Free Republic

Advertisers are turning to gay couples and ethnic minorities to sell their products Advertisers are so worried about being accused of racism or homophobia they are shying away from using images of white people and straight couples. Marketing departments are even putting diversity above relevance to their target audience to avoid accusations of bigotry, a survey of 500 companies has found. A third of advertisers questioned said they had used fewer white models and heterosexual couples over the past year. More than a third of these said they were taking this approach to “prevent perceived discrimination”. The findings are likely...

AL-RAQQA– Considering IS’ state and its attacks’ tactics within al-Raqqa city, it comes to light the extent to which its collapse is imminent, still, the situation should not be underestimated since victory cannot be achieved so easily.Syrian Democratic Forces have declared on June 6 the commencement of the al-Raqqa liberation from IS gangs, SDF broke into the city from the eastern and western sides after fierce clashes with IS gangs.The forces managed till now to liberate 8 neighborhoods from IS gangs which are :al-Sabahiya, al-Romaniyah, al-Qadisiyah, Huteen, Yarmouk western al-Raqqa and al-Mushlab, al-Sinaa, and al-Batani eastern of the city, and...

The German court system has been brought “to the limits” due to the massive number of asylum cases waiting to be challenged, the Association of German Administrative Law Judges warned Thursday. Robert Seegmüller, the organization’s chair, said the courts have piled up a huge backlog, with 250,000 asylum decisions waiting to be challenged in court. “The situation is dramatic for administrative courts,” Seegmüller told German news outlet Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND), according to The Local. “We are now completely stretched to our limits.” Seegmüller warned that a collapse of the court system is inevitable unless authorities invest more resources and hire...

I predicted the Trump POTUS victory from the day Trump announced his candidacy. I predicted that the industrial "blue collar" union folks would go massively for Trump, they did, I said Trump would get over three hundred electoral votes, he did. I now predict the Democrat Party will lose between 8-10 Senate seats and, 12-20 House seats in the upcoming 2018 Mid-Term elections. The Senate losses could even be larger. If the attempts to repeal Obamacare fail and Senate Democrats do not support the Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare, the Democrat Party will lose Senate seats in Florida, Virginia, West...

Four insurance carriers are seeking average rate increases ranging from 9 percent to 150 percent for individual health plans sold in Maryland for 2018. The proposed rate increases average at 38.5 percent and would bring monthly premium prices for a mid-level plan for a 40-year-old Baltimore resident to between $359.25 and $714.95. The proposed rates are subject to review and approval by the Maryland Insurance Administration. The requests come on the same day House Republicans in Congress passed a bill repealing parts of the Affordable Care Act and replacing them with new provisions. Individual plans are for people who aren't...

The federal government once again hit the debt ceiling. The ceiling limits the amount of money the federal government can borrow — a number that was set at $20.1 trillion. Although the issue should have been dealt with in 2015, then-Speaker John Boehner capitulated to President Obama and postponed the debt limit until March 16, 2017. Since then, the federal debt has grown by $1,414,397,000,000 — more than one trillion in less than two years. President Trump promised during his campaign to bring back American prosperity and make Washington work for everyone — not just for the small group of...

Observers expect targeted killings of Islamic State members to continue throughout the eastern province as ISIS' power wanes and locals seek to enact revenge for atrocities carried out by the group and its associates, opposition outlet Alsouria writes Information from the areas under Islamic State (ISIS) control in the Deir-ez-Zor province has confirmed reports of a wave of assassinations targeting members of the group. Activists on social media said the number of executions carried out by ISIS in the city of Abu Kamal east of Deir-ez-Zor and in other cities and towns inside the province had increased, amid accusations of...

It’s been at least two weeks since a massive fire caused a section of I-85 to collapse, throwing metro Atlanta traffic into gridlock and leaving many wondering who exactly was to blame. » The latest: Man charged with I-85 bridge fire pleads not guilty, to be released on bond Here’s what we know so far: Who’s at fault? Basil Eleby, 39, was charged with starting the fire. On Tuesday, April 18, Eleby pleaded not guilty to arson and criminal trespass charges and is expected to be released on a $10,000 signature bond. According to AJC’s Rhonda Cook, Fulton County Superior...

Venezuela is no stranger to protests, but the recent uprisings have rocked the country and stirred questions about the nation’s future.This past week, the “mother of all protests” has seen upward of 2 million Venezuelans take to the streets demanding an end to the notoriously corrupt Maduro regime.Beginning on what would be the 207th anniversary of the country’s independence from Spain, frustrated Venezuelans have taken to the streets demanding change. So far, three Venezuelans have been killed in the marches, hundreds have been injured, and 500 have been arrested.In the span of just over 20 years, President Nicolás Maduro, his...

New York state budget talks collapsed Wednesday night after members of the Senate left the Capitol, with lawmakers from both parties blaming Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo for scuttling negotiations over the spending plan, now several days late. Members of the Senate and Assembly insist they were close to an agreement and hoped to pass a budget this week after blowing past a Saturday deadline. Those hopes eroded Wednesday night after the Democratic governor summoned reporters to his office to say that while he would continue to negotiate, there was no final agreement. Less than an hour later the Senate walked...

