Free Republic

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson spent over a decade in office as a Democrat before making a significant political shift. Just over a year ago, he announced his decision to join the Republican Party. Johnson wrote in a Fox News op-ed that his switch should have been a wake-up call for Democrats ahead of the 2024 election. “It turns out I was kind of a canary in the coal mine, right? I didn’t think I was going to be some anomaly that everyone needed to worry about,” Johnson told “Fox & Friends” co-host Lawrence Jones, Wednesday. “I thought I was going...

Things are not progressing. They change, but they do not progress. History is not going anywhere. Some changes bring benefits, many changes bring misery. The myth of progress is a narrative that justifies the destruction of traditional ways of life (or anything else that is seen as standing in its way). It frequently takes no account of the collateral damage left behind in its march. Progressive-driven accounts of history carefully ignore the carnage and dislocations brought about by change. Progress is the narrative told by those who receive the profits.

internal-combustion engine, any of a group of devices in which the reactants of combustion (oxidizer and fuel) and the products of combustion serve as the working fluids of the engine. Such an engine gains its energy from heat released during the combustion of the nonreacted working fluids, the oxidizer-fuel mixture. This process occurs within the engine and is part of the thermodynamic cycle of the device. Useful work generated by an internal-combustion (IC) engine results from the hot gaseous products of combustion acting on moving surfaces of the engine, such as the face of a piston, a turbine blade, or...

MADISON, Wis. — It’s sadly not new for a business on Madison’s east side, but EVP Coffee’s owner calls the latest burglary a one-two punch — showing a side of her neighborhood she never expected to see. “There was glass everywhere, the cash register was thrown on the floor,” owner Tracy Danner said. Danner’s general manager encountered quite the mess Wednesday morning at EVP Coffee. “The door was open, the ATM was stolen,” Danner said. As shocking as it looks, it wasn’t the first time this has happened. It’s Danner’s second break-in at the East Washington Avenue location in 10...

The horror stories from Canada about pressure for “assisted suicide” choices on the disabled and those with profoundly-chronic illness rarely make news in American media outlets. That makes this report from the Associated Press eye-popping indeed. Disability advocates in Canada have leveled accusations that Canada’s nationalized health-care system has used the legalized assisted-suicide system as a vehicle for euthanasia and cost savings:Nichols’ family reported the case to police and health authorities, arguing that he lacked the capacity to understand the process and was not suffering unbearably — among the requirements for euthanasia. They say he was not taking needed medication,...

A country music star shunned so-called “woke” record labels and released a song directly to Donald Trump’s social media app Truth Social and video-sharing site Rumble — catapulting it to No. 1 in the world on the Apple iTunes song chart. John Rich, the Nashville-based musician and one-half of the duo “Big and Rich,” released his latest song, “Progress,” on Friday. Truth Social and Rumble have emerged as alternatives to mainstream sites such as Twitter and YouTube, which have been accused of stifling free speech from conservatives. Rich, an unabashed conservative, saw his song outperform those by hit-makers such as...

Archbishop Viganò: Cancel culture in the Church and society is driven by a hatred of Jesus Christ(LifeSiteNews) – In an editorial titled “Cancel Culture: The Eternal Gnostic Dream of Starting Over from Zero,” that appeared on June 30, 2022, in the Bulletin of Social Doctrine of the Church of the Cardinal Van Thuân International Observatory (here), Archbishop Giampaolo Crepaldi stigmatized, with great clarity of analysis, the “attitude that favors the new over the old, which makes virtue coincide with adhesion to historical novelties and sin coincide with the preservation of the past,” and which consists in a systematic and ruthless...

Welcome to Thursday's Overnight Health Care, where we’re following the latest moves on policy and news affecting your health. Subscribe here. Mark your calendars: The House is poised to vote on a marijuana legalization bill as soon as next week. With the support of Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), advocates hope this year it will advance through the Senate. There’s still no agreement on further funding the COVID-19 response in Congress, though Mitt Romney says he’s making some progress on a new compromise.

I am proud to be an American. Yes, I know that our system of government is not perfect, but I firmly believe that it is the best in the world. We are an exceptional country not because our people are exceptional, but because we have a different -- and exceptional -- structure of government. I am grateful that I was born an American. We declared our independence from Great Britain this week 245 years ago. It happened after years of an overreaching rule by King George III and Britain's insistence on taxation without representation. We had had enough. We were...

Article has been Exerpted - full article at link: Top diplomats said Sunday that further progress had been made at talks between Iran and global powers to try to restore a landmark 2015 agreement to contain Iranian nuclear development that was abandoned by the Trump administration. They said it was now up to the governments involved in the negotiations to make political decisions. Advertising Ulyanov said after heading back to report on the talks' results to their respective governments, he expected the diplomats to return for the final round of talks in Vienna in about 10 days and said they...

