Free Republic

Cross-party group of MPs urges greater priority be given for trade talks with India The government must make it easier for Indians to come to Britain to secure a post-Brexit trade deal with one of the world’s fastest growing economies. Warning that Britain is falling behind in the global race to engage with India on its path to becoming an economic superpower, the Commons foreign affairs committee said ministers urgently needed to update their strategy on India and could not rely on historical links from the days of empire. The cross-party group of MPs urged greater priority for post-Brexit trade...

The 'special relationship' between the UK and the US is elusive. Trump's visit to Britain nailed the optics of an empire that was wilting under the weight of an 'unequal' relation Romance and nostalgia surrounding the grandeur of the British empire in the 19th and 20th century is predicated on "the empire on which the sun never sets." This pomposity was extended to include emerging America in the mid-19th century to posit the Anglophone domain, as noted by Alexander Campbell in 1852, "To Britain and America, god has granted the possession of the new world; and because the sun never...

LONDON — Only one person, the joke doing the rounds in Parliament goes, can stop the disheveled, blond-haired, crowd-pleasing former foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, from becoming the country’s next prime minister. That is Mr. Johnson himself. One of Britain’s most recognizable, and now most divisive politicians, Mr. Johnson has a history of verbal gaffes, a poor record as a minister and many enemies in Parliament, not to mention among the voters who reject Brexit, which he helped persuade Britons to embrace in a 2016 referendum. But his charisma, flair for publicity and record of winning two elections as mayor of...

Walt Disney's Dumbo (review) flew to the top of the box office on Friday, with "just" $15.318 million counting $2.6 million in Thursday previews. This may turn out to be a classic "rank doesn't matter" scenario, and not in a good way. 30 years ago, Tim Burton's Batman broke the opening weekend box office record with a then-unthinkable $43 million Fri-Sun debut, just one week after Ghostbusters II had broken that same record with $29 million. And now, in 2019, we're discussing whether a likely over/under $48 million launch for Dumbo is good enough. Yes, inflation is a thing and...

Republican. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky revealed this week that there are at least 10 Senate Republicans who will betray President Donald Trump and vote against his national emergency declaration. While speaking at the Southern Kentucky Lincoln Day Dinner late Saturday, Paul said that he couldn’t “vote to give extra-constitutional powers to the president.”

Hank Johnson is dependable, if nothing else. He can be depended upon for utterly stupid remarks. In the absolute laziest of mental exercises, the other day he likened Trump to Hitler: Tuesday at Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) repeatedly compared President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. Johnson said, “Americans elected an authoritarian, an anti-immigrant, racist strongman to the nation’s highest office. Donald Trump and his ‘Make America Great Again’ followers who want to return American back to a time where white men and white privilege were unchallenged, and where minorities and women were in their place....

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) said President Donald Trump’s rise to power is similar to how Adolf Hitler became the infamous German dictator, at an event hosted by the Atlanta NAACP. He also went after Trump voters for being “old”, “less educated”, and dying early from alcoholism. “Americans elected an authoritarian, an anti-immigrant, racist strongman to the nation’s highest office,” Johnson said in his speech. “Donald Trump and his ‘Make America Great Again’ followers who want to return American back to a time where white men and white privilege were unchallenged, and where minorities and women were in their place.”

There was a Senate Homeland Security, Government Affairs Committee hearing today where one of the responding executive branch officials was FBI Director Wray.  Toward the end of the hearing, long after the rest of the members had left the hearing, Chairman Johnson took the opportunity to ask Director Wray some very specific and pointed questions about the current issues within the FBI as an institutional office.Few people remember, fewer even know, that was Ron Johnson’s committee effort that brought out the Lisa Page and Peter Strzok text messages.  Lots of other committees began exploring DOJ and FBI misconduct, but it...

On August 20, Emerson Polls released a poll for the New Mexico U.S. Senate race. The results: incumbent Democrat Martin Heinrich 39%, Libertarian Gary Johnson 21%, Mick Rich 11%, undecided 30%. If Johnson does outpoll Rich in November, that will be the first time since 1970 in which a Republican nominee for U.S. Senate placed third in any general election. In 1970 in New York, the Republican nominee, Charles Goodell, placed third behind the Conservative and the Democrat. Also in 1970 in Virginia, the Republican nominee, Ray Garland, placed third behind independent Harry F. Byrd, Jr., and Democrat George Rawlings....

