Free Republic

We have finally reached the end! Day #52 of the Top 50 songs on my iTunes playlist -- ranked in reverse order by play frequency from #50 to #1 and presented here on a series of FR threads. I've posted them here on a new thread that compiles the growing list one day at a time since early August. There are two "extra" days at the end because we had a tie at #50 and an Honorable Mention collection a few days ago. To show my gratitude to the FR management for giving us all a forum to post vanity...

Starting Jan. 1, Washington may halt sales of new motorhomes and large trucks powered by diesel or gasoline due to emissions regulations modeled after California’s standards. The new rules apply to vehicles with more than 8,500 pounds gross vehicle weight, impacting most RVs, medium- to heavy-duty trucks and interstate tractor-trailers. “This has caused quite a disruption in the industry,” Washington State Truckers Association CEO Sheri Call told KIRO Newsradio Thursday. The changes stem from California’s Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) legislation, which Washington lawmakers committed to follow in 2020. The RV and trucking industries are now bracing for a major shift...

Project Veritas released undercover video of a UN manager admitting war is the only way to make serious cash and that “lazy” staff were rooting for warmonger Nikki Haley for president over Trump. Per Project Veritas: A United Nations manager of peacekeeping has just said the quiet part out loud: war is good for UN employees. Gagan Vaseer, UN Program Management Officer for innovation and peacekeeping, told a Project Veritas journalist that UN employees only rake in serious cash when wars are raging around the globe. To make things more interesting, he revealed that their preferred Presidential candidate was none...

Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump's pick for defense secretary, was investigated for an alleged sexual assault in 2017 but no charges were filed. The alleged incident took place in the early morning hours of Oct. 8, 2017, at the address of the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa in Monterey, California, the city said in a statement. The police department investigated 'an alleged sexual assault' involving Hegseth, a Fox News host and Army National Guard veteran, that was reported four days later, according to the statement. The victim's name and age are confidential. No weapons were involved, according to the statement,...

I was preparing material for my college music course, and I came upon this quote from Irving Berlin in his NYT obituary:"My ambition is to reach the heart of the average American, not the highbrow nor the lowbrow but that vast intermediate crew which is the real soul of the country. The highbrow is likely to be superficial, overtrained, supersensitive. The lowbrow is warped, subnormal. My public is the real people."Re-reading this quote, I had a kind of epiphany about today's politics. The Democrats have become a coalition of what Berlin called the highbrow and lowbrow. The elites are indeed...

Choosing two men with such strong views on the legitimacy of the West Bank settlements at a time when their status is being legally challenged in international courts makes a powerful statement. There was a time when Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich would have created a deep crisis with Washington by declaring, as he did this week, that 2025 is the year in which sovereignty will be applied to Judea and Samaria. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government’s opposition to a two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has already been a source of deep tension with the Biden administration, which holds fast...

The Airbus A321XLR, which makes its maiden flight today, promises to give passengers more holiday options than ever before The A321XLR is the newest model in the Airbus A320 family of planes At 12.35pm today, Captain Jose Del Valle, Iberia’s chief pilot, will push forward the throttle on flight IB347. The plane will race down the runway at Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport and fly for nine hours to Boston. Iberia has been flying from Madrid to Boston for years, so why will Del Valle tell customers they are “making history”? The Boeing 747 veteran will be captaining the first long-haul...

An anonymous Palestinian described the ongoing suffering in Gaza, insisting Hamas must end it by releasing the hostages and ceding power. Gaza is disappearing from the world map with each passing day as its people face destruction. The world watches as the resilient people of Gaza stand stubbornly in front of cameras, but little changes. Gaza is in its worst state in history, and it is dying. For 400 days now, the people here have lived through what can only be described as Judgment Day horrors. People stagger as if intoxicated—wandering, scared, worried, and confused. They move aimlessly, carrying water...

An alleged "Jew hunt" was announced well in advance in the messaging app Telegram, prompting rioters to travel from far outside Amsterdam to attack Israelis. Supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv hold flags at Dam square ahead of the Europa League football match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv, in Amsterdam on November 7, 2024. Violent attacks against Maccabi Tel Aviv fans following a soccer match in Amsterdam on Thursday evening left several Israelis wounded and were likely to have been a result of a pre-planned attack against Jews organized in a Telegram group, Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf reported on Friday....

(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services has sent shockwaves through vaccine company stocks. BioNTech and Novavax saw their stocks drop by 7.1% and 7.0%, respectively, while Moderna’s fell by 5.6% shortly after Trump’s announcement on Thursday, according to Axios. CNBC noted that Pfizer’s stocks dropped more than 2 percent. These companies made billions after manufacturing the COVID-19 vaccines, which several governments, including the U.S., forced Americans to take. Trump’s appointment of RFK Jr. to HHS seems part of the former independent presidential candidate’s efforts...

