Free Republic

Multiple refineries in California have recently declared their intentions to shutter operations, leaving the Golden State uncertain about future fuel supplies and impacts on prices at the pump. Valero Energy Corp. was the latest to make such an announcement, alerting the California Energy Commission (CEC) last month that it would “idle, restructure or cease refining operations” at its Benicia refinery by the end of April 2026. The Valero notice followed similar news at Phillips 66 in October, when that company said it would be ceasing operations at its Los Angeles-area refinery in the fourth quarter of 2025. Firms are attributing...

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, said on Saturday that President Donald Trump's assertion that the U.S. had done more than any other country to win World War Two was "pretentious nonsense". Trump posted on social network Truth Social late on Thursday that "nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance" in both world wars, and that "we did more than any other country, by far, in producing a victorious result in World War II." -snip- "Trump recently announced that the U.S. made the biggest contribution to victory in World War Two and...

President Trump unveiled his 2026 budget outline Friday, proposing cuts totaling $163 billion to education, housing, medical research, foreign aid funding, energy and environmental protection — while seeking to boost defense spending to more than $1 trillion. The $163 billion cut in non-defense discretionary spending is a 22.6% reduction from current levels, ... The proposed cuts to government funding are in line with Trump’s greater mission to cut bureaucracy via the Department of Government Efficiency — and DOGE ... The defense budget calls for the elimination of “woke” and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs; a down-payment on a “Golden...

The Spanish blackout made us all aware of how unstable the grid can get when renewables are in the driver’s seat, but one should also not forget that they don’t come cheaply. The idea of getting free energy from wind and solar is inaccurate. Man must build machines to extract energy from nature and those machines, windmills and solar panels, are expensive. ... renewables are unreliable and expensive

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has launched a new cash incentive program aimed at recruiting and retaining air traffic controllers, he announced Thursday. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will give $5,000 bonuses to all academy graduates and new hires that complete initial qualification training. Academy graduates assigned to 13 facilities that have faced additional hiring struggles will get $10,000. Additionally, certified professional controllers who are younger than 56 and opt not to retire when eligible will receive bonuses equal to 20 percent of their basic pay for each year they continue to work. The new incentives are being offered for a...

MSNBC host and former White House press secretary Jen Psaki insisted in a new interview that she never saw signs that former President Joe Biden had declined while she worked for him. "I never saw that person —not a single time, and I was in the Oval Office every day, that was on that debate stage," Psaki said on the "Mixed Signals" podcast about Biden's performance during the June 2024 presidential debate which raised alarms about his fitness to serve another term. He dropped out the following month and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him as the Democratic...

The number of assisted deaths could be more than 4,000 in the 10th year after the law comes into force in England and Wales if MPs vote for it, a review of the policy says. The estimate forms part of the official impact assessment, external, carried out by civil servants to inform MPs as they debate whether to allow assisted dying. It said initially the numbers coming forward would be low, but are expected to grow over time. The impact assessment says that the total number of assisted deaths is estimated to range from between 164 and 787 in the...

“‘For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?’” (Matthew 5:46–47). These words of Jesus were perhaps the most devastating and offensive ones the religious leaders had ever heard. The Lord bluntly stripped away their hypocrisy to reveal that their love was nothing more than the ordinary self-centered love common among the despised tax collectors and Gentiles. Tax collectors were dishonest, traitorous extortioners; Gentiles were considered...

Served from 1980 -82 as a M.P (549th M.P. (S.T.R.A.F ) (ATL-side) & (1982) 534 th M.P.

The Left is pissed and sorry that Trump survived the shooting in Butler, PA. Because of that, he came out of it stronger and the people love him more. They created a monster and don't know how to counter him. They are cursing themselves and they caused the problem!

Ten years ago, in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, Islamic terrorists opened fire on a free speech event because Americans dared to draw Muhammad. That moment — May 3, 2015 — should have been a turning point in the West’s battle against Islamic supremacy. Instead, it was quickly buried by media silence, political cowardice, and a deepening national amnesia of Islamic terror in America. Just four months earlier, in January 2015, the staff of Charlie Hebdo in Paris were massacred by Islamic terrorists for publishing cartoons of Muhammad. Incredibly, within weeks of that slaughter, an Islamic group held a “Stand...

