Free Republic

Democratic Sen. Cory Booker seethed with anger over Trump’s alleged “shithole countries” comment during a hearing with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. During a hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Nielsen faced numerous questions about Trump’s alleged insistence that countries like Haiti and African countries are “shithole countries.” “I hurt,” Booker cried. “When Dick Durbin called me I had tears of rage when I heard about this experience in this meeting.” “For you not to feel that hurt and that pain and to dismiss some of the questions of my colleagues saying, ‘I’ve already answered that line of...

The United States administration froze a $125 million grant to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN’s agency for “Palestinian refugees”, which was supposed to be delivered on January 1, Channel 10 News reported on Friday, citing three Western diplomats. The amount frozen is one-third of the annual funding the United States provides the organization, according to the report. The three diplomats, who asked to remain anonymous because of the political sensitivity of the issue, told Channel 10 the grant had been frozen until the end of the reexamination of U.S. aid to the Palestinians, which began...

Pope Francis is the most popular world leader among Irish people, who rate British prime minister Theresa May and US president Donald Trump poorly, an international opinion poll published today finds. The pope was viewed favorably by 70 percent of the Irish respondents to the poll and unfavorably by 21 percent. Mr. Trump polls an 82 percent unfavorable rating, with just 13 percent looking on him in a positive light. More than two-thirds of respondents (68 percent) viewed Ms. May unfavorably, compared to 22 percent who viewed her favorably. The research was carried out by the Worldwide Independent Network (WIN)...

The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including “fetus” and “transgender” — in any official documents being prepared for next year’s budget. Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden words at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney just savaged the federal agency President Donald Trump recently put him in charge of during his first press conference as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Mulvaney, who has long criticized the CFPB, doubled down on his hatred of the agency which was enacted in 2011 by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulations passed in the aftermath of the 2008 economic downturn. “Yeah, my opinion of the structure of CFPB has not changed,” Mulvaney said. “I still think it is an awful example of a bureaucracy that has gone wrong. It...

Wednesday, Nov. 8 marks the one-year anniversary of the 2016 election. On that day, voters took to the polls to vote for their next president, and the majority picked Hillary Clinton. But because of the Electoral College, Donald Trump won in a huge shock. Well, first daughter Ivanka Trump shared some Election Day photos on Instagram this Nov. 8 to recount how she, her family, and the Trump campaign spent that historic day. (Although, technically speaking, Donald Trump was not announced as the winner of the election until Nov. 9, and yes, I'll nitpick.) In case you've blocked the day...

WASHINGTON — The North American Free Trade Agreement, long a punching bag for President Trump, is edging closer toward collapse as negotiators gather for a fourth round of contentious talks here this week. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has sparred with American businesses that support Nafta and pushed for significant changes that negotiators from Mexico and Canada say are nonstarters. All the while, the president has continued threatening to withdraw the United States from the trade agreement, which he has maligned as the worst in history. On Wednesday, as he sat beside Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada in...

Monday is “Deregulation Day” for the federal government as declared by President Donald Trump, and thus is an opportune time to deliver the findings of The Heritage Foundation’s latest tracking of regulation. The bad news is that the final year of the Obama administration brought the private-sector costs of its reign of regulatory excess to $122 billion a year. And that’s the low-ball figure. On the other hand, the Trump administration, in its first six months, launched a multifaceted reform agenda that has slowed regulatory output. Some rules have been blocked and others rescinded, along with the withdrawal of hundreds...

Roy Moore just beat Luther Strange in the Republican runoff for Alabama’s U.S. Senate seat, by roughly 10 percentage points. And now both Democrats and the establishment wing of the Republicans are shaking in their boots — or at least, they ought to be. This wasn’t a win so much for a man as it was a message from voters for a principle — for a movement, one that elitists have been trying to stamp for years is still alive. It’s a movement that goes like this: We’re the American citizens, you’re the political class, and you work for us....

During US president Donald Trump’s first month in office, the Department of Homeland Security saw a 40% drop in “apprehensions and the prevention of inadmissible persons” at crossings between the border of Mexico and the US; after the Trump administration threatened to separate children from their parents at the border, the number of parents and children apprehended at crossings dropped by 93%. Up to this point, many of the people who had been trying to illegally enter the US at the southern border in recent years were not Mexicans, but refugees from other Latin American countries passing through Mexico....

