Free Republic

The Senate will vote Monday on confirming President Trump's nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, to the Supreme Court. "With regard to the Supreme Court justice ... we'll be voting to confirm justice-to-be Barrett next Monday," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said during a weekly press conference, confirming the timing of a final vote on her nomination. ... Top GOP senators and aides had previously indicated to The Hill that they were likely to set up the final vote for Monday, allowing vulnerable GOP senators to spend the final week before the election back on the campaign trail. To set...

New Mandatory Bars Prevent Convicted Felons, Drunk Drivers, Gang Members, and Other Criminal Aliens from Receiving Asylum Today, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security announced the publication of a Final Rule amending their respective regulations to prevent certain categories of criminal aliens from obtaining asylum in the United States. The rule takes effect 30 days after publication of the Final Rule in the Federal Register, which is scheduled to occur on Wednesday, Oct. 21. Asylum is a discretionary immigration benefit that generally can be sought by eligible aliens who are physically present or arriving in the...

After months of seeing its shelves repeatedly cleaned out by brazen shoplifters, the Walgreens at Van Ness and Eddy in San Francisco is getting ready to close. “The last day is Nov. 11,” Walgreens spokesman Phil Caruso said. The drugstore, which serves many older people who live in the Opera Plaza area, is the seventh Walgreens to close in the city since 2019. “All of us knew it was coming. Whenever we go in there, they always have problems with shoplifters, ” said longtime customer Sebastian Luke, who lives a block away and is a frequent customer who has been...

Halloween came early to the nation’s capital. Thousands of angry women marched in Washington, D.C. on Saturday to protest Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett and President Trump. Some women wore their pink pussy hats and some wore long red capes and white bonnets. Since this march was mostly a protest against ACB, many women wore black robes with white lace collars as Ruth Bader Ginsburg did. Sounds like a super spreader event, right? No, no. The mitigation measures to battle the coronavirus pandemic only apply to some events and activities, not large protests in American cities. The protesters are...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - California’s chief elections official on Monday ordered Republicans to remove unofficial ballot drop boxes from churches, gun shops and other locations and Attorney General Xavier Becerra warned those behind the “vote tampering” could face prosecution. Republican refused, saying they are taking advantage of California’s liberal ballot collection law that allows anyone to collect ballots from voters and deliver them to county election offices. “As of right now, we’re going to continue our ballot harvesting program,” California Republican Party spokesman Hector Barajas said. Due to the coronavirus and concerns about health safety at polling places, California for...

Cal Cunningham, the Democratic candidate for Senate in North Carolina, has canceled all public appearances since being caught engaging in at least one extramarital affair with a married woman, but there was something he wanted to get off his chest. In a bizarre video presumably recorded in a "windowless basement," Cunningham lashed out at his Republican opponent, Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C). In his best approximation of Christian Bale's Batman voice, Cunningham suggested Tillis was to blame for his sex scandal. "Because Thom Tillis knows that he is losing, and knows that we are winning, he has now resorted to...

Presidential debate moderator Steve Scully claimed through a statement by C-SPAN Friday that he believed his Twitter account was "hacked" after a tweet showing him reaching out to outspoken Trump foe Anthony Scaramucci went viral Thursday night. However, resurfaced tweets show that Scully has a history of blaming hackers for his social media posts. The "Washington Journal" host appeared to reach out to the former White House communications director, who has become a vocal supporter of Joe Biden, in the now-deleted tweet that read: "@Scaramucci should I respond to trump." Both the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) and C-SPAN have...

Public health authorities in California have unveiled a “Blueprint for a Safer Economy” that requires counties to meet new “health equity metrics” in order to emerge from the current Covid-19 lockdowns. It’s a broad experiment in social justice. Under the plan, counties must reduce “disparities in levels of transmission” in “low-income, Black, Latino, [and] Pacific Islander” communities before they can move forward with reopening. In effect, local businesses must remain closed until local bureaucrats are satisfied that ill-defined racial quotas have been met. The underlying assumption of the blueprint is that race-based coronavirus disparities are the result of “systemic racism,”...

A mayoral candidate in Carrollton has been arrested and charged with voter fraud. Denton County Sheriffs have Zul Mirza Mohamed in custody and have charged him with 109 felonies related to voter fraud. The investigation began September 23 when Sheriff’s were notified by the Denton County Elections Office of possible fraudulent activity related to absentee ballot applications. Officials say absentee ballots had been requested to be sent to a PO Box in Lewisville, that was supposed to belong to a nursing home facility. When investigators made contact with the Carrollton residents whose ballots had been requested they learned that none...

