Free Republic

New York (CNN Business)Dick's Sporting Goods considered stopping all gun sales in early 2018. A shooting at the high school in Parkland, Florida, had killed 17 people. And the company was shocked into action. "We did have a conversation about that," CEO Ed Stack told CNN Business earlier this year. "At the time we felt it was a part of our DNA and we should stay in it. So many people in the country are law-abiding citizens who use firearms to hunt, to use from a recreation standpoint. We didn't think it was right to exit the business completely." That...

As a “peace ambassador” for a Los Angeles nonprofit funded with public money, it was Wilfredo Vides’ job to steer young people clear of gangs. For those who’d joined one, his role was to convince them to leave, as he had. Vides was one of 22 individuals arrested last month in a federal takedown of MS-13’s Fulton clique, a cell of the transnational gang that claims swaths of the San Fernando Valley as its turf and is accused of murdering and dismembering its enemies in the mountains above Los Angeles.

On Monday night, national radio host Mark Levin read from a frightening article by Tyler O'Neil at PJ Media headlined "AOC-Aligned Climate Group Demands Media Silence 'Climate Deniers'." A group called The Climate Mobilization which advocates for a dramatic "World War II-scale" takeover of the economy to fight global warming, condemned the media for pursuing "objectivity" by giving air time to "climate deniers." "Some media outlets are sacrificing the future of our planet for the sake of appearing objective," Margaret Klein Salamon, founder and executive director of The Climate Mobilization, said in a news release Saturday. "This idea of equating...

So-called “Gun Safety” advocates don’t really care about public safety, and it’s easy to prove that all they really fear is an armed populace who opposes their political agenda.  Here’s the deal: They could have the “Universal Background Checks” (UBC) they’re fighting for, if they made just one small compromise.Now, Second Amendment supporters understandably cringe at the word “compromise” because for generations the GOP dictionary has defined it as: “Giving the Democrats half of their ridiculous demands and then hoping they say nice things about us on TV for a few days.”   But that’s not real compromise, it’s capitulation.An...

If I were Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, I’d be worrying that I was batting on a bit of a sticky wicket. As a native of the greatest cricketing nation in the world, I’m sure he understands. Even if he feels offended by the racist sexist homophobic Trumpist hounds baying for Google’s blood. The Horror! And yet. Google employee after Google employee is offering himself up as Sacrificial Hero. First there was James Damore who proposed the utterly anodyne notion that, according to science, women aren’t necessarily as interested in tech as men. Off with his head! Then there was...

More than two decades before Jeffrey Epstein took his own life, a woman went into a California police station and filed one of the earliest sex-crime complaints against him: that he groped her during what she thought was a modeling interview for the Victoria’s Secret catalog. Alicia Arden said she never heard back from investigators about her complaint. No charges ever came of it. And to this day she sees it as a glaring missed opportunity to bring the financier to justice long before he was accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls and women.

In September, the local Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of a global movement for compassion, Charter for Compassion Initiative, will be holding its annual conference. Presentations will range from making baby hats for premature infants and “Contemplative Painting” to more serious topics such as human trafficking and a presentation on “restorative justice” taught by a Richardson, Texas police sergeant. The group, Compassionate DFW, is the local chapter of Charter for Compassion. The theme of the conference is “Compassion in Action: Applications in Today’s Times.” A flyer for the conference reads, “Download, Install and Run the Right Apps in Your Life.” The Charter...

India's Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft entered lunar orbit on Tuesday in a small but important step on its journey towards the moon. Chandrayaan-2, which means "moon vehicle" in Sanskrit, entered the orbit around midnight Eastern Time in a complicated insertion maneuver that took 29 minutes. "Our hearts almost stopped today till it completed its job," Kailasavadivoo Sivan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), told reporters at a news conference. "But still the landing is the terrifying moment... because that is a phase that we are doing for the first time," he added. If the spacecraft lands successfully, India will become...

Looking to buy her way out of decades of identity fraud, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is using billions of our tax dollars and what can only be described as 1/1024th of an apology.

To date the investigation into the Fusion GPS-manufactured collusion scandal has focused largely on the firm itself, its allies in the press, as well as contacts in the Department of Justice and FBI. However, if a sitting president used the instruments of state, including the intelligence community, to disseminate and legitimize a piece of paid opposition research in order to first obtain warrants to spy on the other party’s campaign, and then to de-legitimize the results of an election once the other party’s candidate won, we’re looking at a scandal that dwarfs Watergate—a story not about a bad man in...

