Free Republic

If you follow international politics, you've probably heard that the anti-immigration the Alliance for Deutchland (AfD) won the most votes in Thuringia, Germany and very nearly won in Saxony. Commentators have been suggesting that the Christian Democrats will have to choose between aligning with AfD, or once again throwing power to the leftists. Given that the Christian Democrats are basically establishment Republicans, you can guess the choice they keep making. But the mainstream Left has given the Christian Democrats an interesting problem: they don't have the votes. You see, another socialist party has emerged, and taken enough votes to prevent...

For a while a couple of decades ago, before Spam filters were effective, I had an email address on the front page of a web site. Such a public address attracted tons of spam, and a bizarrely huge portion of that spam was porn. I was baffled as to why our government allowed such horrors to be legal. And no, perverts disguising as libertarians, I don't just mean nudity. There were a few selling points that would come up again and again, and one was promises of seeing incest and/or rape. I sure hope most of this was merely acting,...

In this map, red does NOT mean more Republican than pink, and pink does NOT mean more Republican than gray. Red represents a state that has not been considered a battleground state. Pink represents a state that had been considered a battleground, but polls show Harris uncompetitive, less so than Biden. Gray represents states without Trump vs Harris polling available. The point is that there is no path to 270 without a huge swing towards the Democrats, far larger than Trump's national lead. There are a dearth of Trump-against-Harris polls in every state, but the key point is that Harris...

For all the talk of the Democrats' gloom at looking at the polls, and despite the presumption that surviving in the most bad-ass way possible being shot, triumphing utterly in a debate and having a convention, you might be a little dismayed looking at the polls. There appears to be no bump. There is. No-one should be surprised it's rather small; the days of people learning where a candidate stands and making up their minds only during campaign season is long gone. But while the bump maybe somewhat hidden, Trump has gained a few points in the polls. The only...

I created two maps to show who polls are indicating are winning. This is not so much a prediction as it is an extrapolation from currently available data. What I mean by that is that a lot of states don't have the sort of multiple polls published since the debates. So let's say I have only one poll from Wisconsin, showing Trump up by a few. But I find that credible because several polls have shown Wisconsin close before the debate, and Wisconsin has been moving in a way similar to Michigan, Minnesota, etc., so I feel comfortable showing Wisconsin...

For context, social workers removed a child from the home of his parents, and tried to find a state willing to perform sex changes. NBC reported that "Republican Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte told The National Desk (TND) Monday state officials acted within their legal limitations by removing a child from parents who objected to their transitioning gender identity." From NBC's coverage, Gianforte said, "“Upon hearing recent allegations related to a child welfare case, I asked Lieutenant Governor Kristen Juras – an experienced attorney, constitutional conservative, mother, and grandmother – to review it," Gov. Gianforte said. "Consulting with the director of...

With news that Bill Clinton has been identified as a client of Epstein by one of his trafficking victims, I wanted to check out the old Pizzagate stories. They're all gone? Pizzagate, James Alefantis, Comet Pizza, all of it. Even web archive hits link to comments on news story threads that no longer exist. Did FreeRepublic have to settle a lawsuit? Were the stories pre-emptively removed? I don't mean to force FR to eat any crow, but if the gist of these stories has been found in some official capacity to be libelous or slanderous, I'd like to know so...

The charge to reject Jim Jordan and to give us a liberal Speaker is Don Bacon. He claims is interest is to prevent the House from being hijacked by the minority which got McCarthy ousted. But some of his outraged constituents have found that he is one of 30 congressmen who serve on the board of a Chinese propaganda ministry, the Humpty Dumpty Institute (HDI). HDI claims their goal is to "put the world back together again" but they mean to establish Chinese hegemony. Many top employmees are from the Red Army itself. Who else in on HDI? A few...

I've gotten three e-mails from ActBlue, which handles ALL of the Democrats' campaigns, about the 2024 presidential race. (I'm on their mailing list so I can keep tabs on them professionally.) It's pretty clear which candidate THEY think THEIR people are most afraid of. It doesn't make sense that this is reverse logic, since this is them trying to tease the worst fears of their own donors. And keep in mind, these aren't get-out-the-vote efforts which often are designed to appeal to moderates; these are fundraising ads designed to appeal to the most red-meat, party-loyal types. (These are all from...

China seems to have thrown down HARD on the side of Russia, and from my news feed, our Google overlords seem like they can't contain their glee. For the last few days, I'm routinely getting news of the Russia-Ukraine war from China Daily, the Global Times, the People's Daily, etc. Now, I might have clicked on one of those (Global Times?) not realizing it was Chinese, which may have triggered an increase in the amount of Chi-Comm news sources I'm getting, but there are still three things I find interesting about this: 1) Of course, I can click on conservative...

