Free Republic

Freepers, I need some help and advise. The smart asses can take a time out. This has to be dealt with. It's destroyed my life. Grateful for legit thoughts. I have to get back to who I was. This cost me my family and everything else. Pre Obama freepers comments preferred. This will take a few days. Regards! Founded

The corporate media wrote off Trump’s warning as a knee-jerk reaction and aversion to green energy — but he was right.For years, Europe has depended on Russia for more than 40 percent of its natural gas imports as well as a large portion of its oil and solid fuels. Now that Russia is embroiled in war and facing sanctions from multiple nations, it has tightened its supply to the European Union. As a result, Europeans are struggling with an energy crisis that is forcing millions to dim their lights and ration hot water. One Washington Post article soberly announced, “Europe...

Joe Biden is celebrating July 4th with a massive expansion of the IRS. How better to celebrate the colonists who chased British tax collectors out than by replacing them with Biden's tax collectors. But every progressive person knows that Independence Day is for extremists. The dream of the new post-national nation is Co-Dependence Day in which we all live happily together in a planned economy.

Any Russian invasion of Ukraine will be bad news for energy-dependent Europe. News reports from Europe indicate two potentially dangerous events occurring on the borders of NATO. The most glaring is the report of Russian large scale troop deployments near the Ukrainian border indicating a possible invasion in the next few months. The other report is on the smaller yet volatile migration movements along the Belarussian-Polish border. These two circumstances coincide with Europe’s weak energy situation and the global perception of American weakness created by the mismanaged withdrawal in Afghanistan. Although the risk of war in this region remains low,...

"The first African American to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee" reveals an important point about leftist race obsessions. Can you spell merit? More importantly, do you know what it means? How about Murraya? Zaila Avant-garde, a 14 year old from Louisiana, can spell these words correctly — and a whole lot more — as she did last Thursday night at the 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee competition, emerging as champion. This young adolescent female — oh these identifiers are soooooo important — is also, as many noted, "the first African American to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee." Her...

Democrats across the country prepared to celebrate Dependence Day this week, an annual holiday where they reflect upon their complete and total dependence on the government. Every year on July 4, Democrats celebrate the high holy day where they thank the government for its gracious gifts. "It's good to pause every year and think about how we are completely and utterly dependent on the government for everything," said Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. "We have to give up all our rights to the government to find out how dependent we can be." "This good and benevolent government was given...

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Wednesday that the White House is considering an executive order to reduce America’s dependence on foreign countries for supplying medical resources. “China has managed to dominate all aspects of the supply chain using the same unfair trade practices that it has used to dominate other sectors — cheap sweatshop labor, lax environmental regulations and massive government subsidies,” Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro said in an interview with the New York Times. Navarro indicated that the widespread coronavirus infection demonstrated that the United States depended too much on...

Despite its cool Green parties and ambitious wind and solar agendas, Europe remains by far the world’s largest importer of oil and natural gas. Oil output in the North Sea and off the coast of Norway is declining, and the European Union is quietly looking for fossil fuel energy anywhere it can find it. Europe itself is naturally rich in fossil fuels. It likely has more reserves of shale gas than the United States, currently the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas. Yet in most European countries, horizontal drilling and fracking to extract gas and oil are...

SynopsisA gathering storm: Incompatible views of the American experience. Inevitable clash, between advocates of dependence on bureaucracy to limit individual achievement & defenders of a social order premised on it; a culture premised on personal responsibility in all human interaction.

(Javonnie McCoy and Atlanta attorney Catherine Bernard after his acquittal) Javonnie McCoy was growing marijuana when the cops came to his Middle Georgia home. He was caught red-handed with it. Almost a pound of it, in fact. He admitted it to police, and later he looked jurors in the eye and said, yep, it was mine. I used it as medicine. The jurors let him go. He was minding his own business and wasn’t hurting anybody, they reasoned. He just doesn’t belong in prison. The jury’s decision earlier this month in Dublin, Ga., may have been due to a...

Javonnie McCoy was growing marijuana when the cops came to his Middle Georgia home. He was caught red-handed with it. Almost a pound of it, in fact. He admitted it to police, and later he looked jurors in the eye and said, yep, it was mine. I used it as medicine. The jurors let him go. He was minding his own business and wasn’t hurting anybody, they reasoned. He just doesn’t belong in prison. The jury’s decision earlier this month in Dublin, Ga., may have been due to a muddled prosecution of a muddy case. Or it may have been...