'I used to support you,' protester shouted at the New York Democrat. 'You're a war criminal! War criminal! War Criminal!'A hysterical protester yelling about the "genocide" in Gaza interrupted a district town hall event being held by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., shortly after it began on Friday night. As Ocasio-Cortez first began speaking, she pulled up a PowerPoint presentation for the night's event. She was then interrupted before even getting through her first slide discussing the Trump administration's budget cuts, including alleged cuts to local healthcare systems. "I am a healthcare worker and I want to know what you're doing...

Move over, Jean Valjean — Luigi Mangione will soon be immortalized on a San Francisco stage in a sickening musical comedy glorifying the alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO gunman. “Luigi the Musical,” slated to debut at the Taylor Street Theater on June 13, promises a “bold, campy and unafraid” take on the life and times of the man accused of perpetrating an assassination that left two young children without a father. Opening night is already sold out on the official website, which uses the tagline “A story of love, murder and hash browns,” a reference to Mangione scarfing down the McDonald’s menu...

The mid-1990s feel like a different world. In the 30 years since, the global economy has shifted dramatically, across sectors and markets.But headline stats like GDP, GDP per capita, or growth rates don’t always reflect what’s happening at the individual level.So, has life actually improved over time?To help answer that, Visual Capitalist's Pallavi Rao visualizes figures from Our World in Data to show how daily median incomes have changed in 20 of the world’s largest economies from 1994 to 2024.All figures are in PPP-adjusted International dollars per person. They are also adjusted for inflation, taxes, and benefits.ℹ️ PPP-adjusted International dollars...

Reality is absolutely downstream from fiction. Did the creators of South Park predict the future in their 1999 comedy film? I think we’re all suddenly realizing that prognostication is easy – Simply imagine the most absurd scenario possible and eventually it’s going to come true because we’re living in clown world.A war between Canada and the US opening up a portal to hell might be a bit of a stretch, but recent events lead me to believe that there are very real ingredients coming together that could trigger an active conflict with our neighbors to the north. Furthermore, these factors...

The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency has referred 57 cases of potential voter fraud to the DOJ, an official told NBC News.“Voter Rights” activists, like the leftists at the Brennan Center Justice, and their pals in the accomplice media have spent a lot of time and credibility telling us that foreign nationals never vote in U.S. elections. If they do, it’s extremely rare. A myth. But we’ve seen a lot of “extremely rare” pop up in recent years on the battleground of election integrity. “It amounts to a vanishingly rare phenomenon that is not going to impact the outcome...

‘No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the Government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize.’On Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order defunding NPR and PBS — two taxpayer-subsidized “news” organizations that have consistently published propaganda.The order proclaims that “Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.”“At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage,” the...

If we learned anything from mainland China's slow-motion take over of Hong Kong, it should be that China has option other than rolling tanks in the streets. In Hong Kong it used legal measures and police action to stop protests and jail activists. Then it threatened everyone into silence and shut down independent news outlets, raiding their offices and jailing publishers. And the bottom line is that freedom from the mainland is now just a memory. Hong Kong's oldest pro-democracy party shut down this month because talk about democracy leads to prison these days.The Democratic Party, one of the leading...

Second only to President Donald Trump's historic first 100 days of his second term, from a newsworthy perspective, has been the voracity with which Democrat-nominated federal district judges have attempted — unconstitutionally so — to obstruct this president at every politically driven opportunity.On Thursday, Trump took the first step of his second term to right the federal district court system.In a post on Truth Social, Trump announced his nomination of Whitney Hermandorfer to serve as a judge on the Cincinnati-based Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which hears cases from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. I am pleased to...

A new musical is coming to San Francisco, one singing the highs and lows of an imagined prison life scenario of accused CEO-killer, Luigi Mangione.