It never even mentions NINETEEN twenty-one, as opposed to 2021. I think this must've been secretly the Biden campaign's theme song. If you don't recognize it, it's from The Who's rock-opera, "Tommy." It's how Tommy, the "Pinball Wizard" ended up rendered psychologically "blind, deaf and dumb.": Got a feeling '21 is going to be a good year Especially if you and me see it in together So you think '21 is going to be a good year? It could be good for me and her but not for you, no never! I had no reason to be over optimistic but...

Over-expansion has been such a pox on the old Big East/American, the ACC, the Pac-12, the Atlantic 8/10/14/whetever, and even the Big 10/14. Nebraska, Rutgers and Maryland don't help the Big 10, and you can't tell me that the mega ACC and the American make for better competition and better sports than the old ACC, the Big East and Conference USA. Forgetting the effect on the raided conferences, The raiders often end up bloated, diluted conferences with shattered history, and weakened rivalries. So, it's weird that I'm proposing a huge new expansions, but reportedly the Big 12 and Pac 12...

Take as war propaganda if you will that Ukraine claims to breaking through Russian defenses in their costly bid to reclaim Kherson. But even English-language Russian newspapers are acknowledging that gun battles were raging in Kherson city yesterday. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/08/30/fighting-reported-inside-russian-held-city-of-kherson-a78678 Russian politicians blamed the reports of battles in Ukraine on mere "saboteurs and spies" and snipers, with a local Russian-installed official claiming “Everything is under control. They were all killed,” But that seems to contradict the footage of intense fighting and billowing smoke, presented on Russian news. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office reported heavy fighting in “almost the entire territory” of...

Each month, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) asks, "how many people are out of work?" That number GREW by 184,000 last month. It's entirely possible to have a surge in unemployment AND a surge in employment at the same time, because sometimes there is a collapse in the number of people who are "out of the workforce." But that didn't happen. Instead, the government readjusted its estimated size of the workforce up by over 1 million. Since the number of uemployed grew by a much smaller number, the government says, "Whelp, I guess they all got jobs." They...

There seems to be a disturbing, growing sense that Gov Youngkin overreached when he forbade school districts from requiring mask mandates. The problem, advocates are admitting, is that Virginia's legislature passed a law requiring school boards to comply with CDC guidelines. But the law says only that they must do so "to the extent practicable." Here's the thing: The new law did not mandate masks per se. It could have. It could also define what CDC guidelines could be deemed impracticable and what could be deemed mandatory. It did not. And that phrase, "to the extent practicable" is there for...

I hope Gov Youngkin realizes that the race-based education crisis that permeates Virginia Schools goes so very, very far beyond history classes taught according to Critical Race Theory. Meet Dr. Kendria Boyd. She works in Fairfax County Public Schools as assistant principal who oversees special education. It's difficult to allege she was hired to eliminate white teachers from Edison High School, because attributing motives is always uncertain. But her (publicly available) doctoral thesis from the University of Pittsburgh was a survey of a handful of non-Black teachers which it found, horror of horrors, that they didn't realize that they were...

Since neither Drudge nor the U.S. Sun to which he links has any credibility whatsoever, I was wondering what anyone knew of the Sun's/Drudge's claim that Trump flew the Lolita Express. As in: is that even what the pilot actually said? I could easily imagine the pilot ingratiating himself with prosecutors by insinuating Trump, but did he say anything to contradict Trump's earlier claims about Epstein?

The Big 12 expansion was so perfect that it pretty much ended not only the dream of another major FOOTBALL conference, but much of the need as well: The four strongest programs upon which a new major conference could best be founded upon (Cincinnati, Houston, BYU and Central Florida) have all at last found major-conference homes. Most of the best of the remaining teams (Appalachian State, Coastal Carolina, San Antonio, Liberty) are newer universities that are quite possibly merely hot. Only Memphis and Southern Methodist really got left out. (The Mountain West is such a sensible conference, I'm not even...

We need lawyers willing to test these legal theories. I keep reading where Americans are pretty much resigned to the notion that they can't sue for harm done to them by vaccines, because the United States of America itself cannot be sued. But what constitutes the United States of America? Does the F.D.A.? An advisory committee to the F.D.A.? Certainly Pfizer is not the United States of America. If a statement is false, misleading, incomplete, lacking candor, or is in any way intellectually dishonest, and the author knows that such a statement is likely to be used by the United...

Election-day voters choose Youngkin, 59-41. Overall, Youngkin is leading 51-49. Caveat: CNN is NOT publishing the overall winner. Instead, they are breaking up the vote into five regions, and publishing the percent of each region each candidate gets. I am multiplying each candidate's portion of each region, and adding up the five regions. However, CNN rounds the results, so I'm calculating results by doing math on final results which have already been divided into five and THEN rounded. That means rounding can actually amount to an inaccuracy of several percentage points. Please add info to comments as you get it