This week marks the fifth anniversary of Colorado's legalization of the commercial marijuana trade, and the reviews aren't good. An editorial in the Colorado Springs Gazette reports, "Five years of retail pot coincide with five years of a homelessness growth rate that ranks among the highest rates in the country. Directors of homeless shelters, and people who live on the streets, tell us homeless substance abusers migrate here for easy access to pot." The paper says, "Five years of Big Marijuana ushered in a doubling in the number of drivers involved in fatal crashes who tested positive for marijuana, based...

The war on drugs has been going on since 1971, and we have a winner: marijuana. Back then, possession of pot carried heavy penalties in many states -- even life imprisonment. Today, 29 states sanction medical use of cannabis, and eight allow recreational use. Legal weed has become about as controversial as Powerball. One sign of the shift came in Wednesday's debate among the Democrats running for governor of Illinois. The state didn't get its first medical marijuana dispensary until 2015, and it decriminalized possession of small amounts of pot only last year. But most of the candidates endorsed legalization...

Cannabis users are more likely to commit violent crime, pioneering research has shown. It warned those who smoke the drug regularly run an increased risk of using violence against others. The project is the first to demonstrate that cannabis is not only linked with violent crime but is the cause...Researchers said that cannabis causes violence and they found no evidence that the link is the other way round – ie that violent people are more likely to use cannabis...The academics said the effect of cannabis use was clear and not diminished by other factors such as patients who were heavy...

The plaintiffs, who are represented by the ACLU of Georgia, were all stopped for briefly touching or crossing the line at the edge of their lanes—an offense that every driver on the road probably has committed at some point. They were all evaluated by Carroll, who deemed them stoned despite their protests to the contrary. They were all arrested for DUI and spent a night in jail. And in all three cases, as WXIA, the NBC station in Atlanta, revealed in an exposé last May, the DUI charges were eventually dropped after blood tests found no trace of marijuana—neither active...

Just when you think you’ve heard it all, a pastor calls your radio show asking how to respond to a congregant who claims that cannabis was sanctioned by God in the Torah. That’s right, sanctioned by the Lord Himself, not to be smoked but to be burned in large quantities by the priests of Israel. Far out! To be sure, there was a time in my life when I would have readily believed something like this, since I spent 1969-1971 as a heavy drug-using, hippie rock drummer, consuming everything from pot to LSD and from speed to heroin. Not surprisingly,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The betting was that law-and-order Attorney General Jeff Sessions would come out against the legalized marijuana industry with guns blazing. But the task force Sessions assembled to find the best legal strategy is giving him no ammunition, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety, a group of prosecutors and federal law enforcement officials, has come up with no new policy recommendations to advance the attorney general’s aggressively anti-marijuana views. The group’s report largely reiterates the current Justice Department policy on marijuana.

Last month I gave the keynote address at the Cannabis World Congress Business Expo in New York City. CWCBExpo is the trade show for the cannabis industry. I had the pleasure of meeting thousands of like-minded cannabis activists, and the experience was truly refreshing and inspiring on many levels. I learned firsthand that those in the legal cannabis industry — whether they're growing hemp, medical marijuana or recreational marijuana in Colorado or California or Oregon or wherever — have formed a united front. Everyone at the convention was looking to work together to come up with solutions on how to...

Nevada state officials declared a state of emergency after stores that sell recreational marijuana reported that their supply is running out just less than two weeks after the drug went on sale legally. Gov. Brian Sandoval, R-Nev., issued the state of emergency on Friday, which will allow state officials to decide on new rules that could ease the shortage of marijuana, according to Fox 13 Now. Nevada’s Department of Taxation released a statement that said it will contemplate emergency regulations that would permit liquor wholesalers to cash in on the marijuana sales. “Based on reports of adult-use marijuana sales already...

Recently, there was a report posted about the decline of the Denver Public Library, due to rampant drug usage and criminal activity. Apparently, a lot of the library "regulars" are homeless people who have been victimized by drug dealers who take over the bathrooms to do their deals. Other library users complain that the computer terminals are all taken up by the homeless people and back packing vagrants passing through the area, and that the place stinks. Apparently, the Denver Police have increased patrols and at least cleaned it up to some extent. They even closed off the bathrooms on...