Free Republic

A sign on an upside-down dumpster spelled the end of Pearl Pai’s long romance with plastics recycling. For years, Pai and her family generated almost no trash. She carefully washed, sorted and bagged hard-to-recycle items and drove them two towns over from her home in Berkeley, California, to the area’s best recycling center. But on a gray morning in late May, when she pulled up with a bag of flimsy plastic clamshell-style containers, yogurt tubs and meat trays, the sign informed her that, “due to poor market conditions”, these items would no longer be accepted for recycling. This is a...

Full header: "Wow: Whoopi Had To Correct Swalwell On Facts Surrounding Virginia Beach Shooting Despite His Anti-Gun 'Expertise" Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) on Wednesday made an appearance on "The View." Naturally, the discussion turned to his desire for gun control, especially after last week's tragic shooting in Virginia Beach. When asked what could be done to keep this from happening again, Swalwell reiterated his desire for an "assault weapons" ban and buyback program. "First, ban and buyback every assault weapon in America. I’m the only candidate calling for that. That will go a long way. Kids are sitting paralyzed with...

If I have to choose between sneaky radical leftists who pretend to be small-d democratic activists and honest ones who admit they would stop at nothing in punishing people like me should they gain power, I would always choose the honest ones. Like radical jihadists, they believe that their cause is so righteous that opposition is immoral, and the evil people who oppose them deserve no constitutional protections once they are in power. In fact, the Constitution itself is an obsolete document, written by evil white slave-owners, and a hindrance to the utopia they believe is in reach if only...

Police are looking to charge more than 1,100 people who were arrested during last month’s “Extinction Rebellion” climate protests, a senior officer has said. During the protests, activists laid down in the middle of busy public roads, glued themselves to the walls of financial institutions such as the London Stock Exchange, and even attempted to disrupt flights from Heathrow airport.

A South Florida mayor has offered up a proposal to deal with the Trump administration’s plan to release hundreds of asylum seekers into two of the region’s counties: bring them to Trump hotels and ask President Donald Trump to open up his own “heart and home.” Broward County Mayor Mark Bogen said in a statement on Thursday that he had been informed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials that the agency planned to release hundreds of asylum-seeking families caught crossing into the U.S. into his county each month on a weekly basis, without any apparent plans to address their...

Democrat presidential hopeful Mayor Pete Buttigieg supported gun controls Barack Obama pushed, as well as the gun control “framework” Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns sought. Buttigieg’s gun control support, documented through the years on his own Twitter account, shows his support of everything from Obama’s push to criminalize private gun sales via universal background checks to Bloomberg’s overarching gun control agenda. When Obama was in office, Buttigieg tweeted: Pete Buttigieg ✔ @PeteButtigieg I'm with the majority of Americans (& gun owners) who agree with @POTUS that we need universal background checks to help #StopGunViolence

Donald Trump will have to release five years of tax returns if he wants appear on the Illinois 2020 presidential ballot, the state’s senate has ruled. The bill, which still requires approval by the Prairie State’s House of Representatives, comes amid a growing row in Washington over Mr Trump’s unprecedented refusal to make publicly available his income tax returns. The US Treasury ignored a congressional deadline to release the documents earlier this week. Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin claimed the request by the House ways and means committee was “politically motivated”. Mr Trump himself has claimed that he cannot release his...

The headline of Jonathan Zimmerman's article in the Washington Post, "How Trump finally turned Republicans against McCarthyism," alerted me to the possibility that Zimmerman has never spoken to a Republican in the wild. The subhead, "After nearly 70 years, Republicans have stopped defending Joe McCarthy," confirmed my suspicions. Zimmerman insists that the "new consensus" among Republicans is that "McCarthyism was, in fact, a massive, unpardonable assault on freedom, fairness and the rule of law." This is nuts. In reality, McCarthy's status among Republicans is higher now than it has been since his untimely death in 1957.

Nancy Pelosi is actually the most popular Democrat among Democrats, owing to her perceived capacity to fight and win against President Trump, particularly over the border wall issue. Seriously, one poll showed her ranked as number one, more popular than any of the Democrats running for president. Remember this? Her record, actually, is one of miserable failure. She did achieve in fact, a government shutdown for more than a month in her bid to halt a desperately needed border wall as the migrant surge sends tens of thousands of unvetted illegal immigrants into the country with as many as five...

The consequences deriving from the allegedly false hate crime report of Jussie Smollett are vast. The expression "collateral damage" is appropriate. Whatever his fate, now that he was written out of his part on a TV show and indicted for 16 felony counts related to his allegedly false reporting of a hate crime, dozens of other people are suffering career catastrophes derived from the scandal's aftermath. At least 50 employees may have been fired from Northwestern Memorial Hospital for accessing the medical profile and records of "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett without authorization, sources with knowledge of the situation said. One...

