Free Republic

The trend that we are seeing is a very positive one. People are seeking tradition...It's a learning lesson for a lot of pastors I talk to. If you are not creating an environment where the people that come to your church can find holiness and meaning and be elevated, you're not doing your job. There was a time in the nineties where people were hungry for a personal encounter with God, and Evangelicalism I think offers that better than some Catholicism circles. Maybe that's to be debated, but times change and needs an appetites change. And I could tell you...

Roughly 8% of the more than 3,000 people enrolled in the often-criticized electronic monitoring system in Cook County are missing, according to the chief judge. In other words: 243 people are missing. “Transparency is not optional — it is a core obligation of this office,” Chief Judge Charles Beach II said in a statement. “The public has a right to know how this program operates, what the data shows and what we are doing every day to make it stronger." Cook County State's Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke, a frequent critic of electronic monitoring, issued a statement Wednesday saying she welcomes...

On Tuesday, I stood before the Fresno County Board of Supervisors and spoke my truth as a trans woman, a taxpayer, a daughter, a sister, a wife and a member of this community. I watched as three supervisors voted to erase the celebration and visibility of people like me. In a 3-2 decision, Supervisors Garry Bredefeld, Nathan Magsig and Buddy Mendes voted to bar the Fresno County Public Library from participating in the Fresno Rainbow Pride Parade and Festival, as well as from celebrating Pride Month entirely.

The owner of a healthcare software company was convicted of massive Medicare fraud on Thursday, the Department of Justice said, ending what Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called "one of the most egregious fraud schemes in Florida history." HealthSplash owner and CEO Brett Blackman, 42, and co-conspirators "aggressively targeted hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries to get them to accept medically unnecessary" products including orthotic braces, according to a DOJ news release. Blackman and his co-conspirators used Power Mobility Doctor Rx, LLC, or DMERx, a platform acquired by HealthSplash in 2017, to coordinate illegal kickbacks with telemedicine doctors and pharmacies...

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito had some choice words for their Supreme Court colleagues on Thursday over their “remarkable” decision “undermin[ing]” the court’s historic Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The stinging rebukes came in an order the high court handed down to temporarily pause an appellate court ruling that halted a Biden-era FDA rule allowing the mailing of mifepristone to women without an in-person doctor visit. In agreeing to halt the policy, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the FDA’s “progressive relaxation of mifepristone’s guardrails likely lacked a basis in data and scientific literature,” and noted...

Stephen Colbert's 11-year run as host of "The Late Show" will end on May 21. That its untimely end was announced mere weeks before the Trump-loyalist Ellison family finalized their CBS-Paramount takeover led many to believe it was a move to appease Trump, while the network claimed Colbert's late-night program was losing around $40 million a year - a figure that led friendly rival Jimmy Kimmel to quip, "Not a snowball's chance in hell that's accurate." Snip... Well, whatever the reason, Colbert is out in a week. And so, for his final weeks, the funnyman has welcomed an assortment of...

Former Vice President Kamala was dragged online for her laundry list of progressive “bad ideas” she wants to bring to the table at what she’s dubbed a “No Bad Idea Brainstorm” for Democrats. Harris said during a Wednesday night livestream on the “Win with Black Women” podcast that Democrats need “an expanded playbook” and need to consider radical positions ahead of the 2026 Midterm elections — including abolishing the Electoral College and packing the Supreme Court. “Look, this is a moment where there are no bad ideas, a no bad idea brainstorm is what I’d like to call it,” Harris...

Jewish groups in the Bay Area of California are protesting a judge’s removal of a local Jewish district attorney from a case involving pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protesters accused of vandalizing the office of Stanford University’s president. The district attorney, Jeff Rosen, was disqualified from retrying a felony case against five protesters after the judge ruled that Rosen had crossed a legal line when suggesting in a campaign message that the protest was antisemitic. “Rosen is allowed to take a strong stance against crime in the community, against antisemitism. But caution and care need to be taken when utilizing active litigation in...

Bodycam footage has done something the media absolutely never wanted to happen. It’s shown the public what cops are really dealing with. Violent, armed suspects.

“When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, and on that score, he was 100% correct,” [ snip ] Trump did not point to a specific comment made by Xi. But the post comes after his Chinese counterpart, in opening remarks at a U.S.-China bilateral meeting, questioned if the two nations could overcome the “Thucydides Trap” — a theory suggesting that when a rising power threatens to displace an established one,...

