Free Republic

The Democrat stronghold in New England has weakened after a few lower-ticket 2020 election surprises, including an entire state’s legislature flipping to red and two House speakers being ousted by Republicans. One enormous upset came out of New Hampshire, where both chambers of its legislature and its Executive Council lost their Democrat majorities.

U.S. stock futures jumped on Thursday as investors bet that a Republican held Senate would block any moves by a Joe Biden administration to tighten regulation and raise taxes on corporate America, even as the presidential election remained too close to call. Futures tracking the benchmark S&P 500 surged as much as 2%, while Nasdaq 100 futures gained 2.6% a day after Wall Street’s main indexes closed at more than one-week highs. With President Donald Trump and his Democrat rival Biden still awaiting clarity from the battleground states expected to decide the election, investors were returning to the core setting...

An Alabama neighborhood showed its appreciation for the local police department with a blue light tribute. In a tweet, Huntsville Police shared their thanks for the Thursday display, which included “an entire neighborhood” shining blue lights from homes. Residents called police to alert them to the tribute, which the officers also shared through photos. “West Precinct 3rd Shift Officers received an unusual call last night,” the tweet said. “It wasn’t a call of distress. It’s wasn’t a call of a citizen in need. But it was a call that was definitely unexpected.” “An entire neighborhood showing their support for law...

My "friend" needs to be able to continuously paint a continuous line, on pavement. This line will be about 8 inches wide and about three hundred feet long. Neatness is NOT a factor. Time is the most important criteria. A couple of questions? About how much blue paint will this require? Does anyone know of or have suggestions on how to paint this line quickly, in less than 10 minutes? Could the paint be practically applied from the bed of a truck? Do inexpensive, easy to use, "line painting" machines exist? Could two or three teams of two people with...

Robert "Skippy" Carroll was terminated from his employment. He was fired for a Facebook post- Union Protected speech when he was acting in his role as FOP Vice President- letting his members know about a local business hating on 2 young police officers who were killed. This was days after the 2020 riots began in early June when progressive activism was frenzied and buildings were burning. Activists caught wind of Vice President Carroll defending murdered police officers and dubbed him racist, threatening and any other buzz word they use for views that differ from theirs. The weak Media Borough Council...

Renée Cross, senior director of the Hobby School of Public Affairs, said Democrats overreached in painting the Fort Bend district as a bellwether and cast doubt on whether the result serves as an accurate forecast of the November 2020 results. “I think the Democrats to a certain extent shot themselves in the foot with that because the expectations were so high,” she said. “If you look at voting history for the last 10 years, to think they were just going to flip this seat in a special election in January after we had so many elections the last few months,...

GERMANTOWN, Md. - A county executive in Maryland has banned a police station from displaying a wooden “thin blue line” flag that was a gift from a local resident. "The flag provides a symbol of support to some but it is a symbol of dismissiveness to others,” Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich said in a note. “Because it is divisive, the flag will not be posted at the 5th District nor in any public space within the Police Department."

Despite efforts to draw distinctions between each other, the leading 2020 Democrat presidential primary candidates are unified to bring more immigration, and thus more labor market competition for American workers, to the United States if elected. Though polling among all U.S. voters, and particularly with swing voters, finds campaigning for immigration, illegal and legal, is the most unpopular policy position, leading candidates like former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have gone above and beyond past Democrat candidates in their vows to drive a large migration to the country.That increase in immigration would likely have significant consequences...

Texas Republicans are sounding the alarm as Democratic presidential candidates get ready for their debate next week in Houston, warning that the Lone Star State could become more purple if the party doesn’t treat it as a 2020 battleground. Most in the GOP are confident President Trump will win Texas and its 38 electoral votes next year, and they think Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn will turn aside his Democratic challenger. But they are worried they will lose more House seats a cycle after Democrats clawed back two districts as they retook their majority. Five House Republicans have retired, including...

For almost 35 years, Tarrant County has been the most reliably red, urban county in Texas. Then, on Election Day, Democrat Beto O'Rourke beat Republican incumbent Ted Cruz in the county.

