Free Republic

Gun violence in New York City has spiked along with the mercury, with shootings up more than 50% last week compared to the same time last year — indicating that the Big Apple could be in for a bloody summer. A total of 23 shootings were reported across the five boroughs in the week starting April 21, according to new NYPD statistics — an increase of 53% from the 15 shootings tallied over the same period in 2024. Temperatures in Gotham hit a high of 82 degrees last Tuesday, making it the second-warmest day in April, according to Accuweather. Last...

Former President Donald Trump enjoys a net four-point swing his way in just a week’s time in the race against Vice President Kamala Harris, neutralizing momentum garnered from her ascension to the top of the Democrat ticket, according to an RMG Research/Napolitan News Service survey. The poll, published Friday, shows Harris at 44 percent and Trump at 43 percent, while independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. garners 6 percent. In the hypothetical two-way contest, Harris and Trump are tied at 49 percent, per the Napolitan News Service: 🇺🇲 2024 GE: @RMG_Research Harris: 44% [-3] Trump: 43% [+1] RFK Jr: 6% [=]...

Hundreds of nursing homes in Florida have been forced to shut their doors over the past five years because of the soaring cost of commercial property insurance in the state. In the five-year period ending in 2023, an average of 146 nursing homes or assisted-living facilities in Florida have closed each year, according to the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration. During that same five-year period, commercial property insurance premiums rose 125% in Florida. Last year alone, annual premiums rose by around 27% in the state, according to Bloomberg News.

The astronomic rise in mortgage rates and spike in home prices over the past year has pushed a key tenet of the American dream out of reach for millions of families. Now, there is another obstacle to homeownership: higher home insurance premiums. The average cost of home insurance for a $300,000 property in the U.S. surged 12% in 2023 to roughly $1,770 per year, according to a new report published by Insurify, an insurance comparison website headquartered in Massachusetts. However, home insurance is even more expensive in states plagued by severe weather and other climate-related catastrophes. In fact, as the...

COVID is on the rise again, with a peak likely over the holiday season. Given this, health authorities in a number of Australian states have recommended people start wearing masks again. In Western Australia, masks have been made mandatory in high-risk areas of public hospitals, while they’ve similarly been reintroduced in health-care settings in other parts of the country. Hospitals and aged care facilities are definitely the first places where masks need to be reinstated during an epidemic. But authorities are differing in their recommendations currently. Calls to mask up, particularly in the wider community, have not been unanimous. So...

Few outside some bitter Republican circles are still arguing that Donald Trump can’t win the 2024 election. What was conventional wisdom a few months ago has fallen to pieces. Trump has already won the primary, not that Republicans have any reason to regret it: he is outperforming Joe Biden in the polls, despite being indicted four times, a remarkable feat that only Trump could pull off. Notably, Trump ran far behind Biden in 2020, when Trump barely “lost,” something that enraged many liberals at the time. 2024 is not destined to be a repeat: it is a new year with...

As the fall season ushers in and kids are back to school, we find ourselves once again facing the challenge of a rise in respiratory viruses. A new alert out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warns of rising RSV cases in certain parts of the country. RSV is not a new adversary. It's a common virus that for most people causes mild, cold-like symptoms. While RSV typically peaks during the winter months, the pattern has shifted in recent years, with the virus showing up earlier in the year.

While a new subvariant is causing increasing hospitalizations across the country and we await the updated Covid-19 vaccines, now may be a good time to put your mask back on, doctors say. Especially in certain settings like on plane rides and trips on the subway. The percentage of people who said they wore a mask outside of their home in the U.S. decreased from about 57% in January 2022 to around 27% in January of 2023, according to data compiled by the Covid States Project.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis led former president Donald Trump by eleven points in a new poll of likely Republican primary voters by the Republican Party of Texas. The survey, conducted by CWS Research on November 12 and 13 among likely GOP voters statewide, asked respondents, “If the upcoming 2024 Republican Primary for president were held today, and the candidates were Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley and Mike Pence, for whom would you vote?” Forty-three percent of respondents said they would support DeSantis, while Trump followed in second with 32 percent of the vote. Thirteen percent...

The “highly transmissible” Omicron variant of COVID-19 has disproportionately hospitalized kids under age 5 as it tears through South Africa, health officials in the country said Friday. The new strain of the coronavirus — which had largely not caused serious illness in young children previously — has led to a dramatic spike in severe cases in the age group, South African government medical adviser Waasila Jassat said at a press conference. “The week-on-week increase we’re seeing in cases and admissions is higher than we’ve seen it before. We’ve seen quite a sharp increase [in hospital admissions] across all age groups...

