Free Republic

If you thought Joe Biden's electric vehicle mandates were unpopular (and they are) just wait until you see the even more aggressive plans that Kamala Harris has in store if she manages to be elected to the White House. Rather than giving in to a popular lack of demand, Harris intends to double down, accelerating the schedule for converting the American fleet of vehicles at an even more rapid pace wherever possible. The Democrats still aren't quite crazy enough to try to make possession of a gas-powered vehicle illegal, but they will bully the automakers to ensure that a full...

The American consumer's "love affair" with electric vehicles turned out to be more of a figurative one-night stand. That's the conclusion of many economists today, along with the management at automakers including Ford and General Motors. The Biden administration attempted to force its EV mandate and goose the public into supporting it by spiking the punchbowl in the form of generous taxpayer-funded subsidies and rebates. (It's funny how generous they can be with your money, isn't it?) And for a little while it seemed to work, at least to a degree. There was an initial surge in EV sales, leading...

A Tennessee jury has awarded a former research scientist at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee $687,000 in back pay and damages after she was fired in 2021 for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine.Following a three-day jury trial in Chattanooga last week, a federal jury decided BlueCross failed to provide reasonable accommodation for Tanja Benton, who did most of her work from home and claimed a religious exemption to the company's vaccine mandate. Chattanooga Attorney Doug S. Hamill, who represents Benton, said the biostatistical research scientist was fired in November 2021 in violation of her religious beliefs after working for the...

WASHINGTON — The U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic got politically messy. A Friday Supreme Court ruling could frustrate government responses to public health emergencies even further. The Supreme Court struck down a long-standing legal doctrine that directed judges to defer to reasonable federal agency interpretations of ambiguous or technically challenging aspects of the law. The loss of the so-called Chevron doctrine calls into question every federal agency’s interpretation of a statute, so the ruling affects the regulations of all federal agencies. ... There were other cases in which Chevron didn’t come up but that involved agencies making legal justification...

Former President Donald Trump on Saturday endorsed displaying the Ten Commandments in all schools, days after a controversial new law went into effect in Louisiana mandating classroom postings. “Has anyone read the ‘Thou shalt not steal’?” the presumptive GOP presidential nominee told more than 1,000 predominantly evangelical Christians at a Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington DC. “I mean, has anybody read this incredible stuff? It’s just incredible. They don’t want it to go up. It’s a crazy world,” added Trump, who drew huge applause. A new law signed in Louisiana on Thursday requires the Ten Commandments to be...

The Los Angeles City Council officially terminated its vaccination mandate for municipal employees Monday... The council members voted to end the city’s vaccination mandate .. The decision was unanimous, with all present council members voting 13-0 to rescind the mandate, effective retroactively from June 2. This move aligns with actions taken by other Southern California cities and comes more than a year after the city lifted its coronavirus emergency declaration. The ordinance ends the vaccine requirement for current and future city employees and allows those fired or who resigned over the mandate to seek re-employment, ABC 7 reported. The council...

This announcement out of Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin's office yesterday is pretty cool news. In 2021, under the benevolent eye of uber-prog Democratic black-face aficionado Gov Ralph Northam, the completely Democratic-held VA legislature decided to commit the state to follow the California emission standards, which, as everyone knows, are tougher than the federal ones. Progs of a feather flock together. In 2022, doubling down on their infinite wisdom, VA lawmakers saw fit to impose what's known as CA's Advanced Clean Car II regulations on their fellow Virginians. In essence, what that was going to do was impose a 100% EV...

George Washington University class-action settlement for COVID shutdown approved with more money for students, less for lawyers. Mere "overlap between a religious and political view" doesn't negate Title VII’s religious protections, 8th Circuit says.. If COVID-19 litigation were like the virus itself, George Washington University cleared its infection with a pricey therapeutic, the Mayo Clinic's infection rebounded, and Rutgers University faces an unusually virulent strain that could spread far and wide. A federal judge gave final approval to the $5.4 million class-action settlement submitted by GWU students and the private university blocks from the White House, in a tuition-refund lawsuit...

With the military facing a recruitment crisis, Rep. Nancy Mace called the Pentagon’s ‘failure’ to rehire these troops ‘unacceptable.’.. The House Armed Services Committee adopted an amendment in the annual defense policy bill on May 22 that, if cleared through Congress, would force the Pentagon to rehire U.S. troops who were fired for refusing a COVID-19 vaccine. The measure was adopted late on May 22 by lawmakers on the panel, who marked up and advanced their version of the annual appropriations bill, authorizing a defense budget of $849.8 billion. The 2025 bill, titled the Servicemember Quality of Life Improvement and...

