Free Republic

The majority of Americans said it will take at least six months for their daily lives to return to normal, according to a new poll, as states start reopening amid the coronavirus pandemic. Sixty-five percent of people surveyed in an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released Wednesday said it will take six months or longer for their daily life to return to a “sense of normal.” Just 32 percent of Americans surveyed said it will take less than six months. The view did differ by party, however. Seventy-eight percent of Democrats said it will take at least six months, as did 68...

Americans must reject a dehumanizing "new normal" in the wake of the Chinese Virus.Anyone who has ever acted on stage knows the difference between a full audience and a light audience. Even when lights blind the eyes to their presence, even when they are silent, they are there. It’s like the difference between driving a box truck full of furniture or one that is empty and almost weightless. Theater, sports, movies, and church are all driven primarily by an ancient desire to be in each other’s proximity. President Trump made some waves last week when he rejected the idea that...

Chicago Tribune logo Chicago police setting up checkpoints to remind people of stay-at-home order and provide a presence in areas of violence Chicago police are setting up checkpoints throughout the city both to remind people about the statewide stay-at-home order during the coronavirus outbeak and to “show a strong police presence” in areas hit by violence A department memo obtained by the Tribune calls them “seatbelt safety and informational” checkpoints, and adds that the “goal of this mission is to engage the community in a positive and informative manner while providing a visible police presence in areas affected by violence."...

The world may never get back to what it considered “normal” before the coronavirus emerged from Wuhan, China a little over three months ago and spread to more than 1.3 million people across the world, U.S. health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said at a White House press briefing Monday. Gradually, we’ll be able to “function as a society. But you’re absolutely right, if you want to get to pre-coronavirus, that might not ever happen in the sense that the threat is there.”

<p>Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention. Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer.</p>

Congratulations, class of 2018 -- you've hit the jackpot, graduating into the strongest job market in a decade, according to CareerBuilder. Around 80 percent of companies surveyed by the jobs site said they plan to hire college grads this year, up from 60 percent in 2008. Another plus for new grads? More than half of employers surveyed cite starting salaries of $40,000 or more. As for the most sought-after degrees or majors, business topped the rankings with more than a third of companies surveyed looking to hire grads with that major. Around 22 percent of companies are seeking candidates with...

To understand the development of Islam in Western countries, I make a habit of visiting Muslim-majority areas such as Lakemba in Australia, Lodi in California, and Lunel in France. But London, England, is unique in the extent of its Islamic impress. Muslim-majority areas typically consist of poor, unattractive housing projects, remote from the city center, which long ago were abandoned by their original indigenous, working-class populations. They often feature men sitting around cafes and women cooped up at home. They suffer from a range of social pathologies, including unemployment, criminal gangs, and drug-trafficking. London too has such areas, and they...

Devastating wildfires fueled by climate change are “the new normal”, California’s governor has said. Jerry Brown said vast fires, such as the ones that have ravaged southern California in recent days, “could happen every year or every few years”. “We’re facing a new reality in this state,” he said. Mr Brown made the comments after surveying the damage in Ventura County, north of Los Angeles. Thousands of firefighters have been battling the fires since Monday. Mr. Brown, a Democrat who has attacked the Trump administration’s stance on climate change, said: “We’re facing a new reality in this state, where fires...

A van has been involved in a "massive crash" in the city centre of Barcelona, with "several" injured. Police said a white van mounted the pavement and struck several people. Pictures from the scene show emergency services and civilians attending to at least two people on the ground. The Ministry of the Interior said on Twitter: "There has just been a massive trampling on the Ramblas in Barcelona by a person with a van. There are injured."

Donald Trump’s victory confounded elite pollsters, journalists, politicians, academic experts and captains of industry. They all wrote him off as a fading gasbag. By every conventional barometer, he should have lost big time. His own party largely abandoned him. Former Republican presidents and primary rivals refused to endorse him. Donors bailed on him. His campaign staff was ridiculed as amateurish. Trump became the worst nightmare of the establishment, both Democratic and Republican. But unnoticed during the last month of the campaigning was a growing realization among Americans that the supposedly sober and judicious Hillary Clinton was irreparably disconnected. On the...

President Obama warns in a new interview of a future in which a U.S. president could engage in perpetual covert wars “all over the world.” But he claims that the accountability and transparency measures he is instituting will make that less likely. In the interview, with New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, Obama expressed agreement with one of the most salient critiques of his drone war, that it risks creating “institutional comfort and inertia with what looks like a pretty antiseptic way of disposing of enemies.” Obama explained that he had looked at “the way in which the number of drone...

