Free Republic

~The so-called New Hampshire Seacoast, which is actually a New Hampshire Oceancoast, is about as far as you can go from my corner of the state and still be in NH. So I don't get there terribly often. But maybe I'm missing out... (video of whale falling on a boat) Is it a metaphor? Is the whale Trump? And the fishermen the Deep State? Or is the whale the Deep State? And the fishermen Joe and Jill? Or is it just another of Fauci's gain-of-function projects? ~I dissent somewhat from the notion that what befell Joe Biden just five days...

In 2023, a coalition called Idahoans for Open Primaries, made up of mostly leftist groups led by Reclaim Idaho, submitted a proposed ballot initiative to impose ranked choice voting and a top four blanket primary on the state of Idaho. They decided to call it “Open Primaries” despite that moniker having nothing to do with the content of the initiative itself, likely because open primaries polls well with voters while ranked choice voting does not. The Attorney General’s office issued an opinion on the content of the proposed initiative that called out several problems: It violates the single-subject rule, presenting...

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) asserted that cross-sex hormones and surgeries were "medically necessary" so that insurance companies would pay for those procedures, allowing concerns about the treatments' affordability to dictate claims about their effectiveness, newly unsealed court documents show. WPATH's standards of care, which guide clinical practice in the United States, were updated in 2022 to include language about the medical necessity of hormones and surgeries because, as one WPATH official wrote in an email, the group was frustrated with America's "obtuse and unhealthy system of healthcare 'coverage.'" Most private insurance plans and state Medicaid policies...

Greenland police said they apprehended veteran environmental activist and anti-whaling campaigner Paul Watson on an international arrest warrant issued by Japan. Watson, a 73-year-old Canadian-American citizen, is a former head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society whose direct action tactics, including high-seas confrontations with whaling vessels, have drawn support from A-list celebrities and featured in the reality television series “Whale Wars.” He was arrested Sunday when his ship docked in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, a police statement said. He later appeared before a district court to look into a request to detain him pending a decision on his possible extradition to...

MOSCOW, July 23 (Reuters) - Residents of Moscow who sign up to fight in Ukraine will receive a down payment of 1.9 million roubles ($21,777) from the city, taking their annual pay in their first service year to 5.2 million roubles ($59,600), the mayor's office said on Tuesday. Total pay will include the downpayment, wages from the defence ministry, as well as regional and federal handouts, the office of Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in a statement. The new payments will enter into force immediately, it said. The increase means that annual pay for Russian contract soldiers from Moscow will...

Law enforcement officers have uncovered a major embezzlement scheme involving Hr 138 million ($3.3 million) allocated from the state budget for the needs of Ukraine's Armed Forces, the Prosecutor General's Office announced on July 19. The investigation identified 30 suspected officials, including employees of housing and maintenance departments and representatives of commercial structures across Ukraine. According to prosecutors, 15 of these individuals were members of organized criminal groups. The charges include embezzlement and misappropriation of funds related to the procurement of fuel wood, electricity, natural gas, furniture, and construction work on military infrastructure at inflated prices. Some suspects are also...

Archaeologists have uncovered a "monumental" fortification that protected Jerusalem's biblical kings some 3,000 years ago. The "dramatic" archaeological discovery solved a 150-year-old mystery in the City of David. Since 2007, archaeologists have been excavating the area around the Givati Parking Lot, the largest active archaeological excavation in Jerusalem today. The excavation site on the northwestern side of the City of David has unearthed different layers of the city's life from the Middle Ages to ancient times. The most recent archaeological find is the remnants of a moat that split the City of David in half — separating the king's palace...

TYRONE, Pennsylvania — Shirley Hall has always lived in this charming Blair County borough, located a few miles from the big city of Altoona and once the home of booming coal and paper mill industries. She has also been a Catholic all of her life and for most of it a registered Democrat, two attributes she says are, or at least were, a profound part of her identity. She is still a Catholic, faithfully so, but last week when watching former President Donald Trump walk into the convention hall in Milwaukee just two days after being shot, she changed her...

Former GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley slammed an anti-Trump political group Tuesday over its use of her name to back Dem Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. The former South Carolina governor and ex-United Nations ambassador disavowed any connection to the political action committee known as “Haley Voters for Harris,” blasting the group as “deceptive and wrong” for trying to convince her supporters to cast ballots for the veep in November. “Kamala Harris and I are total opposites on every issue,” Haley said in a statement. “Any attempt to use my name to support her or her agenda...

America’s founders believed direct democracy was a slower, more indirect path to tyranny. To prevent this, they avoided establishing an “elective despotism” and designed a system that filtered democracy through representative legislatures. Popular ballot initiatives didn’t exist until the Progressive Era in the early 20th century. Now, progressives use ballot initiatives to turn red states blue, including a proposal to abolish primaries altogether. What is the Republican Party’s response? As Democrats work toward creating a permanent political majority at the national level, their extremism has intensified popular backlash in nearly half the states, making them even redder. Currently, Republicans hold...