With Iran militarily decimated and economically squeezed, Trump holds all the cards. But is a deal possible or worthwhile with a fragmented regime? Something has changed in the Iran nuclear negotiation that many analysts are not fully accounting for. The military balance between the United States and Iran has shifted more dramatically than at any point since the Islamic Republic acquired its first centrifuges. Iran’s air defense shield, the infrastructure that for years effectively concealed and protected its nuclear program, has been destroyed. Its proxies are severely degraded. Its economy is under sanctions and naval blockade pressure that is genuinely...

President Donald Trump has defended Chinese nationals purchasing U.S. farmland, while conceding he does not “love it,” in comments that underscore a central tension in his China policy: balancing national or food security concerns with economic realities. [ snip ] On the campaign trail, Trump was already warning against Chinese acquisitions in the U.S. At a Smithton farm event in Pennsylvania in September 2024, he said that the U.S. should block Chinese purchases of farmland, adding: “we don’t want you buying our land.”

A Washington-based super PAC that has spent a staggering $3.5 million to support physician Ala Stanford for an open Philadelphia congressional seat pulled its television advertising off the air this week with just days left until the election. That is according to media tracking firm AdImpact, which shows that the “pro-science” political action committee, 314 Action Fund, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a week to air pro-Stanford TV commercials through much of March and April. However, that changed last week. The group has spent virtually nothing on television since May 5, according to AdImpact, and has not reserved any...

About 1.2 million international students studied in the U.S. last year, of which about 266,000 are Chinese, according to the Institute of International Education's (IIE) data. "I frankly think it's good that people come from other countries and they learn our culture, and many of them want to stay here, I think it's good," Trump said in the interview which aired Thursday evening. "Not everybody agrees with me, and it doesn't sound like a very conservative position and I'm a conservative guy; I'm more of a common sense guy."

I have to admit I was a bit shocked when scrolling through X to discover this post from the CIA. There were pictures, but without explanation. That's CIA Director John Ratcliffe and folks whose faces are blurred out (likely active CIA assets), apparently meeting with Cuban officials. Here he is outside the U.S. Embassy in Cuba. That looks like he's standing with Chief of Mission Mike Hammer. So what was Ratcliffe doing there, and why was the CIA posting about it? Turns out he was there to meet with Raúl Castro's grandson, who is a colonel in the Ministry of...

Given that we spent over a trillion dollars in Iraq and maybe more in Afghanistan, and Joe Biden left $50 billion in equipment in the latter, the idea that you would spend less than $30 billion and have a chance to overthrow the worst government in the world—one that’s caused most of the problems we’ve had in the Middle East—is a bargain, if it works, and I think it will, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.”

The Tennessee Legislature has sent Gov. Bill Lee a narrow but important reform to the state’s deadly-force law, and the fight over SB1847/HB1802 shows how much can change between a bill’s introduction and the final version that reaches a governor’s desk.The Tennessee Legislature passed SB1847 on April 23, the last day of the legislative session. SB1847 includes the legal justification to use deadly force to protect property under certain limited circumstances. In this correspondent’s reading of the law, the legal ability to use deadly force under the bill is not very wide or broad. In the previous law, residents could...

The grass is real in AT&T Stadium, well, at least for the next two months. Renamed “Dallas Stadium” for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the artificial surface at the home of the Dallas Cowboys was replaced with a Kentucky bluegrass and rye blend grown in Colorado. The North Texas FWC Organizing Committee held a press conference on Thursday to showcase the pitch ahead of June 14, when the Netherlands and Japan clash in the first group stage match in Arlington. Here are all the 2026 World Cup matches played in Texas AT&T Stadium general manager Tod Martin speaks with reporters...

The Trump administration has blocked $60 million in fraudulent student loan applications since launching a new risk assessment tool last month, the Daily Caller has learned exclusively. The Department of Education launched a new risk assessment tool on April 26 to screen federal student aid applicants for fraud. Since the tool launched two weeks ago, the administration has found about 300,000 fraudulent applications that amounted to $60 million in student loans, officials told the Caller. “We’re using best in class technology, and we’ve been able to stop a lot of those fraudulent activities that are there,” a senior administration official...

While B.C.’s human rights code notionally protects people on the basis of political belief, this didn’t help a Simon Fraser University political science professor who was denied a job over his lack of support for DEI. Indeed, the tribunal decided in April not to give the matter a hearing. Article content Josh Gordon had taught at the SFU policy school from 2014 to 2021 on various contracts. He applied for a tenure-track position in 2021, but, despite having positive student reviews, a history of teaching in the faculty (contract renewals and pay increases indicated he was performing well) and a...