Blue asteroids are rare, and blue comets are almost unheard of. An international team led by Teddy Kareta, a graduate student at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, investigated (3200) Phaethon, a bizarre asteroid that sometimes behaves like a comet, and found it even more enigmatic than previously thought. Phaethon sets itself apart for two reasons: it appears to be one of the "bluest" of similarly colored asteroids or comets in the solar system; and its orbit takes it so close to the Sun that its surface heats up to about 800 degrees Celsius (1,500 degrees Fahrenheit), hot...

Republicans in the United States Senate are poised to hold their razor-thin majority, and possibly add to it by a few seats, boosted by the partisan spat over newly minted Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Even as the Democratic Party is on the cusp of surfing a tide of suburban discontent with President Trump and taking power in the House of Representatives, a decidedly favorable map of battlegrounds that runs right through the heart of some of the most conservative states in America will protect Republican control of the Senate. Senators serve six-year terms, and only about one third of...

We thought our politics couldn’t get any crazier, but the political divide and the breakdown in trust became even deeper after the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. When Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, we were permitted to disagree about who was telling the truth. No longer. This time you’re “complicit with evil” if you don’t believe his accusers and oppose Kavanaugh, said Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ). Moral outrage has become the basic currency of political debate, with Hillary Clinton telling her supporters, “You cannot be civil,” and former Attorney General Eric Holder advising, “When they go low, we kick...

The White House Blue Room is getting a new old look. Melania Trump has announced the restoration of a collection of furniture made for the White House by Frenchman Pierre-Antoine Bellange. The first lady says a team of curators has spent more than a decade restoring the furniture. The Committee for the Preservation of the White House approved the restoration project. President James Monroe bought the Bellange suite in 1817. Almost all of it had been auctioned off in 1859....

Forty-nine times the Bible mentions a perfect, pure blue, a color so magnificent and transcendent that it was all but impossible to describe. Yet, for most of the last 2,000 years, nobody has known exactly what “biblical blue” — called tekhelet in Hebrew — actually looked like or how it could be re-created. At the time of the Second Temple, which towered above Jerusalem until it was destroyed by the Romans, a blue dye of the same name was used to color the fabric used in the clothing of the high priests. Jewish men are still commanded to use a...

Chapel Hill Police Chief Chris Blue instructed Chapel Hill officers to stand down as protesters toppled the Confederate monument Silent Sam, his texts and emails show, according to review of the documents obtained by WRAL News. WRAL news obtained 400 pages of emails and texts sent to and from the Police Chief on Aug. 20-21, the article says. These were sent before, during and after the demonstration. At 9 p.m., Blue texted, "Let's give them lots of space," and then, "Yes but do not engage w Crowd at statue. Stay way out."

Something funny is happening with the much-hyped “blue wave” on the way to the fall midterms. That wave of Democratic candidates that is supposed to sweep away the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives? The one that the press and pundits have been predicting for months? One would almost think the steady narrative of a blue wave is an attempt at psychological warfare by the mainstream media and the Left in hopes of depressing Republican donors and voters into thinking the outcome is a foregone conclusion. But that narrative is completely detached from reality. The numbers now tell...

...Lundgren will serve a 15-month prison sentence and will be forced to pay a $50,000 fine. Lundgren had taken to downloading free software that Microsoft offers to Windows users commonly called restore disks... Many states are actively pushing for legislation that guarantees consumers the right to repair their own gadgets, California has legislation in process to force device makers to provide users and third parties with items needed to repair devices...

"Capitalism in space: In order to maintain its goal of launching its orbital New Glenn rocket by 2020, Blue Origin has changed the engine it will use in the rocket’s second stage from a version of its main BE-4 engine to new version of their already developed BE-3 engine, used in their reusable New Shepard suborbital spacecraft...This quiet change, which the company made with no fanfare, carries with it some significant information as well as important ramifications."

The current GOP tax plan sitting in front of Congress has problems. If a true-blue lifelong conservative tax cut evangelist like me is not sold 110 percent, something is very wrong. I’m a Ronald Reagan-Barry Goldwater-Jack Kemp conservative. I’ve been preaching tax cuts since third grade. Until now, I’ve never in my life met a tax cut I didn’t support! My goals are simple- more power and money to the people that earned it (taxpayers and business owners) and less money for the greedy, wasteful government. That’s why it pains me to say the current GOP tax plan is not...