Free Republic

WASHINGTON — Airline passengers are experiencing some of the highest security wait times in the 25-year-history of the Transportation Security Administration — with some taking more than four-and-a-half hours to make it through checkpoints, a top official told Congress Wednesday. TSA acting administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill testified to the House Homeland Security Committee that her beleaguered agency is “being forced to consolidate” and “may have to close smaller airports if we do not have enough officers.” “It is a fluid, challenging and unpredictable situation. We understand this is frustrating and disruptive,” she added. “This is unacceptable.” More than 480 Transportation...

Los Angeles homeless people are being put up in brand new apartments in ritzy neighborhoods that cost taxpayers up to $1.5 million per room, the California Post can reveal. At least $2.6 billion of taxpayers cash has been spent buying and renovating hotels, motels and dorms for the huge unhoused population in the city and county since 2020. The properties were all purchased with $1.3 billion from Governor Gavin Newsom’s Homekey initiative, which then renovated with another $1.3 billion in funding from the city and county of Los Angeles. Some of the suites, which are staggered across neighborhoods such as...

No link. Just wondering. Hate to see it disappear.

Elon Musk is demanding a Delaware judge step aside from a high-stakes Tesla case after she allegedly “supported” a LinkedIn post mocking a $2 billion verdict against him in a separate California case. Lawyers for Musk and Tesla filed a motion in Delaware’s Court of Chancery seeking the recusal of Chancellor Kathaleen St. J. McCormick from overseeing consolidated shareholder lawsuits, arguing her conduct “create[s] a perception of bias” that taints the proceedings. The explosive filing centers on activity tied to McCormick’s LinkedIn account following a federal jury verdict in California that found Musk liable over tweets he posted in 2022...

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice just got a leader to oversee its newly created unit to prosecute fraud, and it so happens he’s from California, which has been making headlines for its alleged fraud cases. The US Senate on Tuesday confirmed Colin McDonald, an associate deputy general at the Justice Department, 52 to 47 to be in charge of the DOJ’s new fraud division. The division is part of a broader attempt by the Trump administration to declare “war on fraud” that was exposed in Minnesota and could also appear in California. “Similar schemes are now surfacing within California’s...

A former Penthouse Pet with a taste for Porsche and Mercedes will face a judge after allegedly wooing lonely old men in Beverly Hills and other posh LA neighborhoods — and then burglarizing their homes. Adva Lavie, 27, better known to magazine fans as Mia Ventura, faces more than 11 years in prison for a rash of high-end burglaries that prosecutors say she committed after using online dating sites to pick her targets. Prosecutors allege that from 2023–2025, Lavie trolled dating apps and cultivated relationships to burglarize and steal from wealthy older men and younger women in Westlake Village, West...

With just over two months until the mayoral primary, a majority of Los Angeles voters are fed up with Mayor Karen Bass, according to a new poll described as “downright devastating.” The incumbent still leads the pack, albeit with just 25% of voter support — but roughly 25% of Angelenos are still undecided, according to a Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies/Los Angeles Times poll. Meanwhile, ultra-left City Councilwoman Nithya Raman and reality TV personality Spencer Pratt are gaining on Bass, garnering 17% and 15% of voter support, respectively, the poll shows. More concerning for Bass is her unfavorable rating among...

There lived a certain man in Russia long ago. He was big and strong, in his eyes a flaming glow. You know the rest. Antony Beevor’s telling of the story of Grigory Rasputin will surely be the greatest literary chart hit of the year. That the life and death of one of history’s most extraordinary charlatans is a well-known and often-told morality tale doesn’t matter. Beevor makes no claim to have uncovered any great revelations. Rather, he carefully sifts Okhrana surveillance logs, court diaries, memoirs, the Empress’s correspondence and contemporary press accounts and, with his characteristically sharp eye for telling...

A once-in-a-century crater formed on the moon right under our noses. A routine search of images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera found a fresh crater as wide as two American football fields, planetary scientist Mark Robinson reported March 17 at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Meeting in The Woodlands, Texas. The crater is 225 meters wide and formed in April or May 2024, Robinson said. According to predictions based on other lunar landmarks, a crater that big should form only once in 139 years. The discovery can help highlight the risks impacts pose to future astronauts. One of the...

