Free Republic

An estimated 325,000 people from other countries who hold California REAL IDs will have to brave the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) again and replace them because of a software error. The redo effects about 1.5 percent of REAL ID holders in the state, the department explained. The DMV will notify those recipients, all of whom apparently are in the state with legal immigration or visitation status. The Sacramento Bee reported: The agency said the issue related to the software that applies expiration dates to the identification cards. A legacy system from 2006 automatically applied standard expiration dates to people...

A powerful image showing a lone Iranian protester defiantly sitting in front of armed security forces has drawn striking comparisons to the iconic “Tank Man” photo near Tiananmen Square — as fierce anti-regime protests engulf the Middle Eastern nation. Footage obtained and shared by Iranian outlet Iran International shows a brave individual in all black sitting in the middle of the street in Tehran, their head calmly bowed, blocking police on motorbikes from riding down the road. The moving image drew comparisons on social media to the historic photo of defiance taken of an unidentified man standing in front of...

In a bizarre and revealing interview, Lakeshia Mashonda Ruddi Alston, the niqab-wearing Muslim woman running as the sole Republican candidate for North Carolina’s State Senate District 22, delivered a series of rambling and contradictory statements that have only intensified suspicions of her true intentions. Alston, who has a documented history of voting Democrat since at least 2008, insists she’s a genuine Republican representing the party’s future. But her interview responses, filled with odd declarations, have left many questioning whether this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage the GOP primary. Alston, a self-described educator, entrepreneur, and community advocate with no prior...

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) is trying to push back on the notion that California is rife with fraud and financial waste. Now would be a bad time to revisit the state’s precarious budget position heading into the new year. Newsom is on the defensive after the blooming Minnesota fraud scandal has turned eyes toward California. Even Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) is now pushing for a “full independent audit of California’s budget,” getting himself into a back-and-forth feud with Newsom’s obnoxious social media team on X in the process. The talking point from Newsom’s team is that there is no scandal...

https://x.com/wcdispatch/status/2007132913658192116 Walter Curt@wcdispatch🚨DO WE HAVE Political Donations Being "Smurfed" By LLCs? We're about to find out.If proven true, it will be the largest taxpayer-funded money laundering operation in history.Here's how it could work:NGOs take federal money.Those NGOs spin up LLCs they fully own.Those LLCs then donate directly into political campaigns.A 501(c)(3) can’t donate to campaigns, everyone knows that, but a 501(c)(3) can own unlimited LLCs. Those LLCs are “disregarded entities”, tax-exempt, 'mission-aligned', and free to donate.Now scale it.What if you have ten thousand LLCs, EACH donating $2,000?That’s $20 million per candidate without tripping a single alarm.We’ve already identified multiple daycare-linked...

As a new year begins, it is sobering to find that one has outlived national stereotypes that endured for generations. A hundred and thirty-seven years ago, when I was just venturing out into the world, the universally acknowledged joke was some variant of:In Heaven the chefs are French, the lovers are Italian, the engineers are German, the police are British, and it's all run by the Swiss.In Hell the chefs are British, the lovers are Swiss, the engineers French, the police German and it's all run by the Italians.How we all laughed!Of course, times change. I was trying to work...

Two men were killed and another was injured in a New Year’s Day shooting in Philadelphia. The incident occurred at about 11:13 a.m. Thursday along the 7100 block of Oakland Street. Philadelphia police told NBC10 that one man was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead at 11:55 a.m. Another was taken to a hospital by a private vehicle but was pronounced dead at 11:52 a.m. A third man is currently hospitalized but his condition is unknown at this time. According to 6ABC, the shooting started as the result of an argument. All of the parties involved knew...

🚨HOLY CRAP🚨 My jaw is on the floor… Aimee Bock, the ringleader of the Feeding Our Future COVID fraud scheme, is listed as the contact for at least FORTY SEVEN taxpayer-funded "child cares" in Minnesota, according to an official state database. These locations must be investigated for potential further fraud @TheJusticeDept

A top blue-state governor slammed conservatives for inflicting "deep damage" on the Somali–American community, while the state’s top prosecutor warned of potential charges after citizen journalists filmed encounters with alleged Minneapolis-like day care addresses and streamed them online. Citizen journalists have raised public visibility of rampant fraud allegations in Minnesota, with a large part of the allegations stemming from within the Somali community there. Weeks after Gov. Tim Walz came under fire, other bloggers traveled to Seattle and King County, Washington, to visit what they claimed were similarly fraudulent day care sites — drawing Olympia's ire. Former White House Department...

Immigration lawyers are warning that federal agencies are increasingly skeptical when migrants claim to have legitimate marriages with Americans. The policy shift comes after President Donald Trump’s deputies began cracking down on rising rates of marriage-related visa fraud by migrants who pay Americans for temporary marriages. While marrying a U.S. citizen has never been a locked-in guarantee that a migrant would be issued a green card, marriages have previously offered a huge boost to a migrant’s request for legal status. But that may be changing as immigration attorneys are finding that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) are giving such...

