Free Republic

[Catholic Caucus] Why Ambiguity Was the Most Lethal Weapon of Vatican II’s ArchitectsEvery single ambiguity of Vatican II tended to undermine Catholic teaching in precisely the way against which the pre-Vatican II popes emphatically warned. This is not mere coincidence. Moreover, the presence of so much ambiguity fundamentally undermines the Catholic Church’s role as truth-teller. The Church obviously knew how to speak clearly and unambiguously on all of the matters that have become so contentious after the Council.In his 2024 book Flee From Heresy: A Catholic Guide to Ancient and Modern Errors, Bishop Athanasius Schneider provided the following question and...

A federal district court issued a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration’s attempt to block further disbursement of $5 billion set aside by Congress in 2021 for taxpayer-funded electric vehicle charging stations. The majority of the plaintiffs — 16 states plus the District of Columbia — had still not completed a single charger funded by the program over the past four years. The order excluded National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure charger funding for Minnesota, Vermont and the District of Columbia from the order, finding they had not submitted required documentation. The ruling says that because the funding is allocated according to...

This is one of those stories you sort of hear about a couple of weeks before, and maybe forget about unless some little nugget of information comes along that makes you want to dig a little deeper into it. Which is exactly what happened to me this morning.I do recall maybe even commenting on X when the first word about this broke. The big story was the raid on Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha, Nebraska, about two weeks ago. It wasn't so much the raid itself, but the number of illegals that they rounded up, which caught people's attention at...

Hey New Yorkers. I heard you're probably going to get an outright communist as your mayor. Zohran Mamdani sounds like a real peach, and the fact that he won the Democrat Primary and is well on his way to the mayor's office has made many of you fire up your Zillow account and start looking for homes out of state. Read: New York Real Estate Broker Flooded With Calls From Wealthy Residents Looking to FleeI don't blame you, but let me offer you some advice. You're probably going to be tempted to come to Texas because so many companies have...

In the linked MSNBC interview, Mandini emphasizes his commitment to protect the Jewish community from anti-Semitic hate crime attacks.

A new report from the head of the IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate Service shows that the agency has lost more than one-quarter of its workforce since President Donald Trump assumed office.The overhaul is consistent with the administration’s effort to slim down the federal government, but it raises questions about the agency’s readiness for the 2026 tax season.According to the June 25 report, the IRS workforce has dropped from 102,113 employees to 75,702 since January—a roughly 26 percent reduction. The majority of those departures came through voluntary exit programs rolled out by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a Trump administration initiative...

Saying the trust of Republican voters in Wyoming election systems hinge on the outcome of the case, Republican Party leaders at the national level are asking a federal judge to let them help defend the state’s new election proof-of-citizenship law. The Republican National Committee (RNC) filed a motion Thursday to intervene in the ongoing lawsuit the Equality State Policy Center is waging against Secretary of State Chuck Gray and Wyoming’s new law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. The nonprofit group sued May 9 on claims that the new law makes voting cumbersome, is unconstitutional and disadvantages minorities,...

The House has passed a bill to deport illegal aliens who get caught drunk driving. 160 Democrats voted AGAINST it. ... Democrats approval rating 21% how can that be …

Monster and CareerBuilder, once two of the most popular websites for job seekers at the height of the dot-com era, have filed for bankruptcy. The two sites, which merged last year to become one entity named Monster + CareerBuilder, voluntary filed for Chapter 11 Tuesday, announcing that the company is selling various parts of its businesses to several buyers as part of a court-supervised process, a press release said. Monster and CareerBuilder were some of the biggest companies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the former brand so popular that it often bought Super Bowl commercials promoting its...

An American Airlines plane was forced to make an emergency landing after it caught fire mid flight. The jet, destined for Charlotte, North Carolina, had just taken off from Las Vegas' Harry Reid International Airport on Wednesday morning when fire started coming out of one of the engines. Pilots onboard the plane, which was carrying 153 passengers and six crew, had to quickly divert course back to the airport after passengers spotted the flames. Footage has since emerged on social media showing the jet with a trail of black smoke following it, fire can be seen spurting out of the...