Chief among the Big Lies currently being promulgated by the American Left is that Western culture is inherently racist, a manifestation of White Supremacy. This is not only nonsense but pernicious, dangerous nonsense. Before we go on, perhaps we should define “Western culture.” It is essentially the marriage of Judeo-Christian morality with classical (that is, Greek and Roman) intellectualism. It privileges reason over emotion and the individual over the state. Its central tenet is that, through their own efforts, a person can rise above their circumstances. Western culture is not now nor has it ever been perfect. But it has...

Despite a population that is now more prosperous and more educated by several orders of magnitude, we clearly have become more lazy.To celebrate another $1,400 in stimulus checks, a quickly withdrawn video from Wisconsin Democrats showed people dancing to a catchy rap song with captions of “$$$ IN THE POCKET” and “THANK YOU POTU$.” As Joy Pullmann noted, its release on the same day abysmal job numbers came out was a testament to Democrats’ blindness to economic reality. It also attested to our culture’s devolving expectation of something for nothing.America has definitely changed. Juxtapose that video with images from the...

Tom del Beccaro, leader of the ongoing effort to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom, announced Wednesday evening that the campaign had reached the 1.5 million signatures required to put the matter to a vote — but will keep going.

In the 1960s, Milton Friedman reportedly visited a construction site in a foreign country. To his surprise, the canal builders used no heavy machinery and instead armed thousands of men with shovels. He questioned the bureaucrat about this odd choice and the bureaucrat responded that it was a jobs program. “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal,” Friedman said. “If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.” Friedman’s absurd proposal illustrates the absurdity of make-work bias—the belief that conserving labor makes us poorer. Make-work bias was particularly popular during the Industrial...

State Senator John Yudichak of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania said that he will be switching his registration to become an Independent. He will caucus with the Republican majority. Yudichak has criticized an increasingly liberal Democratic caucus that has led to this decision. Due to issues that he finds important, Yudichak believes there is a better home in the Republican caucus. Yudichak’s announcement comes less than 24 hours since we learned that New Jersey Democratic Congressman Jeff Van Drew has also made a decision that speaks volumes.

Rookie Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, fresh off igniting an intra-party uproar with comments widely viewed as anti-Semitic, took a swipe at former President Barack Obama, saying in an explosive interview the 44th president's message of "hope and change" was a "mirage" and blasting his administration's drone and border detention policies. Omar, D-Minn., took aim at the president's famed slogan, while further criticizing the Democratic Party for “perpetuating the status quo,” in the interview with Politico.“Recalling the ‘caging of kids’ at the U.S.-Mexico border and the ‘droning of countries around the world’ on Obama’s watch," Omar charged that Obama "operated within the same fundamentally broken framework as...

It’s the natural progression of things: Millennials believe calling yourself a socialist is sexy.Remember the way-cool Sixties when guys used to attend protests and rallies to get laid, because young women could not resist such caring, passionate, liberal guys? Now there’s an app for that. But as in the way of all flesh the guys have had to up the ante on their care, passion and liberalism - all the way to socialism: Things have gotten so social with socialism that the young and restless now can consult a dating app called Red Yenta to find the fellow socialist of...

The environmentalist movement was never about smog, pollution or even global warming. In the minds of naive people who fell for the propaganda, it was. But the reality was always implicit. The environmentalist movement was always about control. And shame. The “Green New Deal” has exposed the environmentalist movement for what it is. It has made the insanity explicit. If you want to sum up environmentalism, you might call it urban religion. It’s an expression of guilt. “You live in a land of plenty. It’s shameful.” Today’s environmentalists are the modern Puritans. They’re repressive, shaming and hostile to comfort and...

In my last article about how life was so much better 40 years ago, I promised I would even things out and talk about how things have actually improved in the past few decades since I was a kid. (I don't want anyone thinking I'm a crotchety old guy.) So here goes — seven things that make life better now than "back in the good old days": 1. Healthier choices in food. Health food has become mainstream. You don't have to go to some out of the way "health food shop" run by "hippies" to get what you need. All...

While others in my family are already planning Christmas Eve dinner, I am still having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that Halloween has come and gone. At this point, I am simply thankful that my husband and son threw away the carved pumpkin on the front step rather than leaving it to decay in place, as happened a few years ago. Thanksgiving arrives next week, and, though we are hosting a dinner, I am not sure how many guests will show up, I have not laid out the seating chart, and I have no idea what...