This is like something that happens in a CGI action flick or a cartoon, via the BBC’s Feras Kilani reporting near Kirkuk, Afghanistan: It appears to be the quickest way for a suicide car bomber to reach Heaven by exploding in the sky after US missile hit him near Apparently the missile hit one car bomb which caused the second car to fly into the air where it then exploded:

Anyone watching Trump?? Taking it to the MSM and left!

President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees are ignoring key Senate Democrats as they vie for lifetime appointments to the bench — a break from longstanding practice that diminishes the minority’s power to provide a check against ideologically extreme judges. The brewing tension between the White House and the Senate over filling an unusually high number of judicial vacancies is impeding the pace at which Trump installs lifetime appointees to the federal bench — so far one of the president’s few major victories, with his legislative agenda largely stymied in Congress. University of Pennsylvania law professor Stephanos Bibas met privately with his...

Homeland Security triggered a waiver Tuesday allowing the department to bypass environmental and other land protection laws in order to begin building and testing President Trump’s new border wall. The waivers apply to San Diego, where officials already plan to upgrade miles of existing fence, but where they’ll also stage a competition this summer to build and test prototypes for Mr. Trump’s wall. It’s the first in what’s likely to be a series of waivers that will be needed as wall construction ramps up. Officials insisted they will still try to be mindful of local impacts as they work on...

President Donald Trump is set to make a big jobs announcement Wednesday afternoon at the White House. He's expected to appear with Foxconn CEO Terry Gou to announce a new factory in Wisconsin that will make liquid-crystal displays, or the screens that eventually get turned into flat-screen TVs, according to reports from The Associated Press, CNBC, and Bloomberg. Foxconn is best known as Apple's primary manufacturing partner, and it assembles products like the iPhone. Apple spent $75 billion with Foxconn in 2016. Foxconn does most of its manufacturing in Asia, though it has facilities in Brazil, India, and other countries....

Advisers like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller gain new momentum in the White House’s ongoing ideological battle. President Donald Trump’s trip to Europe was a victory for his nationalist advisers over their so-called globalist rivals as the two camps gird for more showdowns this summer. In Warsaw, Trump delivered a starkly nationalist speech lauding the right-wing Polish government’s defense of “civilization” from foes like refugees and European Union bureaucrats. At the G-20 summit in Germany, Trump stuck to his dissent from a global climate change consensus, befriended Russian President Vladimir Putin and weighed potential new steel tariffs that a top...

Good Wednesday morning and happy first day of summer. THE FACTS -- KAREN HANDEL quite easily beat JON OSSOFF in Georgia. House Republicans are now 4-0 in contested special elections since PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP won the presidency. That means Democrats have failed -- despite millions of dollars in spending -- to win a single race with a president who has a record low approval rating. Democrats are even further from the majority than they thought. Let’s be clear: something ain’t working for Democrats, party insiders privately tell us. The Ossoff race galvanized national donors and activists in a way that...

The New York Times corrected an editorial on the GOP baseball shooting Thursday that baselessly accused Sarah Palin of inciting the 2011 shooting of Gabby Giffords. “An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated that a link existed between political incitement and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords,” the correction reads. “In fact, no such link was established.” The editorial initially stated there was a “clear link” from Palin’s rhetoric to Giffords’ shooting, as a means of justifying the board’s decision not to place the same kind of blame on Democrats for the baseball shooting.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The first ever tanker with liquefied natural gas from the United States arrived in Poland on Thursday as part of the country's — and the region's — efforts to cut its dependence on Russia. It was the first delivery of U.S. gas to eastern and northern Europe, which is building a new network of energy sources and gas transportation. Last year, Poland opened its first terminal for liquefied natural gas, or LNG, in Swinoujscie, on the Baltic Sea coast, to be able to receive such gas from distant suppliers like the U.S. or Qatar, which has...

So it was clear to her how bad things had gotten two years ago, when young coal miners she'd sold brand new trucks to just a day or two earlier started bringing them back. At the time, it seemed like a new coal company was declaring bankruptcy every week and the laid-off miners weren't able to make the payments. But now, for the first time in roughly seven years, a brand new coal mine is opening in Somerset County - the Acosta deep mine, just three miles from Maurer's dealership. "We're hopeful - it means we're going to have things...