Free Republic

Last night Politico Europe published an interesting story about where Russia is starting to feel the pinch as it tries to keep its war machine going. Despite sanctions, Russia has managed to keep selling lots of oil and that has kept its economy from collapsing. But while it has lots of cash on hand it’s not so easy to import supplies of high tech chips that are needed for its weapons of war. In order to find those parts, Russia has put together a shopping list.Having fired off (or lost in combat) way more of their missile firepower than they...

Russia has been playing this game for months and now it seems to have reached its inevitable outcome. The gas supply flowing through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline has been completely shut off. Russia claimed this week that it was shutting the gas supply off temporarily in order to do maintenance on the line. Then it claimed it had discovered a problem which prevented it from resuming the supply. No one is being fooled by any of this anymore. Even the German company that built the machines used to pump gas through the pipeline has said Russia’s explanation makes no...

It looks like my colleague Jazz Shaw first wrote about Dan Price back in August of 2015. Price is the Seattle CEO Gravity Payments who made a lot of news when he announced he’d be paying his employees a minimum of $70,000 each and cut his own salary from just over a million dollars a year to $70,000.Dan became a mini-celebrity for these efforts. Esquire called him a “folk hero for the age of inequality.” In a separate story published in 2016, Esquire reported that Price’s background and motive weren’t as pure as it may have appeared.In a TEDx Talk...

In case you missed earlier installments of this story, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant is in territory controlled by Russia; however, the Ukrainian energy company, Energoatom, is still operating the plant. There have been reports that Russia is using the site to launch artillery attacks on the Ukrainian front lines, knowing the Ukrainians don’t dare fire back for fear of damaging the reactor.Earlier this month there was a report from Energoatom claiming that Major General Valerii Vasyliev, the Russian in charge of the surrounding area, had mined the facility and was threatening to blow it up rather than leave. He was...

A week ago we learned that the go-broke date for Social Security had been pushed back by a whole year:The annual Social Security and Medicare trustees report released Thursday says Social Security’s trust fund will be unable to pay full benefits beginning in 2035, instead of last year’s estimate of 2034. The year before that it estimated an exhaustion date of 2035.The projected depletion date for Medicare’s trust fund for inpatient hospital care moved back two years to 2028 from last year’s forecast of 2026…When the Social Security trust fund is depleted the government will be able to pay 80%...

Luke Rosiak is a reporter for the Daily Wire and he’s about to have a book published about K-12 schools. It’s titled “Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education.” Today the Daily Wire published an excerpt from the book about the director of ethnic studies for Seattle public schools, a woman named Tracy Castro-Gill. Originally Tracy Hammond, her husband asked her for a divorce and Hammond decided to leave him and her young daughter behind in California so she could marry a convicted child molester in Seattle, a man she’d met playing the video game...

To really appreciate Michelle Goldberg’s latest column on cancel culture, you need to consider how the left’s talking points on the topic have calcified over the past few years. For most of the past 5-6 years the left has been writing versions of the same story over and over claiming that cancel culture isn’t real. The progressive line is that cancel culture doesn’t exist, it’s just that some people are finally being held accountable for their bad behavior. Meanwhile, evidence of this sort of “accountability culture” going too far continues to pile up on a weekly basis. It’s an untenable...

The Dwight-Englewood School in New Jersey is a private prep school where high school tuitions costs just over $50,000 per year. Tuesday an English teacher at Dwight-Englewood named Dana Stangel-Plowe announced she was resigning her position because of the school’s embrace of Critical Race Theory, an ideology she believes is harming students at the school. A group called the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) published Stangel-Plowe’s resignation letter, which reads in part. I believe that D-E is failing our students. Over the past few years, the school has embraced an ideology that is damaging to our students’ intellectual and...

As I’ve said before, academic John McWhorter is someone who has frequently strayed from ideological orthodoxy on the question of race and policing. For instance, last year he gave an interview on the 5 year anniversary of the death of Mike Brown which pointed out that a lot of what we initially heard about the case turned out not to be true. Over the weekend, McWhorter was interviewed by Bret Weinstein for his podcast show. The two discussed the current Black Lives Matter movement and the far-left ideology that seems to have migrated from college campuses to America’s city streets....

Young Turks employees vote to unionize over Cenk Uygur’s strenuous objections John SextonPosted at 2:41 pm on April 10, 2020 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter The Young Turks is a progressive media company co-founded by Cenk Uygur. When a group of employees announced plans to form a union earlier this year, CEO Uygur suddenly started sounding like a conservative union-buster. He warned that a union couldn’t make a magic pot of money appear and begged employees to reconsider. Thursday, over his objections, the employees voted to unionize: We have voted again and have reaffirmed our decision to organize. We...

When Nikki Haley’s name was floated as one of the people most likely to have written the NY Times op-ed my immediate reaction was ‘I don’t think so.’ To me, doing something like this would go against Haley’s entire brand which is to be bold and call people out when they are wrong, whether that’s Russia or Iran or some sleazy author hawking a book. It was just hard for me to imagine her resorting to an anonymous attack. Today, Haley has written a piece for the Washington Post calling out the author of the anonymous op-ed. Haley has a...

John Sexton at Hot Air pinpointed an obnoxious Washington Post article on President Trump visiting the victims of the Parkland school shooting. Trump made a point of not bringing reporters with him as he visited victims, so he could milk the publicity out of it. We can predict reporters might have either (a) found it crass for Trump to be politicking in the hospital so soon or (b) found some gaffe in what he said to victims. Post reporter Josh Dawsey openly editorialized that Trump doesn't care about victims as much as he wants to praise cops and first responders,...

Greg Sargent is a Washington Post blogger and compromised JournoList hack whose “Plum Line” entries are decidedly left of center. Greg was overwhelmed with enthusiasm last Friday when, for a brief but shining moment, it appeared President Obama was supporting the construction of the ground zero mosque. He gushed that it would “go down as one of the finest moments of his presidency.” Sargent contrasted Obama’s bold stance with the “clever little dodge” which some Republicans were using. Here’s his description of the conservative stance, “The group has the right to build the center, runs this argument, but they are...

New York University’s controversial penchant under President John Sexton for doling out real-estate perks to top professors and executives also extended to his son.Jed Sexton, whose sole affiliation with NYU was his status as the president’s son, for years enjoyed a spacious faculty apartment while the university experienced a “severe” housing shortage, The Post has learned. In spring 2002, NYU ordered that a pair of one-bedroom apartments normally reserved for law school faculty be combined into a lavish, two-story spread in the heart of Greenwich Village, property records show.The Harvard-educated Sexton, who was a 33-year-old aspiring actor at the time,...