Free Republic

Biden announced on Wednesday that the White House would forgive more than $6.1 billion on student loan debt for 317,000 borrowers who attended The Art Institutes, a private art school system in the U.S. that shuttered last year

NEW YORK (AP) — Preston Cabral eats meat nearly every day at home, but his favorite meals at school are served on “Meatless Mondays” and “Vegan Fridays.” “Today I ate chips, tangerines and this thing that looked like chili but without the meat — just beans,” the 12-year-old said after lunch. Programs like these are among the few proven to work for one of the thorniest problems of the 21st century: How to get people to eat less meat. Experts agree that the urgency of climate change and the demands of a surging global population call for an overhaul of...

[Catholic Caucus] Synod, October 18: Cardinal Hollerich calls for ‘small but sensitive changes’ in Church governanceOctober 19, 2023On October 18, participants in the first session of the 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops turned their attention to the Synod’s fourth topic: “Participation, governance and authority. What processes, structures and institutions are there in a missionary synodal Church?”The Synod’s first session has reached its halfway point: the session began on October 4 and will conclude on October 29. The Synod’s second session will take place in October 2024.Archbishop Grušas: The Gospel is ‘given on God’s terms, not man’s’On...

Leftist policies start out seemingly reasonable and compassionate before they become totally monstrous. Initially, there are sympathetic test cases, they started out with arguing that raped 12-year-olds should be able to get an abortion, and then before you know, it’s partial-birth abortion for bored celebrities. Euthanasia was supposed to help those with fatal illnesses suffering a great deal of pain. And then, in typical fashion, it morphed into killing teenagers and the depressed. Where to in the Great North? How about killing the homeless and the poor? Half of Canadians would agree to allow adults in Canada to seek medical...

Nobody who favored overturning Roe ought to be particularly surprised by the result of the Kansas referendum on abortion. By the margin, maybe — but a Republican state voting to preserve a right to abortion emphasizes what’s always been apparent: With the end of Roe, the pro-life movement now has to adapt to the democratic contest that it sought. Right now, majorities of Americans favor abortion restrictions that were ruled out under Roe, but only slightly over one-third of the country takes the position that abortion should be largely illegal, a number that shrinks if you remove various exceptions. That...

U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- This correspondent has been involved in the struggle to restore Second Amendment rights for more than 50 years. For much of that period, many of those who wanted the Second Amendment to be honored in the United States asked a simple question:Why doesn’t the NRA[or any other pro 2A group] bring a case to the Supreme Court?The assumption was the Supreme Court would rule in favor of the clear “shall not be infringed” words of the Second Amendment, and all those unconstitutional infringements would go away.The assumption was Supreme Court justices were honorable men and women who would...

[Catholic Caucus] Yes to female "readers and acolytes," puts Diaconate in dangerBy virtue of his motu proprio Spiritus Domini, The Pope's decision to modify Canon 230 opens the Lectorate and Acolytate to women as well. Down through the centuries, these have always been ‘ministries’ conferred to males alone, because, like the other ancient minor orders, they emanate from the Diaconate. In this way, having broken the bond with tradition, the latter can also be attacked.A bone thrown out to momentarily appease the hunger for female priesthood of the "German pastors" and South Americans? Or, conversely, a further step - according...

Pope Francis’s inclusion of ‘female ministries’ continues his pattern of ruptureIt is, one might say, another nail in the coffin of the Novus Ordo, detaching it still further from the patrimony of Latin-rite worship.I do not belong to that special class of people who claim to have known, the moment Jorge Mario Bergoglio stepped out on the loggia of St. Peter’s, that we were in for a terrible time. However, within the first year, there was already evidence that the cardinals had elected a modernist, a proponent of rupture, of liberation theology and socialism; and as the years went on,...

Earthquake: Francis decrees women can occupy the former Minor Orders of Lector and Acolyte | Update: Full Text of Motu ProprioSwedish Lutheran female "bishops"Of course, for us Traditional Catholics, the Minor Orders never ceased to exist. And for good reason: the last major dogmatic Council, Trent, mentions all seven orders explicitly in the Canons and decrees related to Session XXIII.But after Vatican II, the new elites severed the minor orders (Acolyte, Exorcist, Lector, and Porter) and one of the Major Orders (the Subdiaconate) from the Diaconate and Presbyterate. They became mere functions that could be performed by laymen, though...