In a landmark decision earlier this month, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit delivered a scathing rebuke to the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine, declaring its COVID-19 vaccine mandate unconstitutional.The 55-page ruling highlighted that the mandate, which excluded religious exemptions, was tainted by “religious animus” and thus violated the First Amendment’s protection of religious liberties.The court’s decision reversed a prior ruling by a lower court, bringing to an end a contentious legal battle initiated by the Thomas More Society on behalf of 17 faculty members and students. These individuals had faced severe repercussions, including...

A Colorado university’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate violates the U.S. Constitution, a federal court has ruled. The Sept. 1, 2021, mandate “clearly violates the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause as interpreted by our precedents,” a majority of a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit said in the May 7 decision. While the mandate was later updated, the newer version also violates the Constitution, the judges said. The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in 2021 required COVID-19 vaccination of all students and employees. It initially offered religious exemptions to anyone who checked a box, but later said...

'These heroes were callously tossed aside'.. Multiple times already Colorado, led by homosexual Democrat Gov. Jared Polis, has been cited for its "hostility" to Christianity. It happened in the state's attack on the faith of specialty baker Jack Phillips. Then the same issue arose in a fight involving state censorship of a web designer... Both times the state got slapped hard by the U.S. Supreme Court. Now it's another court, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and a division of the state, the University of Colorado, That court now has ruled that CU's Anshutz School of Medicine's policies that...

How much of your safety should you delegate to government?In the name of safety, the government has taken steps that critics say have denied citizens what used to be considered inalienable constitutional rights. Citizens are concerned that their right to freedom of speech under the First Amendment is being denied, ostensibly, to keep citizens safe from "harmful misinformation," and fear that the Second Amendment right to bear arms is being infringed upon to combat gun violence. Watchdogs further contend that citizens are being denied the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination and the Sixth Amendment's right to face one's accuser when...

We just passed the fourth anniversary of “15 Days To Slow the Spread,” the start of the COVID lockdowns that did damage from which we still haven’t recovered. ... Anthony Fauci, Nancy Pelosi and Bill de Blasio were telling us not to worry, to take cruises and go visit Chinatown ... They reversed course like a week later. ... Neither the lockdowns nor the masking requirements did any good, though they caused a lot of trauma, inconvenience and colossal economic destruction. ... Then there were the deaths caused by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s program of moving still-contagious COVID patients into old-folks’...

The most high-profile opponent of Australia’s brutal COVID-19 lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and violent suppression of public criticism has been Monica Smit. Her resistance is continuing. She has announced that she will be suing the Victoria police. The court case is scheduled for July 23 and is expected to take 15 days.

Paul Sperry @paulsperry_ BREAKING: Biden is mandating Americans reentering US give CDC contact tracing info or face "criminal penalties," even though CDC's COVID health emergency expired May 2023

New Report Details Horrifying Cost of Fauci’s FailuresIn the post-pandemic period of Covid, there’s now a concerted effort to comprehend and explain the damage that was caused by our capitulating to the hysterical overreaction and overreach of the ‘experts.’ There’s a long list of policy failures to examine; mask mandates were a disaster that accomplished absolute nothing of value, but instead led to tremendous harms, many of which continue today.Children were forced into masks for years on end, millions of people still wear masks when traveling or inside stores and restaurants, permanently convinced of the deliberate falsehood that masks are...

Say goodbye to the trucking industry as we know it, and goodbye to the American economy, too. You might have missed it on Good Friday — which you can be sure was no accident — when the Biden EPA released its new tailpipe rules for semi-trucks, but the new rules will destroy how we move goods around the country. It seems like only two weeks ago [It was only two weeks ago, Steve —editor] that I told you about Presidentish Biden's new EPA regulations, coming into effect starting in 2027, that will force two-thirds of new car buyers into electric...

Story after story has come out about the implosion in the EV market. As with many luxury goods, the market can quickly expand and just as quickly top out, as the latent market demand gets filled. This is what happened with electric vehicles, which appeal greatly to a small cross-section of the market, but not so much to the general car buyer. Our colleague, Beege has been on this beat and done an outstanding job, so I won't duplicate her work proving that the market for EVs has slowed dramatically. All you really need to know is that the market...

World-renowned infectious-disease epidemiologist and biostatistician Martin Kulldorff is no longer a professor at Harvard Medical School after refusing the COVID vaccine because he had infection-acquired immunity. Refusing the vaccine is a decision that lost him his appointment at a Harvard-affiliated hospital at the time several years ago — and this month led to his termination from the Ivy League school. “Harvard Medical School has affiliation agreements with several Boston hospitals which it neither owns nor operationally controls. Hospital-based faculty, such as Dr. Kulldorff, are employed by one of the affiliates, not by HMS, and require an active hospital appointment to...