A Texas bank employee accused of being an accomplice to a violent armed robbery appeared in court Wednesday to face charges. Shelby Wyse, 25, was arrested and charged with aggravated robbery on Tuesday for her alleged part in a brazen daytime attack on a woman carrying $75,000 in Houston. The mother-of-one appeared before a judge Wednesday, wearing a Whitney Houston tank top with her hair scraped up in a top knot. Court documents state that security footage captures Wyse watching the woman while she conducted her business at the bank. She then allegedly sent a text message to her boyfriend...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Former Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson said in seeking to make history and capture a U.S. Senate seat in New Mexico he'll have to give up a few of his favorite activities: marathon biking rides, hanging out in his northern New Mexico "dream" home and tuning out news about President Donald Trump. But he can't promise he won't smoke an occasional joint. Johnson, who served two terms as New Mexico governor in the 1990s and gained national attention as one of the first mainstream politicians to call for the legalization of marijuana, announced Thursday that he's...

Tim Pawlenty -- who briefly ran for president in 2012 and had derided President Trump as "unhinged" -- was denied in his effort to stage a political comeback and become Minnesota’s governor again in the race to replace Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton. County Commissioner Jeff Johnson won in Tuesday's Minnesota GOP gubernatorial primary despite Pawlenty's enormous fundraising and name recognition advantages. He also won despite his own history as the party's losing candidate for governor four years ago. Pawlenty joins several other prominent Republicans -- including Reps. Martha Roby and Mark Sanford, as well as Sens. Jeff Flake and Bob...

Former Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson is considering jumping into the race for the U.S. Senate in New Mexico, raising the profile of a race that Democrats seeking to capture the majority in Congress had seen as a safe seat. Johnson consultant Ron Nielson told The Associated Press on Friday that the former governor is “strongly considering” running if Libertarian candidate Aubrey Dunn quits the race as expected. “He is weighing it over right now,” Nielson said. “He doesn’t want to get into a race he can’t win.” […] During the presidential campaign, Johnson vowed to cut military spending,...

“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” director Rian Johnson erased approximately 20,000 of his tweets days after Disney fired “Guardians of the Galaxy” director James Gunn over offensive online remarks. Johnson explained on Twitter that he wasn’t deleting his tweets under any official directive, but was preemptively destroying ammunition in the event right-wing trolls try digging them up to ruin his career. “No official directive at all, and I don’t think I’ve ever tweeted anything that bad,” Johnson tweeted. “But it’s nine years of stuff written largely off the cuff as ephemera, if trolls scrutinizing it for ammunition is the new...

A political action committee backing former state Sen. Michael Johnston of Denver for the Democratic nod for governor has received another $1 million dollars from Michael Bloomberg, bringing the wealthy former New York mayor’s total donations to the committee to $2 million. ... The $1 million contribution was the largest that any campaign committee received in the most recent reporting period from May 31 to June 13, according to the secretary of state’s office’s TRACER campaign finance system. Second on the list: another $750,000 from fellow Democrat U.S. Rep. Jared Polis of Boulder to his gubernatorial campaign, bringing his total...

Alice Marie Johnson's life changed on Wednesday -- and she has US President Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian West to thank. And thank them she did as soon as she left an Alabama prison after 21 years behind bars. "I feel like my life is starting over again," an emotional Johnson told reporters outside the prison in Aliceville. Trump commuted the first-time nonviolent drug offender's life sentence on Wednesday, one week after Kardashian pleaded her case in an Oval Office meeting with the President. "I am going to make you proud that you gave me this second chance in life....

U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Thursday that he is growing to admire President Trump, saying there is a "method in his madness." “I am increasingly admiring of Donald Trump,” Johnson said in a leaked audio excerpt from an appearance at the Institute of Directors in London, obtained by BuzzFeed News. “I have become more and more convinced that there is method in his madness," he continued. “Imagine Trump doing Brexit. He’d go in bloody hard… There’d be all sorts of breakdowns, all sorts of chaos. Everyone would think he’d gone mad. But actually, you might get somewhere. It’s...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday issued a pardon for the late boxer Jack Johnson, an African-American convicted a century ago for the crime of taking a woman across state lines, saying the move corrected a wrong in American history. The heavyweight champion was arrested in 1912 with Lucille Cameron, a white woman who would later become his wife, for violating the Mann Act, a law that had passed two years earlier in response to a morality campaign.

Shortened title. Full title: Sen. Ron Johnson Sends Letter to FBI – Discovers Secret Deep State “Sensitive Matter Team” Behind Phony Dossier On Monday Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) sent a letter to the FBI Director regarding phony Steele Russia dossier. Explosive new e-mails show FBI brass discussed dossier briefing details with CNN. Senator Johnson accused the FBI of having a “sensitive matter team” as reference by FBI Chief of Staff Jim Rybicki in an January 6, 2017 email to unspecified recipients.

Britain's last surviving Dambuster says he still misses his crewman as they are remembered on the 75th anniversary of the iconic WWII raids. Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, George 'Johnny' Johnson says he feels lucky to still be alive as he turns 96 later this year. On the night of May 16, 1943, Mr Johnson was one of 113 airmen from the Royal Air Force 617 Squadron to fly to Germany for one of the most complex military operations of the war. Operation Chastise set out to destroy three dams deep within Germany’s Ruhr valley in order to set back the...