@TheoVon Omnibus bills and why they suck w/ @RepThomasMassie

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s current and former top deputies are flinging shocking allegations at each other in court filings, from sexual harassment to falsifying documents and tampering with witnesses during Paxton’s impeachment trial. While both sides go to great lengths to stress that Paxton was not involved in any of the alleged malfeasances, the infighting threatens to become an unwelcome sideshow to Paxton’s bid for U.S. Senate. The latest filings accuse current First Assistant Attorney General Brent Webster of “obstructing justice, committing official oppression, and tampering with witnesses” while Paxton was facing impeachment in 2023. He was eventually acquitted...

Microsoft is saying hello to the Black Screen of Death error message instead.The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) has held strong in Windows for nearly 40 years, but that’s about to change. Microsoft revealed earlier this year that it was overhauling its BSOD error message in Windows 11, and the company has now confirmed that it will soon be known as the Black Screen of Death. The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified black screen.The simplified BSOD looks a lot more like the black screen you’d see during a...

US President Donald Trump has called for Israel to "pardon" Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on trial for alleged corruption, or drop the case altogether. He also claimed in a social media post that the US had saved Israel - alluding to its intervention in Israel's war with Iran - and would now also "save" Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister denies charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, for which he has been on trial since 2020. Netanyahu wrote his own post thanking Trump "for your moving support for me and your tremendous support for Israel". Israel's main opposition leader...

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman vowed on Wednesday to provide “hundreds of millions of dollars” to back any viable challenger against Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral race. Mamdani defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s Democratic primary on Tuesday and will compete against incumbent Mayor Eric Adams (running as an independent this cycle) and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa in the November general election. Ackman, founder and chief executive of hedge fund manager Pershing Square Capital, wrote a lengthy post on X to express his alarm at Mamdani’s victory. “I awoke this morning gravely concerned about...

Former U.S. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, who successfully ran for Congress in 1996 as a crusader for gun control after a mass shooting on a New York commuter train left her husband dead and her son severely wounded, has died. She was 81. News of her death was shared Thursday by several elected officials on her native Long Island and by Jay Jacobs, chair of the New York State Democratic Committee. Details about her death were not immediately available. McCarthy went from political novice to one of the nation’s leading advocates for gun control legislation in the aftermath of the 1993...

The Democrats have stopped bothering to conduct politics; they prefer to engage in max-cringe performance art, and it’s unclear who their audience is. Maybe it’s each other, since this festival of onanism is designed for them to shamefully pleasure themselves while accomplishing nothing. It sure can’t be for the benefit of normal people. For one thing, normal people aren’t on X looking at senators’ social media feeds. For another thing, normal people have better things to do than listen to the tantrums of tedious government functionaries shilling for the dismal side of those proverbial 80/20 issues. It’s hard to get...

[Catholic Caucus] Dr. Kwasniewski and the Honest TruthClose the Workshop: Why the Old Mass Isn’t Broken and the New Mass Can’t Be FixedI imagine very few millennials grew up as traditional Catholics. For most of us, it was a tangled process, or rather conversion, that led from the kitsch and thin Catholicism of our youth—“And if the devil doesn’t like it he can sit on a tack. Ouch!”—to that rich, distant land of Tradition. It took until my late teens before I attended my first traditional Latin Mass. I was sold right from the Asperges. “Eureka!…or whatever that word is...

President Donald Trump is helping congressional Republicans investigate his White House predecessor, Joe Biden, and the Biden administration’s extensive use of the autopen. Nine senior Biden aides have been called to testify before the House Oversight Committee, and the Trump White House decided Tuesday to waive executive privilege for the staffers, allowing committee members to grill them on the autopen use without any legal obstacles. “Evidence that aides to former President Biden concealed information regarding his fitness to exercise the powers of the President—and may have unconstitutionally exercised those powers themselves to aid in their concealment—implicates both Congress’ constitutional and...

Mayor Eric Adams announced his re-election campaign Thursday on the steps of New York City Hall, surrounded by supporters, union leaders and business partners, while protesters called him a "criminal" from across the park. Adams was elected as a Democrat in 2021 but chose to run as an independent this year amid low approval ratings and his since-dropped federal corruption charges. In Adams' absence, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo was widely expected to pick up the Democratic nomination in Tuesday's primary election, but 33-year-old self-proclaimed Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani shocked the political establishment when he declared victory. "This is a city...