jerusalem, the prophet Ahijah of Shiloh accosted him on the road. Ahijah was wearing a new cloak; the two of them were in the open country by themselves. Ahijah took the new cloak he was wearing and tore it into twelve strips, saying to Jeroboam, ‘Take ten strips for yourself, for thus the Lord speaks, the God of Israel, “I am...

In his two-hour-long interview with Tucker Carlson, the Russian president listed Moscow’s conditions for bringing the two-year-old NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine to an end. Now, the ball is in the West’s court, according to Russian international affairs expert Dmitry Suslov.President Putin has confirmed to Tucker Carlson that Russia favors a “negotiated settlement” to the crisis in Ukraine, saying that it will be up to Kiev and its Western partners whether or not to accept it. “We prepared a huge document in Istanbul [during peace talks in the spring of 2022, ed.] that was initialed by the head of the...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — After the shock of a Special Counsel report that characterized the President as mentally incompetent to stand trial, Biden has joined the growing chorus of voices in calling for the President to step down. "President Hoover needs to do the right thing. He's in over his head. Can't even do his job right," said Biden to the nurse administering him his daily medications. "Eisenhower is an honorable man, and he needs to do the honorable thing. I was speaking with Emperor Hirohito about it just last Saturwednesday. Blamflibbernuzzit!" At publishing time, Republicans had drafted a resolution in...

“Are we having a talkshow or a serious conversation?” Vladimir Putin asked Tucker Carlson at the start of their interview on Thursday. By the end of the two-hour conversation, the answer was clear: neither. Instead, viewers got a lesson in Russian history, going all the way back to Prince Rurik – a Scandinavian who came and dished out a good kicking in the region in 862 – and taking in the reign of Yaroslav the Wise, the circa-1300 threat of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Russia going to war with Poland in the mid-1600s. -snip- “So that you don’t...

The Feb. 20 primary election in Wisconsin is two weeks away. But who will head to the polls in the Milwaukee area? Not all voters in the state will participate in the first election of 2024 — this one is held as needed to narrow down candidates for local, nonpartisan offices like school boards and city councils.

Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., has sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking him and the rest of the Cabinet to explore invoking the 25th Amendment to remove President Joe Biden from office following a Justice Department report that commented on his "poor memory." The Justice Department this week released special counsel Robert Hur's report on Biden's practices in regard to classified documents after he left office as vice president and before he was elected to the White House in 2020. The report recommended not charging Biden with any crimes and noted that the president could present a defense...

UNICEF is warning that military escalation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah would mark a “devastating turn” in the war between Israel and Hamas, as Israel moves toward an expected ground invasion in the area. “An escalation of the fighting in Rafah, which is already straining under the extraordinary number of people who have been displaced from other parts of Gaza, will mark another devastating turn in a war that has reportedly killed over 27,000 people – most of them women and children,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said in a statement Thursday. UNICEF said 600,000 children are among...

Residents along the Niagara River and Lake Ontario are calling on officials to take action after they say they’ve seen an increase sighting of suspicious vehicles, and trespassing in their backyards. Since this past November, U.S. Border Patrol agents from the Niagara Falls Station along with state and local law enforcement have arrested numerous individuals from over 20 incidents of illegal Niagara River crossings. On Thursday, those agencies provided an update on what’s being done to solve the problem. “We have always had rafts and people crossing the river. We’ve always had drugs crossing the river. Now, what has changed...

National MS Society makes a 90-year-old volunteer step down because she wasn’t “inclusive” enough. Her crime was asking what pronouns are after she was required to start using them. Fran was a volunteer for 60 years and her late husband had MS.

NYPD officers are searching for an attacker who opened fired in gun-free Times Square around 7 p.m. Thursday night. ABC News reported that the suspect first shot at a security guard in JD Sports, after the guard stopped he and two others for suspicion of shoplifting. The shot missed the guard and hit a tourist from Brazil, wounding her in the leg. The suspect then fled the store, but fired two more shots at an officer who was pursuing him. This is the individual who displayed a firearm and shot at security, striking an innocent bystander. While fleeing, he also...

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh released internal footage of senior officials at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Flight Program Operations division working on a plan to reduce the number of white males in aviation. According to Matt Walsh: The footage, which is from April 2022, begins with FAA acting deputy chief operating officer Angela McCullough saying more workers need to go from “ramp to cockpit,” meaning she wants to see more baggage handlers become airline pilots. Brilliant. -snip Angela McCullough complained that Flight Operations is “white-male dominated” and told the managers they need to “talk about what the future could look...

