Free Republic

The first Six Flags in the nation to reopen after months will be the one in Oklahoma City, a company official announced Tuesday. “It’s pretty exciting,” Trevor Leonard, general manager of Frontier City Six Flags, said during an appearance on NBC’s “Today” show. “Things are going to look a little different in the park when you get here.” Every person who wants to enter the park will have to make a reservation. Customers will be screened en masse by a new system after presenting themselves at the front gate. And marks in lines for rides will force family units to...

California Governor Gavin Newsom has been facing a lot of criticism (and lawsuits) over the way he’s been dragging his feet on allowing the churches, mosques and synagogues to reopen. But as of Sunday night, it appears that Newsom has blinked first in the ongoing standoff. Originally slated to be part of phase three of his reopening plan – which could still be weeks away – the state announced that areas with lower rates of infection would be allowed to decide if the houses of worship could reopen sooner. That could come as early as this week, but there...

A new model shows reopening states and ignoring the pandemic could result in more than 5 million people contracting coronavirus. According to Yahoo Finance, a Penn Wharton Budget Model shows reopening states could cause positive coronavirus cases in the U.S. to jump to 5.4 million by the end of July. The model, which assumes states reopening May 18, explores various scenarios under which states reopen.The model also includes lockdowns, a partial reopening, and takes into account whether social distancing rules would continue to be adhered to or are relaxed.If states fully reopen with no social distancing rules in place, the...

Days after MinnesotaÂ’s Catholic and Lutheran churches publicly declared they would defy Gov. Tim WalzÂ’s order restricting in-person services to not more than 10 people, the state has announced it's lifting that limitation to let larger groups gather for worship beginning Wednesday. At a press briefing Saturday, Gov. Walz announced that churches will be able to hold services starting Wednesday if they follow social distancing guidelines and limit the gatherings to not more than 25% of a buildingÂ’s capacity, MinnPost reported. The governor has recognized that churches can reopen safely and carefully in the same way as malls and other...

How does one define an economic “reopening”? I think most people would say that a reopening means that everything goes back to the way it was before the crisis; or at least as close as possible. Most people would also say that a reopening is something that will last. Simply declaring “America has reopened” while keeping many restrictions in place in certain parts of the country is a bit of a farce. And, reopening with the intention of implementing lockdowns again in a matter of weeks without explaining the situation to the public is a scam of the highest order....

Do you remember when Pope John Paul II went back to his native Poland, about eight months into his pontificate? The Communist officials couldn't not let him in -- he was too beloved. As Pulitzer Prize winner Peggy Noonan, author of "John Paul the Great," has written, from the moment he eventually arrived behind the Iron Curtain, "the boundaries of the world began to shift." Despite the government's attempts to keep Poles from getting too emotionally invested in the visit, the people lined the streets to see him. During his first Mass in Warsaw, the crowd thundered, "We want God,"...

Grove City College will open as scheduled for the fall 2020 semester on Monday, August 24 with protocols in place to protect the health and safety of students, employees and the larger community in light of the coronavirus pandemic. College President Paul J. McNulty made the announcement Monday. McNulty has assembled a cross-disciplinary Fall Return Planning Committee. They will address key campus and community concerns associated with the return of students and develop and implement a comprehensive plan that ensures an excellent academic and residential experience in the fall. “It is our intention to return to our distinctive residential program...

Remember “14 days to slow the spread?” When social distancing began in earnest in March, political leaders encouraged Americans to stay home, avoid crowds, and minimize their exposure in order to prevent hospitals from getting overwhelmed. Coronavirus hospitalization data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests that early social distancing measures worked. Hospitalization rates peaked in early April, even in hotspots like California and New York. Other conditions used to justify the original lockdowns have also not held steady. So why is so much of America still in one phase or another of lockdown? There are good...

Mission accomplished? At least in terms of flattening the curve, yes, CDC director Robert Redfield tells The Hill’s Steve Clemons in an interview released late last night. The shelter-in-place orders have succeeded in tamping down mass community spread and health-care resources are extensive enough to deal with spot outbreaks — for now, anyway. Redfield spends most of the time arguing for a massive investment in public health infrastructure, to the point where the green light for starting to reopen is almost an afterthought.Still, the green light is given: The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)...

Texas has entered Phase 2 of Gov. Greg Abbott’s expansion and reopening of businesses across the state. In a news conference at the Texas Capitol on Monday afternoon, Abbott announced that more Texas businesses will be allowed to either reopen or open at larger capacity. Businesses that will be able to reopen immediately include child care facilities, massage parlors, and youth clubs like the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts... During the news conference, Abbott said that since Texas entered Phase 1 of reopenings, the state has not seen any indication that the state would need to shut down again... Despite...