The news out of Amsterdam gets more and more horrifying. #1. The Bad: In Amsterdam, Antisemitic Attacks Continue Throughout SaturdayWhile the Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer fans, or most of them, were flown back to Tel Aviv early on Saturday, Muslim thugs continued throughout that day to roam the streets of Amsterdam looking for Jews to attack. More on those attacks, and other antisemitic acts at the Holocaust Museum, can be found here: “Dutch police can refuse to protect the Holocaust Museum ‘on moral grounds.’ Today, ‘Free Palestine’ stickers with razor blades were found there.” Elder of Ziyon, November 10, 2024:The...

Income tax rates in Europe vary widely and reflect different approaches to funding public services, with countries imposing higher top marginal tax rates often supporting extensive social welfare systems, while those with lower rates may prioritize competitiveness or maintain less comprehensive programs.This map, via Visual Capitalist's Kayla Zhu, shows the top statutory personal income tax rate of 36 European countries.European countries typically use a progressive tax system, where higher income brackets are taxed at higher rates, with the top rate applying only to income above a set threshold. These are the highest personal income tax rates of each European country.The...

President-elect Donald Trump is entering the White House with a Republican trifecta, but he may hit roadblocks to implement his America First agenda — and not because of Democrats. Instead, Republican swamp creatures like Texas Sen. John Cornyn are signaling their intent to sabotage Trump’s cabinet nominees because they threaten the deep state.Trump tapped former Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz to serve as attorney general. Gaetz, prior to March of 2021, “had been an effective and prominent voice in Congress pushing back against the Washington establishment’s worse impulses and abuses of power,” as my colleague John Daniel Davidson wrote.Gaetz took...

The Iranian regime has given the government of Lebanon the go-ahead to reach a ceasefire with Israel on behalf of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terror group that began the war in October 2023 but has since been beaten badly. The Jerusalem Post reported Friday: Iran will support any decision taken by the Lebanese government and Lebanon’s “resistance” in current talks on a ceasefire in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, Ali Larijani, senior adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, said on Friday. “We are not looking to sabotage anything. We are after a solution to the problems,” Larijani said after meeting Lebanese caretaker Prime...

Restrictions on semi-automatic rifles, pistols, and shotguns have been ruled unconstitutional under the Second Amendment in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Illinois, in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The order is a permanent injunction against enforcement of the state legislation in the case of Harrel v Raoul on 8 November 2024. It is commonly known as an “assault weapon” and magazine ban.Judge Stephen P. McGlynn addressed two basic arguments in his order. The first is whether semi-automatic rifles and magazines for them are “arms” as covered by the Second Amendment. Part of this argument is...

The institutions that make elections less free and fair, from the corporate press to corrupt election offices, are weakened but not reformed.In the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his voters faced media interference, suspicious ballot dumps, politicized censorship of information, low-security election laws, polling place issues, and legally dubious Democrat get-out-the-vote operations.In the 2024 election, Donald Trump and his voters faced media interference, suspicious ballot dumps, politicized censorship of information, low-security election laws, polling place issues, and legally dubious Democrat get-out-the-vote operations. On top of those, he faced two assassination attempts and a political lawfare campaign designed to bankrupt and...

Indigenous lawmakers broke into a tribal dance to protest a bill in New Zealand's parliament.To reject a piece of legislation proposed by the island country's libertarian party, a bunch of Māori members of Parliament (MPs) staged a protest by busting out the "haka," a Māori war dance traditionally used to terrify enemies on the battlefield.Māori members of New Zealand’s parliament disrupted the passage of a bill that would reinterpret the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, which uplifts Indigenous peoples. The MPs performed a haka—a traditional Māori dance and chant—causing the session to be suspended. pic.twitter.com/89VhB1aqAS— red. (@redstreamnet) November 14, 2024The disruption...

I just got word from the North Pole that Santa is looking for really, really, kind people this year. Supply chain issues of all kinds due to red tape and weather may cause shortages and delays of the usual things children ask for at Christmas. Now, here's the thing. Santa knows that families in North Carolina have lost so much, and even everything. Houses, pets, family members, land, jobs, some whole towns were washed away in the terrible floods of Helene. Many families and children are sleeping in shelters and tents, they have no clothes of their own, their toys...

On Wednesday, President Trump, like the Road Runner kindly returning Wile E. Coyote’s misplaced explosives, dropped an Acme Gaetz-grenade down the back of progressive Washington’s trousers while it was distracted looking for the President down in the gulch of Florida. After Gaetz’s nomination for Attorney General, was inconceivable the President could have been any more provocative, but he managed it anyway. CNN covered the story under the headline, “Trump’s latest controversial Cabinet pick could have a huge impact on Americans’ health and lives.” Hopefully. While DC was distracted, distressedly leaping around frantically trying to get the Gaetz-grenade out of its...

Nov. 13 (UPI) -- Boeing started issuing layoff notices Wednesday to 17,000 employees to cut 10% of its workforce in an effort to shore up the aerospace giant's shaky finances. The layoff notifications, which will be handed out through Friday, are being issued the same week 33,000 Boeing machinists in the Seattle area returned to work following their seven-week strike. "Our business is in a difficult position, and it is hard to overstate the challenges we face together," Boeing chief executive officer Kelly Ortberg told staff in a memo last month as he announced the cuts. "Restoring our company requires...