El Cajon, California (CNN)Activists dismayed by the police killing of an unarmed, possibly mentally ill black man in El Cajon, California, demanded Wednesday that authorities release video of the shooting. They also want a federal probe into the man's death. Police have not released the man's name. As of Wednesday afternoon, police had released little information about the incident, aside from a still photograph showing the African-American man, in what authorities describe as a "shooting stance," facing off with two officers in a parking lot.

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced a couple of days after U.S. citizen and Afghani immigrant Ahmad Khan Rahami’s terrorist attack had injured 29 in his city that this was the time to bring in more Muslim immigrants. The timing of the Mayor’s immigration comment, which had a forced, agenda-driven quality was odd. Many New Yorkers certainly wished for a brief period of reflection, at least, before plunging willy-nilly back into the quixotic pursuit of the multicultural dream. The Mayor had just met with his London political and ideological counterpart, Sadiq Khan, who’d stated that terrorism was part...

Anyone questioning the sustainability and rightness of The New Normal is immediately attacked by the mainstream-media defenders of the crumbling status quo. Not only is everything that broke in 2008 fixed, everything's going great globally, and anyone who dares question this narrative in a tin-foil hat conspiracy nut or simply an annoyingly doom-and-gloomer who recalcitrantly refuses to accept the positive glories of official statistics: low unemployment, rising valuations of stock market Unicorns, etc. But the New Normal is anything but normal; all the readings of artificial life-support and manipulation are off the charts. If the New Normal were indeed a...

...Regardless of the question of whether he has had his genitals amputated, Cox is not a woman, but an effigy of a woman. Sex is a biological reality, and it is not subordinate to subjective impressions, no matter how intense those impressions are, how sincerely they are held, or how painful they make facing the biological facts of life. No hormone injection or surgical mutilation is sufficient to change that. Genital amputation and mutilation is the extreme expression of the phenomenon, but it is hardly outside the mainstream of contemporary medical practice. The trans self-conception, if the autobiographical literature is...

Detroit Teachers Moonlight As ‘Sugar Babies’ To Offset Wage Cuts DETROIT (WWJ) - It’s back-to-school season and many Detroit teachers are struggling in the wake of budget cuts and overcrowded classrooms. According to the National School Supply and Equipment Association, the average teacher spent at least $485 on school supplies for their classroom last year. So, what are some Detroit women doing to offset their struggles in the classroom? Well, they’re becoming “sugar babies” of course — seeking financial assistance from wealthy men online. In the Detroit School District alone, 201 teachers are moonlighting as sugar babies to offset wage...

BART's top-paid worker of 2012 never worked a day With a gross salary of more than $333,000, BART's highest-paid employee last year wasn't its general manager, police chief or a worker who racked up gobs of overtime scrubbing grime from filthy train seats. It was someone who did no work at all for BART in 2012: Dorothy Dugger, the agency's former general manager who resigned under pressure more than two years ago. Under a lucrative retirement scheme, Dugger, 57, quietly stayed on the books, burning off nearly 80 weeks of unused vacation time, drawing paychecks and full benefits for more...

The New Normal has been canceled after one season at NBC. The semi-autobiographical comedy from Glee's Ryan Murphy and Ali Adler marked Murphy's first half-hour comedy and aired as part of NBC's Tuesday comedy block. Boosted by The Voice, the Justin Bartha-Andrew Rannells starrer about a gay couple starting a family earned a full-season order in October despite early protests from conservative watchdog groups.

Almost four years ago, in June 2009, the US entered into a technical recovery from the Great Recession touched off by the collapse of a decade-long housing bubble. The bubble collapse nearly wiped out the financial sector, thanks to extensive investment in mortgage-backed securities that ended up being nearly worthless as foreclosures swept across the nation like a wildfire. American investors lost trillions in net worth as the stock markets plunged, and the federal government shoveled out trillions more in bailouts, safety-net subsidies, and stimulus programs that promised a soft landing and then a steady recovery based on a more-sound...

The unemployment rate may have fallen from 7.9% in February to 7.7% in January, but the number of people not in the labor force has set a record all-time high. The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines those not in the labor force as those who are unemployed and no longer looking for work, including those who retired on schedule or retired early. CNS News reported the numbers: “The number of Americans designated as ‘not in the labor force’ in February was 89,304,000, a record high, up from 89,008,000 in January, according to the Department of Labor. This means that the...