As Americans entered summer with a glimmer of hope that COVID-19 might recede, those hopes were quickly dashed after a rapid resurgence of the virus in Sun Belt states. Now approaching midsummer, the numbers continue to surge across the South and Western regions of the United States. Florida and Texas, two of the hardest-hit states besides California and New York, have broken record numbers of cases in the last several weeks. Florida recorded an all-time high of about 15,200 cases in a single day July 11.

Trump’s momentum is surging. His campaign is noticeably full of energy and the numbers prove it. Night after night Trump fills venues throughout the country setting capacity records and turning away thousands in the process. The internet is filled with videos of long lines waiting to get into Trump events and packed houses all over the country.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aayz5l7J25Q Since entering the race in 2015 through July 2016 it’s estimated that Trump entertained 1.1 million people at his rallies.Since July (in only 2 and a half months) it’s estimated that Trump has entertained another half a million people.  He has turned away another...

Good news from Wisconsin. With one month left before republican primary voters go to the polls in Wisconsin (August 9th Congressional District 1), challenger Paul Nehlen is gaining significant ground. Nehlen is well positioned within striking distance:The poll results were released today from the Nehlen campaign:Janesville, WI – Today the Nehlen campaign is releasing data on one of its latest polls that shows incumbent Paul Ryan now well below 50% among likely Republican primary voters in the district. The poll, conducted by P.M.I., has Ryan at 43%. This represents a drop of more than 30 points since the Nehlen campaign...

The Trump Bump has arrived. After wrapping up an acutely fractious primary in which Donald Trump and his opponents lobbed scores of personal, playground insults at one another, the presumptive GOP nominee has quickly unified the vast majority of Republican voters around one goal: defeating Hillary Clinton, his prospective Democratic opponent. Entering the general election trailing by about 7 points, Trump has rapidly erased most of that gap: As of Friday, Clinton’s advantage was down to roughly 2 points, according to the HuffPost Pollster average. And some polls, like a Fox News survey out on Wednesday, show Trump inching ahead...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's growing support among California's hard-core conservatives and evangelical voters has pushed him out in front of Donald Trump among likely voters in the state’s June 7 Republican presidential primary, a new Field Poll shows. While Cruz's 25 to 23 percent lead over the billionaire businessman is a statistical tie, the freshman senator's position is stronger since plenty of California Republicans are scared to death of seeing Trump as their party's nominee. In a state where 28 percent of likely Republican voters say they'd be "upset" if Trump was on the ballot come November, "Trump doesn't have...

Ted Cruz has assembled an impressive presidential campaign structure in Iowa, veteran political observers here say, with one going so far as to describe Cruz’s campaign as perhaps "the most sophisticated" the first in the nation caucus state has ever witnessed. Because of that grass roots organization, Cruz is primed to maintain his recent surge in the polls and win the Iowa Republican caucuses in five weeks, those observers say. Cruz, the Tea Party firebrand and first term U.S. Sen. from Texas, was the first Republican candidate to enter the presidential race, on March 23. Nine months later, he has...

Republican support for U.S. presidential candidate Ted Cruz rose this week as voters keyed in on the senator from Texas as the top alternative to Donald Trump, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll on Friday.Cruz had the support of 17 percent of likely Republican voters, behind Donald Trump, who remained the front runner with support of 31 percent of respondents in the five-day rolling poll.Last week, Cruz had the support of 10 percent of likely Republican voters and was relatively even with Ben Carson and Marco Rubio.Cruz has been gaining momentum nationally this month after polls showed him overtaking Trump in...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the highest-ranking elected woman in the United States, plunged Wednesday into the heated battle over gender gap politics, arguing that Republicans and their party's presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney, have alienated millions of women voters. That helps Democrats' chances of taking back the House of Representatives, Pelosi said at a news conference in San Francisco. "I would have said, two months ago, we had a fifty-fifty chance of winning the House," she said. "Since then, so much changed because women have shifted in large measure to the president and to the Democrats." Pelosi cited GOP budget...

Shares of Ford got a boost Thursday from CNBC's Jim Cramer, but they certainly didn't need it. Cramer mentioned them as worthy of being a buy candidate, but this is nothing new. Ford's stock has been nothing short of remarkable, since December 2008 when it was under $1 per share. Shares are currently over $12, a remarkable run for a company that many though would need to go into bankruptcy or need government help. Since dropping to under $1, Ford has done everything right. From cutting its massive debt load, getting products out to market, to making the company more...

"3. Website Traffic Velocity Here is a graph (click to enlarge) of the amount of attention each GOP Candidates’ website is getting. Notice Fred08.com is number two. Rudy, Romney and Huckabee have all peaked. This directly translates into donations and new voters."