Joe Biden has expanded his edge over the Democratic field in a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, with 29% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters saying they back the former vice president. That's up 7 points compared with a late June CNN survey. No other candidate has made meaningful gains over that time.

Antifa is a Left-wing terrorist organization. We asked leftists to denounce Antifa. Gillibrand: “I don’t know what Antifa is” Biden: "I denounce hate" Inslee: “Who is Antifa” Williamson: "No" Castro: "Thanks" Booker: "..." Sanders: "..." Harris: "..." Yang: "No hate"

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) has released an interesting poll this week regarding public attitudes toward legal abortion. Most public-opinion polls conducted by media outlets and survey-research firms contact only several hundred people. This PRRI survey, conducted between March and December of last year, surveyed more than 40,000 Americans. As a result, it is able to provide state-level data on public attitudes toward life issues, and on attitudes about abortion among some relatively small demographic groups. The poll contains two findings that are particularly helpful to the pro-life movement. First, this poll, like several polls conducted so far this...

Our new CNN/SSRS poll shows the Democratic primary has mostly reverted back to where it was before the first Democratic primary debates. Joe Biden's at 29% now compared to 32% in late May and 22% in late June ... Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is at 5% now, while she was at ... 17% in late June. [Snip] Here are a few other takeaways from the poll: Warren, for now, cannot seem to appeal outside of her base of very liberal and white college educated base. She leads or is close to ahead with both groups, but well behind in others. Sanders,...

We first reported in late July that Texas businessman Ed Butowsky filed a lawsuit where he outed reporter Ellen Ratner as his source for information on Seth Rich. The DNC operative was murdered in the summer of 2016 in Washington DC. His murder was never solved. According to the lawsuit Seth Rich provided WikiLeaks the DNC emails before the 2016 election, not Russia. This totally destroys the FBI and Mueller’s claims that Russians hacked the DNC to obtain these emails. Butowsky claims in his lawsuit: Ms. Rattner said Mr. Assange told her that Seth Rich and his brother, Aaron, were...

WASHINGTON — Days after a pair of deadly mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, President Trump said he was prepared to endorse what he described as “very meaningful background checks” that would be possible because of his “greater influence now over the Senate and over the House.” But after discussions with gun rights advocates during his two-week working vacation in Bedminster, N.J. — including talks with Wayne LaPierre, the chief executive of the National Rifle Association — Mr. Trump’s resolve appears to have substantially softened, and he has reverted to reiterating the conservative positions on the gun issue he has...

Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs), commonly referred to as "red flag laws," have been at the forefront of the gun control debate. The idea is simple: if a person is deemed mentally unstable, and a risk to themselves or others, he or she can be stripped of their firearms. Typically, family members, doctors and law enforcement have the power to petition a judge to deem the gun owner mentally unfit to own a firearm, at least for the time being. Some states, like Florida, have already implemented these laws. While they sound great on paper, they have a number of...

Pope Francis mourns melted Iceland glacier… the nation which aborts almost 100% of babies with Down syndrome ICELAND, August 19, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Iceland, which aborts nearly 100 percent of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome, has held a funeral for a glacier. The glacier, known as Okjökull or “Ok,” covered 6.2 square miles in 1890. However, by 2012, it had shrunk to less than 0.3 miles, and in 2014 Icelandic scientists decided it was no longer moving. An Icelandic geologist, Oddur Sigurðsson, told Agence France-Presse that “...We made the decision that this was no longer a living glacier, it was...

From Cincinnati, the Associated Press reported that 24-year-old Connor Betts [the young man responsible for the mass shooting] “opened fire with an assault-style rifle.” (See: “The Latest: Dayton Shooters’ Friend Will Stay In Jail,” apnews.com, Aug. 15.) My question is: “So freaking what?” Would it have made a difference if he had cut loose with baked-bean farts and rotten eggs that resulted in the asphyxiation of the nine murdered and 27 wounded? Would it have made a difference if he had used a six-shot revolver that fired .22 bullets? I don’t know who wrote the Associated Press piece, but it’s...

A federal judge has ordered the FBI to search for and produce all documents related to the bureau’s one-time asset, former British spy Christopher Steele, who produced the long-discredited “Russia dossier” fired FBI Director James Comey and others used to obtain surveillance warrants against the 2016 Trump campaign. U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper, in issuing his ruling, said that the public’s interest outweighed Steele’s privacy rights and ordered the FBI to complete the search within 60 days. Steele, who was dismissed by the bureau for unauthorized contact with the media, nevertheless produced the infamous dossier that was central to...