This week, I looked at some striking parallels between the ratification of the National Firearms Act of 1934 (arguably the first major piece of gun control ever passed in America), and how modern politicians approach pushing new gun control tactics today. The NFA was fraught with ignorant legislative texts, draconian taxes to be levied against regular Americans, and outright bans and restrictions on firearms and accessories that were never discussed when the bill was even written. Proponents of the NFA, including then-Attorney General Homer Cummings, used four key tactics to push the NFA to Federal law: 1. A false sense...

It’s only when progressives lose control of an issue that they agree to even have it discussed. This is then called a conversationThe president of Wilfrid Laurier University recently published a statement on free speech at Laurier and in the academy generally. It was a sad effort. She built a Giza-sized pyramid of clichés and virtue-speak about something she was pleased to call “better speech” — as opposed to that decayed old concept, hustled by the likes of John Stuart Mill, Voltaire, and the framers of the American Constitution, known as “free speech.” Amid the vast waste of anodynes, platitudes...

Marijuana reform activists have created a new super PAC aimed exclusively at defeating Texas Republican Rep. Pete Sessions, the House Rules Committee chairman who has blocked cannabis reform legislation from reaching the House floor. Marijuana Policy Project founder and former Executive Director Rob Kampia is leading the effort, which he said is crucial to legalizing medical marijuana federally and affirming federalism for recreational pot, two policies supported in principle by President Trump. “Everyone knows who he is and that he’s our biggest problem on Capitol Hill. Half of my job has already been done by Pete Sessions himself," Kampia told...

On the world stage, Pope Francis’s star is burning brighter than ever, now even as nuclear peacemaker between the United States and North Korea. But even within the Church he finds himself at grips with a piecemeal world war, a strange war that he himself has contributed to unleashing, absolutely convinced that it will come to a good end.Jorge Mario Bergoglio is unquestionably an innovator. But in method, before it can be seen in results.He always introduces the innovations in little doses, on the sly, perhaps in an allusive footnote, as he did with the now-famous footnote 351 of the...

[I begin] with the story of a series of Socialist scholars conferences that Barack Obama attended when he lived in New York City between the years 1983 and 1985. And when I finally reconstructed what had gone on at these Socialist conferences that Barack Obama attended, I truly was amazed because what I saw was a kind of map of Barack Obama’s entire subsequent political career. It was at this Socialist conferences in New York in the mid-’80s that Barack Obama encountered the groups, the strategies, and the mentors who would guide him throughout his entire political career. [T]hese Socialist...

"And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for the second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering." -- Thomas Jefferson "The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts." - Edmund Burke Most Americans these days are, politically, like the proverbial frog that is being boiled slowly, so that they won't jump out of the pot. Everyone knows that...

True enemy is statism and the ideology of statism is being implemented in a fashion of creeping incrementalism The true enemy is statism. We can argue ideology, Democrat versus Republican, liberalism versus conservativism, or left versus right all we want, but in the end “big government,” especially in a manner that is in direct opposition to the rule of law, and the United States Constitution, is the enemy. Every issue has its surface arguments, but in the end, the argument always comes down to if the issue is a local or central authority, and how it is being shoved down...

Many in America’s freedom movement still hope that the Libertarian Party will one day become a power on the political scene to challenge the Democrat-Republican monolith. But in 42 years it hasn’t happened, and it probably won’t happen. There are some very distinct reasons why the LP and all other alternative / independent parties fail. This essay will examine them. Let’s take, for example, the top independent parties out there: the Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party. Even though each of them haveappeared at times to be a start toward genuine political reform, they repeatedly fail because they have structured...

Charlie Crist, the Democratic nominee in Florida’s governor race in November, says the Obama administration shouldn’t require proof of immigration status for Obamacare sign-ups. “We need to make this law work for the people depending on it, and the President should suspend this requirement so that no American citizen loses their health insurance due to a bureaucratic requirement,” Crist spokesman Brendan Gilfillan told Politico Thursday. Over 310,000 Obamacare customers have failed to provide proper documentation on their citizenship or immigration status to the Obama administration, after the federal government contacted them between five and seven times about discrepancies in the...

Nancy Pelosi says that she’d like to see Obamacare improved by moving to a public option or a single-payer system:

The prospects for single-payer health care -- adored by many liberals, despised by private health insurers and looking better all the time to others -- did not die in the Affordable Care Act. It was thrown a lifeline through a little-known provision tucked in the famously long legislation. Single-payer groups in several states are now lining up to make use of Section 1332. Vermont is way ahead of the pack, but Hawaii, Oregon, New York, Washington, California, Colorado and Maryland have strong single-payer movements. First, some definitions. Single-payer is a system where the government pays all medical bills. Canada has...