Former attorney general Eric Holder, now a senior counsel at the white shoe law firm Covington & Burling, is taking a break from conducting "diversity, equity, and inclusion" audits for major corporations to vet Kamala Harris’s potential running mates. Holder, who charges corporations over $2,000 an hour to assess their racial inclusivity, was enlisted on Monday to vet potential vice presidential nominees including Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, and Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, Reuters reported on Monday. Harris’s selection of Holder to oversee the first major undertaking of her short-lived presidential campaign...

Virginia’s capital city this week voted to give Planned Parenthood a $1.2 million property for use as an abortion clinic. Critics say the city’s gift of the property—which is situated just steps away from a middle school—could violate its own rules. The Richmond City Council on Monday agreed to sell the acre of land, which holds an abandoned public school building, to the Virginia League of Planned Parenthood for just $10. But as the Founding Freedoms Law Center’s Josh Hetzler observed in a July 19 letter to Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney (D.), the city council did not follow the process...

An 80-year-old man living in a small city in Michigan's Upper Peninsula is in the hospital with serious injuries after an ATV driver apparently ran him over as he put up a sign in his front yard to show his support for the candidacy of former President Donald Trump. On Sunday, police received reports of three attacks likely tied to the same suspect in Hancock, Michigan, a small city at the base of the Keweenaw Peninsula, the stretch of land that juts out into Lake Superior in the northwestern area of the state's Upper Peninsula. Two of the incidents involved...

“Prop 1, the Ranked Choice Voting and Open Primaries ballot initiative, qualified to be on the general election ballot this November. If Prop 1 passes, this will be the end of the Idaho Democratic Party. The promise of Prop 1 is to allow Democrats and Independents to have a voice by choosing Republican candidates, but it also means the Republicans will be voting for Democrat candidates. This includes precinct committeemen (PCs) who elect the leadership of the Democratic Party. Imagine a concerted effort by Republicans to run for Democrat party Pc races (or maybe this is already underway). Same play...

Do you know the old joke about a rabbi, a priest, and J.D. Vance walking into a bar? Actually, it’s not a joke. It happened to me. In 2021, I found myself wandering around the Orlando Hilton trying to find a beer to self-medicate after hourslong harangues around the fallen nature of the West, when I bumped into J.D. Vance. I was trying to fit in with the Catholics and Orthodox (of both Christian and Jewish varieties) who populate the National Conservativism Conference (NatCon), which I was covering for Tablet. I had my kippah on—though I was more than a...

The impacts of human-caused climate change are so overwhelming they’re actually messing with time, according to new research. Polar ice melt caused by global warming is changing the speed of Earth’s rotation and increasing the length of each day, in a trend set to accelerate over this century as humans continue to pump out planet-heating pollution, according to the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The changes are small — a matter of milliseconds a day — but in our high-tech, hyperconnected world have an important impact on computing systems we have come to...

Microsoft sparked internal revolt after it fired its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) team, leading the program's leader to slam the company's 'changing business needs.' The tech giant's move was exposed in an email obtained by Business Insider, which appears to show the DEI internal team leader criticizing the fact diversity was 'no longer business critical.' Microsoft joins a number of tech companies in walking back DEI commitments that were made in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, including Google, Meta and Zoom. It is unclear how many employees were laid off, and Microsoft did not...

A federal appeals court upheld a ruling striking down a Minnesota law restricting public handgun permits from those under the age of 21. The U.S. Appeals Court for the 8th Circuit panel of three judges ruled 3-0 in favor of the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus and other pro-gun groups. They found that the law, the Minnesota Citizens’ Personal Protection Act of 2003, barring 18 to 20 year olds from obtaining the permits, violated the 2nd and 14th amendments. “Minnesota has not met its burden to proffer sufficient evidence to rebut the presumption that 18 to 20-year-olds seeking to carry handguns...

The mother of a first grader punished for handing an “innocent” drawing with the phrases “black lives matter” and “any life” to a classmate of color is appealing to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals after a lower court ruling declared first-grade students are too young to be protected by the First Amendment. After a first grade lesson on Martin Luther King Jr. and Black Lives Matter, a student who felt bad for her classmate of color drew a picture for that classmate to allegedly help the classmate feel more included. The picture had the phrase “Black Lives Mater” (sic)...

~Two years ago tomorrow - July 13th 2022 - GB News became the first over-the-airwaves (and, in UK terms, Ofcom-regulated) broadcast network anywhere to air a one-hour special on victims of the Covid vaccines. All that year, I had covered the story in nightly segments with concerned medical professionals and, more importantly, with individual victims triply injured - first by myocarditis or Guillain–Barré syndrome or some other affliction, next by government stonewalling, then by the media's denial of their very existence. But at some point we thought it worth tying it all together for our first ever single-issue show with...