Free Republic

San Francisco has 'become a fourth world country within a first world country,' Gen Z activist says One month after California Gov. Gavin Newsom promised to crack down on San Francisco's open-air drug markets, a Gen Z activist says far-left politics have made the city a "fourth world country within a first world country." "We are witnessing the collapse of the Paris of the West and potentially the decline of Western civilization, with San Francisco being the first domino," Darren Mark Stallcup told Fox News. Stallcup documents the drug and homeless crises in San Francisco — which he refers to...

A rather peculiar moment occurred during the Congressional hearings on Unidentified Aerial Phenomenal (UAPs, aka, UFOs) Tuesday (May 17). Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis) asked a question about the 1967 Malmstrom Air Force Base incident, and got a rather astonishing, shall we call it, non-reply. Scott Bray, the deputy director of Naval Intelligence, responded that he knew nothing of the event, other than that it has received some publicity outside of official channels. Of course, we cannot expect that the foremost people leading the UAP investigations, especially at this initial stage, will know everything about every reported incident going back decades....

I keep thinking, “Christie can’t possibly come back from this.” And then I think, “Wait, did we actually just nominate John McCain and the guy responsible for RomneyCare?” Never underestimate the Republican capacity to forgive, my friends: But behind the scenes, the intensity of the reaction from those in Mr. Christie’s party caught him by surprise, interviews show, requiring a rising Republican star to try to contain a tempest that left him feeling deeply misunderstood and wounded...The tensions followed Mr. Christie to the annual meeting of the Republican Governors Association in Las Vegas last week. At a gathering where he...

Santa Clara County consumers, take heart: When it comes to reporting your taxes on online and other out-of-state purchases, you're the most honest bunch in the state. But don't pat yourself on the back just yet: 99 percent of you still cheat on your taxes. A new report released Friday from the state's tax collectors found that just 0.42 percent of California residents actually reported their out-of-state purchases on their 2009 tax returns. The South Bay led the state at a whopping rate of 1.03 percent. Carl Guardino, CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, attributes this partly to the...

JOHNSON CITY, Tennessee (AP) -- Two inmates housed in a smoke-free prison traded a hostage for cigarettes after a six-hour standoff. [...] "As the night progressed they started saying, 'Look, we'll give up if you let us have some tobacco. If you do that, we'll go back to our cell,"' Carlton said. "They got them some cigarettes, they smoked them and went back to their cell and locked themselves back in." [...] Prisons across the state are instituting no-smoking policies after the Legislature passed a law banning smoking in state buildings.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, who won re-election as an independent, has a message for his Senate colleagues in the next Congress: Call me a Democrat. The three-term Connecticut lawmaker defied party leaders when he launched his independent bid after losing to Democrat Ned Lamont in the August primary. During the campaign, he vowed to be an "independent-minded Democrat" if he were re-elected. In Tuesday's election, Lieberman won strong GOP support and given the closely divided Senate, Republicans are expected to court him. So will he count as a Democrat or an independent who caucuses with the majority Democrats? In an e-mail...

The more time I spend in the blogopshere, the more it seems to me that many blogs are merely online cults. It's an easy comparison to make. Notice, for example, that blog audiences simply do not cross over. Most people who read and contribute to Free Republic stay away from DailyKos, and vice-versa. Once in a while, some brave soul wanders over to a rival blog, as it were, and is invariably banned by the owners of that blog; more rarely, there is a full-fledged flame war in which members of rival boards virtually invade each other's territory with the...

CAIRO, Sept. 28 (UPI) -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urged Arab countries to refrain from establishing relations with Israel until it pulls out from territory captured in 1967. Speaking at a news conference Wednesday at the seat of the Arab League in Cairo, Abbas said, "Arab countries are sovereign states and act in a sovereign ways, but there are Arab agreements to which all Arab countries are committed." An Arab peace initiative launched at an Arab summit in Beirut in 2002 linked normalizing Arab relations with Israel to the latter's withdrawal from Arab territories captured in the 1967 war and...

I cannot believe this...ho here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=1316497

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Democrats paid tepid homage to Ronald Reagan (news - web sites), the man most political observers credit for the steady rise of the rival Republican party during the past two decades. Since Reagan's death Saturday at age 93, Democrats have been in a quandary, needing to pay at least token tribute to the late president, praised by his admirers as one of their country's greatest leaders ever. But Democrats see in Reagan the figure whose social policies contributed to an epidemic of homelessness and the decline in prowess of labor unions, and whose economic policies led to...

As CyberAlert predicted, newspaper critics have denounced a Showtime movie for being too favorable to President Bush. The September 5 CyberAlert forecast: "On Sunday night, September 7, Showtime will premiere DC 9-11: Time of Crisis, what I understand will be a 'docudrama' with a sympathetic take on President Bush and his top aides in the days after September 11, 2001. So, expect some derisive reviews in newspapers on Saturday and Sunday."BREAK Reviews in USA Today, the Washington Post, New York Times and the Boston Globe all ridiculed the script and acting in it, but the favorable portrait of President Bush...