Deadbeat drivers left nearly $350 million in tolls unpaid in 2025 — more than double the annual total from three years earlier, a new MTA analysis estimated. The staggering figure comes after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority adopted a “cashless” system — with officials now looking turning for the state to pass legislation that would take extreme measures in some cases, like allow the agency to put liens on the property or bank accounts of scofflaws. “Preliminary data for 2025 indicate that upward trend has continued, and interventions adopted in 2024 have not gone far enough to mitigate impacts of persistent...

WASHINGTON — Security lines at the world’s busiest airport stretched for five hours on Sunday as the TSA crisis escalated over the weekend. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy predicted that massive waits at airports across the country are about to “get much worse” due to the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. Lines stretched around the building at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on Monday. And TSA agents told travelers that the wait for some areas at the airport — which handled 106 million travelers last year — was five hours, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Nearly 400 TSA workers...

Alleged Iranian spies with ties to regime bigwigs have been charged with infiltrating Silicon Valley. Last month, a federal grand jury indicted three Iranian software engineers for allegedly stealing trade secrets from tech companies, including Google. Two of the suspects are sisters, Samaneh Ghandali, 41, and Sorvoor Ghandali, 32. They were charged alongside Mohammadjavad Khosravi,40, who is Samaneh’s husband, with allegedly using their employment at unidentified technology companies to “obtain access to confidential and sensitive information,” according to the Department of Justice. The tech workers then allegedly “exfiltrated confidential and sensitive documents, including trade secrets related to processor security and...

A statue of Christopher Columbus was installed on the grounds of the White House early Sunday morning, as part of President Trump’s effort to position the explorer as a hero after monuments to him were removed across the country.The statue is a replica of one that protesters in Baltimore tore down and dumped into the city’s Inner Harbor in the summer of 2020. The statue’s marble pieces were retrieved from the harbor, and a Maryland artist used them to guide the creation of the replica.The new statue was erected sometime overnight on the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office...

“And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.” (Mt 17:1-2) When Jesus took Peter, James, and John to a high mountain to show them this amazing moment where he was transfigured and glowed with such brilliance that he outshined the sun, Peter’s reaction was very earthly. Peter wanted to build tabernacles in places where people could come and worship where this event took place. It’s almost...

Cuba’s communist dictatorship may be living on borrowed time as the island’s power grid crumbles — but the Democratic Socialists of America is making “solidarity” with the regime its issue of the moment. On Friday, the DSA sent 20 of its members there as part of the lefty “Nuestra América Convoy,” aiming to “show the world that Cuba is under siege, but they are not alone.” They relaxed in luxury Havana hotels and rode in air-conditioned buses to meetings with Communist Party officials. A wrecked economy and a grim 67-year history of repression that’s made more than a million Cubans...

A new statue of Christopher Columbus went up on the White House grounds Sunday that was built using pieces from a monument to the Italian explorer that protesters destroyed six years ago. The 13-foot, one-ton replica of a Columbus statue toppled in Baltimore in 2020 – then dumped into the city’s inner harbor – was commissioned by the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations and is part of the White House’s celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. The statue has been placed outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Artists retrieved shards of marble belonging to the wrecked statue from...

(Mar. 20, 2026) — Author’s Note: If parents have existing foreign citizenship, the 14th Amendment ‘born in the United States’ citizenship at birth clause DOES NOT APPLY to their children. WHY? Because the child already has the citizenship of their parents. The 14th Amendment was drafted from the 1866 Civil Rights Act to ‘cure’ stateless children whose parents had no nationality to confer, NOT to create ‘dual’ or ‘hybrid’ citizens which is a Conflict of Law. Modern nationality law began in the 1700’s, changing with the age of exploration, colonization, and the decline of feudal monarchies. The jus feudalis ‘feudal’...

A California sheriff and top Republican candidate for governor seized over 650,000 votes from the state’s November elections this weekend. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco launched an investigation into the state’s November 2025 special election on Proposition 50 after a third-party organization, the Riverside Election Integrity Team, claimed it found roughly 45,000 excess votes. California elections officials have dismissed the team’s findings, but Bianco says his office will conduct another count. “This investigation is simple: Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes recorded,” Bianco told reporters at a Friday press conference. Proposition 50 was a...

Lindsey Graham on Kharg Island: "We did Iwo Jima. We can do this."

https://larrys.substack.com/p/a-short-musical-bio Sometime in the late 1970s I abruptly became a history professor. Prior to that, I was a rocker who was "almost famous." Here is a little of my drumming bio, experiences, and influences.