Free Republic

On the menu today: Back on December 13, I noticed that the Biden administration released its “National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate” and announced the establishment of two China-focused initiatives and observed there was something a little absurd about the Biden team unveiling “short, medium, and long-term actions” with 38 days left in Biden’s presidency. These guys are the short term. Now, we are 17 days away from the start of Donald Trump’s second term, and Biden — or more accurately, the team around our mumbling, stumbling octogenarian president — is trying to push through a difficult-to-rescind ban...

MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell claimed US military personnel are more dangerous than illegal immigrants when it comes to domestic terrorism. O'Donnell, 73, insisted on air Thursday that the US 'has suffered more deadly terrorism at the hands of American-born citizens who are veterans of the United States military than people who have crossed into this country at the southern border.' 'It is very clear from the evidence that if you want to worry about terrorism in this country, the United States Army is a much bigger problem than the southern border,' he said. His remarks follow the deadly attack by...

Here we go. Top Senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee are quietly seeking more information on the debunked sex assault accusation against Pete Hegseth ahead of his confirmation hearing. ...... Snip...... The requests, reviewed by ABC News, show that the top Republican on the committee, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and the top Democrat, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., sought additional information from the Monterey County district attorney concerning allegations of sexual assault that were levied against Hegseth in 2017 and first reported in November, following Trump’s announcement of Hegseth as his DOD pick.

A quadruple-whammy of viruses are hitting the US as millions go back to work after the holidays, data shows. Official figures reveal that infections cause by flu, Covid, RSV (a respiratory illness that causes the cold) and norovirus (sometimes called the stomach flu) all started to surge over the Christmas period, when families gathered to celebrate. And experts say figures will only continue to rise over the coming weeks as the US heads into the peak period of its annual flu season. Data shows that norovirus cases are at their highest level for this time of year since 2012, while...

President-elect Donald Trump's guilty verdict on 34 felony counts in New York won't be thrown out due to his presidential election, Judge Juan Merchan ruled Friday, keeping one of the only remaining criminal cases against Trump alive as the judge set Trump’s sentencing for Jan. 10, just 10 days before his inauguration.

Let’s face it, the Democratic Party got off track. Back in the late ’90s, President Bill Clinton had approval ratings in the 70s as the party stood for a form of centrist progressivism. It meant finding a vital center in which the party looked to give people in need a helping hand but required people take responsibility for their own actions. That meant the adoption of policies like Pell Grants that required a B average or work requirements for welfare or a balanced budget. The economy soared. But the left fought these policies, and gradually they regained more and more...

There are about 100,000 alcohol-related cancer cases and about 20,000 alcohol-related cancer deaths each year, according to the new report.Alcoholic drinks should carry cancer risk warning labels, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said in a report Friday. The report cites a direct link between alcohol consumption and at least seven types of cancer, including of the breast, colorectal, liver and mouth. An estimated 16.4% of total breast cancer cases are linked to drinking alcohol. There are about 100,000 alcohol-related cancer cases and about 20,000 alcohol-related cancer deaths in the U.S. each year, the report found. Alcohol is the third-leading cause...

The first rule of Muslim atrocities in the UK is that you’re not supposed to talk about them. Not long ago the Starmer regime unleashed a ruthless purge against anyone who mentioned that a Muslim terrorist had stabbed a bunch of little girls, declaring that it was a national emergency to shut down any speech on the matter.But the topic of Pakistani Muslim ‘grooming gangs’ and the atrocities they committed against huge numbers of young English girls, and the role the authorities played in covering that up, has once again come to the surface.The British authorities not only enabled and...

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk slammed a new California law Friday that aims to prohibit local authorities from requiring photo identification (ID) when voting, saying that it had been passed “to make voting fraud unprovable.” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed the law in September. The law was partly a reaction to an attempt by the City of Huntingon Beach, one of the last conservative bastions in California, to require voter ID in the 2024 election. Voters in the city passed Measure 1, requiring voter ID, in March 2024, but it does not take effect until 2026. The law, SB 1174, includes...

President Joe Biden rewarded disgraced ex-Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney with one of the nation’s highest civilian honors on Thursday for her work undermining democracy through the illegally established and since-disbanded Jan. 6 Select Committee.After sources close to Biden recently told The Washington Post he regretted that the Justice Department (DOJ) did not move more aggressively to jail top political opponents, Biden awarded Cheney the Presidential Citizens Medal. He also gave the medal to Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who chaired the House probe. The Presidential Citizens Medal is second only to the Presidential Medal of Freedom in prestige.Fox News contributor Guy...