Two months ago, on March 17, 2020, we reported that the controversial Ethiopian politician and Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. He claimed in a press conference in early March that the fatality rate for the coronavirus was 3.4% — many multiples that of the fatality rate of the common flu which is estimated to be around 0.1%. This was egregiously false and we knew it.The Director General of the WHO spoke on March 3, 2020 and shared this related to the coronavirus: While many people globally have built up immunity to seasonal flu strains,...

President Trump told governors on a conference call Monday that he "will step in" if the federal government disagrees with state reopening plans, as he largely expressed satisfaction with how the governors are moving to lift coronavirus restrictions in their individual states, according to a report. Trump, whose administration last month revealed guidelines for when states should begin lifting stay-at-home orders and other social distancing measures meant to slow the spread of the virus, has vocally pushed for the rapid reopening of the economy. The president said in an interview with Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo last week that his critics...

This morning on the Sunday talk shows, Alex Azar pointed out that in states that have reopened ahead of the others, like Florida and Georgia, there has not been an increase in COVID cases and deaths: “We are seeing that in places that are opening, we’re not seeing this spike in cases,” Azar said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “We still see spikes in some areas that are, in fact, closed.”However, Azar said identifying and reporting new cases takes time. …“It’s still early days,” Azar cautioned in an interview with CBS’ “Face the Nation.” He said data...

Mr. President, Herbert Hoover said, "Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt." But he had no idea how big that deficit could become under your administration. I know you won't accept Nancy Pelosi's embarrassing $3 trillion Coronavirus Relief Bill, but it's time to say "No" to any additional spending packages. You were elected to tame big government, but by temporarily falling under the spell of the "experts," you've allowed our economy to be shut down. It's time to realize that there's no doubt that some countries and some states that have remained or become open are...

The governors of Georgia and Colorado have at least one thing in common. They both took steps to reopen their states' economies in late April amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. But for some reason, the media's coverage of Gov. Brian Kemp (R., Ga.) has been slightly different from the media's coverage of Gov. Jared Polis (D., Colo.). Kemp, for example, has been accused of experimenting with "human sacrifice." So reads the headline of an April 29 article published in the Atlantic, which accuses Kemp of turning Georgia residents into "unwilling canaries in an invisible coal mine, sent to find out...

Any media discussion of coronavirus deaths typically centers on the ‘official’ raw number, which currently stands at over 90,000. Granted, there are questions about this number, particularly given the fact that someone who dies of a heart attack and has COVID-19 at the time is automatically included in the ever-increasing COVID-count. Would the heart attack victim have survived another day, or another week, had coronavirus not also been present? Maybe, and so apparently goes the rationale for including them in the count. The other, slightly more conspiratorial rationale is that our overlords have a vested interest in ticking the coronavirus...

There has not been an observed spike in CCP virus cases in areas that have reopened, while some areas that remain shut down have seen an increase in cases, said Health Secretary Alex Azar. “We are seeing that in places that are opening, we’re not seeing this spike in cases,” Azar told CNN’s “State of the Union” program on Sunday morning. “We still see spikes in some areas that are in fact close to very localized situations.” A number of governors have imposed stay-at-home orders to curb the spread of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, a novel coronavirus that...

Last week, I spoke with a community college administrator.  I asked him a couple of questions: First, when do you want to re-open the campus?  He said the sooner, the better. Second, are you afraid of lawsuits?  Darn right, he said.  Then he added that many colleges are scared to death of a class action lawsuit. My guess is that a lot of businessmen and school administrators know exactly what my friend was saying. This is why we need litigation protection, as this editorial from the Las Vegas Review-Journal is indicating: As states lift their coronavirus lockdowns, businesses face a host of obstacles, including...

It sounds as if Roger Goodell isn’t willing to wait around for the White House or anyone else to tell him when the National Football League is “ready” to get back to business. According to the Associated Press, the league sent out a memo to all 32 teams yesterday telling them that they can begin to get back to their normal preparations for the 2020 season on Tuesday. Of course, they’ve included a lot of caveats and hoops to jump through before they can begin and the reopening will only happen in phases. Let’s just say that a first...

Flexing unearned influence has exposed the thirst for control of their citizens. In Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf caught a whiff of his constituents working up the desire to step out and start living their lives once again. The idea of citizens exerting their freedoms and basking in the normalcy of liberty was too much for him to stand. On Monday he sent out a tweet storm, delivering a series of firm commands of how he intends to clamp down on those who might dare get the idea of doing things. ‘’Today I am announcing consequences for counties that do not...