In Part One of this article I analyzed the similarities of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy to Strauss & Howe’s Fourth Turning, trying to assess how Donald Trump’s ascension to power fits into the theories put forth by those authors. In Part Two of this article I compared and contrasted Donald Trump’s rise to power to the rise of The Mule in Asimov’s masterpiece. Unusually gifted individuals come along once in a lifetime to disrupt the plans of the existing social order. Despite the forlorn hope Donald Trump or some other savior can reverse our course, decades of missteps, dreadful decisions,...

Csting his ObamaCare replacement bill as the only chance to save America from a complete health-care collapse, Speaker Paul Ryan Sunday countered his conservative critics who say the bill fails to make good on Republicans' promise to repeal ObamaCare. "Understand the speaker’s plan doesn’t repeal ObamaCare," a member of the House Republicans' Freedom Caucus, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), said Sunday. "Even Charles Krauthammer said that, called it ObamaCare Lite, as you said earlier. It doesn’t bring down premiums and it doesn’t unite Republicans. So, why not do what we all voted for just 15 months ago, clean repeal, and then...

March 2, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) -- Ridding the world of 6 billion people to bring the population down to 1 billion would have an “overall pro-life effect,” a pro-abortion population control advocate told the press two days before delivering his speech at a Vatican-run conference on saving the natural world. “A world population of around a billion would have an overall pro-life effect,” The Guardian indirectly quoted Sanford biologist Paul Ehrlich as saying. “This could be supported for many millennia and sustain many more human lives in the long term compared with our current uncontrolled growth and prospect of sudden collapse,”...

Following the capture of 8 villages earlier in the day, the US-backed ‘Syrian Democratic Forces’ (SDF) swept through another five ISIS-held villages in a huge offensive that now has Kurdish forward units stationed at the northern bank of the Euphrates River in a region some 40 kilometers east of the provincial capital of Raqqa. Syrian Democratic Forces have officially reached the northern bank of the Euphrates River EAST of Raqqa… New batch of villages liberated pic.twitter.com/81MTH9WOi0— Chris Tomson (@TheDaneChris) February 21, 2017 Effectively, the SDF were able to impose full control over the villages of Al Kajla, Judayat Khabur, Hamad...

How did a giant, gaping hole tear through the massive Oroville Dam’s main concrete spillway last week, setting in motion the chain of events that could have led to one of America’s deadliest dam failures? Dam experts around the country are focusing on a leading suspect: Tiny bubbles.The prospect is simple, yet terrifying and has been the culprit in a number of near disasters at dams across the globe since engineers discovered it about 50 years ago. In a process called “cavitation,” ...

Submitted by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com The Purpose of Decadence and the Pleasures of Coercion I guess you’ve noticed by now that the center didn’t hold. Instead of a secure platform for political premises like tradition, precedent, rationality, and cultural norms, you see a fiery maw of sheer emotion between the camps of the so-called Left and the so-called Right. I say so-called because the campus Left and the Trump Right have escaped the categorical corrals they formerly occupied. And they may have left their customary official parties stranded and dying too. It may be fatuous to say whether that...

There’s a predictable checklist for meltdowns in socialist countries, and it’s playing out with tragic regularity in Venezuela. Nationalize agriculture? Check. Start government-enforced rationing when the food supply dries up? Check. Seal the border when people try to flee to buy food elsewhere? Check. The next step, and usually one of the last before total collapse, is runaway inflation. That’s what we’re starting to see in Venezuela. Rapid inflation, called hyperinflation by economists when it gets really bad, is one of the deadliest poisons for any economy. The spiral is usually triggered when a government prints too much money to...

January 22, 2017The Left is not just in disarray--it is in complete collapse because the working class has awakened to the Left's betrayal and abandonment of the working class in favor of building personal wealth and power. The source of the angry angst rippling through the Democratic Party's progressive camp is not President Trump--it's the complete collapse of the Left globally. To understand this collapse, we turn (once again) to Marx's profound understanding of the state and capitalism. We turn not to the cultural Marxism that is passingly familiar to Americans, but to Marx's core economic analysis, which as Sartre...

Obamacare, the left’s grand attempt to create a national government-run health care system, has failed. They promised lower health insurance premiums, but delivered higher ones. They promised more choice and competition, but delivered less. They promised continuity and better access to care, but delivered disruption and dislocation. Despite promises that people could keep their plans and doctors, thousands of Americans were forced into more expensive insurance with higher deductibles and plans that didn’t include their doctors. After spending billions in tax dollars, Obamacare managed to increase the number of people with health insurance by much less than predicted—with over 80...

Four years after Michigan’s right-to-work law was passed, the state’s largest teachers union appears to be taking a different response to the fact that school employees no longer have to pay union dues or fees. The Michigan Education Association has significantly cut back the amount it spends on collection agencies sent after school employees who didn’t pay dues. It has also created a new high-paying position — a director of membership engagement — according to documents filed with the federal government. Attempts to engage school employees who can no longer be legally compelled to pay dues would make sense considering...