Free Republic

With the summer drawing to a close, the big question for nearly 60 million U.S. school-age children is whether they can return to school for in-person learning, or must remain at home limited to virtual education. States and municipalities differ widely on whether and how to re-open schools based on differing assessments of the risks of COVID-19 to children if they are in direct contact with each other and with teachers. Teachers’ unions are resisting school re-opening with political demands that have nothing to do with teaching, such as defunding the police, passage of Medicare-for-All, and elimination of competing charter...

New York has the worst economic outlook of any state in the US, according to a recent ranking that comes as thousands flee the Big Apple amid escalating crime and chaos. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) published its 13th annual Rich States, Poor States ranking on Wednesday. The researchers looked at issues such as taxation and the economic competitiveness of the state. The economic outlook rating state gross domestic product, absolute domestic migration and non-farm payroll employment. Utah, for the 13th year running, was top of the ranking and New York, for the sixth year in a row, was...

United Airlines Holdings Inc. late Thursday surprised Wall Street with a narrower quarterly loss as it attempted to manage “the most disruptive global crisis in the history of aviation” due to the coronavirus pandemic. United UAL, -5.22% said it lost $1.7 billion, or $6.86 a share, in the first quarter, versus earnings of $292 million, or $1.09 a share, in the year-ago quarter. Adjusted for one-time items, United lost $639 million, or $2.57 a share. Sales fell to $7.9 billion from $9.6 billion a year ago. Analysts polled by FactSet had expected United to report an adjusted loss of $2.85...

At the age of 95, Jimmy Carter is now the longest-living U.S. president in history. “Great men are a dime a dozen,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough noted on the former president’s birthday. “Jimmy Carter has always been something far greater than that. He has lived his life as a good man. And that is exactly what America needs right now.” Now, I realize the Trump-obsessed Scarborough is attempting to juxtapose the former president with the present one. But the canonization of Carter has always been transparent revisionism. Habitat for Humanity or not, the world would have been a far better place...

Louisiana is a state where childhood is the most threatened in the country, according to a report from Save the Children. The international aid group's annual End of Childhood report released May 30 stated Louisiana falls at No. 50 in state-by-state rankings, which are determined by averaging a state's rankings in infant deaths, violent deaths, adolescent birth rates, high school students not graduating on time, and food security and malnutrition. "This year's End of Childhood Report and U.S. Complement again demonstrates that we are far from realizing the vision where all children survive and thrive," the report states. "Millions of...

French school children aged 9 to 10 have been ranked the worst in Europe for their reading skills, marking a steady decline in levels since 2001, a new study has revealed. It’s not good news for French schools. The study by PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study), which has been carried out every five years since 2001, ranks the reading skills of school children aged 9 to 10 in 50 countries. Thousands of French school pupils took part in the study in the spring of 2016, answering a series of comprehension questions on literary and informative texts. And the...

A quality of life study conducted by the website 24/7 Wall Street formulated a list of the 50 worst cities to live in America, and some commonly referenced shanty towns headline it. The 50 worst cities list was not kind to the state of Michigan, which contributed two cities to the top 10, and is home to the number one worst city to live in the US: Detroit.

Jonathon M. Trugman at the New York Post reported this week that the final numbers for the Obama Administration are in and they are abysmal: On Thursday we closed the book on the Obama economic “miracle” — and it’s a miracle we are not in a recession. Last week the Commerce Department released its third revision for fourth-quarter 2016 gross domestic product. The number came in at a paltry 2.1 percent, meaning that growth during President Obama’s final year in office — the end of an “Error of Hope” — landed with a big thud at just 1.6 percent. That...

As more of Obama’s nefarious deeds are unveiled, his reputation continues to suffer tremendously. The former President not only worked through organizations such as Organizing For Action (OFA) and even the deep state, but has also been outed by Judge Napolitano, who revealed that Obama did, in fact, wiretap President Trump during the 2016 election, and without a warrant. Is there no end to the treachery of the disgraced former President? Obama’s popularity continues to decrease by the day, with only himself to blame.