You know, I want to feel bad for the fact that Joe Biden’s evil wife keeps letting him embarrass himself in public, but then I remember that he wasn’t the greatest guy before becoming the medicated, senile shell of a human being that is currently running for president. Harsh? Maybe. Inaccurate? Not at all. The charade is becoming more difficult for Team Harris-Biden to keep up these days. When Grandpa Gropes isn’t pathetically slurring his way through yet another teleprompter fail, his handlers have him on a short leash and are yanking him out of the spotlight well before lunchtime...

The Black Lives Matter movement trades on Americans’ ignorance about the demographics of criminal offending. As long as that ignorance prevails, BLM’s anti-cop narrative will continue destroying the institutions of law and order. Activists and their media enablers present racial disparities in police activity—be it stops, arrests, or officer use of force—as prima facie evidence of police bias. They generate those racial disparities by comparing policing data to population ratios. In New York City, for example, a little over 50% of all pedestrian stops conducted by the New York Police Department have a black subject. But blacks are slightly less...

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle want Joe Biden to become the next President of the United States. They haven't actually said that in so many words. But it's very obvious from a video message they released last night via Time magazine which way they want the result of the election to go and it's not in Donald Trump's direction. Meghan, a US citizen and well-known Trump-hater (she's called him 'divisive' and a 'misogynist' and once told me herself how much she loathed him) said: 'We're just six weeks out from Election Day and today is National Voter Registration Day. Every...

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) made a stunning reversal of her position on filling the vacancy left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. According to a report from Alaska Public Media, Murkowski now can’t rule out voting to confirm a nominee before the election. “I know everybody wants to ask the question, ‘will you confirm the nominee?’” she said. “We don’t have a nominee yet. You and I don’t know who that is. And so I can’t confirm whether or not I can confirm a nominee when I don’t know who the nominee is.”

For some time, there has been a poorly-kept secret in Washington: as soon as the Democrats take power, they will make four power moves. To date, most prudent Democrats have refused to discuss these four moves aloud. But now with Justice Ginsburg's death, the cat is out of the bag. Jeffrey Toobin lays out the roadmap in the New Yorker: ... The first is the abolition of the filibuster, which should have happened decades ago. Even in the minority, McConnell will do everything he can to thwart Biden, and the filibuster will be the tool. This antidemocratic relic should be...

Weeks after White House officials called for a halt to training sessions for federal employees that deal with “white privilege” and “critical race theory,” some government staffers are starting to see the memo’s effects, MarketWatch has learned. Last week, President Donald Trump told the Office of Management and Budget to crack down on federal agencies’ anti-racism training sessions, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda.” Employees in the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division were supposed to hear about “unconscious bias” at a program scheduled for this week — but that has now been postponed pending further guidance. “It does not appear that...

Three people are now facing criminal charges for harassing diners at a restaurant in Pittsburgh during a Black Lives Matter protest over Labor Day weekend. Misdemeanor charges were filed against Monique Craft, 35, Kenneth McDowell, 33, and Shawn Green, 24, on Monday. It's unclear whether they've been taken into custody. A viral video showed the trio and other protesters screaming 'f*** the white people' and yelling other obscenities at diners outside the Sienna Mercato restaurant on Penn Avenue on September 5. Craft was dubbed the 'beer bandit' after she was seen swiping a drink from an elderly white couple and...

Yesterday, Jeffrey Goldberg, the infamous editor of The Atlantic, whose latest fake news article one week ago alleged that President Trump had cruelly disparaged members of the U.S. military, sent an email announcing the lineup of speakers for this year's annual Atlantic Festival of esteemed progressive thought leaders. The two top highlighted speakers at the event, which this year will be streamed virtually online and free to access, are Hillary Clinton and Dr. Anthony Fauci. Also on the bill are Nancy Pelosi; Stacey Abrams; Bill Gates; and the Marxist co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Alicia Garza. Another speaker is Chesa...

Link only because Bloomberg.

Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts (R) announced Wednesday that the state was moving to phase four of reopening, ending almost all statewide pandemic restrictions Sept. 14. "We are loosening the restrictions further on Sept. 14," Ricketts (R) said at a news conference Wednesday, The Associated Press reported. The governor announced slimmed-down pandemic measures for the state which include limiting the size of large indoor gatherings such as concert venues, theaters and meeting halls. However, all other state-imposed mandates will be voluntary, according to the wire service. The decision to pare down restrictions was made based on the capacity of Nebraska medical...

For months, the city of San Francisco health order has prevented local gyms from opening its doors, but some city-owned gyms have been back open for months and are allowing city employees to use them, crushing private gym owners. “It’s shocking, it’s infuriating,” said Daniele Rabkin from Crossfit Golden Gate. She said she has done everything she can to keep her gym on Sutter Street alive. “Even though they’re getting exposed, there are no repercussions, no ramifications? It’s shocking,” she said. Rabkin even reached out to a couple police officers she knows in the neighborhood asking them if they needed...