Colorado is the second state to legalize psilocybin therapyAs Colorado becomes the second state to legalize psychedelic therapy this week, a clash is playing out in Colorado Springs, where conservative leaders are restricting the treatment over objections from some of the city's 90,000 veterans, who've become flagbearers for psychedelic therapyopens in a new tab or window to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. Colorado residents voted to legalize the therapeutic use of psilocybin, the chemical compound found in psychedelic mushrooms, in a 2022 ballot measure, launching 2 years of rulemaking before it could be used to treat conditions such as depression and...

WASHINGTON — The federal courts will not refer allegations that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas may have violated ethics laws to the Justice Department, the judiciary’s policymaking body said this week. Thomas has agreed to follow updated requirements on reporting trips and gifts, including clearer guidelines on hospitality from friends, the U.S. Judicial Conference wrote Thursday to Democratic senators who had called for an investigation into undisclosed acceptance of luxury trips. Thomas has previously said he wasn’t required to disclose the many trips he and his wife took that were paid for by wealthy benefactors like Republican megadonor Harlan Crow...

Multiple reports from northern Syria on Thursday indicated the U.S. military is reinforcing its presence in Syrian Kurdistan, or Rojava, potentially building a new base in the city of Kobani.The regional outlet Kurdistan 24 reported on Thursday that “a convoy of 50 trucks carrying Bremer walls entered Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)-controlled areas in northeastern Syria (Rojava) on Thursday.” Citing the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a non-governmental organization (NGO), Kurdistan 24 reported that the convoy was headed to the Kurdish city of Kobani, on the Turkish border.“Sources from the observatory indicated that the delivery is part of ongoing efforts...

Can objects be possessed by demons? Can dreamcatchers carry demons? Is there biblical evidence for this? Only people can be demonically possessed. But inanimate objects can be negatively controlled through curses. As Adam Blai, a lay Catholic expert on religious demonology and exorcism, writes: A curse is simply a demon sent to do some harm. . . . Cursed objects are objects that have had the opposite of a blessing done to them. Instead of grace being attached to an object to make it holy, a demon has been attached to the object to make it associated with evil (Hauntings,...

The affable traditional conservative from South Dakota is the first new chief of the Senate G.O.P. in nearly two decades. He will confront a challenge managing President-elect Donald J. Trump’s expectations. John Thune won election to the Senate in 2004 by conquering Senator Tom Daschle, the powerful Democratic majority leader, only to quickly face a mortal threat to his political future when a major Air Force base in his state was threatened with closure. He beat back the effort and saved Ellsworth Air Force Base, a financial engine in his largely rural state, keeping his job and learning valuable lessons...

by Edward Madziwa, Program Assistant for the Security and Technology Program at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research The loss of life is an undeniable and tragic reality affecting all parties to armed conflicts raging across the world. Thousands of unidentified victims are left in a state of decomposition. In some instances, corpses are mutilated, desecrated, abandoned without any funeral rites, or not afforded decent burials. International humanitarian law (IHL) seeks to limit the means and methods of warfare and to protect war victims. Parties to armed conflicts are bound to collect and search for the dead, to prevent...

Many Democrats remain comically befuddled over how they lost two of the past three presidential elections to Donald Trump. As one might expect from those obsessed with gender and identify politics, they now engage in projection, chalking up the defeats to a sexist and misogynist electorate. “Will the U.S. ever be ready for a female president?” trumpeted a recent New York Times headline. The story quotes Bill Clinton, whose wife, Hillary, lost the 2016 election to Mr. Trump. “Ideologically, the people who are most likely to be against women are most likely to be conservative,” he said. Republicans should rejoice...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrat Adam Schiff stood on the Senate floor almost five years ago as a House impeachment manager and made a passionate case that Donald Trump should be removed from office for abusing the power of the presidency. “If right doesn’t matter, we’re lost,” he told the senators, his voice cracking at one point.The Republican-led Senate wasn’t convinced, and senators voted to acquit Trump on the Democratic-led impeachment charges over his dealings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump would survive a second impeachment a year later after his supporters stormed the Capitol and tried to overturn his defeat.Now...

A man who was shot dead last month as authorities attempted to serve him an indictment on federal gun charges has been identified as the killer of an 18-year-old Ohio woman in a case that had gone unsolved for 43 years, police announced Monday. Mansfield Police Chief Jason Bammann said the cold case of Debra Lee Miller, a local waitress beaten to death with an oven grate in her apartment on April 29, 1981, was reopened in 2021 to account for advances in DNA technology and forensic investigative techniques. “They examined the case as if it had happened yesterday, through...

Speaker-designate Mike Johnson, R-La., was re-elected to lead the House of Representatives on Friday. The Louisiana Republican won along party lines during the first round of voting, a stark contrast to his predecessor’s drawn-out, 15-round battle in 2023. It comes despite saber-rattling by some conservatives who threatened to withhold support from Johnson in protest of his handling of government funding and several other issues in the 118th Congress.