Hillary and Bill Clinton Spoof Forrest Gump

Of all the cultural battles we fight during the Christmas season, one stands above all. It's not whether we relent and say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" because, let's be real, only a handful of people actually care. What people do care about, though, is of much more importance. It's a bloody, knock-down, drag-out fight about what actually matters. Of course, we're talking Christmas songs. It's an objective truth that the best of the genre is "Christmas in Hollis" by Run DMC. Second place goes to "Carol of the Bells," assuming it's an instrumental version. Third place, or...

A new analysis by WalletHub has compared and classified 1,268 of America's small cities in the U.S. to find the ones where residents don’t have to give up much by avoiding the "bright lights" and the soaring rent. Its data set include a total of 22 metrics, ranging from housing costs to school-system quality to the number of restaurants per capita. Why live in a small city? Inevitably, life in a small city demands some tradeoffs such as shorter business hours, a heavier reliance on cars and fewer dating opportunities.  It does bring benefits - tighter communities, less competition,...

since President Obama took office, the poverty rate among children has soared to 22 percent, with three million more children living in poor conditions, according to an authoritative new report released Tuesday. The 2015 "KIDS COUNT" report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation said that the percentage of children living in poverty jumped from 18 percent in 2008, the year Obama was elected, to 22 percent in 2013....

No presidential decision is as politically hazardous as the war decision. That’s because voters are quicker and more ferocious in turning on their chief executives when wars go awry than when events become troublesome in other areas of governance. Woe be to the president who finds himself in a war he can’t win and can’t get out of, or finds that the price of war far outweighs the promised benefits, or learns that the rationale for war doesn’t hold up. Herewith, then, a catalogue of the country’s five worst wartime presidents, men who took their country to war, or continued...

(CNSNews.com) – Nine of the 10 countries with the worst records for persecution of Christians have populations that are at least 50 percent Muslim, according to the assessment of persecution in the Open Doors USA's World Watch List (WWL) 2015 and population information published by the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. The WWL is an “annual survey of religious liberty conditions for Christians around the world" that was released Wednesday. Communist North Korea topped the list for the 13th consecutive year for the regime’s extreme persecution of Christians. But the other 9 countries among the 10 worst had...

...Obama and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) are among GQ magazine’s “30 Least Influential People of 2014." [Obama] takes the runner-up spot...in the magazine's ranking of "people who took up vast clouds of oxygen, [but] gave us back nothing of use."

**SNIP** Barack Obama at a DNC fundraiser: “We’re gonna make one last push in these last several weeks. We’ve got a lot of just nail-biter races…If we do what we’re supposed to do, then I’m actually confident that we can get it done.” **SNIP** DNC Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz on This Week: “I think we’re going to hold the Senate and the reason that we’re going to hold the Senate…is because we have a ground game that, I know [RNC Chairman] Reince [Priebus] would take ours over theirs any day of the week. …Rick Scott is going to go...

Julia La Roche October 13, 2014 We asked billionaire energy tycoon T. Boone Pickens on Friday what worries him the most about America. "Lack of leadership," he said. "We have the worst president we ever had," Pickens said. "I mean, he's going to be determined the worst before he ever gets out of office. He accomplished a lot less in eight years. Nobody else has ever done that. You know, Jimmy Carter loves him because he was the worst until he showed up, Obama (snip)

As he headed out for a two-week vacation Saturday, President Obama told Americans that the U.S. military could face more fighting against Islamist terrorists in Iraq.

Frustrated with rising prices? Check. Keep getting hit with more fees and charges? Check. You're paying for more channels than you'd ever want to watch? Check. These are just a handful of the most common complaints consumers have when it comes to grappling with cable companies. And it's not just anecdotal: A survey of subscribers on the nation's biggest cable providers has found that more than half of Americans would abandon their cable provider if they felt they could. Cable rage is real, and here's the data to prove it. Fifty-three percent of respondents to a recent survey said they'd...