Statue vandals seem to have mistaken WWII hero for Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, museum officials say Vandals in North Carolina may be in need of a history lesson after having set fire to a statue honoring a World War II hero they apparently mistook for a Confederate general, officials said earlier this week. A white marble monument of U.S. Army Maj. Gen. William C. Lee, who commanded the 101st Airborne Division's "Screaming Eagles" during World War II, was doused with flammable liquid and set on fire last week, museum officials said. The statue bears black scorch marks running up...

The men stole so many items that the spreadsheet spanned two pages. The pair stole 65 firearms from four companies: Remington Arms, LKCI, Blaser USA and Legacy Sports International, the Review-Journal reported. Specifically, the two stole: • Remington machine guns, rifles and pistols • Denel Land Systems machine guns • Mauser rifles • Glock pistols • Sauer & Sohn rifles • Advanced Armament silencers. The reason the men were caught is because the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the hosts of SHOT Show, require all manufacturers to remove firing pins from weapons displayed during the show, meaning they're inoperable. The Department...

ABC’s comedy Blackish is known for taking on the issue of racism, but Tuesday’s episode was particularly heavy on the topic, celebrating controversial former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick as a hero and painting white men as ignorant racists who need to be saved from themselves. In the episode, “Stand up, Fall Down,” main character Dre (Anthony Anderson) decides to take his teenage son Andre "Junior" (Marcus Scribner) to work with him as an intern. While there, Andre witnesses Dre’s white coworkers and boss, who are usually painted as racially insensitive, suggesting racist ideas for a restaurant ad campaign they’re working...

With NBA commissioner Adam Silver in the stands and supporting the cause, the Los Angeles Lakers and Atlanta Hawks honored the victims of the Thousand Oaks shooting by wearing black T-shirts with the message "Enough" on the front. The Lakers and Hawks followed what the Clippers and Milwaukee Bucks did on Saturday when players from both teams first wore the T-shirts. "As I've always said, our players aren't just ballplayers, they're citizens," Silver told ESPN after watching the Lakers beat the Hawks 107-106 on Sunday. "They have strong feelings about what's happening in society and they react to them. I...

Trump supporters are not only deplorable, they also exhibit a “peevish, racist cruelty,” declares the Guardian newspaper Friday, which makes white women who vote Republican especially guilty. The 53 percent of white women who voted for Trump in 2016 bear out “the conventional wisdom that white women would rather choose the racism espoused by the Republican party than join in the moral coalition represented by men of color and other women,” writes Guardian columnist Moira Donegan in an over-the-top essay.

A federal appeals court upheld a nationwide injunction against President Donald Trump’s termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program Thursday. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit concluded DACA’s recension “is arbitrary, capricious, or otherwise not in accordance with law.” Supreme Court action could soon follow. The Trump administration asked the high court to intervene in the DACA cases Monday. The move was highly unusual, as three federal appeals courts, including the 9th Circuit, are separately reviewing orders requiring the government to continue administering DACA. The justices seldom review a case...

A former Obama administration diplomat both praised and criticized President Trump's foreign policy during a forum Thursday at the University of Minnesota... blah, blah, blah ...blah, blah, blah ... the university's Humphrey School of Public Affairs for the forum titled: "The Shrinking International Relevance of Donald Trump," FOX 9 of Minneapolis reported....blah, blah, blah, simper, whinge, blah, blah, blah, sniff, blah, blah blah (I am paraphrasing here)

Socialism is the most discredited ideology in the history of political thought. That’s assuming you don’t count cannibalism as an ideology. During the last century, socialist ideologues killed, tortured and starved innocent people on a heretofore unimaginable scale. R.J. Rummel estimates that almost 170 million people were killed in the 20th century by their own governments. These were not deaths in war. They were the victims of genocide. The vast majority were killed by socialist governments, including the national socialists (Nazis) in Germany. If socialism means anything it means a rejection of the Jeffersonian idea that you have a right...

There's nothing more satisfactory than a sanctimonious jackass getting schooled on his own canards. Rep. Adam Schiff of California is a California Democrat who fits that sanctimonious jackass part. And enter Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, who schooled him good. Check out her tweet:

Calling all of Trump’s voters “easily fooled,” former TV host Rosie O’Donnell says she is gearing up for a protest in front of the White House to push for President Donald Trump’s impeachment. Last week, O’Donnell announced that she was going to gather a group of Broadway theater actors to go to the White House and sing various hit songs to protest the Trump administration. Now, just ahead of her protest event, O’Donnell is explaining her intent.