The American College of Pediatricians has released a new position paper outlining findings based on a review of dozens of studies to claim that providing gender transition procedures to minors with gender dysphoria does not lead to an improvement in mental health.The ACP, which describes itself as a 600-member “national organization of pediatricians and other healthcare professionals dedicated to the health and well-being of children,” released the report Monday titled “Mental Health in Adolescents with Incongruence of Gender Identity and Biological Sex.” The group has long expressed skepticism about surgical and hormonal interventions for children who say they identify as...

[Catholic Caucus] I’m Grateful a Priest Never Blessed My Same-Sex Marriage (or My Irregular One)I got marriage wrong, twice. Here’s why I’m grateful a priest never blessed me for being in that state.I got marriage wrong, twice. Here’s why I’m grateful a priest never blessed me for being in that state. When I was in college, I entered into a relationship with another woman. She was a practicing Catholic; I was less practicing but more an occasional Catholic. Weekly Mass attendance was still part of her routine, and we would sometimes go together. Usually, her sister went with us, so...

Watching Biden's response to the Hur Special Counsel report was enormously disturbing to me. I wasn't thinking about the exposure of classified documents or the maddening double standard at play in giving Biden a pass. The one thing that ran through my mind all during that speech was one unthinkable question: This man has his finger on the nuclear trigger?At a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks so casually about using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the thought of Joe Biden having to make a decision about our nuclear deterrent should give every American who isn't a Democratic Party partisan...

Imagine for a moment what the past few years would have been like if the nation’s socialist “Democratic” party and its media propaganda arm had absolutely no limitations on their power. What would it be like if we just had one-party rule and the GOP was only an afterthought? The problem is that you won’t have to imagine anything if President Trump and the pro-freedom right don’t prevail in November, and even then, it might just be a short respite from the Democrat party’s deliberate destruction of the country as founded. As much as most people would like to deny...

Social Security has marched to a steady cadence of financial decline for the past 40 years. Every year, the size of the Social Security bomb gets bigger while the fuse becomes a little shorter. While that image might be a serious problem for you, it doesn’t seem to have captured the attention of anyone on Capitol Hill. At this point, the program has roughly $22.4 trillion in promises that it does not expect to keep to those who can vote today. Someone who turns 80 years old today expects, on average, to live long enough to feel the impact of...

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) brushed off the idea of throwing his name in the ring to lead the Republican National Committee (RNC) as it seeks to regroup following several challenging election cycles. “No, no, no,” McCarthy told reporters Thursday night, waving his hand, when asked about the possible role by NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard. CAMPAIGN McCarthy says he has no interest in leading RNC BY ELIZABETH CRISP - 02/09/24 9:34 AM ET SHARE TWEET Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., speaks to the media after a Republican conference meeting at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 19, 2023. (AP Photo/J. Scott...

Per Special counsel Robert Hur’s—a Republican, you’ll be reminded incessantly if you follow this story—findings in the Joe Biden classified documents case, Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified material after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” I’m not a lawyer but I’m pretty sure this constitutes a felony, at least when a Republican or anyone not named Obama, Biden, or Clinton does it. But Mr. Hur won’t bring charges because “Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”This...

It appears that two "Squad" members could see their time in the House of Representatives comes to an end in the upcoming election cycle. Representatives Cori Bush of Missouri and Jamaal Bowman of New York have both been financially outraised by their more moderate Democratic challengers, according to a report by Fox News Digital. Bush has been under investigation by the Justice Department for handing out tens of thousands of dollars in campaign funds to a security firm. And now she has been outraised by attorney Wesley Bell, who is running a more moderate Democratic campaign. "Missouri’s 1st District deserves...

A rusted Cold War missile was discovered in a deceased man's garage in Washington state, The Seattle Times reported. What seemed like an ordinary rocket caught the attention of the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, prompting them to alert the Bellevue Police. The museum was made aware of the missile when someone called to offer to donate the rocket, purchased at an estate sale, said reports A bomb squad identified the relic as a Douglas AIR-2 Genie. The unguided air-to-air rocket was designed to carry a 1.5 kt W25 nuclear warhead. Fortunately, the lack of...