"Gaslighting," a term that is often misused, isn’t just a lie, or even a really big lie. It is a specific kind of lie, and a great example of it comes in the form of absurd claims that Minnesota’s new state flag does not resemble the flags of Somalia. The expression comes from the 1938 play "Gaslight" in which a devious husband lowers the lights in the house each evening, while insisting to his wife that she is imagining it, in an attempt to drive her mad and take her money. Regarding the new Minnesota state flag, let's be clear...

I am a visual thinker, and I love maps and charts, so I just put this one together. In my opinion, we are moving from peacetime economic trade war conditions to a quazi-kinetic war for the control of the critical natural resources that are needed by the major powers in our emerging multipolar world.So, just what in the Sam Hill is a quazi-war?Well, it turns out that we already fought one. Read about it at the link.Today, the unipolar period which followed the end of the cold war is coming to an end. It’s being replaced by a tri-polar world...

George Clooney has long been a critic of Donald Trump, but the outspoken liberal has now opened up about their former friendship and how it ended over politics, RadarOnline.com can reveal. Clooney, 64 – who famously penned an op-ed urging ex-President Joe Biden to suspend his reelection campaign in hopes of Vice President Kamala Harris having better odds at defeating Trump, 79, in the 2024 election – noted he once knew the Republican president "very well" and considered him to be a "big goofball." In a recent interview discussing his life and latest film, Jay Kelly, Clooney reflected on his...

Coming off back-to-back blockbusters — “Top Gun: Maverick” and “F1: The Movie” — director Joseph Kosinski can likely make just about any movie he wants. Call it carte blanche. In fact, that’s exactly what he’s doing, as he’s set to helm two projects: a “Miami Vice” reboot at Universal Pictures, written by Dan Gilroy, and, more intriguingly, an untitled UFO film centered on government whistleblowers. Speaking to Deadline’s Pete Hammond, Kosinski discussed his hopes of securing Michael Mann’s involvement in the “Miami Vice” reboot, given that Mann was behind both the original television series and the 2006 feature film starring...

On this day, exactly two and a half centuries ago, an Irish immigrant who had become one of Gen. George Washington’s trusted aides in the Revolutionary Army was the first person to use the name “United States of America.” Stephen Moylan played a key role in the American Revolution, but like his fellow Irish Catholic immigrant and George Washington’s favorite aide, John Fitzgerald, Moylan had been almost lost to history in the modern era. That is, he was overlooked until, at the close of the 20th century, a letter of his from Jan. 2, 1776, came to light that proved...

To some people, earbuds are life. Girl was probably just trying to enjoy some Modern English on the job when one of her earbuds fell out and dropped right into the deep fryer. And then, reportedly, she reached in to try to get it out. Believe it or not, the woman suffered burns to her hand and was treated by an EMS crew and promptly transported to the hospital. I don't know about you, but I'm gonna go ahead and just assume they cleaned out that fryer.

"Festivus" was a holiday created by the writers of Seinfeld for a 1997 Christmas episode, which they jokingly made into an alternative to Christmas for those who hated the commercialization of the holidays. One of the "traditions" created for the fake holiday was the "Airing of Grievances." In 2015, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul used that "tradition" as a springboard to write a report on government waste. Prior to 2015, Paul would post a few comments on Twitter highlighting egregious examples of government waste. But on December 23 of that year, he released a 38-page report. “Our investigations into federal spending...

I suspect that Somalis around the country – especially, but not exclusively, in Minneapolis – wish about now that they had spent more time studying the wit and wisdom of Gertrude Stein. Stein, had she lived in our own day, might well have become commissioner of New York City’s Fire Department. She had the one qualification that Zohran Mamdani seems to deem essential to the post. Sadly, that was not to be. But there is no denying that, on certain matters, Stein was a font of practical wisdom that remains as pertinent today as it was when she was pontificating...

Over 500 women have sued Virginia’s Chesapeake Regional Medical Center, alleging that the health system had "enabled" former physician Javaid Perwaiz, who is currently in prison, to perform unnecessary surgeries on them. Perwaiz was convicted of Medicaid fraud and is serving a 59-year sentence for performing unnecessary surgeries and procedures, including hysterectomies, on women without their consent. In total, 510 plaintiffs are each seeking $10 million. The 204-page complaint alleges that despite "repeated reports and clear evidence" of prior misconduct by Perwaiz, who is from Pakistan and came to the US in the 1980s, at his own OBGYN practice, the...

Harvard is not cheap. Attending as an undergraduate costs $86,926 per year. On top of that, Harvard vacuums up staggering sums of taxpayer money, despite receiving $billions per year in donations and sitting on an endowment of $57 billion. But at least the students are learning something besides LGBTism, Critical Race Theory, and how to hate America. The New York Post reported last spring: The school’s math department is providing a new scaled-back math class for freshmen who are apparently arriving on campus lacking “foundational skills” in high school math basics like geometry and algebra. Why is it that students...